The making of the upgrade money: Home,Turkish housewives and digital secondhand marketplaces

Abstract

In the marketplace, money serves as a utilitarian tool, but when it enters the home, it takes on different social and cultural meanings depending on its origin, earner, and allocation. In today’s digital landscape, digital platforms facilitate the conversion of domestic items and activities into commodities, creating new forms of money with unique meanings. Drawing upon Zelizer’s “special monies” model and recent research on platform-earned money, this qualitative study explores the meaning of an emerging form of money earned by Turkish housewives engaging in digital secondhand marketplaces (DSMs). Through thirteen in-depth interviews, DSM money is investigated across three dimensions: its domestic origins, the earners themselves, and the allocation patterns. The study introduces “upgrade money” as special money derived from the “commodification of home”—the transformation of their culturally designated domain into a source of income and power. While upgrade money operates as an undervalued domestic currency, housewives strategically use it to enhance the social status of their homes, children, and themselves while maintaining sociocultural norms. Although their connection to the domestic sphere persists, housewives perceive this transformation as empowering, shifting from “cashless money managers” to strategic investors. This study demonstrates how digital platforms can enable meaningful perceived empowerment within traditional constraints.