Joe Deville

Consumer credit default and collections: the shifting ontologies of market attachment

Existing accounts of consumer credit market making have done much to explore the business models, technologies and advertising practices of lenders, and the financial circumstances of borrowers. However, the space of interface between consumer credit debtor and debt collector remains underexplored. Drawing on interviews with debtors and an exposition of debt collections technologies, the paper demonstrates how this market domain, in seeking to prompt calculative engagement, depends on its ability to intersect successfully with the everyday lives of economic agents. Critically engaging with key currents emerging out of the “economization” programme, it builds on its attention to the socio-material mechanisms of market making. However, the paper argues that materially sensitive economic sociologies need to account more thoroughly for the place of affect in markets. This is particularly relevant when studying consumer markets, where exchanges routinely centre on intimate and embodied encounters between economic actors.

Concrete Governmentality: Shelters and the Transformations of Preparedness:

This article analyzes how shelters act as a form of concrete governmentality. Shelters, like other forms of preparedness, are political acts in the absence of a disaster. They are materializations and visualizations of risk calculations. Shelters as a type of concrete governmentality pose the question of how to build something that lasts and resists, and remains relevant both when the object that is being resisted keeps changing and when the very act of building intervenes so publicly in the life of the restless surrounding population. Comparing shelters in India, Switzerland and the UK, we highlight three transformations of preparedness that shelters trigger. First we analyse how shelters compose preparedness by changing the relationship between the state and its citizens. Rather than simply limiting risk or introducing ‘safety’, the building of shelters poses questions about who needs protection and why and, as we will show, this can generate controversy. Second, we analyse how shelters decompose preparedness by falling out of use. Third, we focus on struggles to recompose preparedness: Changing ideas about disasters thus lead to shelters being suddenly out of place, or needing to adapt.

Digital Debt Management: The Everyday Life of Austerity

Abstract:The age of austerity has seen large swathes of society adversely affected by ever-harsher austerity measures and protracted economic stagnation. This is compounded by the increasing routinisation of debt default and the everyday management of problematic levels of debt. This paper explores the everyday politics of indebtedness – the multifaceted ways in which household debt is transforming debtors’ lives – and the forms of resistance it can give rise to. In particular we focus on the role played in the UK by online resources as a new and increasingly important source of expertise and collaborative support. The paper’s object is a set of web forums that offer platforms for peer-to-peer (p2p) information exchange, specifically: Consumer Action Group, Money Saving Expert, Mumsnet. We analyse the types of expertise that are made available, how this is discussed and achieves legitimacy (or not), as well as the forums’ effects on forms of domestic accounting. We also compare the online forms of debt advice to conventional ‘real world’ debt management expertise. We conclude by considering how this enhances our understanding of the transformative impact of digital technologies on indebtedness as well as offering insights into the everyday life of contemporary austerity.

Debtor publics: tracking the participatory politics of consumer credit

In the context of apparently ubiquitous relations of debt, it has been argued that the debtor possesses a unique, revolutionary potential. Why is this potential seemingly as yet unrealised? Where might nascent debtor publics be found? And what conditions, what infrastructures, might facilitate their emergence? In answering these questions, this paper argues that there are spaces where emergent “counter-agencing” debtor publics can be detected – however, these are organising less around the issue of (consumer credit) borrowing than default. By analysing a prominent online debtors forum in the UK – the Consumer Action Group debt collection industry sub-forum – the paper argues that such spaces contain important insights into the politics of credit markets and debt default, collective practices of calculation, and the formation of publics.

The Matter of Payment

This chapter sheds light on the materiality of payment devices. It makes a simple proposition: that the matter of money—the tangible qualities of sets of transactional objects and how they are handled and move around—matters. This is illustrated by examining two forces to which money is connected. The first is adaptation, and concerns changes over time in the stuff of money itself, the transformations payment devices have had to undergo to function successfully as money. The second is calculation, and relates to how exactly the material properties of money, once settled, might shape the financial decisions we make. With respect to the latter, the chapter shows that money may not be as transparent a medium as is so often thought.