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

Devising Consumption: cultural economies of insurance, credit and spending

“…This implicated agents in both sectors in what Zelizer (2005) calls the 'relational work' of combining intimate, personal ties with economic transaction but for credit agents the work had heightened significance in line with the raised stakes surrounding credit refusal, repayment and debt collection (c.f. Deville, 2013).…”

“…Debt collection agencies use devices including 'segmentation of collections teams according to the seriousness of debts, the related changes in tone of the collections calls within these teams, the strategic deployment of collectors' personalities, and the use of carefully constructed collections trajectories' (Deville, 2010: 161) that are designed to differentiate between debts based on their seriousness and the probability of receiving repayment. 19 Organised unpleasantness is partly a counter-force to the leaky secret that home credit and debt collection companies are in fact highly reluctant to use legal resort given its expense (Deville, 2013). Yet no matter how determinedly the sectors of the industry dealing with default attempt to impress on clients the changed nature of the relationship, there are certain continuities in the way information is handled.…”

Consumer Credit in Comparative Perspective

“…People are incarcerated not for non-payment but for contempt of court when collectors file lawsuits against debtors who fail to appear.Collection puts debtors under extreme stress(Dunn and Mirzaie 2016). Collectors perform complex emotional labor to keep debtors attached to their debt, and deploy carefully designed scripts of intimidation, moral pressure and empathy(Deville 2014). This work is often outsourced to other countries(Poster 2013).…”

The Financialization of Everyday life or the Domestication of Finance?

“…Instead, people 'inhabit multiple subject positions within a financial ecology in ways that conform, diverge and subvert neoliberal versions of the responsible, financially self-disciplined individual' (Coppock 2013, p. 479). Second, as Deville's (2012Deville's ( , 2014) study on debt collection highlights, when shifts in everyday subjectivities do take place, it does not happen through the conscious adoption of a more rational (and risk-aware) outlook, but largely through embodied, partly emotional, partly rational processes through which anxiety over debt is experienced and acted upon. Similarly, others (Araujo et al 2010, Vargha 2011, Deville 2014, McFall 2014 have questioned the dichotomy of cold calculation and warm consumer world, showing that relationship and affect have become strategies of financial firms to generate (re)-attachment.…”