Falling Behind: Debtors’ Emotional Relationships to Creditors

Custers, Anna

doi:10.1007/978-3-319-57568-1_7

Cited by 6 publications

(6 citation statements)

References 11 publications

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“…This varied temporal displacement (Georgakopoulou, 2007) may be symptomatic of DC encounters themselves as they inherently discuss events or actions that have already happened (or have not) and negotiate those that are impending or hypothetical. This displacement also illustrates that, in reality, financial hardship is not merely a discrete retrospective incident for those in debt, but an ongoing, and perhaps, a prolonged or seemingly endless struggle, which can entail vicious cycles of borrowing (Custers, 2017) Through short narrative accounts, as social practices (Georgakopoulou, 2015;Mishler, 1995), indebted individuals also carried out important interactional, social, and relational work in DC encounters. This analysis identified three recurring narrative functions.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 91%

“…This offers an alternative characterisation of DC communication to those that assert that it prototypically imposes on debtors (Harrington, 2018). Additional, non-interactive data would be required to determine whether indebted individuals' experiences of this debtor-centric DC communication aligned with the unpleasant and threatening experiences of DC that have been reported in previous research (Custers, 2017). Secondly, that indebted individuals' narratives, as tangential talk or possibly extended turns, were readily invited and facilitated is non-standard practice in most call centres where brevity and productivity takes precedence (Belt et al, 2002;Harrington, 2018;Hultgren, 2011).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Harrington (2018, p. 204) summarises that DC prototypically entails "imposition" on individuals to recover owed money whilst other professional-lay encounters, such as customer service (Cameron, 2000;Jagodzinski, 2013), complaints (Orthaber & Márquez-Reiter, 2011) and sales calls (Márquez-Reiter, 2009), are more concerned with appeasement. As DC prototypically entails imposition, it may be unsurprising that Custers (2017) reports evidence of indebted individuals experiencing DC communication as unpleasant, threatening, and even violent, an impression that perhaps accords with public perception. The distinctiveness of DC tasks, paired with the fact these encounters have had very little empirical investigation (see Harrington, 2019), positions it as a unique professional-lay context for this study.…”

Section: Debt Collection Encounters and Credit Unionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Narrative practices in debt collection encounters

Harrington

2020

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Drawing on a corpus of 100 authentic telephone-mediated interactions from a British credit union, this paper is the first to examine narrative practices in debt collection encounters. It demonstrates that the credit union’s debt collector routinely invites and supports indebted individuals’ narratives using alignment and affiliation. Through a small stories approach, the paper therefore highlights that an organisation’s core values and principles can be seen “in action” in the ways that a professional orients to lay-people’s stories in professional-lay discourse. In this case, the collector’s narrative practices are emblematic of the credit union’s consciously ethical, responsible, and debtor-centric approach to collecting debt. The analysis also shows that indebted individuals perform important interactive work through their narrative accounts in terms of mitigating responsibility for their debt, constructing blameless and acceptable identities, and implicitly encouraging (or explicitly instructing) the collector to affiliate with their stance.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 91%

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Debt Collection Encounters and Credit Unionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Narrative practices in debt collection encounters

Harrington

2020

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“…However, he also shows how often legal attachments are insufficient to conclusively tie debtors to their debts. Drawing predominantly on research in the UK, including observation in debt collection agencies, interviews with defaulting debtors, alongside analysis of archival material, he shows how, from the perspective of the debt collection industry, the challenge becomes the continuous 'enlivening' of outstanding debts in order to keep debtors 'attached' to their debts, not just legally but also emotionally (see also Custers, 2017). In order to achieve this, industry practitioners have over decades developed a variety of technologies and techniques designed to ensure a particular debt is continually made relevant to defaulting debtors, while seeking in various ways to leverage the force of the legal attachment which, in theory at least, binds debtor to debt.…”

Section: Attachingmentioning

confidence: 99%

Financial oikonomization: the financial government and administration of the household

Ossandón

Deville

Lazarus

et al. 2021

Socio-Economic Review

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This article introduces a new social scientific understanding of the relationship between households and finance. We call it financial oikonomization. Financial oikonomization signals a specific research problem and a distinctive analytical approach to this problem. The problem is how households are financially administered and governed. The approach is pragmatist and descriptive. It is oriented to the how, to the study of the problems and practices of those directly involved with administrating and governing households’ financial flows. On the basis of an extensive review of recent research, we distinguish seven operations of financial oikonomization, seven distinct problems—with their own practices, sites and techniques, but all oriented to the financial administration and government of households. We call these operations: budgeting, juggling, evaluating, attaching, educating, publicizing and infrastructuring.

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“…In the present time, however, there is little sense of community (and few spaces to create it) among consumers, especially those consumers in difficulty. As Henry explains, "expressions of threat from credit card debt are perceived as individual threats, rather than shared -debtors are in it on their own" (Henry, 2010: 683; see also Custers, 2017).…”

Section: Credit Cardsmentioning

confidence: 99%

A Fool and his Money are Soon Parted: A Critical Examination of Credit Card Websites

Mooney

2019

Russian Journal of Linguistics

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This paper critiques the idea that a fool and their money are soon parted by using multimodal analysis to explore one of the ways in which people are parted from money: credit cards. I analyse the homepages of two products, the ‘best’ and ‘worst’ as rated by UK consumer organisation Which? In order to understand the range of communication used in these websites, I employ a multimodal analysis of their language, choice of colour, typeface, layout and images (Kress & van Leeuwen 2006; van Leeuwen 2005, 2011). Together, these show that the individual is constructed in different ways by the two products. For the card rated best, the viewer is constructed as a trustworthy consumer who is rewarded for this with further opportunities for consumption. For the card rated as worst, the viewer is positioned as a failed, but redeemable, consumer. The different constructions of the consumer also suggest that ‘credit’ is desirable but ‘debt’ is not. Taking into account the moral complexity of debt, I suggest that the lexical item credit card would be better changed to debt token . I argue that the real foolishness is the system itself, the one that credit cards (‘debt tokens’) index and exemplify. Taking the two sites together, I show that consumption is constructed as both desirable and risky. As credit cards construct the individual as an (isolated) person with few rights and great responsibility (Henry 2010), I suggest that these sites index the central role of the individual as a consumer. A good citizen is parted from their money.

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Falling Behind: Debtors’ Emotional Relationships to Creditors

Cited by 6 publications

References 11 publications

Narrative practices in debt collection encounters

Narrative practices in debt collection encounters

Financial oikonomization: the financial government and administration of the household

A Fool and his Money are Soon Parted: A Critical Examination of Credit Card Websites

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