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

Abstract

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.

Keywords:

• affect
• consumer credit
• consumption
• debt collection
• default
• intimacy
• markets

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Paul Langley, Gregory Seigworth and the two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments on a draft of this paper. This research was funded by the Economic and Social Research Council, award number PTA-031–2006–00457.

Notes

1. Drawing on data derived from the Consumer Credit Counselling Service's (recently renamed StepChange) analysis of their client base (CCCS, 2009, 2010, 2012).

2. For more information on the use and controversies surrounding the use of Charging Orders to achieve this, see Tutton (2009).

3. The measures of risk will vary by the business model of the creditor, as well as the regulatory regime they are working under. Under the current Basel II agreement, banks are required to provide assessments of three key indicators: Probability of Default, Loss Given Default, Exposure at Default (see Deloitte 2006; Experian 2006)

4. The Consumer Action Group (http://www.consumeractiongroup.co.uk). The sequence of letters depicted in this paper has been reconstructed according to insights from a range of sources but cannot attempt the task of mirroring the changing trajectories that collectors will deploy over time, or in relation to different types of debtor.

5. See Rock's (1973, 51–106) analysis of the in many way similar threats being deployed in the 1970s.

6. See Massumi's use of resonance/resonation as a metaphor for the in-betweenness of the relations through which entities operating at different scalar registers intersect and interact with one another. Specifically Massumi is referring intimate, corporeal forms of causality; as he puts it, resonation is the “qualitative transformation of distance into an immediacy of self-relation” (Massumi 2002, 14). Also relevant is the analysis of the “resonance machines” that have been argued to be characteristic of contemporary capitalism (Connolly 2005; drawing in part on Deleuze and Guattari 1988, 208–231).

7. One notable exception to this can occur when debtors seek to renegotiate their debts, perhaps assisted by a third party. Here the attempt is to convince all creditors to accept a reduced repayment amount. But one or more creditors may resist this. In these cases, individual company identities do, very much, come to matter.

8. On the need to contain and deny such “monstrous” but inevitable hybridity, see Slater (2011) (thanks also to the anonymous reviewer who provided me with the reference).