Research Colloquium on ‘Crowd Dynamics and Financial Markets’

25 November, 3–5 pm, Porcelænshaven 18B, Room 3.135

Joe Deville, CSISP, Goldsmiths: ‘Intimate Experiments in the Everyday Spaces of Consumer Debt Default’

Consumer credit borrowing – using credit cards, store cards and personal loans – is a routine part of many of our lives. But what happens when these everyday forms of borrowing go ‘bad’, when people cannot, or will not, repay? More specifically, what happens in the encounters between, on one side, a borrower and, on the other, a collector? I argue that this space of intersection offers important pointers for both understanding the relational composition of debt, as well as for the study of economic life more widely. By examining both the experimental technologies deployed by creditors and the everyday experience of default, the paper argues that materially sensitive economic sociologies need to account more thoroughly for the intimate attachments between people and their financial products. The paper follows the deployment of forms of econometric to help collectors identify for particular attention what one industry consultant referred to as the ‘low hanging fruit’. These are defaulting debtors who have in the past shown signs of being the kind of people that are more likely to repay and/or the kind of people likely to repay more (than others in an otherwise similar situation). It also explores the ongoing reshaping of the everyday, lived spaces of default. Homes are shown to become reconfigured as space of ‘anxious anticipation’, where the collector hopes to focus calculative attention on them, not a competitor by ‘capturing’ a range of emergent, co-constituted affective affordances.

Joe Deville is a researcher based at the Centre for the Study of Invention and Social Process at Goldsmiths, University of London, UK. He is currently writing a book looking at consumer credit default and collection, which follows the changing calculative landscapes through which heavily indebted and defaulting consumer credit borrowers move, as well as the increasingly sophisticated techniques being used to attempt to convince debtors to repay. He is also working on an ERC funded project with Dr. Michael Guggenheim, which examines the deployment of contemporary disaster preparedness expertise through exercises and forms of training.

The research colloquium is organized under the auspices of the Sapere Aude research project on ‘Crowd Dynamics in Financial Markets’. For further information, please contact Professor Christian Borch (cbo.lpf@cbs.dk) or visit http://info.cbs.dk/crowds.