Lived Economies of Default

In this unique and trenchant study, Joe Deville explains how the debt collection industry emerged, how it is evolving, and how it is ever more dependent on both data analytics and emotional labor. Deville illuminates the quotidian work of debt collection agencies and their tools—telephone scripts, collection letters—as well as the intra- and intercorporate and personal relations that make debt collection an affective as well as a political (and profitable) enterprise. The book is nothing less than a theoretically astute reflection on the character of obligation, the making of markets and the character of affect in the entanglements of debt today.

Bill Maurer, Dean of the School of Social Sciences and Professor of Anthropology, University of California, Irvine

Debt, it turns out, is not the only thing that is intimate and impersonal, cumulative and disintegrative, charged and discharged. By following out the ways that affect routes though the bodies of debtors and the modulating assemblages of debt collectors, Joe Deville offers a vivid account of consumer default that pulses with everyday intensities and calculative capturings. Immensely readable and deftly argued, Deville displays an astonishing agility for moving among the moods and modes of histories, case-studies, technologies, and theories at precisely the right moment, revealing what folds and unfolds at the fraught materialities of the economic and the affective.

Gregory J. Seigworth, Professor of Communication Studies, Millersville University

Lived Economies of Default is a striking achievement, essential reading for students and researchers in the social studies of finance, economic sociology and cultural economy. Not only does Deville provide the first book-length analysis of consumer debt collection in the UK for over forty years, he also charts a new course for the study of the materialities, affects and intimacies of contemporary market lives.

Paul Langley, Reader in Economic Geography, Durham University

An incisive and timely analysis of the business of contemporary debt collection, in which repayment is not forced through bodily incarceration or the seizing of assets as in times past but, rather, coaxed through carefully calibrated psychological campaigns and the seizing of affects. Techniques and tools of escalating urgency work to ratchet up defaulters' shame, anxiety, and dread and turn them into responsible borrowers. Lived Economies of Default is an empirically fascinating, ethnographically rich, theoretically sophisticated account of consumer-credit capitalism and its discontents.

Natasha Dow Schüll, Associate Professor, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Lived Economies of Default provides more than a highly engaging and insightful analysis of the dark sustenance of the ecology of late capitalism. Because of the attention to the mundane and living economies that sustain it, this book also illuminates some of the paradoxes inherent in them that authors more prone to grand epochal claims about the culture and subjectivity of neoliberal capitalism might easily miss.

Martin Savransky, University College London, Science as Culture