ABSTRACT
What drives people to borrow? More precisely, what drives so many to borrow so constantly, so heavily, that their debt becomes unmanageable? These are the kinds of question that you learn to expect fairly soon after you declare an interest in consumer credit. They can be posed in a range of different ways, as readily by those who have had difficulties with their own borrowing as those that have not. And they demand an answer. In the years before the rise of the sub-prime credit crisis similar questions were already being asked in public in the UK. In particular, 2004 was a year when certain British newspaper editors decided this question was a matter of broad public interest. ‘CREDIT “KILLS” A FAMILY MAN’, screamed the cover of the Daily Mail in early March – the story addressed the case of a borrower who had committed suicide, perhaps as a result of high levels of borrowing and being chased by multiple debt collectors (Poulter and Wilkes 2004). Six days later it followed up with another splash, concerning a potentially looming ‘CREDIT CARD MELTDOWN’ – this time, the story was the dangers to the national economy of the rising levels of personal debt, as well as the ongoing effects on families (Poulter 2004). The next week the Daily Express weighed in: ‘CREDIT CARD MADNESS’, it shouted, with its front page highlighting the fact that UK citizens were accruing an apparently huge proportion of Europe’s total amount of credit card debt (Vickers 2004).1 In these mass-circulation publications with tabloid, right-leaning sensibilities, an issue that might more conventionally be seen as a macroeconomic fact (the economy’s increasing reliance on consumer credit spending) becomes variously recast in lurid front page spreads. Blame for the apparent problem of excessive consumer credit borrowing was on the one hand levelled at business practices (the ‘greedy’ banks (Poulter and Wilkes 2004)) and, on the other, consumer culture (‘a “spend now, pay later” culture’ (Poulter 2004)). At the same time, the apparently cognitively deficient borrower is also held at least partially to blame, with articles such as the above also proclaiming the irrationality (‘madness’) of
such high levels of consumer credit spending (often articulated in terms of a reckless ‘addiction’ to consumer spending). However sensationalist these headlines and their accompanying stories may be, these three ‘figures’ as we might call them – that is, consumer culture, a cognitively deficient borrower, and the practices of the credit industry – in many ways find their parallel in causal arguments that are mobilised in academic and policy debates that too have sought to examine the causes of high levels of consumer-credit borrowing, even if with a little more care. Of the three, it is the attention to the role of consumer culture that comes closest to a sociological response. While for much of the twentieth century consumer credit simply was not subject to much sociological attention as an analytical object in its own right, as Dawn Burton (2008, p. 31) has argued, one reason for this is the near monopoly that economic theories and models had over research into consumer credit) this situation began to change in the mid-to late1990s. Important field-defining work was undertaken by writers including Lendol Calder (1999), Robert Manning (2000) and George Ritzer (1995).2 Although their arguments do not always map cleanly onto one another, this work outlined the significant role played in the expansion and adoption of consumer credit by major cultural and economic shifts engendered by and connected to the rise of forms of mass consumption. It also succeeded in resituating consumer credit within a diverse set of historical trajectories, showing the necessity of attending to the slow but steady institutionalisation and normalisation of consumer credit in, most notably, American society. Finally, amongst a range of other themes, this work also shed light on the crucial role played by the aggressive expansion and marketing of consumer credit, in which consumers were increasingly encouraged to use their newly acquired borrowing instruments, in particular their credit cards, to fund their everyday consumer needs. An emerging body of more recent work continues to explore these currents, while adding layers of nuance. In what can be seen as a broadly post-Foucauldian analysis, connections have been drawn between the expansion of consumer credit and the rise of new models of economic personhood. In these, the responsible consumer credit borrower is revealed as an entrepreneurial and idealised figure, imagined to be able to manage successfully and benefit from the risks entailed in everyday borrowing practices (see Langley 2008a, 2008b, 2014; Marron 2009, 2012). Attention has also been directed to the relationship between consumer credit borrowing and what has become known as ‘financialisation’: that is the increasing dependence of social and economic relations of all kinds on the ups and downs of the global financial markets (Langley 2008b; Martin 2002; Montgomerie 2006, 2007, 2009). On the one hand, new financial instruments (asset-backed securities, for instance) can be seen to have played a direct causal role in the growth of, and national economic dependence on, consumer credit borrowing. On the other, as debtors’ lives become intertwined with the flows of finance, they become ever more filled with uncertainties and insecurities. Further research has looked at how the consumer credit market, and some of its specific social and material agents, can be seen to have affected other social and
economic domains. Most notably, this has involved drawing direct causal connections between the rise of the credit rating as a measure of individual economic competence and, via its spread into global markets as debt became repackaged, the global economic crisis that erupted into public in 2007 (see Poon 2009; Rona-Tas and Hiss 2010). If we turn towards more policy-oriented writing, or the specifics of government policy itself, we can observe a far narrower, more restricted focus on the analysis of the causes for and effects of what is seen as a problematic reliance on consumer credit products. A recurrent concept in these accounts is ‘overindebtedness’. As Donncha Marron (2012) has documented, over-indebtedness in the UK has been largely represented within governmental discourse as a problem of self-government. That is to say, people’s problems with their borrowing are largely assumed to stem from either individual calculative failures or failures to manage themselves properly as ideally entrepreneurial subjects. In other words, what we have here is the summoning up of the figure of the cognitively deficient debtor. A major part of the problem is held to be debtors’ financial management skills, to which the response, overwhelmingly, is to recommend more and better financial education for debtors. Similar tendencies can be found in North American and European contexts (Arthur 2012; Lazarus 2013a; forthcoming (a); forthcoming (b)). A particularly striking example from the US is the institutionalisation of compulsory credit counselling and financial education courses for those applying for bankruptcy, introduced as part of the Bush-era bankruptcy reforms (Lawless et al. 2008; U.S. Code 2012, §§ 109, 727, 1328). The same apparently faulty individual decision-maker that is the target of these pedagogical interventions is also the target of a related attempt to improve the conditions of consumer credit borrowing: the provision of more and better information. This is often framed around ideals of informational transparency (more or less explicit in which is the assumption that this will, in turn, lead to more efficient markets).3 This can be seeing as addressing the third figure in our account – the practices of the credit industry. This is a causal explanation focused on the role of the commercial organisation. For instance, writing about the ‘incomprehensible fine print’ that can accompany credit applications, the newly established Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) in the US makes transparency central to its ambition: ‘Companies shouldn’t compete by figuring out how to fool you best’, they write, ‘[t]ransparency means that markets really work for consumers’ (CFPB 2013b). Very similar language features in both recent EU-wide legislation on consumer credit agreements4 and a sequence of government-sponsored reviews of the UK consumer credit market (see Marron 2012).5 From a conventional sociological point of view, the problem with the turn to either education or transparency as the solution to problems of excessive borrowing is that it obscures the underlying structural factors that drive credit borrowing in the first place, and indeed the way in which the individualisation of responsibility in this way can serve particular political agendas. At the same time, in this focus on the capacity of these quite specific tools to influence market-oriented decision-making there are echoes of the device-oriented
approaches that were outlined in the book’s introduction. The ‘economisation’ programme, which brings this focus into the domain of economic relations, highlights the role that quite specific devices can play in shaping and directing the calculative endeavours of users, albeit in some quite different terms. A device-oriented perspective therefore needs to be clear about whether and how it can provide a distinct contribution to these debates. With this in mind, I will put devices to the test in this chapter and, in the process, propose some other intellectual resources that may required. In particular, I introduce the work of the philosopher Alfred North Whitehead and the role played by what he calls ‘lures for feeling’. This approach will allow room for understanding ways of being and relating to one another – ontologies – which a device-centred perspective has been less successful in following.
