ABSTRACT
The art of debt collection has long been concerned with how, precisely, to secure the attachment of a debtor to his or her debt. As we have seen, over the course of its history, the industry has increasingly directed its attention to the unfolding affective affordances of life. These have become the object of its technologies and its investigation, in some cases, through forms of experimental intervention. These practices are indispensible components in the ‘production of the present’, to recall the terms used by Lauren Berlant (see Chapter 2). They are encountered, in their different forms, and in different ways, by untold numbers of debtors more or less anywhere that has embraced the now almost ubiquitous apparatuses of consumer credit. Very little is, however, understood about the organisational processes that sit behind them. This chapter, and the chapter that follows, seeks to remedy this by moving into the contemporary debt collection company itself.1 To do so, it draws on research undertaken in the call centres and offices of three UK collections companies: Alpha, Beta and Delta.2 Exploring debt collection as it is practiced by these companies will not only open up organisational processes, it will also contribute to further developing the argument that I have been making throughout this book: that the intimate and the affective matter to markets. That we have shifted from the terrain of the everyday and the domestic into the seemingly more impersonal world of the organisation does nothing to change this fact. As we will see, affect is a generative force that is distributed and acted upon far beyond the boundaries of the home or the body. Even if it is not referred to as such by organisational actors, affect is at the very heart of the way collections companies arrange their operations, the way they talk about debtors, and they way they talk to them. In the previous chapter, I suggested that debt collectors have become increasingly interested in the process of ‘capturing’ affect. This is a formulation that I draw from the work of Brian Massumi (2002). It is an analytical resource that I will this explore in more detail in what follows,
while suggesting that it can be put into dialogue with an analysis of what Franck Cochoy (2007) calls processes of ‘captation’. The relevance of bringing both terms to this empirical setting can, however, only be appreciated by understanding the particular problem of market attachment confronting the contemporary debt collector. Before moving on to this, however, it may be helpful to situate the account that is to follow with a brief description of the place that Alpha, Beta and Delta occupy with the UK collections industry, as well as how we are to understand the UK industry’s place within the broader global flow of collections expertise.
