ABSTRACT
Up to this point, the book has explored the lived character of default, that is, how default is experienced and how debtors grasp the lures of the collector as they encounter them in their homes and everyday lives. In the process, debtors’ own accounts have provided some valuable insights into the industry, showing how the predominant routes into their lives tend to be via the twin technologies of phone and letter.1 This insight into the world of UK collections broadly tallies with what we know about the way in which defaulting consumer credit debts are collected in many other countries. This includes the US, which we will also visit in this chapter.2 Collection agencies are therefore now companies whose business involves, above all, the art of making and managing contact remotely. As with a number of financial industries – lending as much as banking – face-toface interactions between company and defaulter are increasingly the preserve of more niche areas of the market.3 In order to trace these organisational processes further, this chapter and the two that follow move away from the everyday, experiential domain of defaulters and towards the day-to-day business of debt collection. This will involve unpacking the particular strategies, approaches, and technologies used by collections organisations to try to strengthen the attachments that connect them, and the credit products they work with, to defaulting debtors. Making this empirical and analytical move brings particular demands, both of the reader and the analyst. Domestic, everyday spaces – the way they are made, lived, and organised – are more or less familiar to us all. The domain of the collector is, however, much more unfamiliar. Very few of us will have found ourselves implicated in the fairly unique work of debt collection whose character is
summed up in the above epigraph by E.H. Barnes, a figure who we will return to later in the chapter. Depending on one’s role, this work can involve emotional labour – having the conversations and (now, as we will see, much more rarely) physical confrontations involved in convincing people to repay – or the organisational, bureaucratic labour of managing and profiting from portfolios of overdue or defaulting debt, potentially consisting of thousands of individual accounts. This difficulty leads to the question of how this domain might be approached analytically. In particular, following on from themes explored in the last chapter, how exactly might the affective become present and operationalised within organisational processes, in attempts to secure, or re-secure market attachment? This chapter proposes that the contemporary business of debt collection can be far better understood by placing it in dialogue with its past. First, this will involve venturing into some of default and collection’s ‘last 3,000 years’.4 While the experience of default and the practice of debt collection (broadly defined) are as old as debt itself, I am interested here in the genealogy of some quite specific mechanisms and techniques, some of which retain a continuity with the present, others that the present has explicitly set itself against. Building on arguments developed in the last chapter, I will look at how this has, sometimes quite explicitly, involved the ‘attachment’ of a debtor to their debt. In the last chapter we looked at the connections that bind people to markets – market attachments – come to intersect with, and draw from, attachments that people have to a range of other people and things. In this chapter we will encounter a further modality through which forms of market attachment have historically sought to operate: through the physical attachment of a debtor to a debt. This mode of attachment works less through processes of affective enfolding and unfolding, than on the very material ‘stuff ’ of the body. Whether through bodily incarceration, dismemberment, or the development of specific legal mechanisms, the body has routinely been used to stand in for a debt in the case of non-payment. However, this modality of attachment became increasingly unavailable to collectors from the mid-nineteenth century onwards, as debtors’ prisons started to be abolished. The chapter documents the responses to this shift and how these in turn became intertwined with developments in the consumer credit lending industry. In the process we will move to the US to see the early development of technologies that would eventually be exported around the world. This involved turning to a range of resources, including psychology and experimental methodologies, in the collector’s quest to ‘capture’ affect. The result is to transform the ontological basis of collections work and to lay the groundwork for tendencies that will only fully come to fruition as we move, in the next chapter, into the twenty-first century.
