ABSTRACT
Making People Pay is an analysis of the way in which the processing of credit and default in London is made bureaucratically manageable. Routine strategies must be evolved to impose order on the vast enterprise of financing consumer credit. In 1966 £3,692,000,000 of credit was extended in Britain (Crowther, 1971, vol. 1, pp. 52–3). In that year, a fifth of the money spent on clothing, 41 per cent of that spent on furnishings, and 45 per cent of that spent on motor cars, took the form of credit (Crowther, 1971, vol. 1, p. 111). Such a system cannot but receive a high degree of organization and routinization. Mail-order firms, hire purchase companies and moneylenders are constrained to transform immensely complex judgments into a series of mechanical acts which can be delegated to junior employees.
