Suspensory indebtedness: temporality, morality and power asymmetry in experiences of unsecured consumer debt

Ryan Davey

doi:10.1080/03085147.2019.1652985

Suspensory indebtedness: temporality, morality and power asymmetry in experiences of unsecured consumer debt

Ryan Davey

School for Policy Studies

Research output: Contribution to journal › Article (Academic Journal) › peer-review

Abstract

The power asymmetries operating through debt include not only the domination of conduct and the extraction of wealth but also unequal struggles to define value. Long-term ethnographic fieldwork on a low-income housing estate in southern England revealed a ‘suspensory’ approach to debt, in which those who cannot afford to comply with their creditors’ debt repayment demands suspend both the temporal point at which debts will end through repayment or enforcement and the dominant morality of repayment through amoral humour about being a bad debtor. This shows that the form of power asymmetry that debtors experience, if any, hinges on their relation to both the morality and temporality of repayment.

Original language	English
Pages (from-to)	532-553
Number of pages	23
Journal	Economy and Society
Volume	48
Issue number	4
DOIs	https://doi.org/10.1080/03085147.2019.1652985
Publication status	Published - 29 Nov 2019

Structured keywords

SPS Centre for the Study of Poverty and Social Justice
Bristol Poverty Institute

Keywords

debt
inequality
morality
temporality
joking
value

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