Research
You will find a complete range of our monographs, muti-authored and edited works including peer-reviewed, original scholarly research across the social sciences and aligned disciplines. We publish long and short form research and you can browse the complete Bristol University Press and Policy Press archive.
Policy Press also publishes policy reviews and polemic work which aim to challenge policy and practice in certain fields. These books have a practitioner in mind and are practical, accessible in style, as well as being academically sound and referenced.
Books: Research
This chapter explores a dialectics of what the author terms unpayable debts that define the current financialized global capitalist paradigm. On the one hand, these are the widely acknowledged and profoundly influential debts of individuals, institutions and nation-states which are unlikely or impossible to repay, from subprime mortgages to the sovereign debt of nations like Greece (or even the US for that matter). On the other hand, unpayable debts refers to those unacknowledged, silenced or purposefully ignored debts for the atrocities and injustices that helped create this current financialized order, including reparations for the transatlantic slave trade, restitution of stolen Indigenous lands and recompense for colonial pillage and subjugation. These latter unpayable moral and political debts must be silenced, ignored or deligitimized in order for the former unpayable fiscal debts to have such power. To explore these tensions the author provides a contextual and aesthetic reading of three interventionist and performative public artworks: English artist Darren Cullen’s “Pocket Money Loans” (2012-present), Argentine artist Marta Minujín’s “Payment of Greek Debt to Germany with Olives and Art” (2017), and Anishinaabe artist Rebecca Belmore’s “Gone Indian” (2009).
Looming behind the formidable spectres haunting Europe is a rising tide of indebted households. This chapter focuses upon the United Kingdom, where a perfect storm of measures has caused a fundamental change in the very meaning of ‘household debt’. In this chapter we focus upon the temporal frameworks of debt, challenging the dominant understanding of debt as imposing a ‘disciplinary’ framework of time upon the subject. Across two bodies of fieldwork – with the advice sector and with debtors – we trace not only the imposition, management and varied narratives of ‘disciplinary’ structurings of time, but also the ‘moments’ in which they crack, fragment, or are suspended. We show how the ways in which debt is sold, managed and collected, as well as the practices through which debtors consider multiple futures in their negotiations of debt, weave other forms of time into the indebted everyday. We show also how the stagnation and irregularity of household budgets renders the disciplinary edifice of debt increasingly unstable. Following the work of Lisa Adkins, we bring these non-disciplinary ‘moments’ together under the remit of ‘speculative time’.
This chapter offers a number of points of orientation for the development of a sociology of debt. It suggests that to date much sociological engagement with debt has been limited by two problems: first, a failure to engage with the long-term and embedded process of the transformation of debt into liquidity and second, an assumption that household and personal debt amounts to illiquid and stagnant households. I outline how such assumptions are compromising the ability of sociologists to identify and engage with how money, debt and finance have become deeply embedded in social life and have become central to the dynamics of social formation. This includes class formation – whose dynamics are increasingly based not on occupations but on the dynamics of financial assets and especially their distribution – and the materialization and dynamics of what I will term here Minskian households, that is, households which exist in a permanent state of speculation.
Slavoj Žižek’s Freudian concepts of desire and drive provide a model to distinguish between ‘normal’ engaged behavior and ‘pathological’ addiction. While desire is structured around the pursuit of an object onto which the subject projects different fantasies of enjoyment and redemption, drive has moved beyond the realm of fantasy and thus also beyond the realm of subjectivity as such. The proposition I would like to raise is that contemporary financial capitalism is no longer even structured around the desire for money but has moved into a state of debt drive. Political initiatives in the wake of the financial crisis such as bank packages, quantitative easing, and austerity politics seem to have given up even on the fantasy that we can move out of the crisis. Ultimately, they all boil down to the compulsive repetition of the same failed act of creating money out of debt.
This chapter addresses a concept that was once central to debates within classical liberal thought but today is largely neglected: usury. The question of usury divided classical liberals over whether there should be a free market in the provision of credit or rather government policing of the social and moral limits of debt. These divisions resurface in a contemporary the current post-crisis period in debate over whether the short-term loan market should be free to meet the demands of credit supply (the libertarian position) or should be regulated by government agencies to ensure that it works within limits (a neoliberal stance). This chapter argues that the concept of usury is useful for questioning the role of state and government in regulating private debt, and for considering the possibility of an alternative politics of debt that centres not on regulating the rate of interest charged on credit, but rather the freedom of banks and other institutions to lend money at a price.
The systemic necessity to take on ever more unsecured credit simply to go about the business of everyday life in a financialized society is still positioned as a personal choice rather than an unavoidable means of survival. In our contribution to this volume, we offer a qualitative analysis of the lived experiences of indebted lives in the context of precarious temporary employment in the UK, in order to examine the extent to which young people are ‘governed’ by debt. Rather than total discipline, we demonstrate empirically how young people actively reject, resist and negotiate the debts that they undertake, challenging a normative framing of debt that seeks to condemn the moral character of struggling debtors. As well as this empirical work, our theoretical contribution here is to interpret this data in terms of what we consider to be the temporal dynamics of indebtedness, which result in living ‘deferred lives’.
This chapter introduces a phenomenon I call ‘digital subprime’. Digital subprime represents a frontier in lenders’ quest for predictive power, involving a growing group of technology startups who are entering subprime, payday lending markets in various countries and are lending at high rates of interest to borrowers who often have either poor or not credit histories. In this variant of consumer credit lending, diverse forms of data are processed through forms of algorithmic analysis in the attempt to better predict the repayment behaviour of individuals. This data often appears extremely mundane and to have very little to do with the credit product in hand. The chapter seeks to map the terrain of possibility represented by the diverse forms of data that are rendered accessible to lenders, partly as a basis for future research, and partly to highlight key developments in the present and future ontologies of money.
In this chapter I explore the impacts of debt through the lens of ecology in order to reimagine the meaning of indebtedness for a form of globalisation defined by exhaustion. In the first part of the chapter I trace the origins of the contemporary debt society through a discussion of global socio-economic change before moving on to consider the impacts of the near collapse of this social form in the period following 2008. In the second section of the chapter I expand my exploration of these impacts through consideration of the ways in which unmanageable indebtedness destroys the future on the level of both societies, which fall into exhaustion and a kind of decrepit post-modernism, and individuals, who come to occupy a space of lack and melancholia by virtue of their inability to live up to the modern ideal of what it means to be an individual. In this respect the central point of my chapter concerns the attempt to rethink the bad, or unsustainable, ecology of financial indebtedness through the reconceptualisation of notions of default and bankruptcy in a new vision of the necessity of interdependence, where self, other, and world come together to form a primal debt complex.
In this introductory chapter I consider the diverse meanings of the idea of debt in the contemporary world. Starting with the current problem of apparently ever-expanding debt, I explain the origins of the globalisation of the condition of indebtedness through a discussion of processes of financialisation, where money is entirely virtual and weightless. In order to situate the idea of financialisation in a sociological context, I show how the financial crisis of 2007-2008 gave weight to the weightless fictitious capital of the fully financialised world in the form of the dead weight of debt that crushes the indebted and creates a new power relation, which Maurizio Lazzarato writes of in terms of the creditor / debtor relation. While economics tends to conceive of debt in terms of number and objective mathematical calculation, the idea of the weight of debt focus upon the subjective experience of indebtedness founded upon a particular subordinate subject position, the debtor, which it then becomes possible to understand sociologically and critically oppose on the basis of different value systems.
This chapter seeks to understand the social and political significance of the Greek Truth Committee on the Public Debt (TCPD), a process set up by SYRIZA in June 2015 to contest the dominant ‘common sense’ of Greece’s sovereign debt. Affirming its value, this chapter analyses the TCPD as an important, strategic response to post-crash neoliberalism. Lazzarato has argued that contemporary neoliberalism relies on a mnemotechnics of debt, a project of memory, which does the crucial work of legitimising and sustaining recourse to austerity policies by making citizens ‘guilty’ and thus deserving of them. Set against neoliberalism’s mnemotechnics, I examine the TCPD as a memory-making project, showing how it produced a counter-memory of the debt which demonstrated the innocence of Greek citizens and thus freed them from guilt. With its capacity to reverse the common sense of debt, I conclude that the TCPD’s memory-making strategy remains an important precedent for resisting post-crash neoliberalism.
