As the review of personal credit and debt literature (Chapter Two) has shown, any investigation into personal indebtedness cannot but encounter the fundamental distinction made by Mills (1967: 8) between “the personal
troubles of milieu” and “the public issues of social structure”; analysis of which “is an essential tool of the sociological imagination”. Personal troubles are, by their very definition, matters directly concerning individuals, whether through personal experience or with regards to their immediate relations with others. For individuals, troubles are distinguished by an awareness of their imminence and pertinence to their social lives, determining how they experience the world around them and, ultimately, how they understand it. In contrast, public issues transcend the immediacy of those personal experiences. They may consist of a multitude of these experiences and how they overlap, interconnect and are organized within larger institutional structures as part of the wider society.
In relation to personal debt, this distinction between personal troubles and public issues is most apparent in ‘rationalist’ accounts of the financial crisis (see Section 2.1.4). The experience of the individual could relate to the increased opportunities to invest in the housing market with cheaper and more readily available mortgage credit. Correspondingly, the asset price bubble and the collapse of global financial institutions that followed its demise were beyond the control of any one individual. As Posner (2009: 106) claimed, what was individually rational proved to be collectively irrational. Therefore, from the various perspectives examined in the review of literature, we can begin to appreciate the ways in which the personal and the public are both differentiated and, at the same time, interconnected.
For example, an individual may comprehend the increased investment and consumption opportunities through the cheap credit available to them. However, this personal experience does not extend to how that cheap credit is generated in the first place and the implications for the wider economy. The causes and implications of cheap credit then are therefore public issues, which are beyond the comprehension of the immediacy of personal experience. These issues would include the liberalisation of financial markets and the increased risks to the financial system that emerged out of increased use of securitization and derivative trading in financial markets (Langley 2008a: 160).
Likewise, the more functional explanations of the pressures on individuals to take on debt cannot be wholly perceived from a personal point of view. Personal troubles that may arise from wage stagnation and retrenchment of social provisions, like housing, pensions and higher education, may be borne by individuals themselves. Nevertheless, their derivations are in fact public issues, such as the anti-inflationary policies pursued by successive UK governments and their consequences for labour market deregulation and the welfare state. As such, we need to acknowledge that institutional practices are public issues that often contribute to the creation personal troubles for individuals (Ritzer 1995: 17). To this end, sociological inquiry should therefore, as Gerth and Mills (1954: xx) advocate: “enable us to link the private and the public, the innermost acts of the individual with the widest kinds of socio-historical phenomena”.
The approach of CPE (see also Chapter Three) will provide the theoretical context for examining how the public issues of political and economic institutional strategies have been rendered meaningful for individuals in the constitution their subjectivities and modes of calculation with regards to personal credit and debt. In drawing our attention to the symbolic aspects of political and economic practices, CPE offers a point of entry to observe how those practices contribute towards the maintenance, reproduction and transformation of social relations involved in personal credit and debt. For this purpose, the key concept of the ‘economic imaginary’ provides the means to examine how the economy, as the sum of all economic activities, has been imaginatively narrated into discursive systems. By constructing a framework that provides subjects with the basis for ‘going on’ in the world, economic imaginaries are used to coordinate action across institutional sites by: “interpreting events, legitimizing actions and […] representing social phenomena” (Jessop 2004: 164).
In addition, an objective of this research will be to address the ‘empirical specificity’ implored by van Heur (2010b: 445). This will require not only looking at the production of meaning-making in these institutional sites, but also how they have become resonant within everyday practices of credit and
debt. Of course, this approach is not intended to make a direct linear connection between the production at one end of the scale and its consumption at the other. As Taylor (2002: 108) has pointed out, the economic imaginaries of elite institutional actors do not necessarily translate explicitly into the common understandings that inform everyday practices. So, while economic imaginaries are not wholly commensurate to implicit everyday practices, the a priori processes of legitimation they provide come to facilitate, shape and inform intersubjective understandings, even if they are not explicitly stated.
4.1.2 Research questions
As the review of literature has illustrated, the qualitative dimensions of the momentous growth of personal debt over the last 30 years are less than conclusive. The following research will be directed towards addressing two distinct, but interrelated research questions. In order to probe those questions further and facilitate the subsequent analyses, three related sub-questions are also explored in relation to each:
1. How has personal debt been framed through the promotion and dissemination of particular policy and other public discourses?
How is personal debt represented in relation to the wider economy?
How is personal debt framed as an object of intervention? How are subjects framed in relation to their indebtedness?
2. How have attitudes and behaviours towards personal debt been transformed as everyday cultural practices and understandings?
What identities and subject positions are being assumed in participants’ narratives of personal credit and debt?
How are different forms of credit and debt being categorised? What are the meanings and behavioural strategies that
The second research question brings us back to the ‘sociological imagination’ envisioned by Mills (1967: 6), when he states that: “no social study that does not come back to the problems of biography, of history and of their intersections within a society has completed its intellectual journey”. By drawing together these two objectives with the CPE approach, the research connects the changes that have affected everyday experiences of personal credit and debt with the wider cultural, social, political and economic transformations in the UK. It is from this perspective that the research seeks to place individual practices and experiences of credit and debt within the cultural framework of historical change they are constitutive of (Plummer 2001: 39).