I'm not going to feed the bailiffs
Personal Bankruptcy and Debtor Agency in Narrative Accounts of Struggling Debtors
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 2181979 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Anja Decker (0000-0002-3867-3935, Czech Academy of Sciences, Institute of Sociology, corresponding author), Tomáš Samec (0000-0003-4378-0732, Czech Academy of Sciences, Institute of Sociology) |
| Year | 2025 |
| Volume | 18 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Pages | 18-34 |
| Publication date | 2025-01-02 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Journal of Cultural Economy (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 1753-0350 • E-ISSN: 1753-0369 |
| Publisher | Informa UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1080/17530350.2024.2360915 |
| OpenAlex | W4401833653 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 2 |
| References cited | 44 |
The article uses the formal instrument of personal bankruptcy proceedings as an illuminating context to contribute to the scholarship on the lived experience of overindebtedness. Through the analysis of 29 in-depth interviews with heavy debtors living in Czechia, we provide a focus on debtor agency, exploring how bankruptcy interrelates with how struggling debtors narratively approach debt and construct their capacity to act. We show that first-hand accounts of (planned) participation in a bankruptcy proceeding contain a surprising number and variety of narratives of agency. Emphasizing the processual character of bankruptcy proceedings, we demonstrate that bankruptcy supports enactments of debtor agency by interfering in the temporal ordering of debt as performed by the struggling debtors, shaping the experiences of overindebtedness also among those debtors who have not (yet) entered the formal process. We show that the narrative constructions of agency as regards bankruptcy are often embedded in a neoliberal discourse of merit and self-responsibilization. While the respondents reproduce a largely depoliticized and individualized account of debt resistance that at times operates with a hierarchization of struggling debtors, disclosing bankruptcy (intentions) to others also evokes spontaneous and unorganized acts of solidarity within personal networks that empower debtors
Bankruptcy · Creditor · Debt · Debtor · Economics · Law and economics · Narrative · Political science · Scholarship · Social science · Sociology · History · Housing Market and Economics · Housing, Finance, and Neoliberalism · Law · Political and Economic history of UK and US · Finance
The model of the text
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Financialisation, Financial Literacy and Asset-Based Welfare
Precarious everyday agency
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Grassroots struggles challenging housing financialization in Spain
Living U.S. Capitalism
Governing Homo Subprimicus
Managing the Stigma of Personal Bankruptcy
Spaces of debt resistance and the contemporary politics of financialised capitalism
Everyday agency and transformation
Everyday financialization
Financial oikonomization
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Measuring Humans Through Money
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Negotiating debts and gifts
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Homeownership in Israel
The Anthropology of Credit and Debt
Symptoms of Another Life
What Is Agency
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Learning to fail
Suspensory indebtedness
The Spanish Mortgage Crisis and the Re-emergence of Moral Economies in Uncertain Times
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| Unique citing works | 2 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 2 |
| Citation span | 2025 - 2026 (2) |
| Citation velocity | current |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 1 |