The morale economy: care, counsel, and cheer at a debt advice centre in the Midlands of England

Abstract

In this thesis I show how the face-to-face technology of debt advice in England reveals a little explored concept that may be useful for further anthropological research: morale giving. I show the importance of morale giving and the space it occupies at the heart of the British state’s interaction with overwhelming household debt – and structural economic inequality – in the wake of the Global Financial Crisis. I respond by contributing to a burgeoning trend in ethnographic research that has a focus on UK debt advice. ‘Structural and historic conditions peculiar to England’ (Forbess, 2022, 43) have allowed for a growth in the anthropological study of advice giving (James, 2020; Koch, 2016; Wilde, 2020). Previous research has been attentive to the ways in which ‘activist-advisers’ work in sympathy with their indebted clients (James, 2020; James and Kirwan, 2019). Often negotiating the legalities between market and state, advisers mobilise instruments of debt relief and tactics of intermediary advocacy to disrupt emotional ‘attachments’ (Kirwan, 2018) between debtors and their debts, essentially performing an ‘ethics of care’ (Fraser, 2014, Koch & James, 2022) at the margins of an increasingly datafied (Kear, 2019) and ‘affectively modulated’ (Dawney, 2019) financial system of consumer-stimuli engagement and capital extraction: a ‘credit-state nexus’ of advice and credit rating default management (Deville, 2015). However, previous research has yet to sufficiently track a paradox at the heart of debt relief practices in the UK. Debt relief is recorded negatively by credit rating data, making future credit applications – necessities for those living on low household incomes – expensive and less available on the formal credit market. With ethnographic evidence, I show in thesis how official advice and debt relief fails to ‘work’ for those debtors for whom credit is a means to offset inadequate incomes, bringing forth a focus on morale giving that lends itself to an analysis of the management of hope as a caregiving practice, a remedy for when the ability to conceptualise a ‘debt free’ future is thwarted by the financial blockade of ‘poor’ credit rating data. By looking at how ethnographers theorise empathy, indebtedness, and temporality (Davey, 2017; Han, 2012) I ethnographically demonstrate an exchange of caregiving/care-receiving in which cheer, uplift, and motivation form part of an integral community service for St Anns’, an inner-city district of Nottingham, where navigating the perils of low income, high default rates, and general household indebtedness is a fundamental social concern. Yet, I equally demonstrate agonisms inherent to this service which may present problems for how a caregiving of ‘the present’ is conceptualised in the anthropology of debt (Han, 2012). Applying morale to the study of face-to-face debt advice comes with important nuances that may give slight but noteworthy contributions to gold standard works of anthropological theory, for which ‘neoliberal’ reformations of care are fundamental concerns (Gutierrez, 2020; Han, 2012; Muehlebach, 2012).

Date of Award	1 Aug 2025
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	The University of Manchester
Supervisor	Gillian Evans (Supervisor) & Katherine Smith (Supervisor)