When the entrepreneurial subject fails: The neoliberal governance of consumer debtors

Neoliberalism ushered in a debt-based economy for American society. The existing scholarship linking neoliberalism to personal indebtedness has mainly been at the macrolevel of analysis. There remains a need to investigate how neoliberalism operates at the microlevel and impacts the everyday lived experiences of consumers struggling with debt. Michel Foucault’s concept of governmentality offers a useful analytical framework for unearthing the technologies that result in the subjectification of consumer debtors.

A governmentality framework enables us to better understand how indebtedness presents both material and psychological harms for individuals and how neoliberal discourses are interiorized and facilitate a resurrection of financial identity. This research adds to existing governmentality studies by reporting on the responsive strategies to creditor demands and the moral self-accounting indebted individuals engage in when they fail to live up to the neoliberal model of the “entrepreneurial subject.” Based upon thirty-six in-depth interviews with individuals possessing unmanageable debt and on the precipice of filing for bankruptcy, I argue that technologies of neoliberal governance serve to both discipline and recenter debtors as responsibilized entrepreneurial subjects who will reenter the economy and once again turn to a state of credit dependency.