On debt obligations as market relations: the entanglement of debtors in market organization

Over the past decade, debt-based solutions have been implemented as part of austerity policies to distribute public goods by the use of market forces, resulting in an increase in public and private indebtedness. This paper considers the terms of such solutions by developing the conceptual lens of market studies to rethink ‘debt’ and ‘the market’ as analytical categories that often reproduce the conditions of their conceptual boundaries. In so doing, it demonstrates how paying attention to particularities reveals the normative, economic and political circumstances that determine debt-based solutions. These do not simply sit peripheral to the market, but come to define debt obligations as part of market relations. In this respect, the paper takes an approach that accounts for obligation as an entanglement of debtors in market relations. The study builds on Michel Callon’s rendition of ‘problematization’ to explore the implementation of the 2010 higher education fee loan regime in England, a result of austerity governance. A novel application of ‘markets for collective concern’ and ‘accountability devices’ is thus used to argue that understanding the ways debt-based solutions entangle market participants in the obligation to repay that reproduces the conditions of the intervention’s conceptual boundaries, requires a market studies approach.