Chasing Happiness through Personal Debt: An Example of Neoliberal Influence in Norwegian Society
Year: 2015
Type: book-chapter
Abstract: This chapter investigates a Norwegian TV show called Luksusfellen (The Luxury Trap). Each episode follows an individual or a couple who are having problems with personal debt. Like many others of its ilk, it presents a variety of indebted individuals whom the hosts try to help out of their predicament. What this particular show provides is an acute example of how debt, and implicitly the debt industry, is articulated in a public arena. It also enables an analysis of how various discourses around debt are both constructed and reproduced. This analytic frame is with particular reference to sociocultural dimensions and how often complex personal circumstances are presented as simplistic financial ones. Debt, and the debtor-creditor relationship, functions in a social capacity as much as it does a financial one. Understanding how the social conditions, specifically the various discourses, around debt are constructed is of significant importance as these attempt to smuggle in various moral and political assumptions, which contribute to legitimating and reproducing the currently hegemonic neoliberal ideology. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.
Source: Palgrave Macmillan UK eBooks
Authors: Salman Türken, Erik Carlquist, Henry Allen
Language: English
Subfield: Finance
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W2408836992