Abstract
This chapter investigates a Norwegian TV show calledLuksusfellen (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.
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© 2015 Salman Türken, Erik Carlquist and Henry Allen
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Türken, S., Carlquist, E., Allen, H. (2015). Chasing Happiness through Personal Debt: An Example of Neoliberal Influence in Norwegian Society. In: Değirmencioğlu, S.M., Walker, C. (eds) Social and Psychological Dimensions of Personal Debt and the Debt Industry. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137407795_9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137407795_9
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