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In
Creditworthy, Josh Lauer explores the evolution of credit reporting from from an industry that relied on personal knowledge to the modern consumer data industry. He highlights the role that commercial surveillance has played in monitoring Americans' economic lives.
List of contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. “A Bureau for the Promotion of Honesty”: The Birth of Systematic Credit Surveillance
2. Coming to Terms with Credit: The Nineteenth- Century Origins of Consumer Credit Surveillance
3. Credit Workers Unite: Professionalization and the Rise of a National Credit Infrastructure
4. Running the Credit Gantlet: Extracting, Ordering, and Communicating Consumer Information
5. “You Are Judged by Your Credit”: Teaching and Targeting the Consumer
6. “File Clerk’s Paradise”: Postwar Credit Reporting on the Eve of Automation
7. Encoding the Consumer: The Computerization of Credit Reporting and Credit Scoring
8. Database Panic: Computerized Credit Surveillance and Its Discontents
9. From Debts to Data: Credit Bureaus in the New Information Economy
Epilogue
Notes
Selected Bibliography
Index
About the author
Josh Lauer is an associate professor of media studies at the University of New Hampshire. His historical studies of communication technology, surveillance, and financial culture have appeared in Technology and Culture, New Media & Society, and several edited collections.
Summary
In Creditworthy, Josh Lauer explores the evolution of credit reporting from from an industry that relied on personal knowledge to the modern consumer data industry. He highlights the role that commercial surveillance has played in monitoring Americans' economic lives.
