Drawing on a corpus of 100 authentic telephone-mediated interactions from a British credit union, this paper is the first to examine narrative practices in debt collection encounters. It demonstrates that the credit union’s debt collector routinely invites and supports indebted individuals’ narratives using alignment and affiliation. Through a small stories approach, the paper therefore highlights that an organisation’s core values and principles can be seen “in action” in the ways that a professional orients to lay-people’s stories in professional-lay discourse. In this case, the collector’s narrative practices are emblematic of the credit union’s consciously ethical, responsible, and debtor-centric approach to collecting debt. The analysis also shows that indebted individuals perform important interactive work through their narrative accounts in terms of mitigating responsibility for their debt, constructing blameless and acceptable identities, and implicitly encouraging (or explicitly instructing) the collector to affiliate with their stance.

中文翻译：

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讨债遭遇中的叙事实践

本文借鉴了来自英国信用合作社的 100 条真实的电话中介互动语料库，首次研究了讨债遭遇中的叙述实践。它表明，信用合作社的收债员经常邀请和支持负债个人的叙述，使用对齐和从属关系。因此，通过小故事的方法，该论文强调，一个组织的核心价值观和原则可以“在行动”中看到，就像专业人士在专业外行话语中定位外行人的故事一样。在这种情况下，收债员的叙述实践象征着信用合作社有意识的道德、负责任和以债务人为中心的收债方法。