The Commodification of Compensation? Personal Injuries Claims In an Age of Consumption

Abstract

This article critiques the opprobrium attached to the phenomenon of tortious compensation seeking observable in those discourses which bemoan the existence of a ‘compensation culture’ (or ‘litigation crisis’). It draws on ethnographic interviews with professionals involved in advancing and defending against compensation claims to demonstrate how issues of consumerism and commercialism have shaped contemporary practice. Where participants locate a heightened claims-consciousness among the socially marginalized, it will be argued that debates on claims-making must be understood in light of consumerist desire and class-cultural judgement. Similarly, where claims resolution practices promote commercial expedience over just entitlement, it will be argued that populist concerns are fuelled by a distrust of abstract, hyper-capitalist modes of responding to personal injury. The ethnography sits within a frame that draws on late-modern social theory to locate both heightened levels of ‘litigiousness’ and its construction as somewhat ‘deviant’ within the same socio-economic conditions.