This open access book explores the history of how banks and banking services have become part of everyday life. Taking welfare state Sweden as its specific setting, the book identifies key cultural boundaries that had to be crossed in order to make people more ‘bankminded’ – boundaries of class, gender, morality, ideology and identity. Each chapter explores one of these cultural challenges, showing how banks and finance companies made inroads into the workplace, the family and the spaces of consumption, and entered the world of social movements while also taking on tasks typically associated with state authorities.

 

Focusing on this ‘bankification of everyday life’ reveals the historical links between the post-war welfare state and the financialised everyday culture of the late twentieth century. The book analyses how neoliberal ideas about consumers and credit permeated everyday financial practices in a Nordic welfare regime often perceived as resistant to such ideas. It explores the analogue antecedents of today’s digital BankIDs, a quasi-official form of identification that is also widely used in non-financial transactions. This book will be of wide interest to scholars of economic and cultural history and sociology, as well as those interested in the history of welfare states and the development of commercial surveillance. 

Book Information
ISBN 9783031776526
Author Orsi Husz
Format Hardback
Page Count 246
Imprint Palgrave Macmillan
Publisher Springer International Publishing AG