Swedish health information, conducted by the National Board of Health and Welfare in collaboration with private participants, expanded rapidly in the 1970s. This study examines a controversial bread campaign, which declared that the National Board, in collaboration with the private Bread Institute, wanted citizens to eat six to eight slices of bread every day. Why and how could such a seemingly unholy alliance come about? Contextualizing the collaborations with the industry, with a network governance approach, this article seeks the answers by investigating the organizational conditions behind the various campaigns. Different conflicting dilemmas influenced the campaigns and their outcomes. For example, the desire to maximize the disseminationof information, and at the same time controlling it, as well as the imbedded power dynamics between private and public sector. The result points to a shift from strong to weak interdependence between the government agency and collaborating parties, basically due to the agency's diminishing campaign resources, which opened up for a stronger commercialization of the bread campaign.
The introduction to the edited collection maps the overarching aims of the book, discusses the time frame and the geographical focus, and situates the book in a media historical research tradition on propaganda and persuasion. A key ambition with this volume is to advance a transnational approach to media history, highlighting how actors and institutions, ideas and practices, have been shaped by transnational entanglements within the Nordic region and beyond. Further, the introduction lays out the rationale for focusing on the entanglement of things, ideas and actors rather than media representations, cross-border connections rather than national comparisons, as well as the importance of a broad media concept in the study of propaganda and persuasion. Lastly, the introduction provides a short overview of chapters included in the book.
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