No abstract
Today, nearly the entire adult population in Sweden uses a digital BankID for more purposes than only financial ones. Issuing identity documents is commonly perceived as a task for state authorities, but in Swedish society banks have played a dominant role as identificators. The first contribution of this article is that it explains this unique emergence of bank identity and traces the historical roots of a financial identification society to the mid-1960s. Banks started issuing standardized identity cards as a complement to the new system of paying salaries and wages by direct deposit to checking accounts, and these cards eventually became quasi-official identity documents. The Swedish story thus contrasts the scholarship on identification and state control. By treating identity as both a socio-cultural category and a materialization of a technology of control, I argue that the formalization of official identity documents for everyday use was intertwined with the creation of new financial identities. The introduction and general distribution of ID cards were parts of a process whereby wage earners became financial consumers, and the banks transformed themselves into retail companies. My second contribution therefore relates to the scholarly narrative on the financialization of everyday life since the 1980s. While the mass move to financial identification in Sweden, highlighted in this article, certainly fits the content of this narrative, it questions its chronology.
This article highlights the transfers and practical uses of the commercial knowledge of window dressing in early twentiethcentury Sweden through the analysis of the professional career and family business of Oscar Lundkvist, Swedish display pioneer and former window dresser in chief of the largest and first Swedish department store, Nordiska Kompaniet. Building on rich source material including unique written and photographic documents from the Lundkvist family, educational material and trade journals, we show how the innovative and spectacular became ordinary and mundane in retail praxis. We argue that the emergence and professionalization of window display brought with it the dissemination and trivialization of the same practice. By focusing on not only the most conspicuous aspects and cultural meanings of window displays but also on the materials and competences involved, we explain how setting up the displays became an everyday commercial practice and how it was positioned between advertising and retail as well as between the artistic and the commercial.
This study concerns the history of Swedish public everyday discourse about knowledge and its benefits for the individual, c. 1920-1974. We examine the value(s) ascribed to knowledgein economic and/or idealistic termsusing private correspondence institutes as our point of departure. These were immensely popular, yet have hitherto been overlooked by historians. First, we argue that commercially driven correspondence education, which was a mass phenomenon in early and mid-20 th-century Sweden, blurred the demarcation lines between general and vocational education, and more importantly between formal and so-called popular education (folkbildning). Second, we examine how knowledge and education were promoted and justified in the widely circulated advertisements for Hermods Korrespondensinstitut, the largest of the Swedish correspondence schools. By analysing and contextualizing advertisements over six decades, we find a strong dominance of individualistic economic valuations from the beginning, a successive increase in idealistic valuations over the decades, and an increasing amalgamation of idealistic and economic justifications for knowledge. We argue that the extensive scale of Hermods' and similar institutes' educational activities offers an important key for understanding the social context in which the overall marketization and capitalization of knowledge in the latest decades was able to take root.
This article is a historical investigation into department stores and consumer culture from a gender perspective. The analysis focuses on two dichotomies: hedonistic versus rational consumption and emancipatory versus oppressive consumption. These two dichotomies are interdependent in many ways. In studies on consumer culture and gender history there are two major interpretations of the significance of the early department store. The stores are perceived as either emancipatory or as oppressive institutions towards women. These two alternative interpretations approach the dichotomy of rational versus hedonistic consumption in very different ways. Scholars who argue for the emancipatory importance of the stores dissolve the dichotomy. Their studies imply that hedonistic and mainly pleasure-seeking consumption was not necessarily irrational. inauthentic and manipulated. In contrast, researchers arguing for the other, rather negative interpretation are actually maintain the conventional dichotomy; or more precisely, they think within the framework of that dichotomy, instead of treating it as a cultural construction, or as an analytical tool in interpreting historical material. Earlier research on the history of consumption has asserted that female consumers were depicted by their contemporaries at the turn of the century and in the early twentieth century as easily manipulated, impulsive, pleasure-seeking and foolish. This image, which corresponds to the ideal type of the hedonistic consumer, was contrasted to that of the male as rational and autonomous, even as a consumer. My research shows that, in the world of the Swedish department store, NK, at least as depicted in its staff-newspaper, consumers were characterized differently. Women-consumers were often described there as self-confident and competent, whereas men were said to be irrational, incompetent and easily tempted. The traditional dichotomy is thus reversed. My analysis of the department store NK shows that mechanisms which conserve the subordination of women and mechanisms that act against it coexist, and that these are often manifested in various representations of hedonistic and rational consumption. However these are merely representations and nothing more. In the actual practice of consumption, in the ways people use and appropriate the store, the 'hedonistic' and the 'rational' elements are always combined.
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