Abstract
This article analyzes the so-called turn to the market in Sweden, with an emphasis on aspects that are typically absent from large-scale narratives. How did the changes known as neoliberalization and financialization enter everyday life and mundane financial practices? And which analytical tools can historians use to meaningfully connect the experience of changes on the micro level to those on the macro level? Zooming in on the the year 1979 and focusing on two empirical cases—the popularization of stock saving and the domestication of consumer credit—allows us to elaborate and apply a set of analytical entry points about (1) mundane micro-infrastructures, (2) financial knowledge as learning and unlearning, and (3) moral boundary work. This framework offers a way of exploring when and in what ways new financial practices were experienced and eventually embraced by those who had previously been skeptical or even hostile. It also reveals the role played by actors and institutions not typically seen as agents of marketization.
Highlights
In the history of Western capitalism, the last four decades have seen a distinct turn to the market
Households have increasingly become linked to large financial circuits, for example in their capacity as mortgage takers or future recipients of retirement pensions.4. While this field of scholarship is highly relevant for us, we find that it seldom takes an elaborate historical perspective or it concentrates mostly on a period starting in the 1980s
While we look at the broad social impact of new financial practices, we explore how the new social meanings were created in relation to the old ones
Summary
In the history of Western capitalism, the last four decades have seen a distinct turn to the market. We maintain that a new direction in economic or consumer policy, for example new credit-friendly legislation, requires an infrastructure on the micro level to take effect, including everyday financial instruments such as a bank account, a plastic credit card, or automated monthly savings in a mutual fund. It requires and at the same time creates a cognitive ability; in other words, financial knowledge on the part of the. The promotion of unlearning old knowledge was intertwined with the ambition to redefine the morality of the past
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