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- Sjöblom, Alf, 1974-
(författare)
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Trygghet som handelsvara : Privat folkförsäkring i det framväxande välfärdssamhället 1900–1950
- 2016
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Industrial Life Insurance (ILI) was introduced in Sweden in the beginning of the 1900s. Following models already used in the United Kingdom and the United States, this insurance was specifically aimed at manual labourers, promising pension savings and compensation to surviving relatives. The insurance was an immediate success, with almost three million insurance policies in force by the mid-1900s. ILI was characterised by extensive and carefully monitored marketing practices. By managing an army of agents, the companies sold policies and collected premiums on a regular basis in the homes of the insured.The purpose of the dissertation is to analyse the development of a commercial business with social policy aspirations, and how it interacted with other social security institutions. How could ILI thrive in the emerging Swedish welfare state that, according to existing research, allowed little space for market-based welfare alternatives? The dissertation also seeks to contribute to a broader understanding of the contemporary “welfare market” in Sweden today.From a perspective of welfare formation as a social process, the emergence and expansion of ILI is interpreted as a phenomenon that has shaped, and been shaped by, the social policy arena. The insurance industry’s capacity to adapt to the changing ambitions of the state in this arena is emphasised. Furthermore, its leading representatives’ ability to continuously locate the role of life insurance in the shifting landscape of social policy is underlined. By locating welfare in separate but complementary public and private spheres, the industry contributed to the shaping of the compulsory pension scheme introduced in 1913 and the overall regulation of insurance in the mid-twentieth century. The social security of Swedish citizens was now to be ensured according to the vision of complementary spheres that the insurance industry had advocated for almost fifty years.The insurance companies’ commercial activities are analysed as a form of governmentality, where the agency system is scrutinized as an interventionist practice that created a long lasting relationship between the companies and the working classes. The dissertation shows how the industrialists’ role as “insurance experts” was used to influence public policies. As public figures and experts on various committees, representatives of the industry advocated a welfare formation that left ample space for their own business interests. The scientisation of security was also essential in creating a product where social aspirations and commercial logics could be united.The success of ILI thus rested on the interaction with the state apparatus. An arena of social policy was established where commercial companies were to be the supplier of all welfare above the level of “meagre basic security”. Through intense marketing measures, commercial actors influenced the perceptions of security and welfare. The process of welfare formation led to the internalisation of commercial ideals about social security that now constitutes an essential dimension of the Swedish welfare state.
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| 2. |
- Ulväng, Marie, 1970-
(författare)
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Klädekonomi och klädkultur : Böndernas kläder i Härjedalen under 1800-talet
- 2012
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- The aim of Clothing economy and clothing culture is to explain the changes that occurred in farmers' clothing traditions in the 19th century, both from a cultural perspective and an economic one. The latter is particularly important, as the study of popular clothing traditions mainly has had a cultural approach and especially been carried out by ethnologists. In order to shift focus from clothing traditions to clothing economy, garments have been regarded in the present study primarily as goods and property, which include both economic and cultural values. Thus, the investigation positions itself in the research field of the history of consumption, whereas previous research in ethnology primarily has offered an object-based perspective. The purpose has been to investigate how the clothing owned by the peasants and the peasants’ consumption of clothing both express and, at the same time, constitute a central part of the transformation process that the Swedish society experienced during the course of the 19th century. The study is based on a careful use of information found in probate inventories regarding the clothes owned by the individual and the financial circumstances of the household. The social status of the individual and the financial circumstances of the household has been analysed in relation to local conditions regarding consumption and societal development at the time. In order to analyse people’s varying abilities to obtain and uphold a wardrobe, the study also includes a gender and life-cycle perspective. All things considered, the thesis contributes with important new knowledge on how peasants’ wardrobes and their consumption of clothing both expressed and constituted a central part of societal change in the 19th century, where the closely examined details in the individual case of Lillhärdal, situated in the southern Härjedalen, are connected to a broader development process.
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| 3. |
- Carlsson, Karin, 1973-
(författare)
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Den tillfälliga husmodern : Hemvårdarinnekåren i Sverige 1940-1960
- 2013
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- This thesis examines the history of the Swedish public home help service. The public provision of home help is taken as an empirical example of the state’s relationship with the private sphere. Housework and care work are discussed as political issues and as the objects of a professionalization project. The study addresses the creation and distribution of welfare in the form of public services that are delivered in private homes and analyses how visionary government policies worked in practice. In the broadest sense, the thesis aims to increase understanding of the difficult and deeply-rooted problem of how housework and care work can be made ‘real work’.Those who started the public home help service argued that it would relieve the shortage of domestic servants, increase the birth rate, reduce poverty and improve public health. In addition, it was believed that paid domestic work, when performed by public home help workers, would be transformed into a respectable occupation through education, selective recruitment and regulated pay and conditions. This ambition, however, was doomed from the start in part because, as this study shows, central actors in the public home help service took an ambivalent approach concerning educational requirements. Professional care work in the household found itself in a paradoxical situation because its central tasks were the same as those all women and mothers were expected to be able to carry out in the private sphere.The public home help service had a surprisingly short life span. After sixteen years the state subsidy for public home help workers was withdrawn, and new societal problems and political questions took priority. At the same time, the gender discourse underwent significant changes. The necessary preconditions for the existence of the home help had disappeared. Nevertheless, the significance of the public home help service is greater than its own short existence. Seen in a wider historical perspective, the home help service represents an important example of how paid housework constantly takes on new forms and how difficult raising the status and value of household labor is, even when it is publicly supported and regulated.
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| 4. |
- Guerrero Cantarell, Rosalía, 1983-
(författare)
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Images of Work and Love : The Dynamics of Economy and Emotions on the Big Screen in Sweden and Mexico 1930–1955
- 2016
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- This thesis studies the intertwinement of economy and emotions within the context of modernity. By investigating how work and romantic love interact in fiction films from the period 1930 to 1955, I seek to shed light on how two cultural practices that might normally be assumed to belong to separate dimensions of life – the economic and the emotional – are actually closely connected to each other. The examination of these interactions allows a better understanding of the process of modernisation, as well as the ways in which cultural differences matter in two national contexts: Sweden and Mexico.The thesis is structured into three overarching dimensions of analysis: space, gender and class. I seek to explain the relationship between work and romantic love within these dimensions using the concepts of emotional capital, respectability and worthiness. The results highlight the differences between the national cases.For example, films depicting the Swedish countryside represent both modern and non-modern domestic spaces when judged in terms of their configuration and appearance; however, certain traits of rural characters such as solidarity, closeness to nature and equality transcend into modern society and guide work and romantic love practices. In Mexico, the countryside is depicted at the core of national identity; however, this space is characterised by its non-modern nature. The countryside, according to films, must be reformed by notions of science and rationality. Film narratives show that through romantic love, the man modernises the non-modern woman.The gender analysis revealed that Swedish films endorse the Housewife Contract in Swedish society during this period. In Mexican films, a similar contract is found in the discourse of the modern nation but films endorse a broader interpretation. Mexican films show that whilst the patriarchal organisation of society is expected to loosen its grip in a modern society, a stable gender structure is desirable.The class analysis reveals that upward mobility is a desirable outcome in Swedish film stories. Women attain it through love while men do so through work. However, upward mobility is unacceptable in Mexican films; they instead endorse class permanence.
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| 5. |
- Husz, Orsi, 1969-
(författare)
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Drömmars värde : Varuhus och lotteri i svensk konsumtionskultur 1897-1939
- 2004
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- The dissertation explores ideas about consumption in general and about consumer dreams in particular in early twentieth century Sweden. This is done in an analysis of two specific consumer environments –- the department store and the lottery. Both have often been explicitly related to dreams by contemporary observers as well as modern-day researchers. My case studies concern Sweden’s first real department store –- Nordiska Kompaniet (NK) in Stockholm –- in the period 1902 to 1939, and Swedish lotteries in the period 1897 to 1939. The dissertation consists of four parts. The first part presents the starting points of the investigations. Previous research has described the consumer culture of this period either as conveying a normative message about rational thinking or as imbued with a new hedonism. Consequently, I apply the notions of rationality, irrationality, hedonism, and asceticism as analytical concepts. I analyse ideas as expressed in words, in actions and in the shaping of institutions. I investigate the material in both empirical substudies from the perspective of three basic issues. Firstly, I examine the perception of old and new; secondly, the role of pecuniary values and ideal values; thirdly, the power relationships reflected and created by the institutions of the department store and the lottery. Part Two is a study of the department store NK. The empirical chapters discuss issues about the ‘enchantment’ of rationality and modernity within the department store, the attempted reconciliation of commerce and (high) culture, and how gender and class were defined by the shaping of the store space and by the interactions between sales staff and customers. In a concluding chapter I point out the cultural implications of the department store’s business principle of providing a complete range of all possible consumer goods. Part Three investigates the issue of Swedish lotteries in the early twentieth century. I focus on the political and press debates about a proposed state lottery but I also illuminate the institutional forms of lotteries and some aspects of gambling practices. In the empirical chapters of this case study I explore how the perception of the lottery as an antiquated phenomenon shifted to the exact opposite; I examine the conflict between individual dreams and collective future planning as expressed in the political debate; and I discuss how the lottery was related to the work ethic in the normative discourse and in the practice of gambling. I also study how the ‘good public causes’ which Swedish lotteries financed were used by contemporaries to provide moral legitimacy to the lottery. To sum up, I argue that the various and shifting social meanings of money should be considered as a key to understanding both individual and collective attitudes to dreams in the lottery issue. Part Four summarises the results and discusses the two case studies together. Rational, irrational, hedonistic and ascetic features were brought together in the ideas about consumption and in the practice of consuming. I isolate three mechanisms that were used in the period to reconcile apparently contradictory notions and actual opposites. I call these mechanisms redefinition, value equalising and stereotyping.In summary, the dissertation illuminates the interpretation of consumer dreams by placing them in a broader context. It shows how dreams were related to the view of modernity and to the power relationships in society and how they were ascribed ideal and pecuniary values.
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