Instruments of Surveillance Welfare : Computerizing Unemployment and Health in 1960s and 1970s Sweden

• The object of this paper is the role of computerization in the establishment of a specific form of “surveillance welfare” after World War II. Was computerization used as a technology of mass-welfaring to produce a governable population in the frame of an expanding welfare state? Large-scale welfare practices such as health screenings and databasing of the unemployed seem to have a common purpose: making the population into a governable, partially self-regulating, collective body–a welfare body. The paper analyzes the use of computers in the implementation of regional health screenings in the 1960s and the 1970s and in the transformation of (un)employment procedures in the 1970s as two sites for the exercise of state control in post-WWII Sweden.

Ämnesord

HUMANIORA  -- Historia och arkeologi -- Teknikhistoria (hsv//swe)

HUMANITIES  -- History and Archaeology -- History of Technology (hsv//eng)

Nyckelord

Control

health screenings

history

unemployment policy

welfare

SOCIAL SCIENCES

SAMHÄLLSVETENSKAP

Publikations- och innehållstyp

ref (ämneskategori)

kon (ämneskategori)