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Bankminded

Banks as Intimate Agents of Everyday Life in Welfare State Sweden

verfasst von: Orsi Husz

Verlag: Springer Nature Switzerland

Buchreihe : Palgrave Studies in Economic History

Enthalten in: Springer Professional "Wirtschaft+Technik" , Springer Professional "Wirtschaft"

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Über dieses Buch

Dieses Open-Access-Buch untersucht die Geschichte, wie Banken und Bankdienstleistungen Teil des täglichen Lebens geworden sind. Ausgehend vom Wohlfahrtsstaat Schweden identifiziert das Buch zentrale kulturelle Herausforderungen und zeigt, wie Banken und Finanzunternehmen in den Arbeitsmarkt, die Familie, Konsumräume und die Welt der sozialen Bewegungen vordrangen und gleichzeitig Aufgaben übernahmen, die typischerweise mit staatlichen Behörden verbunden sind. Die Fokussierung auf diese "Bankifizierung des Alltags" offenbart die historischen Verbindungen zwischen dem Wohlfahrtsstaat der Nachkriegszeit und der finanzierten Alltagskultur des späten 20. Jahrhunderts. Dieses Buch wird für Wissenschaftler der Wirtschafts- und Kulturgeschichte und Soziologie ebenso interessant sein wie für diejenigen, die sich für die Geschichte des Wohlfahrtsstaates und die Entwicklung der kommerziellen Überwachung interessieren.

Mit KI übersetzt

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Frontmatter

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Chapter 1. The Bankification of Everyday Life: Introduction

Abstract

Bankminded tells the story of how banks and banking services have become part of everyday life. The setting is post-war Sweden, a welfare state typically described as de-commodifying and de-marketising economic aspects of social and private life. The bankification of everyday life was a silent personal financial revolution that reshaped moralities, practices and the micro-infrastructures of personal finance well before financial deregulation and the credit boom of the 1980s. This book sets out the key cultural boundaries that had to be crossed in order to make Swedes more ‘bankminded’—boundaries of class, gender, morality, ideology and identity. Each chapter explores one of these cultural challenges and shows how banks and finance companies made inroads into the workplace, the family and the spaces of consumption, and entered the world of social movements while also taking on tasks typically associated with state authorities. The cultural relational work that has made banks familiar has also naturalised the extent to which financial institutions are part of ordinary life. The bankification of everyday life, embedded in a post-war welfare statist cultural context and pointing forward to the late twentieth century’s financialised everyday culture, is a missing link that reveals the intricate historical connections between the two.

Orsi Husz

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Chapter 2. Welcome to the Banking Age: Redefining the Social Class of Money

Abstract

This chapter centres on class and examines how banks made inroads into the workplace. It analyses the so-called cheque accounts for wages reform, which was where the bankification of everyday life started. In the late 1950s, Swedish commercial banks began offering payroll services. Current accounts with chequebooks were opened for both white- and blue-collar employees, blurring the boundaries of the class-based financial system and changing personal financial practices. Wage earners were turned into bank customers and the commercial banks became retail companies, selling a wide range of products to a broad public. Still, this chapter suggests that one should be wary of overemphasising the importance of the self-governing financial subjects of Foucauldian studies. Making and controlling new financial subjects was accomplished through cultural technologies rooted in a hierarchical value system permeated by class (defined by production rather than consumption). A wage-earner identity (the quintessential subject category of the Swedish welfare state), rather than a finance consumer or investor identity, proved instrumental in the initial phase of the bankification process. The new financial subjects were created as much with the help of the old identities as with models imagined for the new ones.

Orsi Husz

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Chapter 3. Making Finance Familiar: Gender and the Domestication of Banks

Abstract

This chapter highlights the new involvement of banks in family life, through the prism of gender and domesticity. I analyse bank adverts and campaigns directed at women, especially a recurring campaign by Handelsbanken for housewives in the 1960s. Interpreting these events as performances of the marketisation of domestic money and of the domestication of banking services, I argue that by playing on emotions, family life, consumerism and, literally, everydayness, the campaigns mobilised femininity to domesticate a new financial mindset—for women and men alike. The bank presented itself as a ‘department store of finance’. Older financial devices, such as the traditional budget sheets, were reinvented and popularised along with cleverly packaged and diversified types of bank accounts, mutual funds and equity investments. As the bank claimed a new expert role in the management of the family budget, topics like housekeeping money and financial equality between spouses were discussed in the same breath as investing in stocks. Female financial experts played a leading role in these campaigns, and the banks created a new expert position: that of the personal financial advisor to ordinary people, also known as ‘budget consultant’ or ‘family economics advisor’.

Orsi Husz

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Chapter 4. Launching the Credit Card: New Moralities of Credit and Payment

Abstract

Thi chapter traces the history of the Swedish credit card market from the late 1950s to the early 1980s and looks at the moral reframing of consumer credit by means of the cards. An early adoption of new banking and data technologies in Sweden was combined with a negative general attitude towards consumer credit. Introduced in 1959 and inspired by the American example, Swedish credit cards had to be reconceptualised, reshaped and renamed before they could be accepted. Marketers exploited the non-credit properties of the card and used it as a device for de-vicing—destigmatising—consumer credit. By looking at the technical and cultural arrangements built into the card, I unpack the workings of three de-vicing strategies employed by card issuers to overcome moral resistance and anchor credit cards into the everyday culture and moral values of the Swedish welfare state: the credit card as (1) modern money; (2) a ‘certificate of trust’, like a membership card; and (3) a device for financial planning. These same conceptualisations facilitated changing those values, and with them the financial practices of daily life. But, plastic cards for payments only became fully successful when a debit function was added in the early 1980s.

Orsi Husz

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Chapter 5. Rewriting the History and Future of Consumer Credit: Ideological Change as a Marketing Strategy

Abstract

This chapter focuses on ideological relational work and the everyday politics of consumer credit in the late 1970s. It explores the story of the card company InterConto and its energetic owner, Erik Elinder, who actively worked to reshape dominant ideological views about credit in society in general and in the labour and consumer movements in particular. Elinder wanted to rewrite the conventional history of everyday credit with the help of university-based economic historians, as he reimagined the future of the plastic card. This chapter also brings into the picture another stakeholder, the Consumer Cooperative Union (founded in 1899)—with many Swedish households as members, and shops all over the country—and looks at its work in redrawing ideological boundaries. Long the leading opponent of consumer credit, in the late 1970s the Consumer Cooperative Union decided to launch its own card system. But this ideological U-turn was controversial. To anchor it in the broad strata of the cooperative membership, the well-established educational infrastructure of this large popular movement was mobilised. The outcome was not only the launch of a cooperative card but also a symbolic consecration of the use of consumer credit in general.

Orsi Husz

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Chapter 6. The Financialisation of Identity

Abstract

This chapter traces the analogue prehistory of Sweden’s digital BankIDs. It shows how the introduction of cheque accounts for wages required a new approach to identity verification, forcing the banks to issue ID documents and thus take on a role that typically belongs to government authorities. The conceptual and practical similarities between credit cards and ID cards and the justifications for the new ID verification routines reinforced the new link between money and identity. The analytical focus on bankification highlights an overlooked phase in the history of identification documents. The chapter argues that, between a paper-based documentary identification regime dominated by the bureaucratic state and a digital regime that is typically assumed to be commercially driven, there was an intermediate plastic regime in which identity became financialised. The development of computerisation, the banks’ role in identity management and their work towards a new financial information and transaction system helped to build the new intimate relationship between banks and their customers into the everyday financial infrastructure. As early as the 1970s, historical actors realised that this mass-managed intimacy held the promise of commercialising identities through the use of transactional data.

Orsi Husz

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Chapter 7. Conclusion

Abstract

This chapter summarises and contextualises the book’s argument about the bankification of everyday life as a process related to, but historically distinct from, the so-called financialisation of everyday life. Bankification involved a radical personal financial change and a shift in the mundane culture of money. It occurred early in Sweden, with its strong banking system and speedy adoption of new technologies. Paradoxically, the strong welfare state and its regulation of the financial system facilitated the bankification process. At the same time, instilling a new way of financial thinking into the population in order to make them more bankminded (rather than merely thrifty) sat well with both the immediate interests of the financial industry and the larger political ambitions of organised business. The bankification of everyday life is a missing link that reveals the intricate historical connections between the post-war welfare statist cultural context (into which it was deeply embedded) and the financialised everyday culture of the late twentieth century (towards which it was pointing).

Orsi Husz

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Backmatter

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Titel: Bankminded
verfasst von: Orsi Husz
Verlag: Springer Nature Switzerland
Electronic ISBN: 978-3-031-77653-3
Print ISBN: 978-3-031-77652-6
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-77653-3