Bankminded: Banks as Intimate Agents of Everyday Life in Welfare State Sweden [Hardcover]

This open access book explores the history of how banks and banking services have become part of everyday life. Taking welfare state Sweden as its setting, the book identifies key cultural challenges and shows how banks and finance companies made inroads into the workplace, the family, spaces of consumption and the world of social movements while also taking on tasks typically associated with state authorities. Focusing on this bankification of everyday life reveals the historical links between the post-war welfare state and the financialised everyday culture of the late twentieth century. This book will be of interest to scholars of economic and cultural history and sociology, as well as those interested in the history of welfare states and the development of commercial surveillance.

Chapter 1:The bankification of everyday life: Introduction.- Chapter 2: Welcome to the banking age: Redefining the social class of money.- Chapter 3: Making finance familiar: Gender and the domestication of banks.- Chapter 4: Launching the credit card: New moralities of credit and payment.- Chapter 5: Rewriting the history and future of consumer credit: Ideological change as a marketing strategy.- Chapter 6: The financialisation of identity.- Chapter 7: Conclusions.

Orsi Husz is a Professor of the History of Science and Ideas at Uppsala University, Sweden. Her research focuses on the cultural history of economic life in the twentieth century.

One of those rare scholarly accomplishments that opens up an entirely new perspective on what it took to transform an important financial institution into something closer to a vital social infrastructure.

Liz McFall, University of Edinburgh

Challenging overly simplistic narratives of neoliberal financialisation, the insights on banking practices and consumer identities gained from this l£®