Reform and Responsibility in the Remaking of the Swedish National Pension System: Opening the Orange Envelope [Paperback]

Reform and Responsibility in the Remaking of the Swedish National Pension System is a detailed study through Sweden's national pension system. With Sweden's recently reformed national pension system as the illustrative example, Nyqvist shows how new forms of governance effectively shift responsibility from state level to an individual level. She sheds light on how politicians, technocrats, and bureaucrats work to educate and foster the general public into responsible, hardworking, and financially literate citizens. This ethnographic example of how contemporary power works by way of new forms of governance, Reform and Responsibility in the Remaking of the Swedish National Pension System is an exploration into the art of governing of a large-scale governmental policy process

1. Insecurity as Incentive in Social Security Policy
2. The Politics of Pensions
3. The Swedish ReformA Radical Compromise
4. The Technological Relocation of Responsibility
5. Governance Through an Orange Messenger
6. Voices of the Governed
7. Orange Agency and Insecurity

The concept of the welfare state is almost interchangeable with the concept of Sweden, and in this meticulous, highly readable study Nyqvist examines its nuts and bolts through a close look at the Swedish pension system. Moving between the particularities of the orange envelope and its wider implications, this monograph is not just a study of Sweden, but an innovative contribution to the anthropology of governmentality and the state in a neoliberal era. - Thomas Hylland Eriksen, Professor of Social Anthropology, University of Oslo, Norway

Reform and Responsibility in the Remaking of the Swedish National Pension System is a tour de force. Nyqvist analyzes brilliantly the challenges of creating a new Swedish pension system, not merely as abstract issues of rules and regul