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

by Orsi Husz

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9783031776533
Publisher:	Palgrave Macmillan
Publication date:	06/25/2025
Series:	Palgrave Studies in Economic History
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
File size:	6 MB

About the Author

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.

Table of Contents

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.

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

“Bankminded is 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. In this book, Husz unravels how exactly ‘the banking mindset’ took hold of everyday life, both domesticating finance and financing domestication.” (Liz McFall, Professor in the Sociology of Markets, University of Edinburgh)

“Financial institutions are a crucial aspect of modern life. Engagingly written and meticulously researched, Bankminded illuminates how banks and banking became integral facets of everyday life and consumption in Sweden. Challenging overly simplistic narratives of recent neoliberal financialization, Husz demonstrates the longer history and complex cultural negotiations behind the rise of checking accounts, credit cards and bank IDs since the 1950s. The Swedish case offers a surprising story of early mass-banking involving not only banks and card companies, but also unions, consumer cooperatives and the Swedish welfare state. Still, the insights on banking practices and consumer identities gained from Husz’ empirically rich and theoretically sophisticated account transcend national history. Bankminded will be essential reading for scholars on modern banking and financial history internationally.” (Jan Logemann, Senior Lecturer in Economic History, University of Göttingen)

As a preeminent scholar on the financialization of everyday life, Orsi Husz offers a masterful history of how banks became essential members of Swedish households. She intricately links the ‘bankification’ of the Swedes to the development of the welfare state, shedding light on profound shifts in cultural norms around class, gender, money, credit, and identification technologies since the 1950s. With remarkable depth, Husz reveals how banking strategies have woven themselves into Sweden’s economic, social, and political fabric, reshaping the nation’s landscape in the latter half of the 20th century.” (Jeanne Lazarus, Research Director CNRS, SciencePo, Paris)

“In her compelling new book, historian Orsi Husz explores the process of the ‘bankification’ of everyday life in one nation: Sweden, typically held as an exemplar of later twentieth-century welfarism and social democracy. Conceptually original, analytically sharp, and creatively researched, Husz’s study follows multiple threads to reveal the far-reaching but almost unnoticed penetration of banks and ‘bankmindedness’ into ordinary daily life, unpicking ‘the history of the marketisation of domestic money and the domestication of market money.’ It is a tale of almost queasy ‘unrequested intimacy’. Across five principal chapters, Husz traces the changes wrought across the dimensions of class, gender, morality, ideology, and identity. Husz shows just how early this process began; not in the 1980s and 1990s, but in the 1950s and 1960s. This finding upends the literature and provides historians, sociologists, anthropologists new concepts, a new language, and a new set of questions for exploring how these processes unfolded elsewhere. Other countries that have undergone similar processes deserve studies as rich as this one. Bankminded will, I am sure, open powerful and fruitful new vistas in the study everyday or intimate economic lives.” (Andrew Popp, Professor of History, Copenhagen Business School)