Bankminded

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 boundaries of class, gender, morality, ideology and identity that had to be crossed in order to make people more bankminded. Chapters explore these cultural challenges, showing 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. The book analyses how neoliberal ideas about consumers and credit permeated everyday financial practices in a Nordic welfare regime often perceived as resistant to such ideas. It explores the analogue antecedents of todays digital BankIDs, a quasi-official form of identification that is also widely used in non-financial transactions. 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.