The Bankification of Everyday Life: Introduction

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.