Welcome to the Banking Age: Redefining the Social Class of Money

This chapter centres on class and examines how banks made inroads into the workplace. It analyses the so-called cheque accounts for wages reform, which was where the bankification of everyday life started. In the late 1950s, Swedish commercial banks began offering payroll services. Current accounts with chequebooks were opened for both white- and blue-collar employees, blurring the boundaries of the class-based financial system and changing personal financial practices. Wage earners were turned into bank customers and the commercial banks became retail companies, selling a wide range of products to a broad public. Still, this chapter suggests that one should be wary of overemphasising the importance of the self-governing financial subjects of Foucauldian studies. Making and controlling new financial subjects was accomplished through cultural technologies rooted in a hierarchical value system permeated by class (defined by production rather than consumption). A wage-earner identity (the quintessential subject category of the Swedish welfare state), rather than a finance consumer or investor identity, proved instrumental in the initial phase of the bankification process. The new financial subjects were created as much with the help of the old identities as with models imagined for the new ones.