Launching the Credit Card: New Moralities of Credit and Payment

Thi chapter traces the history of the Swedish credit card market from the late 1950s to the early 1980s and looks at the moral reframing of consumer credit by means of the cards. An early adoption of new banking and data technologies in Sweden was combined with a negative general attitude towards consumer credit. Introduced in 1959 and inspired by the American example, Swedish credit cards had to be reconceptualised, reshaped and renamed before they could be accepted. Marketers exploited the non-credit properties of the card and used it as a device for de-vicing—destigmatising—consumer credit. By looking at the technical and cultural arrangements built into the card, I unpack the workings of three de-vicing strategies employed by card issuers to overcome moral resistance and anchor credit cards into the everyday culture and moral values of the Swedish welfare state: the credit card as (1) modern money; (2) a ‘certificate of trust’, like a membership card; and (3) a device for financial planning. These same conceptualisations facilitated changing those values, and with them the financial practices of daily life. But, plastic cards for payments only became fully successful when a debit function was added in the early 1980s.