Rewriting the History and Future of Consumer Credit: Ideological Change as a Marketing Strategy

This chapter focuses on ideological relational work and the everyday politics of consumer credit in the late 1970s. It explores the story of the card company InterConto and its energetic owner, Erik Elinder, who actively worked to reshape dominant ideological views about credit in society in general and in the labour and consumer movements in particular. Elinder wanted to rewrite the conventional history of everyday credit with the help of university-based economic historians, as he reimagined the future of the plastic card. This chapter also brings into the picture another stakeholder, the Consumer Cooperative Union (founded in 1899)—with many Swedish households as members, and shops all over the country—and looks at its work in redrawing ideological boundaries. Long the leading opponent of consumer credit, in the late 1970s the Consumer Cooperative Union decided to launch its own card system. But this ideological U-turn was controversial. To anchor it in the broad strata of the cooperative membership, the well-established educational infrastructure of this large popular movement was mobilised. The outcome was not only the launch of a cooperative card but also a symbolic consecration of the use of consumer credit in general.