This article discusses the development of lifestyle and value studies in the market research industry in relation to changing understandings of the consumer in late twentieth-century Sweden. It uses the analytical notion of the ‘sovereign consumer’ to argue that the market research industry both exploited and reinforced this perception of consumers through lifestyles as a means for categorisation. The analysis draws on material from the leading Swedish market research company at the time, Sifo, including its connections to the European industry. The results show how the industry sought to break up the supposedly homogenous postwar Swedish consumption landscape by constructing new consumer types that suited a more market-oriented society, and it was the confident, individualised consumer who sought self-fulfilment that was portrayed as the most attractive type. The article argues that the politics of marketing and advertising played an important part in shaping Swedish consumer culture during the market turn.

This chapter explains how a mutual fund culture, which strengthened the link between households and the stock market, emerged exceptionally early in Sweden. We explore the popularisation of individual shareholding through state-subsidised fund savings schemes, the Tax Funds (introduced by the centre-right government in 1978) and the similar Everyman’s Funds (introduced by the Social Democratic government in 1984). Although initially politically controversial, these programmes ultimately paved the way for a seemingly mundane investment culture. Through this case we argue that neoliberalisation in Sweden involved the creation of hybrid subjects that combined older forms of identification rooted in a welfare statist culture (the wage earner and the taxpayer) with identity positions associated with a new everyday capitalist identity. One explanation for the exceptional Swedish development lies in the turmoil surrounding the so-called wage-earner funds with individual share ownership posited as an alternative to the collectively owned funds. In the other Nordic countries, the conflict between labour and capital was less intense. One fallout of this conflict in Sweden was a nation of everyman investors.

På 1980-talet försökte Volvo förändra sitt varumärke – och fann inspiration i Kalifornien, där framtidens konsument skulle leva: hälsomedveten, emotionell och självständig. Historien om hur folkhemmets bil blev en global livsstilsikon säger även mycket om Sverige i slutet av 1900-talet.

The article develops a new framework for the study ofmarket reforms in Nordic welfare states based on a divi-sion between “markets”, “quasi-markets” and “pseudo-markets”. The two latter types of marketization have been themost common, and the article exemplifies them by revisiting the early 1990s Swedish school reform, “Friskolere-formen”—which instigated a quasi-market for publicly funded schools run by both for-profit companies and non-profit actors—and the Norwegian hospital reform, “Foretaksreformen” of 2001—which created what we call a pseu-do-market, in which public hospitals were reorganized to mimic the structures of capitalist enterprise. By discussingthe different reforms in relation to justification, the typeof welfare state sector, and the political orientation of thegovernment implementing the reform, our study sheds new light on similarities and differences in marketizationprocesses in the Nordics. Particularly, we find that the justification for the reforms differed, with the Swedish reformbeing justified in ideological terms and the Norwegian in technocratic terms. Contrary to some literature, we holdthat marketization has fundamentally altered Nordic welfare states and the relationship between capital and societyin the Nordics, and we suggest that our framework could be used for future comparative studies of market reforms.