Claes Belfrage

Renegotiating the Swedish Social Democratic Settlement: From Pension Fund Socialism to Neoliberalization:

Steering a middle course between the strong neoliberalization thesis and arguments that deny that neoliberalization has occurred, this article accounts for the complex and hybridic shift in Sweden from pension reform through share ownership as a socialist strategy to an as-of-yet incomplete and contradictory neoliberal process. Noting the broader significance of Sweden for the international debate over pension reform, the article unpacks the concept of “mass investment culture” to discern the significant headway toward neoliberalization in Swedish pension savings and provision while still noting profound sources of crisis tendencies.

Towards ‘universal financialisation’ in Sweden?

The reform of Swedish pensions serves as a case study to explore resistant institutions and logics shaping processes of financialisation in Europe. EU membership cemented the path towards neoliberal restructuring, yet Sweden remained an unlikely case for financialisation by the mid-nineties. Social Democratic principles and practices of de-commodification and redistribution remained dominant with pensions at the core. Reform aimed at changing this by subjecting pensions to financial market performance. The outcome of the project to, in a characteristically Swedish way, ‘universalise’ financialisation is however uncertain. If successful, those challenging the legitimacy of financialisation elsewhere in Europe lose a ‘social democratic’ reference point in their struggle.

The Gentle Art of Retroduction: Critical Realism, Cultural Political Economy and Critical Grounded Theory

This article, first, proposes critical grounded theory (CGT) as a way to develop systematically an array of methods and theoretical propositions into a coherent critical methodology for organization studies (and beyond). Second, it demonstrates CGT’s usefulness through a case study of competing recovery projects from the Icelandic financial crisis. CGT is developed in engagement with the emerging paradigm of cultural political economy (CPE) and its preferred method of critical discourse analysis (CDA). CPE analyses the evolution of ‘economic imaginaries’ in both their structural/material and semiotic/discursive dimensions. This requires a critical realist, multi-dimensional research strategy which emphasizes ethnographic methods and substantial theoretical and historical work. The proposed methodology of CGT enables a retroductive research process that combines deductive theoretical deskwork with inductive fieldwork enabled by grounded theory tools to analyse organizational process, stability and change.

Operationalizing cultural political economy: towards critical grounded theory

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to take conceptual and methodological steps towards the elaboration of the critical grounded theory (CGT) method. Design/methodology/approach – Starting from conceptual issues with mapping everyday discourses and practices in their broader societal context in organisational ethnography, cultural political economy (CPE) is proposed as a suitable theoretical framework for integrating the cultural dimension of discourses and imaginaries into political-economic analyses of organisation and management. The CGT method is introduced for empirical operationalisation. Findings – Grounded theory tools for working with ethnographic data can be employed within critical approaches such as CPE although they originate from positivist social science. The need to combine ethnographic fieldwork with substantial theoretical work and/or critical discourse analysis may be met by CGT, which affords the ethnographic strengths of grounded theory without, however, bracketing the critical-the...

The unintended consequences of financialisation: Social democracy hamstrung? The pensions dilemma

At the end of the Third Way and no sense of its future, social democrats look to Sweden for inspiration. However, Swedish social democracy is in no better condition. Scholarship is starting to grasp the broad outlines of the movement’s difficulties. Providing greater depth, this article employs the Social Systems of Innovation and Production approach to analyse Swedish social democracy’s current condition by historicising its current policy dilemmas in relation to the public pension system, once the jewel in the crown of the Rehn–Meidner model and the push for economic and industrial democracy, now the constraining legacy of financialisation.

Towards a Benjaminist Political Economy

In Political Economy, Benjamin is frequently referred to typically in the form of catchy quotations. Indeed, in Western intelligentsia, a ‘Benjamin cult’ has emerged (Buck-Morss, 1989, p.ix). Benjaminist Political Economy is nevertheless unheard of.1 This chapter outlines such an approach. Through a critique of Benjamin’s understanding of dialectics and intended to develop context-sensitive concepts for thinking about the processes by which the aesthetically embedded economy undergoes change, it develops Benjaminist dialectics. Drawing on fragments of Benjamin’s fragmented thought and interpretations of his work, I construct a dialectical concept of ‘economic aesthetics’ to sketch the contradictions emerging with the economic transformations that we have come to know as the ‘financialization of everyday life’, or the privatization of financial risk (e.g. Martin, 2002). Post-war Keynesian Fordism enabled the construction of a Sorelian ‘myth of consumption’. Financialization can be understood as a very powerful set of processes by which the ‘myth of consumption’ itself is commodified through the mass-formation of investor subjects, which at the same leads to its possible demise. Economic aesthetics sensitizes us to the fact that financialization constitutes a profound challenge to capitalist modernity on the level of subject-formation.

The politicisation of macroprudential regulation: The critical Swedish case

This article explores the prospects of stabilising financialisation in Europe as a spatial-temporal fix for Anglo-American capitalism’s crisis-tendencies. We analyse the politics of (countercyclical) macroprudential regulation in the critical case study of Sweden. Here, macroprudential regulation is introduced, in contrast with much of the rest of the EU economies, in a credit boom. We find evidence of an administrative crisis, as technocrats face the political constraints on re-regulating financialised accumulation. This suggests that the conditions are ripe for a deepened administrative crisis in Europe once countercyclical macroprudential regulation is implemented.

Aesthetic International Political Economy

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