Aktiesparande — en dubbel subversion?

Abstract

During the last decades of the 1900's and the beginning of the 2000's, share investing has accelerated in a way that gives Sweden a unique position in an international perspective. The spread of share investing among ordinary people has attracted our interest. The overall purpose is to make a cultural analysis of the shareholders' motives, forms of expression and the new social communities that develop. If, as often assumed, a global economy and neoliberal values have colonized everyday life, is it possible for shareholders to become subversive agents, turning against a neoliberal hegemony?

The research can be theoretically formulated as an analysis of how connections between individuals and the share market are arranged as an interplay between actors. It certainly involves actors of different kinds whose actions can be said to contain different degrees of intention, but they are nevertheless involved as active actors who influence each other by changing possibilities and restrictions for new actions and values. Ethnography, where people alone are in focus, is replaced by a technography where neither persons — shareholders — nor objects — media, shares, computers, internet and the share-market — are allowed to have a preferential right of action or interpretation beforehand.

The project intends partly to seek an understanding of an empirical phenomenon and partly to further develop a cultural theoretical understanding of how economic, social and cultural spheres are connected.