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Time: Fri 2020-11-20 13.00

Location: https://kth-se.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_BxHz_f44Sl2A7OeIYWUm4w, Du som saknar dator/datorvana kan kontakta per.hogselius@abe.kth.se / Use the e-mail address if you need technical assistance, Stockholm (English), Stockholm (Swedish)

Subject area: History of Science, Technology and Environment

Doctoral student: Jesper Meijling , Historiska studier av teknik, vetenskap och miljö

Opponent: Associate Professor Per Wisselgren, Umeå universitet

Supervisor: Professor Sverker Sörlin, Historiska studier av teknik, vetenskap och miljö; Associate Professor Sabine Höhler, Historiska studier av teknik, vetenskap och miljö

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Abstract

This thesis investigates how marketisation was introduced as an idea in public systems and operations in Sweden from the early 1970’s to around 2000. Marketisation is defined as a process of conversion: to make something more marketlike than it was in an earlier state, and that this applies mainly to public systems and operations. The investigation concentrates on historical courses of events, translation processes and a perspective of activity and practice. It analyses marketisation as a translocal idea with its origins among a group of English and American authors and economists mainly during the 1950’s and 60’s, that spread – was translated – and encountered local contexts in public systems and operations in Sweden through initial drafts for applications carried out by singular Swedish actors/translators. A concept important to the idea is analogy, which signifies the way of seeing public systems and activities as markets. This, in its turn, produces another concept, terrain, describing how actors viewed, tested and evaluated the possibilities and resources for market organising in a given public system or operation. The questions of the thesis are e.g. how the idea was seized by the actors, how they went about it, and what they extracted from the terrain that could become market functions. Further what forms emerged in their work on the terrains, and if it is possible to observe patterns in this. The comparison between the two areas of health care and the railway offers the opportunity to study whether there was a rolled-out model, or a development more dependent on individual actors and terrain conditions, and thereby an unpredictable process, and the outcome of that. The investigation brings together the close, market studies-inspired perspective with the context of ideas history. A general pattern that emerges are subdivisions (parcellations) of new components, a process whose result created the base for new economic and organisational definitions and functions that carried marketisation further.

urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:kth:diva-284567