Liza Jakobsson: "Finding Your Home on the Market: The Financialised Homeownership Ideology in Sweden and Estonia 1997-2007"

Abstract:

This thesis examines the history of ideas about the home in the late 20th and early 21st centuries in Sweden and Estonia, when markets in general, and the financial market in particular, expanded and came to serve as a model for how society could best be organised. By studying claims and statements about the home in mortgage advertising from Swedish banks, the professionalisation and practices of the real estate agent industry, the presentation of new apartments by a public housing company at the housing exhibition H99 in 1999, in Ikea’s marketing at the same exhibition and the expansion of the a Swedish bank into new mortgage markets in the Baltic states after the fall of the Soviet Union, the thesis provides a new perspective on the neoliberal system switch in Sweden and Estonia.

Previous research on changes in the housing systems has tended to focus on analyses of price statistics as well as forms of ownership and regulations. Less attention has been paid to understanding how ideas about housing changed as abstract market logics, such as those of the financial market, became increasingly important in determining access to housing. Less attention has also been paid to analysing how actors other than politicians and economists have changed practices and influenced people’s everyday lives and their attachment to markets.

With the purpose of showing how commercial actors have changed political ideas about the home in Sweden and Estonia in the period 1970–2007, the dissertation examines the actors’ description of the political role of the home as both a place of residence and a sense of belonging to that place. While the home as a place of residence has long been available for sale and purchase, I argue that commercial actors have commodified the intimate dimension of the home in new ways during the period under study and produced a financialised ideology of homeownership.