The Rise of the Welfare Industrial Complex: Welfare Capitalism in Sweden

While a certain political debate, fuelled by a number of public scandals, is developing around the consequences of the profound transformation of the Swedish welfare state, the social sciences are yet to produce a comprehensive picture of this transformation, of the historic process in which it occurred, and of the ways in which it redraws the boundaries between politics and markets, and between state, market and citizens. This contribution develops a conceptual analysis of the role of the welfare state in contemporary capitalism, which focuses on Sweden but raises issues that are relevant to the social sciences generally. Welfare, understood for most of the post war period as a public good situated beyond market provisions, is prevailingly understood as a commodity. Welfare has become a high profit sector in which a range of actors including hedge funds and multinational corporations are active. The contribution proposes that the welfare industrial complex is a central feature of neoliberalism in Sweden. As a consequence, change in Sweden should not be thought of as having somehow occurred in tension with the welfare state, but rather, through the welfare state, through the agency of its political and economic elites, and through its institutional settings functioning as a series of potential markets. Central to this process is, we argue, a redefinition of welfare as a market good and the creation of networks, which stretch out from Sweden onto the transnational and global level since they have increasingly identified welfare as a global market.