Seminar: How Politics Is Made – An Ethnographic Study of Swedish Corporate-Political Interaction
On November 28 Anna Tyllström will do a seminar on Swedish corporate-political interaction based on her own thesis fieldwork. The seminar will focus on how Swedish politicians and corporations interact at the Almedalen Week and how this process has changed from a soft-corporatist model towards lobbying directly on politicians.
Since the 1960s, Swedish politicians have gathered for one week every summer to discuss politics with each other and regular citizens on the island of Gotland in the Baltic Sea. Over time, the ‘Almedalen Week’ has turned into the single largest political event in Sweden, and in 2012, this prototype for the Danish ’Folkemødet’ organized 1800 events attracting 17,000 visitors. The growth of the Almedalen week has been paralleled by a shift in the ways Swedish corporations interact with politics; from a soft-corporatist “Scandinavian model” where contacts were channeled through arrangements such as business associations and inter-sectorial board representation, to a more pluralist system, where companies lobby directly on politicians.
Anna is postdoctoral fellow from Uppsala University in the project Organizing Freedom - Governance and Organization of Swedish Higher Education and Research Under the Autonomy Reform. As part of her thesis fieldwork on the emerging Swedish public relations industry, Anna Tyllström has shadowed PR consultants working on corporate lobbying campaigns in Almedalen. Her findings are presented, and discussed through the lenses of the three “meta-processes” of 1) de-corporatization but also 2) marketization and 3) mediatization. The text is a chapter on its way of becoming a paper, so comments on empirical emphasis and theoretical framing are more than welcome! Please see the paper attached.
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The seminar is open for everyone who are interested in participating in the seminar.
Please let us know at: publicprivateplatform@cbs.dk.
Organized by CBS Public-Private Platform and the cluster Shifting Forms of Public Governance.