Folkets fonder? : En textvetenskaplig studie av det svenska pensionssparandets domesticering

Sammanfattning: The social and political background for this study is the change in Sweden from a system of a collective pension scheme to a system that includes elements of individual responsibility and a higher personal involvement of Swedes in pension saving funds. This phenomenon has been conceptualized as domestication, a metaphor that serves as a unifying notion in this study. The aim is to capture the idea of controlling markets from the perspective of individual investors. Two groups of texts are studied, advertising materials from banks and information from the PPM agency, responsible for the fund- based premium pension. What role do these texts play in the domestication of pension savings in commercial funds?The investigation includes a careful analysis of the settings of the texts and an identification of text purposes. Another matter of interest is the part that textual genres and their institutional framework play in the process. The methods are qualitative close reading techniques, held together by a view of language as a communicative and social phenomenon. Domestication in- volves the construction of informal relations between senders and the con- ceived reader together with individual-focused strategies. The senders share strategies of informalisation and individualisation but genres have differenti- ating roles in the actualization of domestication strategies. Domestication stabilizes the shared discourse of the banks and the PPM agency. It is how- ever doubtful that the focus on the individual’s responsibility has helped to gain trust in a pension system partially based on commercial funds.