Opening the Orange Envelope : Reform and Responsibility in the Remaking of the Swedish National Pension System

Every spring Swedish citizens receive an Orange envelope from the government. The envelope contains individual information about each citizen's future state pension. This book takes a close and critical look inside the Orange envelope and explores how a large-scale social policy, such as a national pension system, is created and by whom. The ethnography maps out the process of creating and implementing Sweden's new national pension system, here viewed as a 'political technology' with the power to transform society through the citizens. The Orange envelope has become a symbol of the new pension system as well as a disciplinary too1 by which the citizens are governed. What was formerly a strong promise of financial security in the future has, with the construction of the new national pension system, been replaced by a lesser degree of predictability and a dependence on market fluctuations. Technologies within the construction of the pension scheme divide and relocate agency and responsibility away from the political sphere to both an abstract level of automatized and self-regulating mathematical calculations and an individual level thus making each citizen responsible for his or her own future pension. In-depth interviews with the politicians and experts who created the new pension scheme, participant observation at the two government agencies in charge of its administration, and an interview study in which 'ordinary' Swedes share their views and feelings about the new pension system make up the rich ethnographic material of this study. By way of close and detailed ethnography 'through' the process of making and implementing Sweden's new pension scheme, this book analyses the workings of new forms of governance.