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Danish Welfare Exports as the “New Bacon”: Myth and Meaning of the Nordic Welfare Model as Glocal Cultural Commodity

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Abstract

While consumer culture theory (CCT) has been increasingly concerned with market-level dynamics, little research has been done to understand the relationship between state and market in a global social and economic order. The Nordic context provides an ideal context to address this gap and in this chapter we set out to explore how the idea of the Nordic welfare model is leveraged as a brand in processes of cultural commodification. More specifically, we explore how particular public welfare services are articulated as market offerings in an export context. To do so, we take a starting point in globalization literature, while theoretically framing cultural commodification as myth marketing. We situate our discussion in macro-social explanatory frameworks, including not only social and cultural contexts but also political and institutional contexts, and unfold the productive capacity of state/market dialectics as regards market creation dynamics.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Southern Denmark, Odense, Denmark

    Stine Bjerregaard & Dannie Kjeldgaard

Authors
  1. Stine Bjerregaard
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  2. Dannie Kjeldgaard
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of Southern Denmark, Odense, Denmark

    Søren Askegaard

  2. Stockholm Business School, Stockholm University, Stockholm, Sweden

    Jacob Östberg

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Bjerregaard, S., Kjeldgaard, D. (2019). Danish Welfare Exports as the “New Bacon”: Myth and Meaning of the Nordic Welfare Model as Glocal Cultural Commodity. In: Askegaard, S., Östberg, J. (eds) Nordic Consumer Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-04933-1_8

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