Post-war Industrial Media Culture in Sweden, 1945-1960: New Faces, New Values 9789048535835

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Post-war Industrial Media Culture in Sweden, 1945–1960

Post-war Industrial Media Culture in Sweden, 1945–1960 New Faces, New Values

Mats Björkin

Amsterdam University Press

Cover illustration: Svenska Esso at meeting, with flannelgraphs, in Sundsvall 1956. Photo: Norrlandsbild / Sundsvalls museum. Published with permission by Sundsvalls museum. Cover design: Coördesign, Leiden Lay-out: Crius Group, Hulshout isbn 978 94 6298 492 9 e-isbn 978 90 4853 583 5 doi 10.5117/9789462984929 nur 670 © M. Björkin / Amsterdam University Press B.V., Amsterdam 2022 All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this book may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the written permission of both the copyright owner and the author of the book. Every effort has been made to obtain permission to use all copyrighted illustrations reproduced in this book. Nonetheless, whosoever believes to have rights to this material is advised to contact the publisher.



Table of Contents

Acknowledgements 7 Introduction 9 1. The Housewife, Film, Television, and the Quiz Show Nerd

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2. Film and Swedish Industry in the World

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Intermission 99 A Substitute for an Industrial Film Theory

3. Meetings for Trading Ideas and Goods, New and Old

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4. The New Face 155 Conclusion 183 Index 187

Acknowledgements Every book has its history; the longer the history, the more people have contributed to its development. The f irst impetus to look at industrial films came from Jan Olsson. He recommended me for a short-term role as secretary for a government committee investigating the development of an archive for non-fiction films (which became the Grängesberg Archive a few years later). The head of the committee, ethnologist and museum veteran Bengt Nyström, opened up new horizons for me regarding the study of audiovisual materials. A special thanks from these early years also goes to Sverker Sörlin, who recommended that I look at a very strange film about hydroelectric power plants and “new faces.” I would like to thank Vinzenz Hediger and Patrick Vonderau for feedback on earlier texts and issues related to this book. I would also like to thank my former colleagues at Stockholm University for inspiring conversations, particularly Marina Dahlquist, Mats Rohdin, and Tytti Soila, as well as colleagues at the University of Gothenburg, particularly Anna Backman Rogers, Mats Jönsson, Tobias Pontara, Erika Alm, Mats Nilsson, and Alf Björnberg. A special thanks goes to Pelle Snickars, Per Vesterlund, and William Uricchio for broadening my views on media history, without which this book would never had been written. My research has been funded in many different ways during the years. Riksbankens Jubileumsfond supported the project for the first three years; the Holger och Thyra Lauritzens stiftelse för främjande av filmhistorisk verksamhet supported travel and image-related costs, and the University of Gothenburg has provided me with time to do the ongoing work of the project. A special thanks goes to the late Marie Nisser, professor of industrial cultural heritage at the KTH Royal Institute of Technology, and chairperson of Vattenfall’s Cultural Heritage Committee when it awarded me a grant. I have received great assistance from the archives at Scania, Vattenfall, Kungliga biblioteket, Svenska Filminstitutet, and the Centrum för Näringslivshistoria. A special thanks goes to Lars Jacobsson and Svante Färnbo for their generosity and deep knowledge about the history of Vattenfall. The always friendly and supportive staff of the Centrum för Näringslivshistoria helped me access archive materials and secure image rights. The Confederation of Swedish Enterprise (formerly the Swedish Employers’ Confederation), Vattenfall AB, Electrolux Sverige, Sundsvalls museum, Nordiska museet, Hallands konstmuseum, and Lantbrukarnas Riksförbund

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have granted rights to publish images, as has Petter Davidson for Husmors Filmer AB. A special thanks also to the late Professor Thomas Elsaesser and his successors, Malte Hagener, Patricia Pisters, and Wanda Strauven, for believing in this book; to my editor, Maryse Elliot, for her great patience and support, and to the anonymous reviewers of the manuscript of this book who provided me with relevant critiques and so many valuable recommendations for its improvement. Finally, I thank my best and most patient reader, my dear wife, Boel Ulfsdotter, for support and encouragement!

Introduction We only see what is and do not miss what has been. Our memory does not register the new – it only recognizes change. It preserves the first impression. Our memory never stops comparing new impressions with the first. Oddly enough, the first impression always lasts. We want everything without sacrificing anything. Let us at least sacrifice our prejudiced way of seeing. We have to accept interventions in nature for us to gain what we need from it, just as we have to accept changes for which no one can be blamed. We have to help nature heal itself. It is not a question of concealing change. It is about creating new values of beauty out of natural conditions. In the same way the plastic surgeon plans the recreation of a face, the designers, architects, and gardeners of the new landscape create new values of beauty in a landscape that has to change because we need more electricity. The landscape has to get a new face. You can, of course, miss the old, but the new is a good replacement. We have to accept deliberate changes, as well as those caused by chance, because we need electricity. If each interference corresponds to a positive value, we have not lost anything. The traces of man’s attempt to gain something from nature do not have to be ugly. It is possible that they become values within the environment. Let us abandon the prejudices of memory and learn to see the positive values of the new face. It is not less beautiful just because it is different.1

This is what we can learn from a Swedish film from 1959 called Det nya ansiktet (The new face). It was made by one of the largest producers of industrial films in Sweden, Kinocentralen, and by one of its most original film-makers, Alex Jute, for one of the most important commissioners of films, the government agency responsible for the regulation of water and hydroelectric energy, Kungliga Vattenfallsstyrelsen (Vattenfall). The film describes the work that was done to restore (as much as was possible) the landscape after the building of a hydroelectric power plant by comparing this reconstruction with restoring a woman’s face after a car crash. “The landscape architects are the new cosmetic surgeons,” the narrator 1

Det nya ansiktet [The new face] (Alex Jute, 1959, Kinocentralen/Vattenfall, Sweden, 13 min.).

Björkin, M., Post-war Industrial Media Culture in Sweden, 1945–1960: New Faces, New Values. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2022 doi 10.5117/9789462984929_intro

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says. It is an odd film and not particularly representative of contemporary industrial films (in Sweden or elsewhere). The question I ask here is, How did this film come to be conceptualized and produced? To answer this question, we need to map the many discourses intersecting the sounds and images of the film. This makes it a useful case study to show the struggle to find media technological means of creating new (economic) values out of nature, people, and places. In the same year, 1959, a group of companies, led by Norwegian insulation material manufacturer Glassvatt and Swedish truck and bus manufacturer Scania-Vabis, planned and carried out an extraordinary public relations event: the transport of three tons of ice from the Arctic Circle to the Equator. What began as a contest initiated by Radio Luxembourg became the most successful PR stunt ever carried out by Scandinavian companies. The journey was covered in print media, as well as in newsreels, on radio, and on television. For the latter, the organizers hired a film crew to document the achievement. It was not only a display of engineering mastery (focusing on the insulating materials and the transport technology) but also a humanitarian event, in that the companies also delivered 300 kilos of medicines to Dr. Albert Schweitzer’s hospital in Lambaréné, French Equatorial Africa, just before reaching their final destination, Libreville, in what was soon to become the independent republic of Gabon. Geography and space had now become an object of conquest, won by new technologies. The expedition was not so much a display of the intended uses of the products as a speculation about what people could do with the new technologies, and what these technologies could do with, and to, people. Just a few years earlier, on 17–20 May 1954, the Swedish Center for Business and Policy Studies (Studieförbundet Näringsliv och Samhälle, SNS) held a conference for top managers in Swedish industry under the title “Business and Industry Plan for the Future” at the summer resort of Tylösand, in southwestern Sweden. The conference focused on automation, atomic energy, game theory, operations research, cybernetics, and the social, economic, physiological, and psychological consequences of automation.2 At this point 2 The presentations were collected in two volumes edited by Hans B. Thorelli, the president of the organising body, the Swedish Center for Business and Policy Studies (Studieförbundet Näringsliv och Samhälle, SNS): Automation. Ny teknik – nya perspektiv i ekonomi och arbetsliv. Del I. De tekniska utsikterna, and Del II: De ekonomiska och sociala framtidsutsikterna. SNS was established in 1948 as a response to what the industry identified as socialization tendencies by the Social Democratic minister of finance. They were, and still are, a key factor in public relations and research activities for a market-driven liberal society. It was also a “school” for policy development in business and industry. The people represented SNS frequently took part

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automation had already been well established in industrial production for some decades, and it had proved to be essential for the development of Swedish industry and a key component in the economic progress of Swedish society after the war. Atomic energy was new and politically highly controversial due to the Cold War.3 All these broad topics were frequently discussed within Swedish industry as well as in public debates. Within the context of these crucial issues for Western industrial progress the Tylösand conference took up the questions of interaction and overcoming distance, both literally and metaphorically. More importantly, at this conference and at numerous other industrial gatherings, on study trips abroad, in publications, and at training events, the conference delegates spent much time discussing how they could create interaction and contact between people and how to capitalize on it, in this modern world where so much had already happened during the last half century. Given the experience of the century so far, providing people with tools for interaction and contact was not only a question of efficiency; it was just as much a question of providing an ideological and, as we will see, aesthetic toolbox for the free world.

Contact By 1945 the twentieth century had seen enormous progress in Europe, but also horror. There were so many lessons to learn, and there was no turning back. Change was necessary. Change became a scientific question; after decades of ideological combat, decisions had to be based on facts and sound reasoning. It became a technological question; people drive change, but not without tools. It became a political imperative; rejecting change and forgetting the evil forces of the past became almost impossible. It became an ethical question; it would be wrong not to do good after so much horror. Finally, change became an aesthetic question; everyone must be able to recognize what is new and find it attractive. “It is not less beautiful just because it is different,” as the narrator says in The New Face. World War II had forever ruined the face of early-twentieth-century Europe. The challenge for post-war cosmetic surgeons, figuratively and in both industry and public debates concerning the economy and society. SNS’s first CEO was Jan Wallander, who later was chair and CEO of the Swedish bank Handelsbanken for many years. 3 It seems, though, that this interest was not dealt with within popular culture, at least not according to historian Michael Godhe (2003). There is, of course, a possibility that space technology and atomic energy is more fashionable to study than automation among Swedish historians.

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literally, was to decide which new faces to build, which to discard, which to celebrate, who will control the changes, and, most importantly, how to carry out the surgery. The term used at the time for many of these changes was “contact.” In Swedish business and industry discourse of the 1950s, the idea of “contact” offered a middle path to follow between individualism and the mass ideologies of the interwar years. However, for the “men in the grey flannel suits,” individualism was a seemingly unattainable goal, not a description of the present. The term “contact” therefore becomes paradoxical. It was supposed to uphold personal exchange at a time when both public authorities and private companies grew larger. It was an attempt to use the old and new media technologies without losing personal interaction. So, what was contact? Contact was a science of persuasion and organization, a set of technologies of interaction, a politics of democracy and progress, an ethics of efficiency and equality, and an aesthetics of the new. Contact was the antithesis of mass communication; it was everything television was not. With improved contact industries would be more profitable, adults and children would learn better, and housewives could make better homes. Using scientific methods and new technologies any company, organization, or public authority would be able to reach out, to make a difference, and to interact with people. The 1950s culture of contact was the birth of modern advertising and marketing. Methods of contact can also be seen as a prehistory of gamification, literally in the application of game theory, and metaphorically in contact’s behaviouristic models of exploiting basic human traits. In addition, it is a fundamental element of the early history of interaction design. Even if contact primarily was discussed in relation to industrial organization, marketing, and learning, it was something that required tools in order to work. Even face-to-face contact-based sales needed technological enhancements. Alternatively, in modern terminology, contact was by necessity mediated. Consequently, studying contact is a way to do media history while putting media in the background. We need to use analytical tools from media studies to understand 1950s business and industry, but we also need tools from science and technology, management, and design studies to understand 1950s media. Most importantly, we need the missing link, the elephant in the room, what everything was about but no one talks about today because we do not see the links. Contact was all about interactivity, which means that any understanding of the multifaceted processes of developing tools for contact in the 1950s must include a search for tools for interactivity.

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The real beauty of change was a particular process of innovation based on a combination of scientific thinking, a new understanding of human behaviour, new technologies (sometimes old technologies reclaimed for new purposes), and a new aesthetics. And it had to be better than television. In order to look beyond television we have to go to a place where television was not on everyone’s mind: Sweden. Sweden is small enough to grasp, not in its entirety, of course, but in enough detail. Sweden after World War II was also extremely open to influence from other countries, mainly the US, but also Germany, the UK, France, Italy, and the Netherlands. If an idea emerged in any of these countries, it was immediately examined, discussed, and often adopted in Sweden. Another reason for studying Sweden is its political situation. Sweden had a legal framework similar to other Western democracies and its business sector considered itself to be a natural part of the Western capitalist system. This sector was facing a social democratic government determined to strengthen the exceptionalist Swedish “third way,” that is, an intricate web of private, governmental, and cooperative movements. Therefore, I will argue that what in the US or West Germany, for example, may be entangled in other contexts can in Sweden be easier to identify and study. The reason is that, despite its deep engagement with the United Nations and the European Union in later years, Sweden has never been as international in its cultural, media, and business approaches as it was during the 1950s. This book studies the quest for interaction, at the time when modern audiovisual mass media broke through, by looking at a vast array of objects and relations related to uses of media technologies in Sweden from the end of World War II to the emergence of television in the years around 1960. The book is an attempt to understand what was in place in Swedish business and industrial discourse and practice for a film such as The New Face to be made.

Contact: Method as a Spatial Challenge Europe 1945, anno zero. The twentieth century, the short century that Eric Hobsbawm (1994) later would call “the age of extremes,” started at full speed. Two world wars, an interwar period filled with hope and despair, progress and devastation all radically changed the situation that societies faced. However, the period also included the struggle for democracy and political freedom, industrial efficiency and growth, improved healthcare and social security systems, regulated working hours and pension systems, improved education, the questioning of social hierarchies, and reduced differences in

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wealth and income. Advertising becomes both a science and an art. Popular media, in particular moving pictures, became the most influential provider of fiction and images of reality. Radio transformed news and entertainment, as well as education, consumption, national identities, and home decoration. Even if all this was a long and hard process – some of these phenomena had already emerged before World War I – the twentieth century had so far been a period of profound change (Judt 2005). For the young industrial visionaries of the post-war years, the future promised even more change. Then came television. Everything new and most things old seem to converge after 1945 in the medium of television. Few cultural histories of the post-war years or the 1950s can avoid it.4 Likewise, television has become so emblematic for this period in Western history that it has been used to explain almost everything that happened at the time.5 What remains of the 1950s if television is not put at the fore? How can we even study the media of the 1950s, while keeping television in the periphery? An analytic concept for understanding post-war culture where television actually is decentred is Fred Turner’s argument for “a turn away from single-source mass media and toward multi-image, multi-sound-source, media environments – systems that I will call surrounds.” (2013, 2). The theories of democratic characters, and what it meant to live in post-war America, becomes indirectly relevant for Sweden in the 1950s, due to the direct influences from the US and indirect via the western European effects of US propaganda. Nevertheless, the concept of industrial bureaucracy discussed by Turner is applicable to industry, to the state, and perhaps even to cooperative organizations (Turner 2013, 178). Isn’t this typical of interpretations of historical change; if, in retrospect, something new has proven to be important, must it not have already been important when it arrived? When film studies was institutionalized as a major discipline within the humanities in the 1980s and 1990s, the introduction of cinema was regarded not only as the birth of a medium, but as a part of cultural and social change together with immigration, urbanization, and new conflict lines between conservative and progressive political movements.6 During the last two decades, both television studies and the recognition 4 To such an extent that a lack of importance of television, due its late popular breakthrough in most European countries, has to be noticed, for example, when Kristin Ross argues that photographs in magazines were more important than television and newsreels in spreading images from the Algerian War in France during the 1950s (Ross 1995, 140). 5 For example, the argument linking television to glass windows in ovens (cooking as television) and washing machines (Marling 1994, 14). 6 From Sklar (1975) and Bruno (1993) to anthologies like Charney and Schwartz (1995).

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of the cultural and social importance of early television have undergone a similar transformation.7 Both have produced incredibly fascinating and important research and major theoretical and methodological advancements, particularly concerning new empirical sources and eclectic and pragmatic theoretical tools for analysing them.8 Similarly, on a much smaller scale and within other “neglected” areas such as studies of industrial films, groundbreaking studies have been published, conferences arranged, networks created, and university courses developed (sometimes even becoming popular).9 Each time it has been driven by a combination of curiosity, career tactics, and a large amount of frontier mentality. Every new field seems to demand a particular ideological (or psychological?) stance: the research(er) as oppressed by the “mainstream” within “old” disciplines and the ensuing arguments about why the particular perspective or object of study is so important for so many other fields that it really must have funding, publications, conferences, programmes, etc.10 In a similar vein, if different in address, proponents of broader, comparative, holistic, ecological, environmental, and cultural approaches to the study of media fight for their perspectives.11 If the former category of research is dominated by “narrow” specialists who, in order to reach out and create legitimacy for their subfield, must strive for a contextualizing competence, the latter have to struggle against accusations of not being experts in all the fields they aim to cover, and the particular problems that motivate causal explanations in vast, and complex, areas. This book is an attempt to do the latter by way of the former. I will use the last decades’ formative historical research on industrial films, early computing, management, accounting, market communication, advertising, vocational training, public relations, domestic research, etc., to explain 7 From Morley (1980) to Spigel (1992). 8 Combining David Bordwell’s pragmatic poetics of film with Henry Jenkins’s conceptualizations of fandom and transmedia enables a broader understanding of what media research can do and highlights the importance of letting the questions guide the choice of theories and methods, rather than the other way around. 9 For example, the network interested in so-called “orphan f ilms,” that is, educational, informational, industrial, and other non-theatrical films lacking a clear provenance. 10 A telling example is Heide Solbrig’s introduction to a special issue on “Orphans No More: Ephemeral Films and American Culture,” where she states that “the [orphan] films’ devalued characteristics” can “contribute to an expanded ideological framework of film study” and thereby challenge “the valorization of form over content, as well as some core hierarchies and research strategies in the field” (Solbrig 2009, 102). 11 There are numerous examples, but three that have influenced this book are Fuller (2005), Colomina (2007), and Parikka (2011).

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a series of issues and objects related to media. Thus, I want to widen our understanding of the context of the time when television happened to break through, though in areas where television failed.12 I am not arguing that conducting research on television history, industrial film, industrial and management history, etc., is wrong. With my book, I want to show what happens during the glitches. I want to study an interesting attempt at disrupting established ways of communication, because encapsulated in this disruption lay some of the seeds that would not grow until the breakthrough of modern-day, networked digital technologies. There are many studies of the introduction of new media that analyse both the institutional and discursive consequences of media change.13 Scholarship on television history has explored the political, economic, and cultural aspects of how television made its entrance as both a public and a domestic technology.14 The relationship between media and the nation has been frequently discussed by film historians, often giving the UK as the prime example.15 Interestingly, discussions on transnational approaches to television history seem to focus on the same issues emphasized in British research, that is, the importance of grounding the research in thorough analyses of local conditions.16 One problem with research in this area is that histories of the development of media in the US or the UK are sometimes treated as synonymous with media history as a whole. A more positive approach would be to do just the opposite: to show what the alternatives are by revealing what the alternatives were at the time.17 When discussing educational films in Sweden, for example, it is as relevant to study what was happening with them in Germany, in the Netherlands, and in France as much as it is in the UK and in the US.18 The widespread use of film for 12 But also, indirectly, to problematize the arguments that electronic media constituted the major shift in twentieth-century history “by reorganizing the social settings in which people interact and by weakening the once strong relationship between physical place and social ‘place’” (Meyrowitz 1985, ix). 13 From cultural histories of innovation, like Marvin (1988), to Gitelman and Pingree (2003), and Sigert (1999); or broader cultural histories of communication, such as Erikson (2011). 14 For example, studies by Turnock (2007) and Holmes (2008) on early British television have eloquently analysed the intricate relationships between British society after the war and the development of both public service and commercial television. 15 For example, see Higson (1995). 16 For a discussion of these problems, see Bignell and Fickers (2008). 17 Telling examples concerning France and Israel are Bourdon (2003) and Bourdon and KliglerVilenchik (2011). 18 Pedagogical uses of film had been discussed, tested, and evaluated at least since the 1920s. See, for example, Brandt (2003) or Vignaux (2009).

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educational, informational, promotional, and even propagandistic purposes in Europe during the interwar period contributed to the emergence of media workers with commissioning and production skills as well as to the creation of a reasonably experienced popular audience. What also followed was a professional network in Europe that was reborn after 1945 and in 1953 took form as the European Productivity Agency (EPA). The EPA was a part of the Organisation for European Economic Co-operation (OEEC) and, thus, was closely associated with the Marshall Plan (Boel 2003, 19). This occurred while Sweden, like most European countries, continued to develop its heavy industry rather than expand its consumer sector (Oldenziel and Zachmann 2009, 7). Having argued against the dominance of a national perspective in media studies, and for the importance of rejecting totalities and systems, why am I still talking about a specific nation, and why Sweden? The aim of my study is to use a particular, local case – a broad study of the media ecologies of 1950s Sweden – to discuss the intricate web of relations and non-relations between media, culture, and society that are difficult to discern in a larger and better-known context.19 The Swedish third way, with its intricate relations between private, governmental, and cooperative movements, and with individuals constantly moving through these relations, must be studied as both a whole and a multitude of parts simultaneously. It is therefore important not to privilege any particular level. The key methodological point, though, is that they all are necessary for the analysis without having much to do with each other. They might create systems and form parts of systems, but they do not belong to a system. The social democratic government might have wanted to make all of society into a unitary whole. Nevertheless, many parts of society withdrew from political awareness, from media coverage, and even from the memories of those who lived through those things. Yet they affected other parts, and possibly even the whole.

Contact: Theory as a Temporal Challenge Questions concerning small and large cultures, centre and periphery, dominant and subordinated countries are of course interesting, if not for 19 My understanding of “media ecologies” is closer to Mathew Fuller’s use of the term in Media Ecologies (2005) than the post-Postman North American Media Ecology movement. I will, however, use the term in both senses.

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political reasons. A much bigger problem is how to use that level of scale at all. Media studies tend to use, or should I say misuse, theories developed for analysing governance on the national level or national cultural policy, or for that matter, even theories of national cinema that combine policy with ideas about an imagined national community. With the exception of some legislative issues (broadcasting regulations, national taxation and accounting laws, laws regulating work and safety, etc.), few topics in my study actually belong to the national level. Most people and things work at either subnational or transnational levels at least as often as at a national level. The latter has been heavily theorized during the last decades, but the former, the different kinds of localities, are most of the time left un-theorized. To put it bluntly, the local has become an empirical question and the global a theoretical question. Even if the lack of empirical research within global studies may be a problem, my concern here is how to perform a theorizing endeavour at the local level. Theories are frames. They help us see things from certain perspectives. They shed light on certain things while obscuring others, just as media does, if we listen to Marshall McLuhan. This also means that theories, despite their claims of generality, have a local dimension, in both spatial and temporal terms. They were designed to frame certain phenomena and obscure others. There will always be a remnant of this locality in every theory; something for which it is custom fit and something that belongs to its original time and space. Much contemporary theory either tends to be designed from a top-down perspective, or is used for top-down analyses (what theorists of science call “deduction”).20 This may of course result in interesting and relevant results – if you are lucky. If not, it will still be a nice theory, but nothing more. Even if the national was an important issue in the 1950s, the experiences of war and pre-war nationalism in Europe probably contributed to a residual fear of overemphasizing national or nationalist perspectives. There were also other, theoretical reasons for avoiding the national level, not because it was national but because it is a historically and culturally arbitrary level of organization, with real lived and material consequences. The national level is good for doing statistics, of course, and there was plenty of that in the 1950s. But the national level obscures individuals, and in the 1950s the individual was reintroduced, as citizen and consumer, which means his or her relation to individual things and to the systems of which he or she took 20 David Bordwell’s argument for “middle level” questions are relevant not only for film history, but for media and cultural history in general (2008, 21–22).

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part, or had to belong to. Mass communications and mass media seem to have made this issue unavoidable. In 1958, American anthropologist Julian H. Steward discussed the importance of recognizing the complexity and intricacy of the impact of “mass means of communication” on societies. Even if mass communications reached “nearly everyone,” and thus resulted in “certain uniformities of behavior,” there is no way to measure the cultural effects of mass communications on a national scale. Indices of use of mass media are suggestive of the extent of their effects – a qualitative estimate – but since the quality or nature of the effects may well depend upon the subcultural context of their consumption, it must be ascertained through detailed ethnographic analysis of the subcultures. (Steward 1958, 50)

Decades later, this ethnographic perspective became fundamental to cultural studies, but since it could appear en passant in an anthropological methodological investigation concerning cultural evolution, similar analytical perspectives from the same period in time must be able to be found elsewhere. And they are possible to find. Consequently, they represent other ways of doing research, especially bottom-up research, while still avoiding the trap of (under-theorized) empiricism or scientism. They are scattered cultural and scientific models of explanation that, at least theoretically, were available at the time.21 Looking at the 1950s, we find a multitude of theorizing activities that took place among scholars and scientists, bureaucrats and entrepreneurs, workers and housewives, artists and teachers, engineers and philosophers. To some extent they can be compared to what – under the influence of Henry Jenkins, and based on research by Thomas McLaughlin and Houston Baker – has in media studies been called vernacular theory (Jenkins 2006, 61). The idea is that theorizing activities taking place outside the academy are also theory, and should be understood (and perhaps reused) just like other, academic, theories. Another part of this perspective is the profession-based (or artist-based) research that investigates practice through practice, which also uses and develops practitioners’ theorizing activities.22 21 Thus they are a kind of “dead theories,” comparable with studies of “dead media”: technologies that once had a future but were later replaced by other media. See Bruce Sterling, http://www. deadmedia.org/. 22 Too much of it, though, is just employing traditional top-down theories in order to explain bottom-up practices.

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What unites traditional ethnographic research, vernacular theory, and practice-based research is that the researcher is there, at the place and time of the people, things, and practices under investigation. Such researchers interview people, observe people in a more or less participatory manner, or just participate. In historical research this is, of course, impossible. Even if ethnographers and historians use interviews to learn about past people, things, and practices, the researcher is not there. The advantages and disadvantages of relying upon people’s memories have been thoroughly and convincingly theorized and empirically investigated during the last decades. It is certainly possible to reach further with in-depth interviews, particularly concerning individual issues. However, it is still, I think, impossible to escape the problems of changing contexts when analysing ethnographic data. A certain person, thing or practice may have meant one thing then, but it would be surprising if it means the same thing for an individual today. Historical ethnography can therefore only say something to us about what people say or write about other people, things, and practices. Steward was early to reflect upon this fact: “While mass media are therefore undoubtedly potent in helping to level subcultural differences, empirical research must also be alert to the probability that their meaning is somewhat repatterned according to the total point of view of the consumer” (Steward 1958, 50). Bruno Latour, in his study The Pasteurization of France (1993), contributed to one way of dealing with the “repatterning” through his actor-network theory, and partly also to the “total point of view” of the individual. Even if actor-network theory, and ethnography for that matter, are far too little used in media studies, the “network” part seems to have been too tempting to avoid when researching media. Network models on a par with actor-network theory too easily bring us back to the national, because that is the level where important decisions have been made, and where data have thereby been produced.23 Even if it were theoretically possible to historically study the “total point of view of the consumer,” it is most certainly impossible to actually do so. Actor-network theory may partially help us do it, as may traditional, document-based historical research, and modern media-archaeological methods. At least these theories and methods help make us aware of the complexity of actors and networks, of relations and non-relations, of the inconsistencies and dead ends, the dead media, the failed methods, etc. I am not an ethnographer nor an anthropologist, so I do not even dare to go questing for the “total point of view of the consumer.” To be fair, most 23 FAA in US research, BBC in the UK, etc.

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modern ethnographers and anthropologists reject that perspective as well. Too many before me have walked that path, but never returned home with a full answer. Julian Steward knew all this, of course. Still, he spent his career researching it. His evolutionary thinking may help us here, too, because, of course, the “total point of view of the consumer” changes, or evolves if you will, over the course of a lifetime. Therefore, what counts is how we know what was in the range of this point of view, and what the consumer did with it. This could be studied by investigating what this point of view comprised in certain places, at certain moments, for specific people. Another way to proceed is to reverse the angle. But what is the “reverse shot” that complements Steward’s “total point of view”? It could be what Latour call actors or what philosopher Graham Harman and other object-oriented thinkers would call objects. I will empirically and theoretically investigate what lies within the range of the “total point of view of the consumer,” including that which Steward’s consumer did not even know was looking back. By doing this, both the woman’s face and the power plant, both the truck and the ice block, become as important as the media technologies that were developed and used during the 1950s. Not having a network perspective enables the use of different scales and different perspectives. As I hope to show, by doing this we might better understand media change without becoming too local to generalize the conclusions, or too general to take the advantage of the local richness of empirical material. This is a problem that many historical studies try to frame, and it is still a problem in need of attention. The question of scale, I will argue, is of particular importance for studies of small nations, which either tend to repeat what already has been said concerning larger nations, or become so local that they are of no interest to anyone else. In 1951, in the introduction to The Mechanical Bride, Marshall McLuhan likened his approach to that of the sailor in Edgar Allan Poe’s 1841 short story “A Descent into the Maelstrom” who “saved himself by studying the action of the whirlpool and by co-operating with it” (McLuhan 1967, v). McLuhan’s first book has often been seen (mistakenly, I will argue) as “straight critical cultural theory” and “straight content analysis,” far-removed from the style of his later work (for example, Flayhan 2005, 240–241). Holding the view that The Mechanical Bride as just another theoretical starting point is anything but straight. McLuhan’s resistance to imposing unity “upon this diversity” is significant (1967, 50). Given the allure of systems and cybernetics at the time, McLuhan’s critique of “popularized science” and its risks is not so much a question of culture vs. technology but a clash of perspectives. In one chapter in The Mechanical Bride, “The Voice of the Lab” (90–93), McLuhan

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takes the famous MIT mathematics professor and cybernetics popularizer Norbert Wiener as an example: “Popularized science encourages people to avoid many unpleasant truths only to confront them suddenly in practical life with Professor Wiener’s type of prospect that the electronic brain will certainly eliminate the ordinary man from the human scene” (McLuhan 1967, 92). This is not only a reaction by McLuhan, the humanist, against Wiener, the scientist, but also an argument by a humanist trained in formal textual analysis who acknowledges the complexities of the world against a complexity theorist who is reducing the same complexity into simplified mathematical and rhetorical arguments. We will see examples of this in the discussions on cybernetics that took place in Swedish industry. In the following chapter, the oft-quoted “Love-Goddess Assembly Line” (93–97), after discussing the machine-inspired, standardized views of women’s bodies (ending with f ilm director Cecil B. DeMille asking: “Maybe the average Hollywood glamour girl should be numbered instead of named”), McLuhan initiates a discussion of how to look at and understand the world: The meaning of this is very different for the student of popular culture, who develops the same sort of eye for morphological conformities as the folklorist and anthropologist do for the migration of symbols and imaginations. When the same patterns recur, these observers are alerted to the possibilities of similar underlying dynamics. No culture will give nourishment and support to images or patterns which are alien to its dominant impulses and aspirations. (McLuhan 1967, 96)

It is in the variations of these recurring images and patterns in a certain society that McLuhan finds “the ‘laws’ of that society; laws which will shape its songs and art and social expression” (96). However, the laws of McLuhan are not the laws of traditional scientific naturalism, as they appear to be in Norbert Wiener’s account. If McLuhan had been able to go beyond Wiener’s popularizing his ideas in The Human Use of Human Beings (1950), and into the complexity theories in Cybernetics (1948), the difference between them would not have been that significant. As I will show below, from the perspective of post-war welfare societies they will both symbolize conservative modernists intrigued by modern technology. Instead, McLuhan invokes mathematician and philosopher of science Alfred North Whitehead in rephrasing the maelstrom analogy: A. N. Whitehead states the procedures of modern physics somewhat in the same way in Science and the Modern World. In place of a single

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mechanical unity in all phenomena, “some theory of discontinuous existence is required.” But discontinuity, whether in cultures or physics, unavoidably invokes the ancient notion of harmony. And it is out of the extreme discontinuity of modern existence, with its mingling of many cultures and periods, that there is being born today the vision of a rich and complex harmony. (McLuhan 1967, 96–97)

The way in which McLuhan in The Mechanical Bride looks at content, with science and technology being made comparable with ethnology and anthropology, is perhaps far from his later focus on the “significance of the medium” (Strate and Wachtel 2005, 5). But this focus on content does what his later work so often does not, namely, it supplies an empirical grounding for his analyses. Scattered throughout his 49 chapters are revelations and the naming of things (what McLuhan calls “objects and processes”), similar to what computer game scholar and object-oriented ontologist Ian Bogost calls “ontographies.” Not in the form of lists or litanies, but with each image and adhering text becoming a kind of self-reliant, semi-independent, half-withdrawn unit. To me, McLuhan’s content analysis can be explained in the same way as Bogost defines ontographies: Let’s adopt ontography as a name for a general inscriptive strategy, one that uncovers the repleteness of units and their interobjectivity. From the perspective of metaphysics, ontography involves the revelation of object relationships without necessarily offering clarification or description of any kind. (Bogost 2012, 38)

Even if McLuhan most probably aimed at both clarification and description, the great value of The Mechanical Bride is closer to Bogost’s discussion of object relationships because, in contrast to many cultural analysis enterprises, McLuhan did not recognize the existence of a coherent world to be represented by any multi-perspectivist method: “We do not have a single, coherent present to live in, and so we need a multiple vision in order to see at all” (McLuhan 1967, 97). Although McLuhan’s multiple vision may be the opposite of Wiener’s systems, Anne Balsamo identifies a field where Wiener and McLuhan actually do meet: in the relations between technology and the human body. But they reach opposite conclusions: To this end, McLuhan critically examines a variety of images and texts from popular culture to demonstrate how communication technologies function as the new body sensorium. We know our bodies through

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technological sense organs (self-surveillance devices), and the bodies we know have been irrevocably transformed by technological practices. If Wiener shows how cybernetics was founded on a simulation of the human body, McLuhan suggests the converse – that people have begun to simulate machines. (Balsamo 1996, 173–174)

For me, Julian Steward stands somewhere between the systems world view of Wiener and the fragmented, changing, and partially incomprehensible world that McLuhan creates through his analyses. Steward’s theories, although obsolete within contemporary anthropology, are particularly important to me as they form a model for the industry’s vernacular theories, a model that focuses on evolution, accepts the world’s complexity while retaining the ambition to reach “full understanding,” and yet has a pragmatic sense of the limitations of what is actually possible to do and understand. As an anthropologist, he puts the individual human body in both historical and geographical perspective by emphasizing both evolution and culture, change and consistency. Still, it was change that needed explanation, and perpetually needs explanation. How can we describe the recurrent terms and general ambition to create an industry-specific discourse on tools for contact? During the immediate post-war decades modern, Western capitalist corporate organizations developed a particular, but tremendously influential, form of public sphere separate from, but still related to, both the private spheres of family and friends, and the traditional bourgeois public sphere. Here Oskar Negt and Alexander Kluge’s concept of the “industrialized public spheres of production” (“Produktionsöffentlichkeiten”) may be useful (Negt and Kluge 1993). Negt and Kluge, writing during the late 1960s and early 1970s, described the public spheres of production as at the same time excluding and incorporating; they were direct expressions of organizational power relations and strictly material. More importantly, the public spheres of production “provide, without any real change in the class situation, the semblance of the human as a separate product” (ibid., 17) and “the consciousness of the worker becomes the raw material and the site where these public spheres realize themselves” (18). Negt and Kluge thus distinguished the public sphere of production from the traditional bourgeois public sphere in that the former does not even pretend to separate itself from the marketplace. This dichotomy opens up for an interpretation of industrial media use as a truly unique and individual experience, still profoundly gendered and class-biased.

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Contact III: Localizing a Study In a parliamentary debate from 1956, the Swedish minister of culture and education Sven Andersson declared that “television had no foundation in the consciousness of the Swedish people.”24 A few years later, television was as popular in Sweden as in any other country. The question is not whether or not Andersson was wrong. If anything, he was attempting to set an agenda that was already obsolete, even for his government colleagues. Obviously, television rapidly and profoundly, if late, became a firm part of the everyday life and media landscape in Sweden, in a form combining US commercial media culture and UK public service culture. But there are many more perspectives from which to study the 1950s media culture(s). In a way, Andersson was right. Of course, his nationalist-conservative argument, ubiquitous among social democrats at the time, had little to do with what was going on. On a general level, it might be possible to argue that television had no foundation in anyone’s consciousness. The ongoing processes of change took heed of neither foundations nor people, and hardly ever of consciousness. Rather, what was already going on, both behind the back and before the eyes of the Swedish government, was a local version of global processes of changing foundations, changing people, and perhaps even changing consciousness. This is consequently a book about change: practices of change, objects of change, bodies of change, and the beauty of change. This book uses f ilm, sound slides, flannelgraphs, conferences, and management consultancy to argue that uses of (potentially) interactive media technologies, together with workers’ personal experiences of media, created a kind of human-technological resistance – deliberately, out of sheer ignorance, or just by necessity – against prevailing corporate uses of media forms such as film, printed media, and traditional foremen’s orders. Communication technologies were seen at the time as the most modern way of developing shared visions and strategies, creating new regulations and new methods, and improving safety and efficiency. In its footsteps followed the consequences of how experiences within the public sphere (democratic institutions and debates, as well as news and entertainment media) and the private sphere (family life, fantasies, emotions, nonprofessional competencies) interfered with corporate practices. I discusses how contemporary theorizations of information were developed, tinkered with, and applied to the specific challenges posed by public and private experiences to strategies 24 “Skriv till Sven!,” Arbetsgivaren, no. 11, 2 June 1956, 1.

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of education and marketing. The increasing immigration from southern Europe and Finland to Sweden necessitated an interest in mobility and translation. Companies and public authorities had to communicate in new ways, and new media technologies were created to this end. The book begins with the story of an unlikely early television celebrity, “TV Boman.” Kjell Boman was a clerk at the household appliances manufacturer Electrolux who became a quiz show hero, and soon became was part of Electrolux’s marketing strategy. After his victory, he travelled throughout Europe, as early modern noblemen had done, to study the landmarks of European civilization and the glories of post-war reconstruction. Here, household appliances went hand in hand with heavy industry in the rhetorical figure of the traveller. The explorer is now the travelling salesman, but disguised as a well-informed, though not highly educated, socially awkward clerk. The well-known image of the housewife as homemaker and consumer meets a media ecology without commercial television. The genre of “housewives’ films” (“husmorsfilmer”) – educational-informational-advertising films that travelled around the country and were screened in cinemas free of charge during the daytime and early evenings – is explored to discuss not only their consequences for families and homes, but also the contact, the interface between home and public life, and the merger of consumption and citizenship that they represented. The housewives’ films thus became something other than what we recognize from 1950s commercial television advertising. It was also different from traditional industrial films. It became a true tool for contact, perhaps a form of useful cinema rather than useful films. The introduction of television in Sweden in the 1950s becomes a starting point to reflect upon the hegemonic ideological mechanisms of the Social Democratic Party’s policies as well as of the organizations that formed much of Swedish public life. Television and housewives’ films thus reveal some of the tensions and ruptures in the dominant political strategies of the Swedish third way (between capitalism and socialism). Sweden’s third way was an option to “neutralize” both public citizenship and capitalist consumership by merging people into well-informed individuals, well aware of their social and national attachments. Public service television could thus experiment freely with commercial formats like variety and quiz shows without risk, since any television format could be translated into a vehicle for information. At the same time, it was the commercial formats that really engaged the audience and that interacted with them. Therefore, public service and commercial television joined forces to become both one-directional and interactive. The view was that human behaviour could, and therefore should, be changed.

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The book ends with a truly original and exceptional industrial film, The New Face. This film is the starting point for a discussion on how media objects not only expressed ideas about the modern human being, but also contributed to its creation. The film was commissioned by Vattenfall, the government agency for hydroelectric energy production and distribution, to argue for the need to build new power plants, the construction of which harmed the natural environment of the rivers of northern Sweden. The film presents the possible benefits of change by way of two parallel stories. One describes the construction of a power plant and the efforts made to reconstruct the landscape afterward. The other one describes how a young woman who had suffered facial injuries in a car accident was helped to regain her beauty, though changed. Landscape architects became the cosmetic surgeons of nature, and cosmetic surgeons became the architects of new bodies. Here we see how audiovisual media is used for a re-enchantment of nature, this time by way of technology. Technology not only destroys and develops nature or changes our image of nature; it changes our bodies and minds, thus preparing the merging of the consumer and the public service human being.

Outline of the Book The first two chapters set the scene by introducing key actors, ideas, and media formats that helped create an industry vocabulary and thus the background for an industrial public sphere. Chapter 1 analyses the Swedish social democratic, third-way vision of state, commercial, and cooperative interests acting in harmony (the “development triad”), through the cases of TV Boman and housewives’ f ilms, and examines how a small but growing consumer-oriented industry sector navigated though the Swedish media ecology with a public service broadcast media lacking commercial alternatives. Chapter 2 focuses on uses of industrial f ilms among export-oriented large industries, and the infrastructure of these films in Sweden. The renewed interest in using industrial films had its roots in a 1948 regulation of company work councils ( företagsnämnder), which boosted the demand for economic information. It also went hand in hand with the policy work of the Swedish Employers’ Confederation (Svenska Arbetsgivareföreningen, SAF) on increasing the public interest and acceptance of private enterprises and private ownership (Westerberg 2020). SAF then took the initiative to create a human resources research and development organization called the PA Council (Personaladministrativa

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rådet, Personnel Administrative Council) to further support business and industry to develop their own rhetoric and vocabulary, exemplified by applications of the term “contact.” Then follows a theoretical intermission focusing on how films, slides, sound slides, and flannelgraphs were integrated into organizational and educational contexts, not in the sense of predefined theories, but as encouragement of creating new concepts and practices. One of the main questions concerned the role of human involvement in instructional, educational, and promotional work. These debates coincided with the increasing interest in middle management, particularly the industry foreman. Chapter 3 is thus grounded in the two contextual chapters and the theoretical intermission in a discussion of how the industrial public sphere evolved though spatial contact, through both public relations and industry conferences, courses, and exhibitions. Individual entrepreneurs and controversial state activities challenged the development triad and disrupted the harmony by increasing the level and treatment of risks: political, economic, and environmental. In Chapter 4, The New Face is put into the context of Vattenfall’s promotional and community-building activities (around the construction sites), and its corporate ethnographic and quantitative storytelling. In the conclusion, the creative treatment of the concepts of beauty, surgeons, landscape, and, most of all, values in The New Face are put into the context of an industrial public sphere.

References Films Det nya ansiktet (Alex Jute, 1959, Kinocentralen/Vattenfall).

Periodicals Arbetsgivaren No. 11 (1956).

References Balsamo, Anne. 1996. Technologies of the Gendered Body: Reading Cyborg Women. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

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Bignell, Jonathan, and Andreas Fickers. 2008. “Introduction: Comparative European Perspectives on Television History.” In A European Television History, edited by Jonathan Bignel and Andreas Fickers, 1–54. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell. Boel, Bent. 2003. The European Productivity Agency and Transatlantic Relations, 1953–1961. Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press. Bogost, Ian. 2012. Alien Phenomenology, or What It’s Like to Be a Thing. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Bordwell, David. 2008. Poetics of Cinema. London: Routledge. Bourdon, Jérôme. 2003. “Some Sense of Time: Remembering Television.” History and Memory 15, no. 1, 5–35. Bourdon, Jérôme, and Neta Kligler-Vilenchik. 2011. “Together, Nevertheless? Television Memories in Mainstream Jewish Israel,” European Journal of Communication 26, no. 1, 33–47. Brandt, Hans-Jürgen. 2003. “Vom Lehrf ilm zum Kultur- und Propagandaf ilm: Entwicklung und Kontroversen,” In Triumph der Bilder: Kultur- und Dokumentarfilme vor 1945 im internationalen Vergleich, edited by Peter Zimmermann and Kay Hoffmann, 74–104. Konstanz: UVK. Bruno, Giuliana. 1993. Streetwalking on a Ruined Map: Cultural Theory and the City Films of Elvira Notari. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Charney, Leo, and Vanessa R. Schwartz, eds. 1995. Cinema and the Invention of Modern Life. Los Angeles: University of California Press. Colomina, Beatriz. 2007. Domesticity at War. Cambridge; MA: The MIT Press. Erikson, Kai. 2011. Communication in Modern Social Ordering: History and Philosophy. New York: Bloomsbury. Flayhan, Donna. 2005. “Early Medium Theory, or, Roots of Technological Determinism in North American Communication Theory.” In The Legacy of McLuhan, edited by Lance Strate and Edward Wachtel, 237–246. Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press, 2005. Fuller, Mathew. 2005. Media Ecologies: Materialist Energies in Art and Technoculture. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Gitelman, Lisa, and Geoffrey B. Pingree, eds. 2003. New Media, 1740–1915. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Godhe, Michael. 2003. Morgondagens experter: Tekniken, ungdomen och framsteget i populärvetenskap och science fiction i Sverige under det långa 1950-talet. Stockholm: Carlsson Bokförlag. Higson, Andrew. 1995. Waving the Flag: Constructing a National Cinema in Britain. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Hobsbawm, Eric. 1994. The Age of Extremes: A History of the World, 1914–1991. New York: Pantheon.

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Holmes, Sue. 2008. Entertaining Television: The BBC and Popular Television Culture in the 1950s. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Jenkins, Henry. 2006. Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. New York: New York University Press. Judt, Tony. 2005. Postwar: A History of Europe since 1945. New York: Penguin. Latour, Bruno. 1993. The Pasteurization of France. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Marling, Karal Ann. 1994. As Seen on TV: The Visual Culture of Everyday Life in the 1950s. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Marvin, Carolyn. 1988. When Old Technologies Were New: Thinking about Electric Communication in the Late Nineteenth Century. Oxford: Oxford University Press. McLuhan, Marshall. 1967. The Mechanical Bride: Folklore of Industrial Man. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Meyrowitz, Joshua. 1985. No Sense of Place: The Impact of Electronic Media on Social Behavior. New York: Oxford University Press. Morley, David. 1980. The “Nationwide” Audience. London: BFI. Negt, Oskar, and Alexander Kluge. 1993. Public Sphere and Experience: Towards an Analysis of the Bourgeois and Proletarian Public Sphere. Translated by Peter Labanyi, Jamie Owen Daniel, and Assenka Oksiloff. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Parikka, Jussi. 2011. Insect Media: An Archaeology of Animals and Technology. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Ross, Kristin. 1995. Fast Cars, Clean Bodies: Decolonization and the Reordering of French Culture. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Sigert, Bernhard. 1999. Relays: Literature as an Epoch of the Postal System. Translated by Kevin Repp. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999. Sklar, Robert. 1975. Movie-Made America: A Cultural History of American Movies. New York: Random House. Solbrig, Heide. 2009. “Orphans No More: Definitions, Disciplines, and Institutions.” Journal of Popular Film and Television 37, no. 3, 98–105. Spigel, Lynn. 1992. Make Room for TV: Television and the Family Ideal in Postwar America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Steward, Julian S. 1958. Theory of Culture Change: The Methodology of Multilinear Evolution. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Strate, Lance, and Edward Wachtel. 2005. “Introduction.” In The Legacy of McLuhan, edited by Lance Strate and Edward Wachtel, 1–24. Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press. Thorelli, Hans B., ed. 1954a. Automation. Ny teknik – nya perspektiv i ekonomi och arbetsliv. Del I. De tekniska utsikterna. Stockholm: SNS Studier och Debatt.

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Thorelli, Hans B., ed. 1954b. Automation. Ny teknik – nya perspektiv i ekonomi och arbetsliv. Del II. De ekonomiska och sociala framtidsutsikterna. Stockholm: SNS Studier och Debatt. Turner, Fred. 2013. The Democratic Surround: Multimedia & American Liberalism from World War II to the Psychedelic Sixties. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Turnock, Rob. 2007. Television and Consumer Culture: Britain and the Tranformation of Modernity. London: Tauris. Vignaux, Valérie. 2009. “The Central Film Library of Vocational Education: An Archeology of Industrial Film in France between the Wars.” In Films That Work: Industrial Film and the Productivity of Media, edited by Vinzenz Hediger and Patrick Vonderau, 315–327. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. Wiener, Norbert. 1948. Cybernetics: Or, Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Wiener, Norbert. 1950. The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.

1.

The Housewife, Film, Television, and the Quiz Show Nerd Abstract Chapter 1 analyses the Swedish social democratic, third-way vision of state, commercial, and cooperative interests acting in harmony, through the examples of TV Boman and Housewives’ Films, and examines how a small but growing consumer-oriented industry sector navigated though the Swedish media ecology with a public service broadcast media lacking commercial alternatives. Keywords: housewife, television, public service, welfare state

In the 1950s, the largest household appliance company in Sweden was Electrolux. It was created by Axel Wenner-Gren in 1919 to sell modern vacuum cleaners and later on refrigerators, and it soon became a pioneer in sales directly to homes.1 Its reputation as a company that offered the best in customer service endured for decades. During the immediate years after the end of World War II, the company ceased advertising its products (with the exception of vacuum cleaners and floor polishers) due to an unstable production situation. Electrolux restarted its advertising and marketing work in the early 1950s at the trade and customer goods fairs around the country.2 Among the products that were marketed in this new start was a combined vacuum cleaner and polisher for floors, furniture, and even for the car.3 One of the most popular television shows in the first years of television in Sweden was Kvitt eller dubbelt – tiotusenkronorsfrågan, the Swedish version of the popular American quiz show The $64,000 Question. One 1 “Bigge” Holmquist, “Personalens seder är firmans heder . . . ,” DBA-Nytt, September-October/ November-December 1955, 4–5. 2 “Det är annorlunda i dag,” DBA-Nytt, July-August 1953, 6–7. 3 “Bona och skura med dammsugare,” Electrolux rapport 6, no. 3, October 1953, 3.

Björkin, M., Post-war Industrial Media Culture in Sweden, 1945–1960: New Faces, New Values. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2022 doi 10.5117/9789462984929_ch01

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1. An exhibition of domestic products and brands, in Örebro, June 1956. Photo: Örebro Kuriren / Örebro läns museum.

of the first winners, on the topic of “world history,” was Kjell Boman, a 55-year-old “sympathetic, slightly curly grey haired” clerk at Electrolux’s sales department in Stockholm, recently early retired due to his rheumatoid arthritis. 4 In the eyes of his colleagues, Boman was a humble and easy-going person and a welcome player in the Electrolux bridge club (he even participated in the Friday bridge game the day before the quiz show finale). As a winner of the contest he received a significant sum of money, a car, and a Turkish mat. It was certainly important for an early retired clerk, although he did not approve of the tabloids’ stories of him as poor. I do not think I’m buying a TV, says the TV star when we ask how he plans to spend the money. I think TV is quite underwhelming. I have not yet received any information about my trip to Italy. If the trip will not take place, I will probably wait until the autumn to go south. It would be a shame not to spend the summer in Sweden. My wife and I would prefer to stay the whole winter in the Mediterranean.5

4 “TV-Boman vann pengar och sympati,” Electrolux rapport 10, no. 1, March 1957, 15. 5 Ibid.

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2. Säffle’s Boman, from Electrolux Rapport 1957. © AB Electrolux.

After his success, Boman participated in stage events, particularly different quiz shows organized by Electrolux, for example, in Kungsträdgården, the main meeting place in the centre of Stockholm.6 By the end of 1957, he had participated in another quiz show, 21, both as contestant and co-host.7 He eventually regained his health and returned to work at the sales office. Electrolux used the occasion in other ways as well. It hired one of the female hosts from Kvitt eller dubbelt to tell a story about a new freezer at an event with 600 sales leaders and advertisers from all over the country, at the Rigoletto cinema, organized by the Swedish Advertisers’ Association 6 Ibid. 7 “Julelux,” Electrolux rapport 10, no. 4, December 1957, loose leaf, back.

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(Svenska Annonsörers Förening).8 Electrolux arranged its own quiz shows at company events. In December 1957, the administrators at its plant in Säffle held a meeting at the town hotel, where Gun Hansson became the local, female equivalent of Kjell Boman, “Säffles Boman.”9 In March 1958, at another sales event for salespeople and their families, Electrolux presented its contribution to the housewives’ films genre, a film about deep-freezing. The event included a Q & A session and a live talk show inspired by popular formats in radio and television.10 Electrolux engaged with many different cultural phenomena at the time. The fact that Arne Sucksdorff’s internationally acclaimed film En djungelsaga (1957), a docudrama depicting the lives of the Muria tribe in central India, used an Electrolux refrigerator to keep the film stock cool during filming became a reason for a sales event at the Motala factory involving Chendru, the boy who played the main role in the film. Chendru was accompanied by the sound engineer Arvindh Shah from Bombay, who worked for Sucksdorff for two years during the shooting of the film and then travelled to Sweden for the postproduction. They both would like to see the factory making the Electrolux refrigerator, because such a cabinet was invaluable during the filming. In a kerosene-driven Electrolux LT 500, the film reels were protected against the prevailing heat, which could otherwise destroy the film emulsion. As soon as a reel was filled with pictures from life in the distant Gahr-Bengal jungle village, it was placed in the refrigerator, before being flown to London and the film laboratory.11

Kjell Boman himself received a special award from Electrolux. The company decided to give him a trip during the spring of 1960 to various locations in Central and Eastern Europe – “in the footsteps of King Charles XII” of Sweden: Stockholm-Bromma – Hamburg – Berlin – Frankfurt – Milano – Rome – Riva del Sole – Milan – Venice – Pireus – Athens – roundtrip in Greece to famous historical sites – Athens – Istanbul – Edirne – Demotica – Istanbul – Sofia – Bucharest – Vienna – Prague – Dresden – Berlin – Stralsund – Sassnitz – Trelleborg – Malmö – Stockholm. 8 “Sida vid sida,” Electrolux rapport 10, no. 4, December 1957, 2. 9 “Gun Hansson ‘Säffles Boman,’” Electrolux rapport 10, no. 4, December 1957, 13–14. 10 Publicus, “Imponerande förevisning på Svenska Försäljningen av bolagets nya produkter,” Electrolux rapport 11, no. 1, March 1958, 18. 11 “Djungel-Chendrus film i Electrolux kylskåp kunde klara heta dagar,” Electrolux rapport 11, no. 3, October 1958, 5.

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3. “With Kjell Boman through Europe,” ”In the footsteps of Karl XII,” from Electrolux Rapport 1960. © AB Electrolux.

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4. Kjell Boman in Berlin, from Electrolux Rapport 1960. © AB Electrolux.

Kjell Boman wrote about the journey in a series of articles in the company journal Electrolux rapport. The articles were introduced with reference to his TV success: Kjell Boman’s free and comfortable way in front of the TV cameras and his unlimited historical expertise has made him the TV idol of the entire Swedish people. Now we will get to know about his experiences along the famous path that Charles XII took from Bender to Stralsund. It will certainly be an interesting journey as seen through Kjell Boman’s eyes and accompanied by his historical comments.12

In this way TV Boman, a clerk at household appliances manufacturer Electrolux, became a quiz show hero. He even published a quiz book (Boman 1958) and soon became part of Electrolux’s marketing strategy. After his victory, he travelled through Europe, as the early modern noblemen had done, to view the landmarks of European civilization and see the glories of post-war reconstruction. On the one hand, the example of TV Boman shows how the promotion of household appliances by this travelling celebrity could go hand in hand with the aims of the core industries in Sweden in 12 “Med Kjell Boman genom Europa,” Electrolux rapport 13, no. 3, June 1960, 18–21 21, 24–25, 30.

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5. Electrolux 1926 advertisement reprinted in the Electrolux Rapport article from Boman’s journey. © AB Electrolux.

6. Kjell Boman poses in front of photo of Karl XII statue in Stockholm, in the Electrolux Rapport article from Boman’s journey. © AB Electrolux.

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the 1950s. On the other hand, consumption and television had a much more complicated relationship in Sweden than in most other Western countries.

Television From 1951 to 1954, a governmental commission investigated the future organization and function of television in Sweden.13 The television question divided Swedish society into two camps. On the one hand, the business and industrials sector and the conservative and liberal political parties were in favour of commercial television. On the other hand, unions, social democratic parties, and most of the press (regardless of political orientation) advocated for state-owned, public service-oriented television. Newspapers that otherwise supported the conservative and liberal parties argued against commercial television – with the exception of the Stockholm-based tabloid Expressen. The main reason that this position was embraced across the political spectrum of the press seems to have been its fear of losing advertising revenue to commercial television (Wirén 1986; Hadénius 1998).14 In 1951 the TV commission ordered a study of the interest in television advertising among potential advertisers. The survey became highly contested because Sveriges Radio (the national publicly funded radio broadcaster), the government, and the National Telecommunication Agency constantly changed the conditions for the various proposals.15 Four years later, the Industrial Research Institute conducted a similar study. This one, which was implemented when only Stockholm, Gothenburg, and Malmö had television broadcasters, had likewise no lasting political significance. For many potential advertisers, the main problem with television was that it was national. Many of those who advertised in other media mainly targeted a local or regional market (Gillberg 1959). However, local or regional television was never a real alternative in Sweden. From the business side, attempts were made to highlight West Germany as a good example of how regional television could work. In most discussions, the United States was seen as disconcerting and it is interesting that the opponents of commercial television evaded comparisons with, for example, West Germany. Such a pronounced regional system as West German television was considered by 13 “Televisionen i Sverige: Televisionsutredningens betänkande,” SOU 1954:32. 14 “Debatten: Reklam i TV,” Arbetsgivaren, no. 7, 10 April 1959, 2. 15 Nils Paulsson and K.-O. Samuelsson, “TV-utredningen på villovägar,” Arbetsgivaren, no. 22, 4 December 1954, 3.

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most as irrelevant to Sweden.16 Commercial television thus goes hand in hand with broader discussions on the issue of regionalization. In retrospect, it seems that the major problem with the debate over commercial television was that both sides essentially held a national perspective. Potential advertisers, however, and perhaps even viewers, were more interested in geographically specific programmes. In September 1956, television off icially started in Sweden and, at the same time, a ban on television advertising was introduced. In the years that followed, the debate gradually faded away. In the absence of commercial television, Swedish advertising costs looked different to neighbouring countries. Press advertising doubled in size between 1953 and 1961, while the cost of other means of advertising increased even more. An analysis from 1964 identified an increased number of posters, more and longer advertising films, more films shot in colour, changes in taxation, and a general decrease in daily press during the time. Advertising costs in total increased by 120%. In comparison, during the same period, total private consumption increased by approximately 60% and private gross investment by about 90%. Advertising costs thus increased more than private consumption and private investments. But since private investments increased much more than consumption, it is not surprising that so much of the “other commercials” focused on investment (that is, housing and cars). The discussion on the cost of advertising was intense around the start of television broadcasting in Sweden. The newspapers opposed commercial television because of the risk of increased competition at the advertising market. The Swedish Advertisers’ Association argued in 1957 against those claims. With some unspecified references to other countries, most likely the UK and West Germany, it argued that television advertisers most likely would advertise in the press to support and deepen their television advertisements. Of the total annual advertising budget in Sweden, newspaper advertisements made up about 50%, printed matter and retail advertising combined amounted to about 20%, film and slides 2%, exhibitions 3%, and other promotional items 5%, while television advertisements at the time was estimated to be about 4%.17 Advertising and television remained separate, even if many tried to combine them. When electronics retailer Centrum presented a new “management telephone” called “Celevision” designed to aid individual and machine 16 Folke Haldén, “TV-annons – inget för oss?,” Arbetsgivaren, no. 9, 11 May 1957, 11–12. 17 “Reklam i TV minskar inte annonsmängden,” Arbetsgivaren, no. 2, 26 January 1957, 10.

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surveillance (to be used in industries and for signature identification at banks, for example), the advertiser trade journal Info asked in 1959 why could not it be used for sales purposes – a “Sellevision”? It imagined advertisers viewing studio sketches at a distance, salespeople looking at a screen to determine how many boxes of “yxtralin” were left on the storage shelves, or people secretly observing customers’ reactions to an exhibit or shop window display: “Oh well, commercial TV is coming, for sure! (It’s only the Swedish Newspaper Publishers’ Association that wants to believe something else.)”18 For the following 30 years, the newspaper publishers were right and Info got it wrong. But restrictions nurture creativity, so there were other options available for advertisers who wanted to reach (women) consumers using a television-like format – the movie theatre.

Housewives’ Films A housewife is preparing dinner for her family – soup made out of fresh vegetables and pancakes prepared from flour, eggs, milk, and butter. She is in her mid- to late 30s and her dress is somewhat old-fashioned. She is presented as someone who is not supposed to be especially attractive. We will soon learn that she is a bad wife and mother. There is also another housewife, younger, more fashionably dressed; she lives in a more modern home. She is the good mother, the good wife, and hence the good housewife. Why? Because she is making her soup from canned vegetables and her pancakes from a mix. She even has time to prepare baked cod for her husband, made from deep-frozen cod, of course. So she qualifies as a good housewife. The story of the two housewives does not, as one might think, originate from a 1950s American television commercial, but from the movie Var­ dagsmiddag: En film om modern matlagning (Everyday dinner: A film about modern cooking) from 1954. This is a Swedish public information film, made to encourage housewives to better manage their households. To further emphasize the difference between the two housewives, the voice-over manages to talk about fresh vegetables and fresh fish with near disgust in her voice. According to the rhetoric of the voice-over, canned vegetables and deep-frozen fish in square packages are fresher than unprocessed vegetables and fish in the store. Her main point, however, does not really concern the level of freshness, but the level of efficiency. Preparing food 18 “Sellevision,” Info, no. 7, September 1959, 39.

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7. Film stills from Vardagsmiddag: En film om modern matlagning (Husmors filmer, 1954). © Petter Davidson.

from fresh vegetables and fresh fish is a tremendous waste of time. It is almost immoral, definitely irresponsible, and perhaps even unpatriotic. To understand why, we need to see the big picture – the ideological map of modern Sweden and how it relates to the Swedish third way. The story of the two housewives was screened at various locations in Sweden as part of an educational and informational touring film programme called “Housewives’ Films.” Companies selling canned vegetables (Skandia), deep-frozen fish (Findus), and baking mixes (Juvel) had paid for the film. The housewives’ f ilms were not ordinary commercial f ilms for cinema theatres. They were specially, and carefully, composed film programmes about 60 to 90 minutes long, made up of seven to ten informational/ advertising f ilms, each f ive to f ifteen minutes long. A celebrity known from women’s magazines, entertainment, cinema, and, later, television acted as host for the show. Between 1952 and 1976 these programmes toured Sweden and were shown at cinemas, for free, during the afternoons (Jansson 1996, 7–12). The company that made them was Husmors Filmer AB (Housewives’ Films Ltd– its name came to be synonymous with the phenomenon). It was founded by adman Bengt Davidsson with the aim of making “sober, fact-based advertising films.” A fact checker ensured that the films were both informative and good at selling. No reliable audience statistics are available, but at their ten-year anniversary celebration in

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1962 the company claimed that “about four million visitors” had attended the programmes.19 The company started in 1952, just before the first public debate about commercial television, and two years before the first Swedish experiment with commercial television, the Sandrew Television Week of May 1954 (Olsson 2004). At first Housewives’ Films emphasized another source of inspiration. Together with the films, it published a magazine called Husmors-Journalen (The housewives’ journal). In the very first issue the editor described the need for “sober advertising,” which ought to be as informative as it was good at selling. In the journal, good advertising was seen as a way of making a housewife’s day more efficient.20 It is important to add that the journal’s def inition of a “housewife” was a married woman with children and a part-time job outside the home (even if only 25–30% of all Swedish married women actually worked outside the home in the 1950s). Because of her life outside the home, she needed to run her home as efficiently and be as well organized as possible. Above all, there was little time to gather information about different products, which is why Housewives’ Films saw a need for an improved form of advertising. The screenings were sometimes accompanied by live events. For example, in autumn 1954, Michael Meschke, then a 23-year-old puppeteer, originally from Germany but trained in France, performed for the film audience.21 In the printed programme, which was only available to the cinema audience, there were quizzes and other competitions. The winner of the spring 1954 programme quiz could win a travel package worth 3,000 SEK, which was specified as a trip to New York, a flight to Rome with a journey around Italy, or a four-week vacation on the Swedish west coast for the entire family.22 An article in the local newspaper Hallandsposten in 1954 gives an impression of what it was like to watch the film programme. The author seems to have been interested in the screening from a practical perspective: You needed sharp elbows to be able to find a seat at the extremely well attended housewives’ film screening at the Royal cinema in Halmstad on Wednesday. Elsa Lindström [the director of the Home Research 19 Husmors-Journalen, no. 1, 1962. 20 Ingegerd Englund, “Ge konsumenterna saklig reklam,” Husmors-Journalen, Spring 1954, 1. 21 Husmors-Journalen, Autumn 1954, 1. Michael Meschke would later start his own puppet theatre in Stockholm. 22 “Se Husmors Filmer och vinn valfri resa för 3.000 kr.,” Husmors-Journalen, Spring 1954, 2.

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Institute (Hemmens forskningsinstitut, HFI)] and her associates had cooked up a really nice potpourri. The HFI shared its many experiences of suitable tools for the household, and for those interested in sewing, Aktiv hushållning [Active Housekeeping, a wartime information and support organization for household matters that merged with the HFI the same year] had a lot to say, among other things about different types of sewing machines. The everyday food radio hosts Folke Olhagen and Tore Wretman almost made my mouth water with all their talk about cheese. In addition, [they emphasized the value of] the cucumber as an especially cherished component of everyday meals. “Tips and tricks for the household” was among the most fun sections [of the film] and one guesses that even well-trained kitchen ladies picked up something there. A refreshing addition to all the useful information was seeing Stig Järrel [a famous actor] with his wife, Ingrid, appearing in some funny scenes. It would be desirable for the film to be shown for a whole week so that many more could take advantage of the valuable lessons learned, but, unfortunately, it will only be available today.23

When focusing on advertising, the few Swedish scholars who have studied these films have seen this development as the outcome of the post-war diffusion of American consumerist ideology, and when looking at the informational aspects, they have regarded the films as the result of three decades of social engineering (Soila 1997; Berner 2002). Both interpretations tend to disregard how housewives’ films became embedded in contemporary discourses on media use in Sweden.

(Not) Television Advertising In a 1959 advertisement aimed at potential advertisers and cinema owners, Housewives’ Films described the success of American television advertising and said that it would be a long time before it was possible to broadcast television advertising in Sweden. Therefore, potential advertisers should use the services of Housewives’ Films, which were even better than TV advertising. The company listed five reasons why: 1. Their films were in colour. 2. They were screened in large format with a clearer and sharper image. 23 “God husmorsfilm med många tips,” Hallandsposten, 10 March 1954, 4.

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3. They were screened in a dark space, without “disturbing elements” (that is, children) present. 4. The audience members had come to see the films with the purpose of “seeing and learning” and were therefore focused on receiving information about different products. 5. The housewives’ films, and the company’s other product, “youth films” (ungdomsfilmer),24 were a selective means of advertising. According to advertising theories, any advertising that was targeted at a specific audience reduced the “cost of contact,” that is, the cost of reaching and influencing each potential customer. Housewives’ Films added one further argument. Up till 1959, its programmes had been screened in all the major cities of Sweden, twice a year, and every fourth housewife had seen them. That, according to the advertisement, was better than most American TV shows.25 The comparison to television is not surprising, because the company started operating just before the first debate about commercial television in Sweden. When studying this debate today it seems incomprehensible why comparisons with West Germany and the UK (which combined public service and commercial television) did not apply to Swedish circumstances. It was a heated debate, partly following the lines of party politics: the left was against allowing advertising while the liberal and conservative right was in favour of advertising in general and using it as a mean of financing television, in particular. The debate was also rather abstract, probably because most of those involved had never seen television advertisements. Neither had their readers. Therefore, the dividing question was a distinction between non-commercial public service and profit-maximizing commercial interests. The frequent comparison with American television thus became a proxy argument. There are many reasons why this was, and the housewives’ films can help us understand some of these reasons. First, we have the conditions, the taken-for-granted assumptions and views about television by those who were opposed to commercial television. No one seemed to question that television was directed at the home. In accordance with social democratic, functionalist ideology, the home was a place for sobriety, contemplative reading, human interaction within the nuclear family, and the education of children. In other 24 A comparison with journal Ungdomsnytt can be found in the journal for women living in the countryside, Budkavle, no. 11, 1955, 14. 25 Advertisement, Husmors Film AB, Info, no. 1, 1959, 29.

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words, a site of social learning, and therefore a place where, according to contemporary psychological and pedagogical perspectives, people would have difficulty defending themselves against advertising. Television would distract men from properly relaxing after getting home from their jobs, women from doing the housework, and children from doing their homework and playing. Commercial television would transform consumption from a rational household chore into an amusement. Television was a threat against a world view that separated consumption from information and learning. A domestication of advertising risked putting private, commercial interests before public, cooperative ones, which made public service television, as a joint public-cooperative phenomenon, a more politically acceptable solution. Looking at the early history of Swedish television through the lens of housewives’ films, and vice versa, helps us rethink the traditional distinction between commercial and public service television, or rather, American commercial television and European public service television (Bignell 2008, 4). In most cases, this is a relevant description, particularly concerning regulations, financing, and other political and institutional perspectives. From a Swedish viewpoint, this distinction could be seen as a simple one to make. From its official start in September 1956, television was synonymous with public service television – until TV3 began broadcasting commercial television (from the UK) to Swedish viewers in December 1987.26 The history of public service television in Sweden challenges and questions the distinction between commercial and public service television. Most analyses of the history of television in Sweden invoke specific methodological and theoretical discussions regarding its rather unique position as grounded in post-war Sweden’s social democratic, third-way model, as well as in an industrial-commercial environment firmly rooted in US and Western European capitalist discourses (Steinmo 2010, 30–87). The f irst transmitter for regular TV broadcasts was inaugurated on 15 September 1956, in Nacka, south-east of Stockholm, after more than ten years of discussions, debates, investigations, criticism, praise, warnings, hopes, tests, and planning. The governmental public service radio commission of 1943 had undertaken the analysis of television. From 1947, a state-funded research group for television worked at the KTH Royal 26 What happened in 1987 was the culmination of a discussion on the advantages and disadvantages of commercial television that had lasted for more than 40 years. Within four more years, legislation and media policy finally regulated other means of financing television than license fees. For a thorough discussion of the deregulation of the television market in Sweden, see Engblom and Wormbs (2007); Ewertsson (2005).

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Institute of Technology (Kungliga Tekniska högskolan) in Stockholm. It started experimental transmissions in 1950. In 1951, a governmental television commission developed a plan for when and how television should be introduced in Sweden as well as how television was supposed to be financed and organized. It took the members almost three years. In the meantime, the radio industry, together with other companies, tried to start its own (commercial) television broadcasting system. The only successful experiment was the so-called Sandrew Television Week (Sandrew-veckan) in May 1954, initiated by the Swedish film company Sandrew together with the radio industry (Olsson 2004). From 1954 it was also possible to watch Danish TV in south-western Sweden. The geographical diffusion of television in Sweden is quite easy to follow. One of Swedish industry’s leading research institutes, the Industrial Institute for Economic and Social Research (Industriens Utredningsinstitut), followed the diffusion closely. From 1 October 1956, TV owners located within a radius of 70 km of the Stockholm (Nacka) transmitter were required to have a television and radio license. For the rest of the country, a certificate of registration was required for a person to own a TV set. From 1 July 1957, the licensed area was extended to cover the city of Stockholm, the provinces of Stockholm, Uppsala, Södermanland, Östergötland, and Västmanland (the Stockholm area), along with parts of the provinces of Göteborg and Bohus, Halland, and Älvsborg (the Göteborg area). For the rest of the country, a certificate of registration was enough. From 1 July 1958, the license fee was mandatory throughout the entire country (Törnqvist 1967). My reason for mentioning the (technical basis of) the dissemination of television is that it is not only a technical issue; it is typical of the centralized, national aspects of the organization of television in Sweden. Sweden has a small population, mostly located in half a dozen metropolitan areas scattered throughout the country, while the rest of the population lived in small towns and villages between the urban areas and in the sparsely populated north of the country. This made the provision of television infrastructure expensive, with few households per transmitter and labour-intensive construction works due to long distances and working in uninhabited areas. For this reason, it was important for public service television to become “democratic” regarding both technology and content; therefore, popular programming became key to the political legitimacy of Swedish public service television and hence became a financial necessity from the very start. For these reasons, Sweden’s hosting of the 1958 World Cup Football (Soccer) Championship was very timely for the rapid development and popularity of television. Also important for its success was the airing of I

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8. Map of early stages of Swedish television transmission system, from the 1956 Television State Committee.

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Love Lucy (CBS), Andy Pandy (BBC), and later Perry Mason (CBS), as well as domestic talk shows, variety shows, and game shows. For its entire history, Swedish public service television has been keen on audience measurement and polls and repeatedly campaigned to encourage members of the public to pay the license fee. The license fee was important not only as the basis for funding, but also as a symbol of a kind of membership in a national television audience community. In social democratic Sweden, taxes were important for distributing resources as well as an expression of solidarity and national community. The license fee, then, viewed as something between a tax and a traditional fee, became the proof of the household being accepted into modernity and embracing progress. The huge impact of talk show host Lennart Hyland and his show, Hylands hörna, and its ambition to create audience participation (housewives’ “labour day,” having the audience turning off their lights, etc.) enhanced the rapid technical development and an equally rapid development of the television community. Even the administrative handling of license fees was rapidly integrated into two other important national projects of the time: the improvement of savings and payment systems. The savings propaganda, which had been going on since the early social democratic governments of the 1930s as part of the state housing programmes, began to be oriented towards household consumption, such as refrigerators, washing machines, cars, and, of course, television sets during the 1950s and 1960s. Even the registration of licenses soon became a highly technologized system. From 1958 every license entering the responsible governmental authority (through the postal giro forms by which they were paid) was transferred to punch cards (Törnqvist 1967, 28–29). These punch cards made it easier to keep track of who had paid, as well as to study the diffusion of television through Swedish society. The rapid development of a transmitting system and a financing system positioned television within the developing discourse on systems and communication at the time. It is therefore possible to argue, on the one hand, that it was the popularization of savings, as well as the punch card system for license fees, rather than the question of commercial or public service television, which in the end clearly positioned Swedish public service within a commercial and industrial discourse on efficient information and communication. On the other hand, the demographic patterns, together with what in the 1950s were still local commercial markets, also constituted the basis for the failure of any attempts to argue for commercial television. The ever-present issue was American television. In the Swedish debate it was regarded as popular and vulgar (a common anti-American argument in Europe), “too commercial,” and lacking in all forms of quality. In reality, as

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Jérôme Bourdon has argued, the European public service television networks were from the start not only popular but included many of the features of American television (Bourdon 2004). The question is not whether this was a correct description (in some cases it may have been), but whether it was at all relevant for the question of whether or not Sweden should have commercial television. The debate over television differs in one significant aspect from the media discourses within Swedish industry: America as enemy or role model. Many of the desirable goals of industry – such as professionalization, commercialization, reaching for larger customer segments – were the same as the elements of Americanization that so often epitomized the bad sides of the (generalized) image of American television in the minds of Europeans (Bourdon 2008, 105–106). The advocates of commercial television either said that American television was not all that bad, even arguing that advertising made television better, or they argued that although American television was not particularly good, it was not relevant. The United States was so different from Sweden that any comparison between the two was misguided – or, as one commentator argued, that Sweden should look at West Germany, the UK, Italy, or any other European country, “except Albania,” that already had or was planning commercial television networks.27 The Swedish film industry had, perhaps not surprisingly, a negative attitude towards commercial television. It was becoming receptive to the prospect of incorporating commercial aspects, but it was not until the 1990s that SVT (Sveriges Television, the Swedish national public television broadcaster) began commissioning programmes from independent production companies. Its arguments were in fact ideological, and were publicly presented as deriving from a concern for the Swedish mentality (Swedes were not “publicity minded”) and a fear of “light entertainment.” These arguments turned out to be irrelevant when SVT, which was founded in 1956, started to attract large audiences with I Love Lucy and Perry Mason. Advertisers and sponsors – little distinction was typically made between paid programmes and regular programmes in commercial television – were said to prefer variety and talk shows. These were called “Karusellprogram,” after a popular radio talk show, Karusellen, which, within a couple of years would be produced for TV (and immediately became Sweden’s most popular television show, Hylands hörna). In this dual system, commercial television 27 Carlpeter Lepsius, “Kommersiella televisionen erövrar Europa (inkl. Bulgarien!),” Info, no. 1, 1959, 13, 15.

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became an entertainment machine while the state television was responsible for “cultural ambitions.”28 A major obstacle for commercial television, but only a minor problem for Housewives’ Films, was the limited engagement of small- and mid-sized enterprises. Most Swedish companies worked in local markets, but television was from the start presented as a national medium. It therefore comes as no surprise that many companies that otherwise actively used modern communication technologies, when they were asked about their interest in television advertising at the end of the decade, said they were only interested in local and/or regional television advertising (Wallander 1959, 11).

Towards a More Practical Life One of the earliest housewives’ films made was Ett praktiskt kök (A practical kitchen) in 1953. The film was a very instructive presentation of new standards for kitchens. It starts with a husband having trouble doing the dishes because of the low kitchen sink – it was old style, only 78 centimetres high, not the 90-centimetre modern standard. Therefore, for him to be able to “help out” in the kitchen it would need to be modernized. The couple get help from a household advisor to design a new kitchen, they get a loan from the savings bank, and soon they have a shiny, modern kitchen. The film ends with the wife’s parents visiting, and the wife’s mother remarks to her husband that they should also get a refrigerator. Holding a cold vodka bottle in his hands, he responds, “Yes.” From the last scene, it is obvious that the wife’s parents are working-class people. The mother seems to know a great deal about traditional housekeeping. (She is surprised that her daughter’s family have no paper on the shelves, because they have modern wood composite shelves.) The father’s preference for cold vodka, his only contribution to the scene, is a typical representation of an older working-class man at the time. This, and the information that the couple had a savings account, indicates that the young couple is better off than the wife’s parents, at least. This was a quite typical situation in Sweden, as in most other Western countries in the 1950s, but it was also representative of how the government preferred things to be; it was an expected outcome of urbanization, housing policies, industrial growth, and the developing welfare state. Similar to later discussions of industrial semi-public spheres, it is important to note that not even here can we talk 28 De svenska filmfacken och televisionen (Stockholm, 1955), 9–10.

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9. Film stills from the film Ett praktiskt kök (Husmors filmer, 1953). © Petter Davidson.

about a traditional tension between the private and the public spheres. It can better be described as something that technology historian Mikael Hård, in an analysis of the development of Swedish housing standards, has called “a development triad consisting of private, public, and cooperative actors [that] fostered the formation and diffusion of new technical standards and solutions” (Hård 2010, 130). The “development triad” seems to have been particularly suitable for issues related to human use of technologies. Considering the widespread understanding of the foundational role of science and technology at the time, the concept of the development triad can help us understand many aspects of 1950s Swedish society. At that time, domestic products seem to have been actively advertised and marketed in more modern ways, probably due to cooperation between industry, consumer bodies, and women’s organizations.29 The ideology of a harmony within the triad, of course, echoes Sweden’s third-way policy. But it also resembles the “new centre” in Fred Turner’s account of the theories of Arthur Schlesinger Jr. from around 1950 (Turner 2013, 175). The most striking part of the film does not concern household design and efficiency, but rather the financing of the refurbishment. The household development ideology would not have been so successful were it not for the 29 “Kontaktkonferens med tvättindustrin,” Arbetsgivaren, no. 22, 13 December 1957, 12.

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10. Film stills from the film Ett praktiskt kök (Husmors filmer, 1953). © Petter Davidson.

development of the credit market. Since the early years of the twentieth century, private savings had been a major concern of public policy and public information, often in cooperation with savings banks as well as commercial banks. The development of the cooperative savings and housing company HSB (Hyresgästernas sparkasse- och byggnadsförening) in the late 1920s further emphasized the joint activities of private, public, and cooperative actors. After World War II, the market for home or household loans increased, which boosted the buying of private houses and apartments as well as the refurbishment of old houses and apartments. The rapid increase in private loans for housing and renovation thus helped construction companies (for example, HSB), household appliance companies (Electrolux), and furniture companies (IKEA, which was founded at this time). But it was also important for the car industry (Volvo and the recently started Saab). Most new housing projects were located outside city centres, and were therefore dependent upon both public transportation (Scania and Volvo buses), and privately owned cars (Saabs and Volvos). These new suburbs and peripheral urban areas also helped change the modes of food purchasing. With more and more food not being bought on the day of consumption, housewives had to rely on private and public transportation (cars and buses) as well as on efficient and healthy food storage devices (Electrolux refrigerators). Consequently, there was a slow political and economic reorganization from local or regional small-scale producers to large-scale national brands.

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In the abovementioned film A Practical Kitchen there is a clearly stated difference between the young couple and the wife’s parents. The parents are talking, and are dressed, as if they lived either in the countryside or in old, pre-modern inner-city housing. In this way, the film argues that better kitchen storage gives the modern housewife a chance of fulfilling the necessary conditions to become a better consumer than her parents. A Practical Kitchen also presents the husband as a supportive and responsible partner, and thus a good citizen, while the wife, by way of utilizing both the transport and finance sectors, has the opportunity to be a good consumer. To simplify the argument a bit, the husband becomes a better citizen through appropriate consumption (such as paying for the new kitchen), while his wife becomes a better consumer (incorporated into the public-private-cooperative development triad), by being (forced to be) a good citizen. A similar pattern can be found in another of these early film programmes, Tonårsmodet (Teenage fashion) from 1954. Here we follow the teenage daughter of a fashion journalist and her friends. They go to a shop where they (and we) watch a film about the fashions of the season. After that, a male friend invites them to his parents’ vacation home, just outside the city. There they have a morally proper party, listening and dancing to modern jazz, eating, and talking fashion. Typically, the role of the girls is that of the female consumer, reasonably aware of quality and costs. The boys, though, seem to be positioned between traditional roles (being interested in cars, motorcycles, and sports) but also being aware of fashion. One of them wears the same brand as one of the girls, a label belonging to the main sponsor of the film. However, more interestingly, by being good consumers, that is, being dressed in ways that are positively recognized by the girls, the young men also show that they are modern, and equally mindful of fashion and modern consumer styles. Again, men’s citizenship is enhanced through their consumption habits.

Benevolent Oppression vs. Conspicuous Consumption? Behind many housewives’ films, particularly A Practical Kitchen, was the Home Research Institute (Hemmens forskningsinstitut, HFI), founded in 1944. This was an organization for research on most things related to the private sphere. For Swedish historians of the social democratic Folkhemmet (People’s Home) era from the 1930s to the 1970s, the HFI represents the two faces of the ideology of the private sphere. Providing scientific arguments for

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11. Home Research Institute at Royal Academy of Enginering’s testing laboratory at Drottnings Kristinas väg in Stockholm, 1955. Photo: Hemmens forskningsinstitut / Nordiska museet.

political intervention in people’s private lives “for their own good,” or when not accepted by people, or when standardizing efforts excluded minorities, it could become an instrument for oppression (Hirdman 1989). However, because housewives’ films combined the development triad of private, public, and cooperative interests, it is difficult to attribute their origin and effects to social democratic ideology alone. When viewed from the perspective of media culture, this development triad cannot have been an undesired outcome of social democratic policies. The strong focus on consumption as a tool for better living conditions is related to the contemporary changes in housing standards and in the redistribution of private income and wealth. In the decades following the end of World War II, Sweden had a more equal distribution of income than most other (Western) countries (Roine and Waldenström 2008, 383). It has frequently been argued that this was the result of post-war social democratic policy. Jesper Roine and Daniel Waldenström have shown, though, that the process of redistribution had already begun by the early 1930s, partly as a result of the financial crises in the early 1920s and the early 1930s, particularly the so-called the Kreuger Crash of 1932 (Roine and Waldenström 2009, 167). The war years contributed to some degree, but the reduction in the number of women who were paid for domestic work between 1940 and 1950, and the corresponding increase in the number of women in the commercial,

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healthcare, and industrial sectors, are presumably related. Nonetheless, the internationally unique economic equality of Swedish society, from 1940 until 1980, certainly received a strong impetus from what happened during the 1950s. The increase in private wealth was due in part to the increase in the proportion of the population that owned their own homes combined with the rising values of those homes. This was clearly the goal of public policy, given the size of municipal and cooperative financing and construction during the 1960s and 1970s as well as the different state subsidies of housing loans (Roine and Waldenström 2009, 153). The result was that an increasing number of Swedish citizens had more money than before, money that was spent on better housing and increased consumption. With an intact industry, successful exports to war-stricken Europe, and increasing consumption in the American market, Sweden rapidly became a wealthy country. The development of the internationally recognized Swedish welfare model can thus be traced back to the 1950s. What later, in the 1960s and 1970s, became a redistribution of wealth based on high taxes for individuals and companies, was in the 1950s rather a consequence of the development triad; that is, resources were redistributed by guiding consumption in the right way. A result of such an analysis would be that the relationship between media and social change depends on how media functions in relation to social and cultural mechanisms. The housewives’ films could be successful as long as the development triad was still in play, while public service media and the commercial movie industry were both too closely connected to individual interests (the state and private industry, respectively) to play the same role. (An indication of this would be the next fundamental change during the deregulation of the media market in the 1980s.) The constant focus on “healthy” consumption habits, practical solutions, and the efficient use of resources and people’s time indicate a reluctance to develop what Thorstein Veblen in 1899 called “conspicuous consumption,” the social display of relative wealth, good taste, and husbands’ economic ability to keep their wives at home (Veblen 1959). While these circumstances certainly were commonplace in 1950s Sweden, it was not prominent in either the housewives’ films nor in printed advertising. What was often implied was an ideal where most housewives worked part-time outside the home, which gave the family more money and the housewife a limited degree of economic independence, thereby making her into a more interesting consumer. The “affluent worker,” especially found in the British debate in the 1950s, becomes a useful analytical category in the Swedish context as well, even if it here referred partly to individuals exhibiting other values

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12. Two consultants measuring a kitchen. Photo: Hemmens forskningsinstitut / Nordiska museet.

and behaviours, with clearly different attitudes towards married women’s work outside the home. The main reasons for the affluent worker’s existence (booming industry, a shortage of skilled labour, and low unemployment) were the same in both countries, but other aspects differed significantly. In Britain, there was a division between automotive workers (in the midlands and the southeast) and traditional workers. In Sweden, this new class must be analysed geographically as well as by industries. The Swedish affluent workers were more oriented towards conspicuous consumption than family and home, and could be found in most branches of industry, even in the old core steel and wood industries of northern Sweden. The values and behaviours typical of affluent workers in the UK were, in Sweden, instead associated with the new middle-class white-collar workers of the growing public bureaucracy and state-owned companies. The target audience for housewives’ films included not only the wives of the conspicuously consuming, specialized, high-income workers in rural industry; it comprised their husbands as well. It is important to remember that the Swedish welfare state is a mix of socialist ideas of social equality and something closer to the Marshall Plan concept of “people’s capitalism” with its emphasis on “widespread ownership” of houses, as well as smaller enterprises (Castillo 2010, 129).

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This echoes the effects of the “home front” of the European Recovery Program (the Marshall Plan) to attract European consumers to an American lifestyle. The HFI did not argue for a full American “fat kitchen,” as the technologically enhanced fantasy kitchen was called, but for a more sober, social democratic, third-way version (Castillo 2009, 38). At a more general level, the Swedish attitude was probably closer to that of the Norwegians, and therefore sceptical due to the risk of moving closer to NATO (Sørenssen 2009, 378). The roots of the kitchen shown in housewives’ films is certainly to be located in a combination of interwar German-French-Swedish functionalism and post-war Marshall Plan ideologies of progress in and through home design and technology (Oldenziel 2009, 329).

Progress in the Shadow of (Hot and) Cold War In a survey of housewives’ knowledge about products, conducted just a few years earlier at the Gothenburg Business School, it was found that their knowledge about semi-prepared food brand names differed according to both age and household income. Among housewives up to 34 years old, those from high-income households were more acquainted with the most studied brand names than those from low-income households. Where the opposite was the case, it most often concerned fresh fruit or vegetables. Similar figures could also be found among older women, aged between 44 and 59, particularly concerning canned fruit and f ish balls, although this group was generally less knowledgeable about canned food (Henell 1953). This, I will argue, was a typical feature of the housewives’ films. They supported the tastes and values of young, middle-class housewives at the same time as they aspired to educate working-class housewives and in so doing also protected them from the “bad influence” of their mothers. Replacing the mothers with (often male) experts was not only, as is often argued in Swedish research, a result of a policy of social engineering founded on science and technology; it also involved the construction of new patterns of consumption. Mothers were not just a threat because they were old-fashioned and inefficient; their power had to be reduced because they were bad, or less active as, consumers. In their introduction to Cold War Kitchen, editors Ruth Oldenziel and Karin Zachmann mention how “in a perverse misreading of post-war politics, British consumers projected private enterprise and American attitudes onto public services. The residents attributed the government’s unexpected

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‘luxuries’ of the prefab kitchens to America instead of to the British welfare state” (Oldenziel and Zachmann 2009, 23). In 1950s Sweden, however, no such “perverted misreading” existed. What was going on could best be described as the creation of the public servant’s wife: Mrs. Consumer. For the northern European welfare states, men were equally important as consumers and as citizens, whereas women were treated as of little use as citizens, but all the more important as consumers. Nothing makes this more obvious than the phenomenon of Swedish housewives’ films.

Towards a Theory of Canned Equality Few issues in Sweden were as imperative during the first half of the twentieth century as the fight against (male) alcoholism. It was one of the major driving forces behind the development of labour unions and their educational activities around 1900. During the post-war years, alcoholism was seen not only as a threat to families and the social order, but it also constituted an efficiency and safety problem for industry and was considered an almost immoral rejection of progress and development. The difference was that it was not only a working-class problem, but an upper-middle-class problem as well. Social drinking, in homes as well as in businesses, also had to be dealt with, because the social learning, that is, the training in how to live a middle-class life, included avoiding the drinking habits of the old middle class. This quest of levelling workers and the old upper class into a secure middle-class culture paved the way for the consumer culture of the decade, whether it took the form of audiences for US network television advertising or affluent workers. As Marshall McLuhan had put it, in The Mechanical Bride: Folklore of Industrial Man, discussing why “the American rich [are] such proletarians in mind”: Thus it may very well be that the effect of mass production and consumption is really to bring about a practical rather than theoretical communism. When men and women have been transformed into replaceable parts by competitive success drives, and have been accustomed to the consumption of uniform products, it is hard to see where any individualism remains. Certainly the sense of personal or private property has become very weak in these circumstances. And the fanatic defenders of private enterprises are mainly those corporation bureaucrats who manipulate the savings of an anonymous crowd of invisible investors. (McLuhan 1967, 55)

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13. Film stills from the film Flytande frukt (Husmors filmer, 1954). © Petter Davidson.

Even if Sweden had a much smaller number of rich people than the US, any striving for personal originality was definitely external to the discourses of the welfare state. Originality was to some extent a goal for industry, but, as McLuhan remarked, its representatives, its “defenders,” were as sober and rational as the ideal state bureaucrat or affluent industrial worker. All were subject to “mass market” welfare efficiency and consumption. Housewives’ films, consequently, treated consumption as an answer to cultural problems. However, the question did not concern what men bought, but what they did with what they bought. The housewives’ films require a more nuanced analysis, however. A film such as Flytande frukt (Canned fruit) from 1954 may be seen as an example of this difference. It is somewhat exceptional, being concerned with men and male behaviour. The film begins outside an apartment building at night, moving towards a window behind which a group of teenagers are having a party. A voice-over asks us what the teenagers are drinking, implying alcohol. But no, it is only soft drinks, a fruit juice drink. The film moves on to a well-dressed single man in a nice apartment, and since he is writing something on a typewriter, we are supposed to view him as a middle-class bachelor. Some friends stop by, and when he offers them a drink, all three politely refuse and ask for a fruit drink instead. In the next episode, a young man is getting dressed in his apartment for what looks like a first date, and, of course, he offers the girl a fruit drink. Finally, two men are having a business lunch. One orders a beer and vodka chaser, while the other asks for . . . a fruit drink. The latter man then persuades the former to order one as well, and, of course, like all the other men shown in this film, he really enjoys his fruit drink. The film, sponsored by Bjäres, the Swedish agent for Del Monte as well as the distributor for a couple of Swedish manufacturers of canned fruit drinks, thus aims to counteract the drinking habits of both traditional rural working-class men and urban upper-middle-class men alike (cf., the woman’s father in A Practical Kitchen and Mad Men’s Don Draper, respectively).

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This is why the boys in Youth Fashion are so important. We know that at least two of them come from wealthy families – the son of the owner of the vacation house and a boy driving a fancy convertible. Some of the other boys could have working-class backgrounds. That did not matter to the story, since both still represent more modern masculinities than their fathers do. Consequently, the only parent in the film was a modern mother, in that she was not only an enlightened consumer but, as a fashion commentator, she was also a specialist consumer.

Conclusion The gradual exploitation by Housewives’ Films of the absence of television advertising for promoting their own films actually indicates how wellestablished audiovisual media was for education, information, and marketing – although mainly at a local level and involving private, public, and cooperative interests. When television in Sweden proved to be a purely national phenomenon, the housewives’ film, which was also a nationally composed if locally screened media product, could inscribe itself in a commercial local-televisual logic. At the same time, and for the same reason, business and industry media producers abandoned the debate about television and continued specializing for their own purposes. This is also the moment when any potential combination of advertising and informational/educational uses of f ilm becomes less likely, apart from housewives’ f ilms. That is, public service television indirectly enforced the specialization of business and industrial media. It is possible to argue that business communication interests never succeeded in communicating how they operated in relation to the outside world, that is, to newspapers and radio. Or rather, business communication was fundamentally foreign even to commercial newspapers and public service radio, because of its emphasis on contact and interaction, rather than on mass communication, to improve education and marketing. So far, we could easily make comparisons with studies of, for example, American television. However, there is one important difference. In Sweden, housewives were seen as a more important target for advertising outside the home than inside. Even advocates of television advertising assumed that women were working at least part time. In practice, this was a dangerous assumption, since the majority of women actually did not work outside the home at all. That is probably the reason why advertisers wanted to reach people in their own homes, while simultaneously arguing for the official, public, version. And this may also be a reason why housewives’ films were

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so successful: they reached both the housewives, the married women who worked outside the home, and those women who wanted to have a job outside the home. I will not argue that housewives’ films were originally intended as an alternative to television; rather, that they slowly came to fulfil a similar demand. And, they looked like television. The way in which the products were shown and the visual representation of the nuclear family presented in those films are strikingly close to the ideal of the American family discussed by Lynn Spigel in Make Room for TV (1992). The difference, though, is important. In Sweden, the nuclear family was not necessarily a goal; it was also a means of creating an equal society of individuals whose citizenship was confirmed by women being rational consumers and men being responsible wage earners. Even if the consumption and wage earning were the same, the overarching social democratic goal of social, if not gendered, equality may make a difference. Later in the decade industrial discourses of new technologies merged with discourses on domestic efficiency, for example, in advertisements and articles in home and women’s magazines. These could be about such things as washing machines controlled by punch cards or just be comparisons between housework and other forms of work.30 New technologies, new methods, and a scientific understanding of the functions of a household had, of course, strong roots in the 1930s debates on the functionalist home, covering everything from city planning and architecture to methods of hygiene and cooking. Consequently, companies and public organizations involved with home technology, hygiene, sober and healthy eating and drinking habits, healthy consumption, and private savings were very active in commissioning and producing films for Housewives’ Films. Public information and marketing had become much more integrated. The focus on individual products, as much as on their use, was not only a consequence of marketing, but reflected a shift in focus away from the system towards the individual. Again, in US-focused research, this would be an overly obvious observation, but within a society dominated by the private-publiccooperative development triad it becomes a crucial issue. Instructional films, as well as public service television’s factual programming, with its combination of observational and expository modes of representation, worked well for systemic issues, for processes, for networks. 30 For example, “Hålkortstvätt,” Arbetsgivaren, no. 3, 6 February 1959, 1, or “Allt nära till hands på sin rätta plats – gör arbetet lättare” and a comparison between an office, a shop, and a factory in an ad for AB Borohus, Budkavle, no. 4, 1955, 21.

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Thus they obscured the subjective and personal mode of addressing the audience, the sense of interactivity, the viewer’s engagement with the characters and situation, as well as the viewer’s relation to the objects in the films. The strong focus on consumer goods, objects, in so many films, is therefore not only a consequence of retail marketing, but also a response to a need for tools to function in society. Consequently, the interests of consumer goods manufacturers and those of social development advocates merged in the housewives’ films. Housewives’ Films filled this lack within the development triad but without going against its mechanisms – rather the opposite. The mix of facts and sales, information and marketing – combining the needs of private companies, state authorities, and cooperative agents – ensured the company’s success as long as this development triad dominated Swedish society, that is, until the mid-1970s. Consequently, the phenomenon of housewives’ films is strong evidence of the relevance of Michael Hård’s use of the development triad concept to describe Swedish society during the 1950s and 1960s. The existence of the development triad makes it necessary to analytically move away from the top-down, nationally oriented understanding of social engineering (of the 1930s and 1940s), or public service contra commercial media systems (of the 1950s). Even if the political goals of the social democratic welfare state may have been articulated on a general level, the outcome was most likely not the same, aiming at levelling not only wealth but behaviour, that is, creating both politically participating and income-generating men and consuming and socially participating women. Here both sides of the Swedish debate still focus too much on the national, general, and therefore traditionally politically level, thereby underestimating not only the different individual patterns of the reception of ideas, practices, and technologies, but also that these individually differing reception patterns were more or less already inscribed in the ideas, practices, and technologies of the time. TV Boman travelled through Europe after he had become a broadcasted television celebrity. Housewives’ Films travelled through Sweden as a substitute for television broadcasting. Here housewives were intertwined with Swedish companies’ successes in the global market, with Electrolux as a prime example. Electrolux, with its travelling salesmen, put contact at the forefront. In Electrolux’s hands, media technologies became tools for contact and interaction. Truck and bus manufacturer Scania, on the other hand, focused on traditional media such as films and print information, but in its literal concern for exporting efficient transportation of people, goods, and maybe even thoughts, it went international regarding topics,

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collaborators, and marketing strategy, and even included another medium, radio, if only indirectly, in the mix.

References Films En djungelsaga (Arne Sucksdorff, 1957, AB Sandrew-Ateljéerna). Ett praktiskt kök (1953, Husmors Filmer). Flytande frukt (1954, Husmors Filmer). Tonårsmodet (1954, Husmors Filmer). Vardagsmiddag: En film om modern matlagning (1954, Husmors Filmer).

Archival Collections Archive of the Swedish Employers’ Confederation (Svenska Arbetsgivareföreningen, SAF). Centre for Business History, Stockholm, Sweden [documents, minutes, reports, letters, memos, leaflets, and brochures] The National Library of Sweden [audiovisual material, reports, leaflets, and brochures] Det svenska filmfacket och televisionen: Gemensamt yttrande över televisionsutredningens betänkande från Föreningen Sveriges Filmproducenter, Svenska Film- och Biografföreningen, Sveriges Biografägareförbund, Sveriges Filmuthyrareförening, Folketshusföreningarnas Riksorganisation och Våra Gårdar. Stockholm, 1955. “Televisionen i Sverige: Televisionsutredningens betänkande,” SOU 1954:32

Periodicals Arbetsgivaren No. 22 (1954); nos. 2, 9, 22 (1957); nos. 3, 7 (1959). Budkavle till landsbygdens kvinnor Nos. 4, 11 (1955). DBA-Nytt July-August (1953); September-October/November-December (1955).

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Electrolux rapport No. 3 (1953); nos. 1, 4 (1957); nos. 1, 3 (1958); no. 3 (1960). Info Nos. 1, 7 (1959). Husmors-Journalen Spring, Autumn (1954), Spring (1962). Hallandsposten 10 March 1954.

References Berner, Boel. 2002. “Housewives’ Films” and the Modern Housewife: Experts, Users and Household Modernization: Sweden in the 1950s and 1960s.” History and Technology 18, no. 3, 155–179. Bignell, Jonathan. 2008. An Introduction to Television Studies. 2nd ed. London/ New York: Routledge. Boman, Kjell. 1958. 21: TV-Boman frågar och svarar. Stockholm: Wahlström & Widstrand. Bourdon, Jérôme. 2004. “Old and New Ghosts: Public Service Television and the Popular – A History.” European Journal of Cultural Studies 7, no. 3, 283–304. Bourdon, Jérôme. 2008. “Imperialism, Self-inflicted? On the Americanizations of Television in Europe.” In We Europeans? Media, Representations, Identities, edited by William Uricchio, 93–108. Bristol: Intellect. Castillo, Greg. 2009. “The American ‘Fat Kitchen’ in Europe: Postwar Domestic Modernity and Marshall Plan Strategies of Enhancement.” In Cold War Kitchen: Americanization, Technology, and European Users, edited by Ruth Oldenziel and Karin Zachmann, 33–57. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Castillo, Greg. 2010. Cold War on the Home Front: The Soft Power of Midcentury Design. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Engblom, Lars-Åke, and Nina Wormbs. 2007. Radio och TV efter monopolet: En kamp om pengar, publik och teknik. Stockholm: Ekerlid. Ewertsson, Lena. 2005. Dansen kring guldkalven: En historia om uppbyggandet av TV4 1984–1991. Stockholm: SNS Förlag. Gillberg, Jan. 1959. Den ekonomiska grundvalen för kommersiell television i Sverige. Stencil från Industriens Utredningsinstitut 1959:1. Stockholm. Hadénius, Stig. 1998. Kampen om monopolet: Sveriges radio och TV under 1900-talet. Stockholm: Norstedts.

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Henell, Olof. 1953. Marketing Aspects of Housewives’ Knowledge of Goods. Göteborg: Institutet för distributionsekonomisk och administrativ forskning vid Handelshögskolan i Göteborg. Hård, Michael. 2010. “The Good Apartment: The Social (Democratic) Construction of Swedish Homes.” Home Cultures 7, no. 2, 117–133. Hirdman, Yvonne. 1989. Att lägga livet tillrätta: studier i svensk folkhemspolitik. Stockholm: Carlssons. Jansson, Puck. 1996. “Om produktionen av husmorsfilmerna och lite historik.” In Husmors filmer: dokumentation från forskarsymposium på Arkivet för ljud och bild, 8 maj 1996, 7–12. Stockholm: Arkivet för ljud och bild. McLuhan, Marshall. 1967. The Mechanical Bride: Folklore of Industrial Man. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Oldenziel, Ruth. 2009. “Exporting the American Cold War Kitchen: Challenging Americanization, Technology Transfer, and Domestication.” In Cold War Kitchen: Americanization, Technology, and European Users, edited by Ruth Oldenziel and Karin Zachmann, 315–339. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Oldenziel, Ruth, and Karin Zachmann. 2009. “Kitchens as Technology and Politics: An Introduction.” In Cold War Kitchen: Americanization, Technology, and European Users, edited by Ruth Oldenziel and Karin Zachmann, 1–29. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Olsson, Jan. 2004. “One Commercial Week: Television in Sweden Prior to Public Service.” In Television after TV: Essays on a Medium in Transition, edited by Lynn Spigel and Jan Olsson, 249–269. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Roine, Jesper, and Daniel Waldenström. 2008. “The Evolution of Top Incomes in an Egalitarian Society: Sweden, 1903–2004.” Journal of Public Economics 92, nos. 1–2, 366–387. Roine, Jesper, and Daniel Waldenström. 2009. “Wealth Concentration over the Path of Development: Sweden, 1873–2006.” The Scandinavian Journal of Economics 92, nos. 1–2, 151–187. Soila, Tytti. 1997. “Kvinnan i Folkhemmet – Husmodern som nationell ikon.” In Dialoger: feministisk filmteori i praktik, edited by Tytti Soila, 85–106. Stockholm: Aura förlag. Spigel, Lynn. 1992. Make Room for TV: Television and the Family Ideal in Postwar America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Steinmo, Sven. 2010. The Evolution of Modern States: Sweden, Japan, and the United States. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sørenssen, Bjørn. 2009. “A Modern Medium for a Modern Message.” In Films That Work: Industrial Film and the Productivity of Media, edited by Vinzenz Hediger and Patrick Vonderau, 377–390. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press.

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Törnqvist, Gunnar. 1967. TV-ägandets utveckling i Sverige 1956–65: En empiriskteoretisk studie. Stockholm: Industriens Utredningsinstitut. Turner, Fred. 2013. The Democratic Surround: Multimedia & American Liberalism from World War II to the Psychedelic Sixties. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Veblen, Thorstein. 1959. The Theory of the Leisure Class. New York: Mentor Books. Wallander, Jan. 1959. Den ekonomiska grundvalen för kommersiell television i Sverige. Stockholm: Industriens utredningsinstitut. Wirén, Karl-Hugo. 1986. Kampen om TV: svensk TV-politik 1946–66. Stockholm: Gidlunds

2.

Film and Swedish Industry in the World Abstract Chapter 2 focuses on uses of industrial film among export-oriented large industries, and the infrastructure of industrial f ilms in Sweden. The renewed interest in using films had its roots in the 1948 regulation of company work councils ( företagsnämnder), which boosted the demand for economic information and which also went hand in hand with the policy work of the Swedish Employers’ Confederation (SAF) on increasing the public interest and acceptance of private enterprises and private ownership. A few years later the SAF established a human resources research and development organization called the PA Council, which helped industry to develop its own rhetoric and vocabulary, exemplified by applications of the term “contact.” Keywords:industrial f ilms, work councils, industry organizations, efficiency

“Do not just sell a vehicle – sell transport.”1 That was the credo of the 1953 sales conference at truck and bus manufacturer Scania-Vabis. The company had for more than 40 years designed, manufactured, and marketed trucks and buses. It had a strong position in the Swedish truck market, and dominated the public transport system. At a meeting with the International Road Union Technical Committee in Turin, in November 1957, the CEO of Scania-Vabis, Gösta Nilsson, argued that a well-organized transport system is a prerequisite for economic and consequently social advancement, and industrial specialization in combination 1 “Sälj inte bara en bil – sälj en transport,” Eko: Från Scania-Vabis försäljningskonferens år 1953, 7.

Björkin, M., Post-war Industrial Media Culture in Sweden, 1945–1960: New Faces, New Values. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2022 doi 10.5117/9789462984929_ch02

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with the growth of production volume constantly increases the need for transport [and] the means of transport increasingly becoming a means of production. It is equally important that our roads are operated by rational and economical trucks, just like we have efficient machines in our factories.2

Service, systems, and efficiency, as well as communication and selling, there are some of the themes of business and industry – and public policy – discourses and practices in Sweden during the 1950s. The Swedish twist is that public policy so strongly involved consumer behaviour and consumeroriented industry perspectives. In 1958 they all merged, when a radio producer at Radio Luxemburg offered to pay 100,000 French francs per kilogram of ice left over from a three-ton ice block transported by an unrefrigerated truck from the Arctic Circle to the Equator. Norwegian insulation material manufacturer Glassvatt and Scania-Vabis answered the challenge. Together with a large number of European companies, including Shell and a group of medical companies, the project was realized, and it became one of the most successful public relations campaigns of the era. The sales manager at Billesholms Glasullsbolag, a leading glass wool manufacturer, was convinced that the ice block wrapped in glass wool could handle the transport with a weight loss of about 10 percent. When the press announced that it would cost Radio Luxembourg 4.5 million Swedish krona if that happened, the station was no longer interested in continuing the challenge. Nevertheless, the idea was, from the PR point of view, too good to put on ice. Billesholms Glasullsbolag saw a unique opportunity to dramatically tell the public what one could achieve with modern insulation material. Scania-Vabis agreed and provided a modern diesel truck. From the beginning, it was intended that Operation is (Operation Ice) would be a completely Swedish project, but quite soon the entire western European glass wool industry, particularly Norwegian Glassvatt, was linked to the extensive project. The pharmaceutical industries in different countries contributed with donations to the Nobel Prize laureate Albert Schweitzer’s hospital in Lambaréné. From the Swedish side, Astra, Kabi, and Leo contributed a total of about 300 kg of medicines. Billesholms Glasullsbolag announced that in connection with the transport of the ice it arranged a competition where participants could guess how much ice remained on the truck at 2 “Rationella transportmedel lika viktiga som maskiner,” Arbetsgivaren, no. 21, 29 November 1957, 6–7.

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the time of arrival. To document the expedition, a cinematographer was included in the team. The disembarkation with an ice block taken from the Svartisen glacier outside Mo i Rana in Norway took place on 22 February 1959. The block weighed exactly 3,050 kg. One month later, on 21 March, it arrived in the new independent state of Gabon. The expedition had travelled 10,761 km and the ice block weighed 2,714 kg. In total, the block had lost 336 kg, which was seen as a success. The event received extensive publicity in all the countries the truck passed through. In Swedish public radio the journey was covered in the technical news as well as in the daily news. Images of the arrival of the convoy in Gothenburg was aired on the major television news programme Aktuellt and printed in most newspapers. The film was screened at company gatherings of various kinds, in technical schools, etc. Billesholms Glasullsbolag’s sales manager summarized it all: The cost was comparatively small for [Billesholms Glasullsbolag], as we shared it with all of Europe’s glass wool manufacturers. In addition, Scania-Vabis has been in charge of trucks and buses, excluding shipping costs. The company’s share of the transport costs itself was about 10,000 kr, the competition, including the prize, a holiday trip to the Italian Riviera, approximately 13,000 kr, and our share in the film costs about 8,000 kr.3

In sum, there were extremely low contact costs. Stylistically, the film is a combination of industrial and expedition documentary. In images, although not in the voice-over narration, the film alludes to the Algerian War of Independence, the situation of the Tuareg people of the Sahara, the presence of the French Foreign Legion, and the humanitarian situation in West Africa at the time. The industry and advertising discourses were not only interested in emphasizing costs; they were, as we will see recurrently though the book, almost obsessed with quantif ication. What seems to be a naturalized rhetoric of statistics and quantitative data contrasts in an interesting way with the ambitions of developing qualitative methods in management and communication. Operation Ice is therefore particularly interesting since it builds the narrative on two sets of numbers: kilometres travelled and litres of melting ice. 3 Eric Lindström, “PR-fallet: Operation is – PR-transport från Nordnorge till Ekvatorn,” Arbetsgivaren, no. 1, 8 January 1960, 5.

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When compared with contemporary documentary and journalistic coverage of struggles for independence around the world, the ice block film is an exercise in political naiveté and technological optimism. Consequently, because it is an industrial film and not journalism, the background is the Scandinavian industrial presence in sub-Saharan Africa combined with support for the independence movements, despite being driven by purely commercial strategies. Why make the effort? The international competition in most industrial areas became tougher with each passing year of economic progress in Europe, which affected more and more Swedish companies. Industry had a problem with recruiting employees, even though the number of labour immigrants was large and rationalization and efficiency efforts were ubiquitous. This also included the communication and media industries. This discussion on efficiency had started far earlier. There was of course one strand of discourse following the development of new methods, including motion study films in the US during the 1910s and 1920s. Another wave came during World War II. For example, at a lecture at the Stockholm Merchants’ Club in 1942, Carl Tarras Sällfors, Sweden’s first professor of industrial economy and management, listed six key objectives of office and administration efficiency: 1. Good working conditions; 2. The mechanization of work; 3. Work specialization; 4. Good means of communication; 5. Standardization of working methods, form sizes and furniture equipment; 6. Work studies for determining better methods for the execution of the various work operations and for eliminating unnecessary work and duplication of work.4

An example of this could be the use of 16 mm film to analyse the introduction of bookkeeping machines at Vattenfall during the war.5 At the Scania-Vabis sales conference in 1953, CEO Henning Throne-Holst, formerly at chocolate manufacturer Marabou, later at Scandinavian Airlines, emphasized different contemporary problems: international instability, lack of mobility within European business (unlike the US), difficulties in finding corporate capital, and a general concern for the Swedish economy. He argued 4 Carl Tarras Sällfors, “Möjligheter till kostnadsbesparingar i kontors- och förvaltningsorganisation.” Referat över föredrag i Stockholms Köpmansklubb, 1/12 1942, 40 pages. Royal Library KB OKAT Meddelanden från Kung. Vattenfallsstyrelsen, Ser. A, 1943, no. 2, 19–20. 5 John E. Lundell, “En arbetsstudie med hjälp av smalfilm,” Affärsekonomi, no. 15, 1944, s. 1184 (KB OKAT Meddelanden från Kung. Vattenfallsstyrelsen, Ser. A, 1944, no. 4, s. 43).

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for the value of concentrating the administration in one place (a building that was inaugurated during the conference) in order to “significantly facilitate cooperation within the organization.” He emphasized competition with the US and the importance of sales as a part of the information acquisition relating to customers and the market to enable production and technology to adapt and develop. He concluded: This conference has been arranged to provide an opportunity for deeper contact between all those in different positions at home and in the field working for Scania-Vabis. We hope not only to provide an exchange of valuable data and information, but also to renew the personal contacts that can make it easier for us on both sides to help and support each other as well as to understand each other and the requirements that need to be set. In the hope that our deliberations may work in this direction, I wish you all a sincere welcome.6

Even though he had only been the head of Scania-Vabis for three years, Throne-Holst’s previous experience of consumer goods probably helped him to transform the company into one less focused on (physical) transportation and more on communication and information, and to exploit the fact that both employees and customers were consumers of popular culture.7 Another expression of this awareness is the engagement of celebrities at company events, such as the Scania-Vabis sales conference party at the Gillet restaurant in 1953, which featured entertainment by the comedy actors Åke Söderblom and Douglas Håge, well known from their appearances on the screen and in vaudeville theatres.8 His call for more data about the customers, and better contact between the parts of company, will be recurring themes throughout the decade.9 Scania-Vabis’s need for more efficient communication was increased by the development of international sales and the establishment of new production sites outside Sweden (for example, in Brazil).10 6 [Throne Holst välkomstanförande], “Hårdare tider – hårdare tag. Kampglädje, beslutsamhet och initiativ,” Eko: Från Scania-Vabis försäljningskonferens år 1953, 1–2. 7 A sales conference party involved entertainment by comedy actors Åke Söderblom and Douglas Håge, well-known from the appearances on the screen and in the comedy theatre. “Kalaspetter,” Eko: Från Scania-Vabis försäljningskonferens år 1953, 5. 8 “Kalaspetter,” Eko: Från Scania-Vabis försäljningskonferens år 1953, 5. 9 “Vi tror på kundregister. Aktuella uppgifter behövs,” Eko: Från Scania-Vabis försäljnings­ konferens år 1953, 3. 10 “Scania-motorer skall göras i Brasilien,” Arbetsgivaren, no. 1, 8 January 1958, 11.

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Companies around the country, and to some extent the trade associations, had produced a large number of films since the 1910s. Movies were used to promote the company or its products. They also made films for use in the training of new employees or to further instruct those already employed. These “commissioned films,” as industrial films were labelled in Swedish, were initially close to feature films, stylistically and technically. However, from the 1950s onwards, commissioned films were increasingly included in another epistemic context: how to communicate knowledge about organizational function and change (Dahlström 1956). The films became one of several tools for rationalizing communication between management and employees. This was both a psychological and a spatial problem: How is the best way to improve contact between employees and management?

A Case of Marketing the Industrial Film for Efficiency In the mid-1950s, in parallel with the debate over television advertising, the business community began a large-scale investment in film. It is possible to distinguish two media discourses based on the debate and the films themselves. One is based on films oriented towards local and regional markets. The other is national and collectivistic and is indicated by more politically oriented films. However, the differences appear to have been most profound in industrial films. The contrast is distinguishable during the early 1920s, when these two discourses could be combined in compilations of industrial films, for example, in the so-called “Sweden films” (Björkin 1999). The 1950s discussion of the use of moving images is more complex and can be said to have more in common with today’s media terrain. How can media be used as a communication tool when the recipient has extensive experience of media as a form of information and entertainment? At ASEA (Allmänna Svenska Elektriska Aktiebolaget, General Swedish Electrical Limited Company) in Västerås sometime in the 1940s, an instructional film was made to show new employees the procedures in an assembly unit for small- and mid-sized transformers. The entire production chain was filmed so that workers could see their part in the right context. When the film was finished, it was shown to the people in the workshop and to the work efficiency staff. The aim of the screening was to indicate whether the film really showed how the process worked, that is, if the film accurately portrayed reality. Something happened that the makers of the film did not expect. They received criticism immediately – not because the

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film was a poor depiction of what was happening on the factory floor, but because it showed all too clearly the problems in the production process. The result of this screening was thus a reorganization of the entire production chain and a new film.11 Why had the people in the company not seen the inefficiencies before? Throughout the film, the attention of the viewer was directed at a very limited part of the work process and so was not distracted by all that was happening around it. Those involved in the process every day had never felt that anything needed to be changed – until it became clear in the film what a flawed process it was. This anecdote was told by an engineer at ASEA, Sven-Erik Andersson, during a 1959 conference organized by the Swedish Rationalization Association. By then, using film for work-study purposes had become increasingly common in Swedish industry. By the end of the 1950s, a new film method had also spread among Swedish work-study engineers. It was the special analytical method launched in the United States under the name “memo motion,” which in Sweden was called “memo-filmning” (“memo filming”). In 1959, it was still a new method at the Swedish work-study offices. In short, memo filming involved a form of motion picture studies with film. The film is shot at a relatively low frame rate so that the workflow is displayed at a correspondingly higher speed when the film is then viewed at normal speed. Mostly, memo filming was used to record long or complicated work processes where it was difficult to use other methods to assess them properly. Among the special advantages of memo filming that its followers used to highlight problems in a process was the strong caricaturing effect that was obtained when the film was displayed at normal speed. It can be said that an often-highlighted advantage of the memo films was their distancing function. A work process that was far-reaching in time was presented through the memo film in an easy-to-understand and tangible way. The playback speed did not distract the viewer from seeing the film as a “regular movie.” In the conference report from the 1959 rationalization conference, one can read, among other things, that in the film shown at the conference, the speed of work in the workshop was so fast that “not even a bricklayer in a Mack Sennett comedy could have worked more intensively.” This comment is in part aimed at the fact that early silent film comedies, like the slapstick productions by Sennett, silent film’s “king of comedy,” often played with speed. It also refers to the sad fact that old silent films shown during the 1950s were often screened too fast. The comment thus implies that the readers 11 “SRF-konferensen: Mer och mer information krävs kring arbetsstudierna,” Arbetsgivaren, no. 16, 18 September 1959, 8.

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expected to know what it was all about. A certain amount of cinematic knowledge was assumed, based on people’s regular attendance at the cinema. On the one hand, this anecdote says a lot about the use and understanding of film at the time. On the other hand, the current film, that is, the one that was shown in 1959 – not the 1940s film from ASEA, because it was not a memo film – does not say much to us today. What you see is a very high speed workflow. The first of the films from the 1940s could be discussed in terms of what is “historically correct,” in that it showed how the production process actually (poorly) worked. The second movie showed what to do and how to do it after watching the first movie. Therefore, this film, too, is historically correct. However, we do not know if any of the films were representative of similar forms of factory work, as they were made to depict a specific work step at a particular workplace. Nevertheless, with the help of documentation about the work-study process, you can get sufficiently relevant information about the recording. Only then could one use films to describe this particular workplace, at least. The anecdote is also an example of a film acting as a tool for analysis, but not always used as a document. Seen as such, this film became just another measuring device: an organizer of information and knowledge. At the same time, there were a lot of films about working life that had the deliberate purpose of documenting it, films that are, however, quite unreliable as historical documents (above all, because they often show how it was supposed to look). For example, there were political or union reasons for wanting to give the impression that processes worked in a certain way. Because the design of a film is as dependent on film aesthetic trends as it is on the creator’s possibly pictorial or content intentions, it is difficult to determine what is what in a specific film – staged scenes or real images of work. A movie about an organization is at the same time a movie made to look like how the audience expected that a movie made for that purpose should look. Therefore, industrial films are not a stylistically or narratively specific category. The same narrative and stylistic devices were used in other types of films as well. What is interesting is that this anecdote was recounted more than ten years after the event. It was hardly a coincidence that it came into use during one of the many conferences organized during the second half of the 1950s on education, information, contact creation, and similar issues in business. Even then, ASEA was one of the most diligent companies to use film. So was the Swedish subsidiary of Shell, which not only distributed its own films, but other informational and educational films as well, particularly films with scientific content (Canjels 2009, 246). Another comparison is

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the Renault industrial f ilm department, which produced promotional films for larger audiences at about the same time (Hatzfeld et al. 2009, 189). The company was also careful to distribute its films to other parts of the business community. Both the films themselves and the idea of t​​ he film as a source of knowledge had become a market, and a rapidly growing market. It had become part of an expansive communication technology market. In parallel with the transition from punch card machines to computers, the same company went from having used film to using even more film. Consequently, the 1959 rationalization conference was mostly about punch card machines and computers. In Sweden and the rest of the Western world, business in the 1950s had become increasingly aware of two things regarding moving images: film was a useful information and propaganda tool, employees were also film audiences – they were thus used to the medium itself, if you succeeded in combining these two factors you got a perfect information system. Inspiration came primarily from German films and debates during the interwar period, but of course, after the war most involved tried to avoid all pre-war contacts with Nazi Germany. The interest of contemporary management and organizational theories for creating contact and rational dissemination of information coincided precisely with an increase in research on film and television viewing. In addition, they began to realize that with increasing experiences of moving images followed something we would today call audiovisual literacy. Thus, there was an attraction value in using film at all. By ordering the production of a movie, a company showed that it was a modern company, even if it did not always know what to do with it. The use of film was often motivated by the fact that it was a good way to attract young people to industry through screenings before the feature film at cinemas, or in schools, especially since more and more companies were also establishing their own vocational training schools.12 Part of the interest in film in the business sector should probably be seen in relation to the labour shortage that prevailed in certain sectors during the mid-1950s. Even the already employed were increasingly used to getting their information via film and eventually via television. The cinemas were of course used, while television, however, was excluded from business use. The social democratic government and the press – even the bourgeois press – were apparently afraid of competition in an area that they did not know how to control. 12 “Scania-Vabis inviger ny yrkesskola, rekryterar aktivt över hela landet,” Arbetsgivaren, no. 22, 28 November 1958, 1, 8.

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14. Films at a vocational course, 1950s. Photo: Norrlandsbild / Sundsvalls museum.

By combining storytelling and stylistic approaches that people had learned to interpret based on other media experiences, movies like Operation Ice tried to make the film a modern contact-creating medium. The difference is thus the view of the spectator and how it affected how the films were designed. Film was not just about creating images of reality; these images also changed reality.

The Human Factor In November 1953 the Ömsesidiga Olycksfallsförsäkringsbolaget Land och Sjö (Land and Sea Mutual Accident Insurance Company) arranged a seminar on occupational safety at the Amiralen cinema in Malmö. The event was titled “The Human Factor.”13 Key presenters at the seminar included the insurance company’s managing director, Trygve Lovén, the director general of the governmental Occupational Safety and Health Agency (Arbetarskyddsstyrelsen), Edvard Pelow, engineer Otto Fröman, occupational safety inspector Lorentz Sterving, the industrial psychologist Lennart Bergström, and the (at the time) very well known occupational psychologist Dr. Erling Mindus. The 13 “Den mänskliga faktorn,” Arbetsgivaren, no. 1, 9 January 1954, 1.

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event’s focus was the importance of understanding the human behaviour behind accidents. The seminar also featured an exhibition of occupational safety materials from the Swedish Red Cross as well as manufacturers of personal safety equipment, and an exhibition of informational posters from different countries. Finally, the seminar included screenings of occupational safety and traffic films, including the American film 20 Minutes Left to Live and the Canadian film Safe Clothing. Two years later, a Swedish film about the “human factor” was released, called En vanlig vardag (An ordinary day) (Kay Tenow, 1956). It was a fiction short, with well-known actors, particularly the female lead, Lizzi Alandh, playing the wife of an upset male industry employee, played by Bengt Blomgren. An article, almost a review, in the biweekly journal of the Swedish Employers’ Confederation (Svenska Arbetsgivareföreningen, SAF), Arbetsgivaren (The employer), argued that the film put the human being in the centre to present issues rarely talked about, and that the importance of the film is its ability to evoke feelings and thoughts that everyone can apply to his or her own situation. The review also emphasized the importance of considering the details of the everyday in order to understand accidents: The thoughts and dreams, the annoyance, the indignation and the anxiety, the invisible world, which at any given moment surrounds man, is the real main theme of that film, . . . the irrational and usually overlooked reasons for such accidents, which in the accident statistics are categorized as carelessness, oversight, negligence, etc. . . . This means that occupational safety has taken a new, but a very important, turn towards a previously often talked about, but never seriously treaded, area. . . . There is the agitated manager, who after a disappointing meeting drives home at full speed, and a worker who is mulling over a passing marital problem when an accident occurs under the influence of rage and anger. It also preaches friendliness between co-workers and between management and employees. . . . The film is intended for the employees of industry and, not least, for the employees’ families.14

En vanlig vardag was screened at companies, with or without accompanying exhibitions (for example, at the Vattenfall power plant, at the main depot, works, and industry school in Västerås, and at the Västerås branch of Älvkarleby power plant). Around a thousand people visited the exhibition 14 W., “Film om ‘mänskliga faktorn,” Arbetsgivaren, no. 17, 29 September 1956, 4.

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15. Human factor flanellgraph series, from the PA Council catalogue. © Svenskt Näringsliv.

and screening during work hours. The Älvkarleby employees gathered together after the show for a joint safety event at the Stora Hotellet, where this film and other films were shown.15 What was new was probably the focus on emotions and affect, since so many instructional films tended to be very rational and objective. The review concludes: Therefore, it is the human factor which the film seeks to approach. The technology of protection in industry has become increasingly comprehensive in recent decades, but even where it is at its best, accidents still occur. For the film’s viewer, it is a reminder that a person is not a production factor, which can only be measured in technical terms, and that it is often invisible and irrational forces that govern actions. It is important both for the individual and for his surroundings not to forget this.16

The human factor discussion soon developed from traditional cinematic formats onto the flannel board. In 1958, for example, the Forestry Protection Campaign designed a flannel series accompanied by a text compendium. The flannel series consisted of fourteen silk-screen printed, symbolic images. The compendium provided instructions, questions, and guidelines on how

15 “Arbetarskyddsutställning sågs av 1.000 i Västerås,” Vi i Vattenfall 10, no. 1, 9 February 1957, 12. 16 W., “Film om ‘mänskliga faktorn,” 4.

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to use the series.17 With the move from film to flannel, affect seems to have been replaced by rational explanations.

The PA Council In a few years during the mid-1950s the concept of the human factor returned in discussions and as a topic in audiovisual materials. The human factor became emblematic of a new focus on human resources as a field of knowledge and practice. The main organizational tool for this new interest in more human approaches to organization and management was the foundation of the human resources consultancy agency the PA Council (Personaladministrativa rådet, Personnel Administrative Council) in 1952, which had a strong focus on occupational psychology and audiovisual communication. In a long article in the February 1954 Arbetsgivaren, the PA Council’s secretary (in reality, its managing director) Rolf Lahnhagen wrote about the rationale behind its existence and the first two years of its activity: In the 1950s Swedish industry began to adopt work science ideas and methods, particularly from the US and the UK. In Sweden, occupational psychology grew at universities and within industrial practice. From the perspective of the [Swedish] Employers’ Confederation, the need to combine theory and practice was identified as an important strategic task. With an increased focus on human resources units at companies, occupational psychologists were hired, but their experience often remained within the company. Courses and conferences on human resources became increasingly popular. Here, the Employers’ Confederation saw its opportunity to coordinate knowledge development and the sharing of experience, in the most up-to-date ways.18

Following a survey of the current problems that management in the business sector considered important to occupational research, the PA Council developed guidelines for its activities. In those guidelines it tried to combine demand for certain issues, such as accident research, the measurement of work performance, communications within the companies, with available research.

17 “Mänskliga faktorn på flanelltavla,” Arbetsgivaren, no. 12, 6 June 1958, 9. 18 “Linnégatan 18: Samarbete under ett tak,” Arbetsgivaren, no. 19, 23 October 1954, 5.

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16. “Collaboration under the same roof,” article in Arbetsgivaren on collaboration in new offices in Stockholm, 1954. © Svenskt Näringsliv.

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Research was not an end in itself. The main focus was still the dissemination of knowledge and the provision of practical advice to companies. For this purpose, consultants with experience from industrial psychology were hired to join the council’s office in the autumn of 1953. Their task was, among other things, to compile and disseminate knowledge of human resources that might be of value to business. To do this, particularly to develop audiovisual aids, the council started to collaborate with the Organisation for European Economic Co-operation (OEEC) in Paris. Initially, the consultants mainly delivered lectures and hosted other informational activities to promote a greater understanding of the kinds of problems addressed by human relations. Gradually, they started to collaborate more closely with the companies’ own specialists. The consultants were paid by the companies, while the council contributed financially to the production of the audiovisual tools.19 The PA Council played an important role in the development of films and other audiovisual tools during the 1950s and 1960s. The council was created by SAF in collaboration with the Swedish Trade Union Confederation (Landsorganisationen i Sverige, LO) and the Confederation of Professional Employees (Tjänstemännens Centralorganisation, TCO), which had representatives in the council. The council was primarily an organization for discussion and training in information management and education issues, but also served as an information and education consultancy firm. Much of the rhetoric was about supporting contact and dealing with “contact difficulties,”20 especially with various media such as film, photography, audio tapes – often combined in sound slides – and printed matter. Together, these were called “contact-creating aids.”21 The rhetoric of contact is often literal in order to change focus from the discursive aspects of communication to the technical and behavioural conditions for how people perceive commercial and public information and act according to it.22 In Arbetsgivaren there is an extensive discussion about film during the second half of the 1950s. The interesting thing about this debate is that it was essentially pragmatically oriented. Parallel to film, television advertising and the ongoing computerization of the workplace were also discussed. It is obvious that film was seen just as one of many tools in the service of rationalization and efficiency. 19 Rolf Lahnhagen, “Studieobjekt: människan i arbete,” Arbetsgivaren, no. 3, 6 February 1954, 3. 20 L. B–n, “Litteratur: Kontaktproblemen i modernt näringsliv,” Arbetsgivaren, no. 22, 4 December 1954, 11. 21 Lahnhagen, “Studieobjekt: människan i arbete,” 3. 22 “Filmer och bildband smidiga instrument för både undervisning och information,” Arbetsgivaren, no. 2, 29 January 1955, 7.

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Industrial Film Festivals An interest in film was found everywhere in Swedish business and industry. At a conference of the Sales and Advertising Association in the fall of 1958, film was discussed extensively.23 In early December 1958, the PA Council organized a film conference in collaboration with a number of business organizations.24 During the spring of the same year, Swedish industrial films had been shown at a number of festivals. In Turin, sixteen Swedish films were screened, and Vattenfall’s film Stornorrfors was given an award. In the fall of 1958, at an industrial congress held in London and Oxford, films from the Veterinary College, ASEA, Bahco, Vattenfall, and Åtvidaberg’s industries were shown. At the film days in Budapest, films from Vattenfall and Åtvidaberg were screened, and at the festival in Rouen, films from ASEA, Atlas Copco, SAS, Sparfrämjandet, Svenska Flygmotor, and Vattenfall were presented.25 In connection with the international distribution of the films, an issue called the “double translation problem” began to be discussed. First, it was about a more obvious translation problem: translating the narrator’s text and any dialogue into another language. Second, a more complicated problem was noted: “the content, the environment and the use of the product (whether it is a sales film) must be ‘translated,’ so that the whole ‘language’ of the film is understood by the audience to which it is addressed.”26 Here the term “language” is not being used to indicate a stylistic feature of the films, since stylistically they were not difficult to understand, but to describe the cultural specificity of people’s behaviour, or certain workplace or everyday practices. In 1959, a number of international festivals took place. Interest from Swedish companies was great. Sweden was also well represented at the festivals during the 1960s, including in Australia, where there were films from the Workers’ Safety Board, the Construction Industry Agency for Workers’ Protection, Central Film, Sandvikens Jernverk, and the State Organization Board. At the third official industrial film festival in Belgium, Bahco, Scania-Vabis, Vattenfall, and Åtvidaberg participated with films.27 Sandvikens Jernverk, Bahco, Scania-Vabis, and Åtvidaberg were all good at

23 “‘Sälja med film’ populärt avsnitt på PA-konferens,” Arbetsgivaren, no. 21, 14 November 1958, 2. 24 “Filmfestival för industrin i PA-rådsregi,” Arbetsgivaren, no. 18, 3 October 1958, 18. 25 “Samproduktion bra metod göra industrifilm billigt,” Arbetsgivaren, no. 23, 12 December 1958, 5. 26 “Filmdagar ger PR: Allt fler filmer i utländsk tävlan,” Arbetsgivaren, no. 14, 21 August 1959, 4. 27 [Bengt Magnusson], “Högre standard på industrifilmerna – festivalintryck,” Arbetsgivaren, no. 1, 8 January 1960, 5.

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17. Shooting film at Stråssa mine, 17 March 1959. Photo: Örebro Kuriren / Örebro läns museum.

highlighting their respective local environments in their films. This meant a significant profiling of regionally anchored and locally located companies. Vattenfall is the real standout in Swedish industrial film production in the 1950s. It created lavish and well-made films that were often noticed, usually with interesting representational strategies of landscape and environment. In addition, this was done in a way that could be characterized as the creation of national landscapes. Thus, Vattenfall films provided a picture of Sweden as a modern industrial country with a rich and beautiful natural environment (Sörlin 2000; Björkin 2003). Vattenfall benefitted from what has been described as the special characteristic of Swedish film since the 1910s. Kristin Thompson and David Bordwell write in Film History about Terje Vigen (Victor Sjöström, 1916) in terms of the “mastery of landscape as an expressive element in the action” (Thompson and Bordwell 1994, 68). To show that the use of landscape was recognized at the time, they quote a review by Louis Delluc from 1919 where he writes that “[t]he public is swept away with emotion. For the public is awestruck by the barren landscapes” in another of Sjöström’s films, The Outlaw and His Wife (1917).28 According to Thompson and Bordwell “the silent-film traditions of naturalistic landscape” returned in war-time and post-war art house films, such as Alf Sjöberg’s The Heavenly Play from 1942 and Ingmar Bergman’s “blend of 28 Delluc (1988, 188; quoted in Thompson and Bordwell 1994, 68).

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expressionist dream imagery, natural locales, and elaborate flashbacks in Wild Strawberries from 1957” (Thompson and Bordwell 1994, 450). Bo Florin writes in his book on Sjöström’s Hollywood career about the “influence from Sjöström’s Swedish film to the American ones, with particular focus on landscape portrayal” and quotes a 1929 essay by Robert Herring, who states that “[l]andscape is image in Seastrom [the spelling of his name Sjöström used in the US]” (Florin 2012, 85). The purpose was obviously to help the spectator to use his knowledge of what Swedish film can (and should) look like in this case. At the Congress cinema in Apolloniahuset in Stockholm, the PA Council organized two film days in early March 1960. The interest was so great that it had to repeat the show. A few weeks later, two more film days were arranged in Arme-, Marin- and Flygfilm’s cinema in Stockholm. According to the head of the PA Council’s film service, curator Bengt Magnusson, more than a thousand people saw the touring programme in Malmö, Karlstad, Sundsvall, where they also arranged a course, and Stockholm.29 The tour then continued to Gothenburg, Eskilstuna, and Jönköping. Apparently, there was interest in more such regional screenings, but the PA Council instead focused on a national conference on “the film in the service of business.”30 The fact that the PA Council’s film business had a distinct national character is evident in an interview with Magnusson, after a European industrial festival in Rouen in October 1960: In Sweden, we are far behind in this context. . . . But we still have a chance to develop, and it is mainly because we focus on describing the products or manufacturing methods that are unique to Sweden. Film is, after all, an offensive selling tool and we should take advantage of its opportunities to mark our own character.31

However, there was some regional specialization. Under the title “The Film in Business,” the PA Council arranged film days at the Gothenburg School of Economics in the autumn of 1960, aimed at entrepreneurs in “Gothenburg and western Sweden.”32 However, such regional film days were an exception. 29 “Intresset stort för filmdagarna i PA-rådets regi,” Arbetsgivaren, no. 6, 18 March 1960, 6. 30 “Bild- och ljudanvändning på kursschema i Sundsvall,” Arbetsgivaren, no. 3, 5 February 1960, 3; “41 filmer visas vid PA-filmdagar,” Arbetsgivaren, no. 15, 2 September 1960, 5. 31 “Industrifilmer från Tyskland tog förstapris,” Arbetsgivaren, no. 19, 28 October 1960, 7. 32 “Europavinnare visas i Göteborg vid PA-dagar,” Arbetsgivaren, no. 20, 11 November 1960, 4.

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Face to Face or Face to Screen in the Countryside The “translation problem” has many similarities with how, for example, SoL Film (the forestry and agriculture industry’s own film company) discussed films in terms of the corresponding translation between different parts of Sweden. SoL Film conducted extensive rental activities and through active collaboration with agricultural organizations. It contributed to an increased display of films that treated various rural areas in various ways, and debated how different themes could attract audiences in different parts of the country, as well as the possibility of making regional variants of the same basic material.33 The Swedish rural organizations had for a long time been well organized and good at communications (and public relations). In 1956 the Association for Forestry and Farming Films (Föreningen Skogs- och Lantbruksfilm), started a publication called SoL-Film-Nytt. It discussed the uses of film within forestry and agriculture, presented new films, and (perhaps its main purpose) presented films the association itself had for rent. In 1919 a county forest officer, Vilhelm Dybeck, raised the idea that the regional forestry boards should begin using films for educational purposes. A committee was initiated and in 1924 a film society started, the Forestry Board Film Society (Skogsvårdsstyrelsernas filmförening) with funding from the state censorship board and from the government. In 1932 the state funding for film production increased and in September 1937 the Association for Forestry and Farming Films was founded. A year later the two film associations merged into one and in 1940 they joined forces with the major publisher in farming, Lantbruketsförbundets Tidskrifts AB. In 1947, the society changed its name to Föreningen Skogs- och lantbruksfilm and the film department of the publishing company became SoL Film. At this time the state funding had increased rapidly.34 The 13th Nordic Film Summit in 1957 presented and debated films on and for agriculture, forestry, domestic work, and fishing. It was an area of rapid development, and as so often at the time, the summit held a competition for the best films in different categories. The Norwegian film Lunning med vinsch won the educational film category, while the Danish film Svinefodring won the category for propaganda, that is, informational, films. In SoL-Film-Nytt there also was a comment that now the cinematic qualities were prioritized 33 Richard Håkansson, “Regional Film,” SoL-Film-Nytt, no. 1, 1956, 1, and “Film Distribution and Membership,” SoL-Film-Nytt, no. 1, 1957, 1. 34 Between 1940 and 1955 the annual state support increased 1,000%, “Skogsfilm under 40 år,” SoL-Film-Nytt, no. 1, 1959, 2.

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18. ”20 New forestry films,” distributed by SoL-Film, from SoL-Film-Nytt, no. 2 1959. © Lantbrukarnas Riksförbund.

(which apparently was not the case before).35 However, the answer to the question of whether “cinematic qualities” affected rental statistics was unclear. The coming of television became a subject for discussion among rural film communities. Television presented severe competition for people’s 35 Stig Hammar, “Nordiskt samarbete på filmens område,” SoL-Film-Nytt, no. 1, 1958, 2.

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time in relation to the holding of physical meetings (with or without film screenings), but also as a potential source of information.36 The concern for rural cinemas was also raised in the Swedish film industry’s comments to the television commission.37 Films were also seen as useful for the counselling work done in agriculture, not only for the encouragement of new ideas about agricultural practice, but for more specialized education and information. The rapid development within agriculture was seen as demanding good and instructive films to be used as a part of counselling. Again, the major problem was how to determine the issues that should be addressed in films rather than through less expensive and simpler ways. Film production plans often had to be changed or cancelled due to high production costs (for example, filmed content needed to be replaced by stills). It was recognized that a major advantage of film was its potential to “orientate” farmers to new issues and problems or to persuade them to adapt novel ideas within agriculture. There was, at the same time, a general understanding that such information was best conveyed via personal, face-to-face, meetings, or hands-on group demonstrations. Since the advantages of a demonstration depended upon the time and place and required thorough and costly preparation, the councillor could not always make the best out of it. With the assistance of film, however, a larger audience could be reached.38

The Catalogue After a few years, the PA Council began to publish a catalogue of audiovisual aids, i.e. films and sound slides.39 Initially the catalogue was a subscription-based, loose-leaf system, but from 1960 a printed catalogue, Filmen i näringslivets tjänst (Film in the service of business), was used. It can be argued with some justification that the design of the catalogue fit well into the contemporary debate. The catalogue’s films and sound slides 36 R. H. [Richard Håkansson], “Lantbruksfilmen och televisionen,” SoL-Film-Nytt, no. 3, 1959, 1. 37 Det svenska filmfacket och televisionen: Gemensamt yttrande över televisionsutredningens betänkande från Föreningen Sveriges Filmproducenter, Svenska Film- och Biografföreningen, Sveriges Biografägareförbund, Sveriges Filmuthyrareförening, Folketshusföreningarnas Riksorganisation och Våra Gårdar (Stockholm, 1955), 2. 38 R. H. [Rickard Håkansson], “Film i lantbrukets rådgivningsverksamhet,” SoL-Film-Nytt, no. 1, 1960, 1. 39 The first printed, collected, edition was published in 1960. Compare with the German Der Deutsche Industriefilm, which began publication in 1960.

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19. The PA Council catalogue, 1960. © Svenskt Näringsliv.

were a test map of what companies could and were supposed to do with the old media. The catalogue also reflects the business community’s view of other contemporary media, especially television. There was an obvious conflict between, on the one hand, the interests of local, regional, and individual companies and, on the other, the national perspectives of industry organizations, trade unions, and parliamentary policies. Newsreels of the time commonly included business-related or industry events in their coverage of the news. Despite the public’s apparent interest in such matters, industrial films about these kinds of events are almost completely absent in the PA Council film catalogue. Even if one looks under the category “Company Description – PR,” no films about public events held by businesses are found. The possible exception is the Vattenfall film Stornorrfors which, in addition to providing an overview of the power plant, also includes footage of its inauguration. There was no shortage of public event industrial films being made by companies at the time – there were plenty of movies made about jubilees and inaugurations, for example – so it is difficult to explain the absence of event films in the catalogue. One possible explanation is that such films might have been considered by the PA Council to be too local or too narrow in their focus. There was obviously no interest in encouraging locally relevant event films. In addition, the newsreels, which still accounted for the bulk of the audiovisual news coverage, mainly focused on event coverage when dealing with businesses.

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With this in mind it is possible to see the catalogue as a supplement to the newsreels. In some cases (again, take Vattenfall as the main example), the newsreel format was used to provide annual film reviews. There is no evidence of direct influence, but there is some resemblance to the Krupp company’s Jahresfilme from the same period (Hediger and Vonderau 2009, 42). It may also be that the PA Council primarily wanted films from within the business community. In both cases, it seems that the PA Council wanted businesses to appear to be objective, without giving the appearance of extravagance, but also wanted to distinguish films for company use from films for public relations use.

Annual Reports as Public Relations Annual reports were one of the mandatory phenomena that were seen as having the potential for enabling companies to make contact with members of society. Although the law stated that annual reports must contain certain information, the discussion of additional uses started around 1950. It was argued that it could, and should, be used as a contact-promoting medium. It was not enough to discuss what was in the report; how that information was communicated, and, more importantly, how it could develop trust, was also critical (Hanner 1953; Andrén 1955). In a 1956 Swedish book on annual reports, author Gustaf Bondeson pointed out that modern companies had to be able to communicate with the surrounding society as well as customers, suppliers, shareholders, and employees. He labelled this “public relations” (English in the original) and translated it as “society contact” (Bondeson 1956). The three­part socio-economic system that was developed in Sweden at the beginning of World War II, the Swedish model, presupposed that employers and labour unions settled as much as possible between themselves, while the state provided the necessary political and legal infrastructure (Edin and Topel 1997, 158–159). The 1950s in Sweden saw a rapid development of a more controlling state apparatus: public spending increased, taxes were raised, the social welfare system developed rapidly, and the state also increased the amount of control it had over information, especially in print and broadcast media (Wirén 1986; Hadénius 1998), knowledge, education, and research (Nilsson 1994). In an era when visual media increasingly were regarded as tools for information on “invisible” or intangible assets, film became more important than ever before. Even the contemporary struggle over television was not only a matter of commercial versus public service

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television; it was a struggle over the system of organizing (audiovisual) knowledge and information. Bondeson presented some general principles annual reports should embrace: objectivity and factuality, comparability, clarity, circumstantiality, validity, and a fair overall presentation (Bondeson 1956, 9–14). He argued for using images, preferably of people, but also of plants and processes. For spatial information, Bondeson advised using cartograms, process charts, organizational charts, concern charts, etc. (35). New uses required new methods of distribution. The distribution list had to mirror the strategies for contact. Bondeson did not go into detail, but emphasized that the decision of distribution was important (55–57). When looking at annual reports from the mid­and late 1950s, it is obvious that many companies, particularly those that employed new means of communications, followed Bondeson’s recommendations. For these new, expanded uses of the annual report, it was crucial to supplement it with other forms of communication. This was specified in the 1946 agreement concerning work councils ( företagsnämnder) between the state, employers, and trade unions (Bondeson 1956). The Swedish work councils would soon be followed by similar systems in countries close to Sweden, for example, the 1950 Mitbestimmungsgesetz in West Germany (Lawrence 1980, 45–46).

A Driving Force for Theory and Practice: Work Councils Other measures that were advocated at this time, in particular, were dedicated informational meetings and using employee publications. During the 1950s, most of the larger companies, as well as many mid-sized companies, produced or commissioned films for the work councils. Starting in 1947, every Swedish company above a certain size had to create a work council where representatives of the employees had the right to obtain information about the company and comment on these issues. When films started to be made for the work councils, traditional modes of narration seem to have become insufficient, or at least not appropriate enough. Although entertaining aspects were recognized, the films no longer had to be “closed” in the sense that they were independent of the viewing context. For these films, the context of other, primarily written, material become more important than references to well-known cinematic storytelling techniques. Rather, all of the materials used in council work were discussed in relation to each other, and were regarded as part of what could be called an information system (Bondeson 1951).

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20. Image from a work council meeting in Stockvik 1958. Photo: Norrlandsbild / Sundsvalls museum.

After World War II, there was a new demand for contacting shareholders. The older means of contact were no longer useful for the many smaller shareholders. With a more even distribution of capital and income and greater investments in plants and machines, industry needed more capital. Subsequently, it had to be better in the communication of economic issues. As was often the case, inspiration for new methods came from the US, where the responsibility clearly was that of top management. This may explain why meetings and courses on the uses of film and other communication technologies even attracted the top managers at many of the larger companies. Bondeson regarded personal contact as one of the most important means of communicating with the financial market, and it was important to make it clear who at the company was responsible for this contact (Bondeson 1956, 66). Other ways to encourage shareholder participation, and where film could be used, were annual meetings or specific shareholders’ meetings and company demonstrations (on location). Here Bondeson uses a quote in English: “No decision is better than the information upon which it is based” (66). The changing use of film within industry during the 1950s can be explained as a move from using industrial films as documentation or advertising, that is, as films, to a use of film as an information and communication technology.

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21. Presentation of financial information at a TGOJ work council meeting, around 1958. Photographer: unknown / Järnvägsmuseet.

There was a growing awareness during the 1950s that film was an important tool for information and propaganda (something learned during World War II), but also that the employees were moviegoers, and thereby were presumed to know the medium. Those who learned how to combine these things had in their hands an efficient information system, indicating that they were literate. Signalling communication expertise was crucial at the time, because what was at stake was not only informational efficiency, but the need to protect and develop a political system. The frequent references to uses of industrial media in the US was as much a result of the advancement of US industrial media use, as of European industrial leaders’ “use” of the US to promote a free economy against real or imagined threats by social democracy and trade unions. As S. Jonathan Wiesen argues concerning the West German industry in the 1950s: In . . . corporate publicity – magazines, industrial exhibitions, f ilms – America was clearly omnipresent in the form of US representatives offering advice to their transatlantic business partners or, more commonly, as a set of preconceptions and personal experiences that West German industrialists brought to their PR and human relations work. These publications were also indicative of a larger Cold War anxiety about a different model of labour relations, namely a communist one, which proclaimed the workers and owners to be the same. In effect, West German industrialists in the 1950s used America, in its multiple incarnations, to overcome the animosities between the business world

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and the working world, and to prevent labour from challenging the free market economy. (Wiesen 2001, 574)

Both Sweden and West Germany shared many management principles. One was the presence of representatives from unions on company boards. This seems to be an example of the same values of shared governance between social democratic and Christian democratic industrial policy.

Conclusion The investment in the production and distribution of film and sound slides should probably be seen as the result of the benefits of moving images being so radically different for SAF and the individual companies. A national organization such as SAF felt it enjoyed the greatest benefit from national media and therefore had no significant interest in pursuing regional solutions. In contrast, a company working in a geographically limited market had no interest in national media. Since it was clear early on that there would be no local or regional television stations, television became unattractive to the vast majority of companies – so they had to deploy the means available to them. Therefore, film and sound slides became more interesting as they could be better included in feedback systems, or in the form of discussions with the audience. National television – or for that matter the cinema – was simply not a sufficient contact-creating tool. Whether this development was a result of Swedish industry not being consumer-oriented, but business-tobusiness oriented, or if the absence of television advertising made it difficult for consumer-oriented companies to develop is difficult to say. The important thing here is rather that industrial audiovisual development became more focused on business-to-business communication, recruitment propaganda, public relations, and internal company communication than on advertising. What continued, though, was a political ambition of industry organizations to shift focus within the public debate. The main challenge was how to merge the Cold War rhetoric of levelling society, from both a US propaganda and social democratic welfare state perspectives, with an industry policy based on both corporate and entrepreneurial interests. Particularly the latter became a challenge to the development triad. It is therefore reasonable to argue that the goal of the PA Council and its stakeholders was to create audiovisual tools at a national level: either to sell Sweden and Swedish industry abroad or to create common tools for more efficient enterprise. However, the extensive discussion on audiovisual

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aids resulted in a large production of film and sound slides. The majority of this production was based on the more local and regional interests that dominated most of the business sector. The PA Council’s film investment and the business organizations’ arguments on television advertising thus went hand in hand. At the same time, both the Industry Research Institute’s investigation on the financial bases of commercial television and the companies’ actual film production and film usage indicate that there was a large basis for regional media production. Perhaps companies had adopted the concept of contact at a time with increasing focus on organizational theory more than the PA Council had taken into account. The mass media attracted attention on a theoretical level only. In contrast, film and sound slides were in practice primarily regarded as contact-creating aids on a more small-scale level. Without television, contact was of course a question of promotion, but it seems primarily to have been a term indicating a hope for more communication. So far, contact was thus promotion plus community building, a tool for uniting Swedish industry through the methods of communication employed by individual companies. Nevertheless, communication is a two-way affair, so there is more to be found in regard to the uses of contact.

References Films En vanlig vardag (Kay Tenow, 1956, AB Svensk Filmindustri). Operation is: En filmberättelse om en unik transport (Alex Jute and Charlie Cederholm, 1961, AB Colorfilm/Scania-Vabis, Gullfiber). Stornorrfors (Per Gunvall, 1959, Svenska AB Nordisk Tonefilm/Vattenfall).

Archival Collections The National Library of Sweden [audiovisual material, reports, leaflets, and brochures] Lundell, John E. “En arbetsstudie med hjälp av smalfilm.” Affärsekonomi, no. 15, 1944, 1184 (KB OKAT Meddelanden från Kung. Vattenfallsstyrelsen, Ser. A, 1944, no. 4). Carl Tarras Sällfors. “Möjligheter till kostnadsbesparingar i kontors- och förvaltningsorganisation.” Referat över föredrag i Stockholms Köpmansklubb,

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1/12 1942, 40 pages. (KB OKAT Meddelanden från Kung. Vattenfallsstyrelsen, Ser. A, 1943, no. 2). Eko: Från Scania-Vabis försäljningskonferens år 1953. Film i näringslivets tjänst (PA-rådet, 1957–1967).

Periodicals Arbetsgivaren Nos. 1, 3, 19, 22 (1954); no. 2 (1955); no. 17 (1956); no. 21 (1957); nos. 1, 12, 18, 21, 22, 23 (1958); nos. 14, 16 (1959); nos. 1, 3, 6, 15, 19, 20 (1960). SoL-Film-Nytt No. 1 (1956); no. 1 (1957); no. 1 (1958); nos. 1, 3 (1959); no. 1 (1960). Vi i Vattenfall [Tidning för personalen vid Statens Vattenfallsverk] No. 1 (1957).

References Andrén, Sven. 1955. Om förvaltningsberättelsen: ett led i svenska aktiebolags årsredovisning. Skrifter utgivna av Företagsekonomiska institutionen, Avdelningen för redovisning och finansiering, Handelshögskolan i Göteborg, 2. Göteborg: Gumpert. Björkin, Mats. 1999. “Industrial Greta: Some Thoughts on an Industrial Film.” In Nordic Explorations: Film before 1930, edited by John Fullerton and Jan Olsson, 263–268. London: John Libbey. Björkin, Mats. 2003. “Platser i rörelse – industrifilm och mediehistoria.” In Kultur, plats, identitet: Det lokalas betydelse i en globaliserad värld, edited by Helene Egeland och Jenny Johannisson, 119–136. Nora/Stockholm: Nya Doxa/SISTER Skrifter 9. Bondeson, Gustaf. 1951. Företagsnämnden och årsredovisningen. Stockholm: SAF. Bondeson, Gustaf. 1956. God årsredovisning – goda relationer. Stockholm: Stu­ dieförbundet Näringsliv och Samhälle. Canjels, Rudmer. 2009. “Films from Beyond the Well: A Historical Overview of Shell Films.” In Films That Work: Industrial Film and the Productivity of Media, edited by Vinzenz Hediger and Patrick Vonderau, 243–255. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. Dahlström, Edmund. 1956. Information på arbetsplatsen: Sociologiska studier av företagets kommunikationsproblem. Stockholm: Personaladministrativa rådets meddelanden, 1.

Delluc, Louis. 1988. “Cinema: The Outlaw and His Wife (1919).” In French Film Theory and Criticism, 1907–1939: A History/Anthology, edited by Richard Abel, 2 vols, vol. 1, 188. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Edin, Per-Anders, and Robert Topel. 1997. “Wage Policy and Restructuring.” In The Welfare State in Transition: Reforming the Swedish Model, edited by Richard B. Freeman, Robert H. Topel, and Birgitta Swedenborg, 155–201. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Florin, Bo. 2012. Transition and Transformation: Victor Sjöström in Hollywood, 1923–1930. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. Hadénius, Stig. 1998. Kampen om monopolet: Sveriges radio och TV under 1900-talet. Stockholm: Norstedts. Hanner, Per V.A. 1953. Årsredovisning i praktiken: 100 större svenska aktiebolags årsredovisningar 1949–1951. Meddelande Företagsekonomiska forskningsinstitutet vid Handelshögskolan i Stockholm, 43. Stockholm: Seelig. Hatzfeld, Nicolas, Gwenaële Rot, and Alain P. Michel. 2009. “Filming Work on Behalf of the Automobile Firm: The Case of Renault (1950–2002).” In Films That Work: Industrial Film and the Productivity of Media, edited by Vinzenz Hediger and Patrick Vonderau, 187–209. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. Hediger, Vinzenz, and Patrick Vonderau, “Record, Rhetoric, Rationalization: Industrial Organization and Film.” In Films That Work: Industrial Film and the Productivity of Media, edited by Vinzenz Hediger and Patrick Vonderau, 35–49. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. Lawrence, Peter. 1980. Managers and Management in West Germany. London: Routledge. Nilsson, Anders. 1994. “Visions and Labour Demand: The Planning of Vocational Education for the Swedish Manufacturing Industry 1950–1993.” Lund Papers in Economic History, 39. Svenska Arbetsgivareföreningen. 1951. Företagsnämnden och årsredovisningen. Stockholm: SAF. Thompson, Kristin, and David Bordwell. 1994. Film History: An Introduction. New York: McGraw-Hill. Wiesen, S. Jonathan. 2001. “Coming to Terms with the Worker: West German Industry, Labour Relations and the Idea of America, 1949–60.” Journal of Contemporary History 36, no. 4, 561–579. Wirén, Karl-Hugo. 1986. Kampen om TV: svensk TV-politik 1946–66. Stockholm: Gidlunds.

Intermission A Substitute for an Industrial Film Theory Abstract The theoretical intermission focuses on how films, slides, sound slides, and flannelgraphs were integrated into organizational and educational contexts, not in the sense of predefined theories, but as an encouragement to create new concepts and practices. One of the main questions concerned the role of human involvement in instructional, educational, and promotional work. These debates coincided with the increasing interest in middle management, particularly the industry foreman. Keywords: audio-visual tools, pedagogy, interactivity, cybernetics, management

By 1945, industrial f ilms had been produced in Sweden for more than 30 years. Following rapid growth during the mid-1920s, the practice of commissioning industrial films had become common among many larger companies in what were later regarded as the core industries of Sweden: mining, steel, wood, and paper. Industrial films, taking their lead from the dominant industrial-film production company of the 1920s, Tullberg Film, were primarily seen as suitable for public relations and documentation (Björkin 1999). Those interwar period films were made along the lines of the typical nonfiction films of the time, with a straight narrative structure, authoritative narrator (or intertitles), and, in the films of the 1930s and 1940s, dramatic music. Even though they could also be screened at the companies themselves, which they were, they were obviously made as stand-alone aesthetic objects, though with an informational or sometimes even didactic purpose. During the 1950s, industrial films contributed to shaping the theoretical discussion on corporate communication, organization, corporate learning, human resources, public relations, etc., albeit from the margins. Debates on media effects and agenda setting, however, seemed to be rather absent.

Björkin, M., Post-war Industrial Media Culture in Sweden, 1945–1960: New Faces, New Values. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2022 doi 10.5117/9789462984929_inter

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Technologies created a bit more than theory could describe uses for, while theory demanded a bit more from technology than it could provide. It is important, I will argue, to consider the films as the result of the theoretical debates of the time. Industrial films were not only part of developments in corporate communication, organization, and learning, but soon became part of what could be described as a whole system of theories. Or, perhaps more in keeping with its cybernetic foundation, a theory machine, where different technologies, methods, and theories worked together, reacted to each other, and helped each other develop, at least as long as the post-war economic boom continued. The Swedish debate over industrial media was strictly directed towards other industrial discourses, not other media discourses. It therefore became a more or less closed system, not to be understood as insular or provincial, but auto-referential. This makes the system closed to a certain extent, and dependent on constant, reasserting communications, similar to Herbert A. Simon’s theories concerning the importance of relying on enough information (Simon 1947). This is perhaps the reason for certain conceptual reiterations, particularly contact, tools, and efficiency, which were hardly key terms in the artistic film theory debates in the 1950s. In comparison, European industrial film communities were frequently in contact, and obviously knew what was going on in other countries. For example, the British journal Industrial Screen described Sweden in 1959 as well organized and having an infrastructure for industrial films of which they, in the UK, could only dream.1 After World War II, different media produced new values by transforming information into economic assets. When face-to-face interaction was no longer the only way of communicating, neither in politics nor at companies, and conceptual, psychological, and physical distance had to be overcome, modern media determined the characteristics of that distance. The theories of information and feedback, cybernetics and operations research, which came out of the war apparatus, made this new economy possible (Rau 2000). They were adopted by the universities, the military, and industry during many study trips and educational and research exchanges arranged between Sweden and the US during the post-war years and the early 1950s. An initially small group of men who knew each other from military or engineering education, who moved between universities, industry research, 1 “300 Swedish firms now employ executives trained in audio-visual communications.” James Platt, “Audio Visual Aids in Management Training,” Industrial Film and Photography 3, no. 5, 1959, 216.

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and development units, and military and civil service research units, rapidly disseminated the theories. When confronted with day-to-day management problems, an old medium like film was redefined for new purposes in new contexts. The industrial film did not become a new medium, but it was treated as if it were. This was not because its uses were new, but because they were inscribed in new fields of knowledge, theories, and practices, primarily concerning the embodiment of knowledge and the visualization of capital.

Flannelgraph Of the many new technologies for information and learning in the 1950s, no one is as emblematic and still theoretically as invisible as the flannelgraph. “ The principle behind flannelgraph,” as one plea for the medium’s use in teaching geography in American schools states in 1956, “is that flannel (felt or any napped material) will stick to flannel,” which makes its key feature possible, in that “your figures may be moved at will and can be transferred from place to place” (Hoffman 1956, 77). Thus it was a medium characterized by the features of flexibility and contact between surfaces. Technically speaking, the flannelgraph combines cloth, wood, steel, sometimes paper or cardboard, as well as a physical space, technical support staff, storage, distribution, and, of course, one or more teachers/instructors and at least one student. The flannelgraph has much in common with other information technologies at the time, such as slides, sound tapes, posters, and films: it is a material object that is supporting the communication between teacher and student. There is, however, a paramount difference: the flannelgraph is an interactive information and teaching tool, although the prefabricated parts limit the interactivity. Even if a part could be designed and manufactured for the specific teaching situation, it remained the same during its durability as a teaching tool. The flannelgraph is truly a medium. Someone (a teacher) attaches individual units (words, charts, illustrations) on to the flannel board in order to communicate something to someone else (apprentice, student). There is, at least ideally, some form of conceptual link between the arrangement on the board and the intended message. As for a text, an image, or a f ilm, the arrangement of its units is supposed to help the receiver to create meaning. In this regard, the flannelgraph is and was a typical pedagogical tool, a technical arrangement that was supposed to help the teacher’s proficiency.

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22. Asea’s offices on flanellgraph, from Arbetsgivaren 1956. © Svenskt Näringsliv.

In contrast to a text, a film, or an illustration, the flannelgraph is not necessarily stable; the individual units can be rearranged during the teaching session. Quite often, they were not, but at least they could, be changed. Adding to this, in contrast to a text or a film, but similar to an illustration, the flannelgraph does not necessarily require a predetermined sequential reception of it (even if it often did). Consequently, in contrast to a text, but similar to a film or an illustration, the flannelgraph is neither a text nor requiring a text. Still, in its everyday pedagogical use the flannelgraph was used to create a story. Since its units could be almost anything, representational or abstract, its functions were largely similar to a film, with the exception for its potential of interactivity and its predetermined temporal extension. The flannelgraph thus combined many objects, concepts, ideas, and processes concerning media and information in the 1950s. It did so by having its parts relate to other objects, which creates the material aspects of the informational media ecology of the 1950s organizational world.2 It also, as an assemblage, becomes part of a more or less standardized system of processes concerning both educational ideologies and the uses of material tools for learning. The flannelgraph itself thus often becomes marginal to these relations and processes, but remains the starting point of my analysis. In the following we will look at these relations and processes from the perspective of the flannelgraph. 2

Media ecology understood as in Fuller (2005).

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23-24. SCA’s old and new salary processes, 1958. Photo: Norrlandsbild / Sundsvalls museum.

Learn to Do, Not to Think One crucial dimension of audiovisual media is the relation to human agency. “By using films instead of oral presentations, nothing is lost from the producer, by way of everyone involved in marketing, distribution and selling, to the consumer,” as Einar Förberg wrote in 1946 (24). In this handbook, as in many others at the time, audiovisual media was said to have a strong, direct emotional impact on people, while still being pedagogical, based on facts, and encouraging interaction between people, that is, contact-creating tools.3 Förberg continuously argued that films could be useful for selling specific products. A systematized composition of individual films and whole programmes together with systematized film screenings could become the most effective selling machine. This was rhetoric similar to the sale of television advertising at the same time (Spigel 1992, 83). Considering the importance of emotional features in consumption, the flannelgraph perhaps had few advantages as a selling machine. However, since the same handbook states that the “long-term effects” of audiovisual media was especially useful for creating goodwill for individual companies, all kinds of products, or industry branches, films consequently could also have been regarded as teaching machines. 4 3 See, for example, Gipson (1947), or the many guides to find in journals such as the US-based Business Screen Magazine or UK-based Industrial Screen. 4 See, for example, L. Bn. [Lennart Bondeson], “Modern aktivitetspedagogik kräver förkortad ‘hanteringstid’ för ideer,” Arbetsgivaren, no. 12, 18 June 1955, 1, 7, a text that summarizes some ideas regarding industrial films from the beginning of the 1950s.

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In the production of industrial f ilms, theories and practices of organizational communication were seen as important, perhaps even more important, than traditional movie storytelling. It is therefore striking how few references there are to theoretical, or practical, discussions concerning feature films, or documentary films. One possible explanation is that the industrial discourse was aimed at those who commissioned films, not film production personnel. Films became one of many tools for rationalizing the communication between management and employees. More importantly, the question of whether films actually were useful, in the sense of creating desired changes, was everything but solved.5 To cinematic problems of form, content, and effect was added psychological and spatial problems: How can contact between product and consumer, and between management and employees be improved? The theoretical foundation for emotional and engaging arguments of film as tools for informational and pedagogical practices can be found either in a direct link between emotion and learning (as in behavioural psychology), or indirectly, when the engagement in films is a mediator between sender and receiver, between teacher and student. In both cases we can see influences from the new communication models of the day (for example, Shannon and Weaver’s), as well as different theories of cybernetics (particularly Wiener).6 It may be a coincidence that the preoccupation with contact within organizations became a focus of attention within management and organizational theory at the same time as film and television audience research increased rapidly. The outcome was neither coincidental, nor logical. There are no references to contemporary mass media or media effects studies. Media and communication studies pioneers, such as Paul F. Lazarsfeld, Elihu Katz, Robert K. Merton et al. did not figure in industry discourses during the decade, which perhaps is somewhat surprising given both the qualitative interest in effect, and in the general focus on quantitative perspectives. (Consequently, there are many lists in this book.) What came out of these two tracks was an awareness of the importance of a kind of audiovisual literacy. Since film and television were popular among 5 Although many attempted to appraise the usefulness of non-theatrical cinema, few have convincingly proved these films were successful. On the contrary, the reason for their gradual demise, or at least changed “use” during the 1960s and 1970s, could as well be an indication of their actual uselessness. Compare with Ackland and Wasson (2011). 6 The early Swedish translation of Norbert Wiener’s, The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society (1950) as Materia, maskiner, människor: cybernetiken och samhället (1952) was important. Claude Shannon and Warren Weaver’s The Mathematical Theory of Communication (1949) was also often referred to.

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25. “Information meetings for workers and clerks,” article on Asea’s introduction of new employees, in Arbetsgivaren 1957. © Svenskt Näringsliv.

the public, to commission something became a value for public relations in itself. It became an indication that the company had an understanding of what the present and future employees wanted. One reason for the urge to be popular, particularly among young people, was the shortage of industrial workers. Films became an important tool to attract young people to industrial work. Another paradox is that there are no systematic discussions concerning young peoples’ audiovisual literacy, just a vague reference to a need to tell stories in more convincing ways. Some of the larger Swedish industries used more elaborate toolboxes when inducting new employees. They could, and had to, given their rapid expansion of industrial production after the war. At the ASEA head office in Västerås, the employees first received some printed material. After a while, they were

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gathered together at information meetings with about 25 participants. There, they screened a film about ASEA followed by a tour around some of the workshops and factory areas to give the office workers and junior managers, both men and women, a sense of the company’s production processes. The tour passed by the library, the post office, the punch card office, followed by the Mimer workshop, the foundry, and the Emaus factory, where the large size of the power plant generators was said to make an impression on the new employees. The information meeting ended with a cup of coffee, this most significant social marker at Swedish workplaces, and some information about social benefits as employees at ASEA and some savings information. Thus it was a multimedia, multisensory, and multipurpose introduction. Factory foremen and supervisors were responsible for introducing new workers to local information regarding the workplace. Later on followed two meetings managed by the human resource department. Again, films were used, but also slides and flannel boards to illustrate production processes. The flannel board was also used to introduce the proposal activities, where employees could propose improvements of the workplace and production, while savings information was mediated through slides. The security engineer talked about the security service and worker protection. In addition, as the final point of the second information meeting, ASEA’s so-called “social film” Vid sidan av jobbet was shown, as a way to address what at the time was described as the “leisure problem.” that is, drinking, gambling, and being too obsessed with popular culture. The latter “problem,” interestingly, was in recruitment contexts seen as an asset.7

Theory as Marketing Soon after 1945, new uses for industrial films were already being discussed within companies and branch organizations. In 1946, Einar Förberg, a leading advertising agent and industrial film producer, published his book Att sälja med film (Selling by means of film). The purpose of the book was to “translate” and adapt methods from other countries, primarily from the US, to Swedish business and industry and the Swedish market. However, he structured the book in a manner well known to discourses on industrial film at the time – by emphasizing film’s usefulness as propaganda (i.e. public relations) and documentation, as much as about selling (Förberg 1946). 7 “Informationsträffar vid ASEA för arbetare och tjänstemän,” Arbetsgivaren, no. 16, 21 September 1957, 9.

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Förberg provides a background to industrial films and film-making in Sweden. His main argument, though, is the efficiency of films. Here he enters into an ongoing debate over streamlining and efficiency within the industry. By using films instead of oral presentations, nothing is lost from producer to consumer, despite all the agents involved in marketing, distribution, and selling. Film should be used to help salespersons improve the contact between producer and consumer. Even so, it is the salesperson who does the selling, not the film. His conclusion was that industrial films, more than advertising films, are especially suited for producing goodwill and long-term effects rather than direct effects on the sale of individual products. On the one hand, it could be argued that Förberg’s book was more related to his own interests in media production than representative of most uses of film during the late 1940s and early 1950s. The book was, largely, also a tool for selling his services and films. On the other hand, this makes it even more interesting, because Förberg represented a new profession in Sweden, the information and communication consultant. All considered, Förberg pinpoints two important discourses: the strong concern for the streamlining of production, administration, and selling, and a widespread belief in the economic value of using films for many purposes in business and industry. During the 1950s advertising, marketing, and management literature and journals referred to many American, British, and German studies on media, marketing, pedagogy, and psychology that seemed to confirm Förberg’s ideas. That was certainly not surprising since Förberg made use of what was up-to-date knowledge in the mid-1940s. What is interesting is that the widespread idea that audiovisual media in combination with human contact was the most effective means possible for both learning and selling. Another outcome of this is that issues of learning and selling were regarded as an organizational problem, or even as a spatial problem. Again, the best place to sell something must be where people are prepared to learn things.

A Debate Other schools of thought contested audiovisual media, or rather unreflective uses of them, and focused on the cybernetic concept of feedback. Sten Rosell’s 1957 Återkopplad pedagogik (Feedback pedagogy), a communication handbook and promotional piece for courses delivered at the KVE school of information and communication (a private company specializing in adult education in economics), argued intensively against certain uses of film. Rosell’s idea of education was a modern version of the object lessons of the

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late nineteenth century: seeing, listening, and doing. His understanding of the communicative element in education was shared by many commentators on the uses of audiovisual media who stressed the importance of verbal explanations and discussions both before and after any use of film (Rosell 1957). Films were not just primarily vehicles for information, but were also means for improving and creating contact between people as well as contact between companies and society. Rosell’s critique against films and his support for new methods was also criticized. In a review in Arbetsgivaren, Gunnar Lindvall begins by commenting that it was the “third Swedish book in the field” and that in relation to “its concrete views and opinions on what contact types a teacher or discussion leader can choose from in different situations and the means available for different purposes, the book is a welcome new addition to this area.”8 He continues: To control role-plays by wall-mounted sound circuits, earphones, and the use of a plastic board with self-adhesive plastic building pieces, seem to be the only means not mentioned. In other words, the overview of pedagogical tools can be termed as complete.9

Lindvall is critical of Rosell’s uncritical use of the clicker, and notices that Rosell’s favouring of sound slides is hardly surprising given that it was one of KVE’s main products. Of all the tools mentioned in the book, the author chooses one and treats it in about 50 pages. Not unexpectedly, he chooses the sound slides. As director of KVE with sound slide production as one of the main products, Sten Rosell and his colleagues in this f ield have accumulated many valuable experiences. . . . The chapter also makes comparisons between film and sound slides. Unfortunately, the objectivity ends here. . . . The reservations made by the reviewer must not ignore the many and great merits of this book. There is every reason to recommend it to a number of personnel categories within the companies. The service the author has made to course leaders by publishing Återkopplad pedagogik corresponds well with the central measures in the field of education, not least by this magazine’s related bodies.10 8 Gunnar Lindwall, “Investera i industripedagogik,” Arbetsgivaren, no. 21, 29 November 1957, 11. 9 Ibid. 10 Ibid.

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Films were also made to provide new employees with background information. What was new and somewhat surprising were the many films that provided training for specific moments in the industrial production process. Again, the basic idea was the pedagogical model of seeing, listening, and doing. However, these films were not just training tools. They were presented together with the films for work councils and others dealing with individual companies, industrial branches in Sweden, and Swedish industry as a whole. The inclusion of these specialized films can only be explained as examples of expertise and modern methods, not for what they actually showed. This demand seems to have created, or at least supported, an increasing trade in moving images within Swedish business and industry, which demanded sophisticated information activities, education, and film catalogues.11 Förberg had already described the links between information and learning. When describing film exhibition, especially those travelling sales shows that were quite common during the late 1940s, Förberg discussed how to sell industrial films to schools. Interest in using films as pedagogical tools in schools was high, and since so many of the films available were made during the 1920s and 1930s, it was easy to sell new productions to schools. This gives us one clue as to why Förberg argued for goodwill films rather than advertising films. Films for goodwill purposes were of more “general interest,” and were therefore made available for rental or purchase by schools. At schools, the audience was prepared to receive important information, which is the key to his argument. A site for learning was a good site for selling. It could even be better than traditional advertising (Förberg 1946, 64). However, we have to remember that the book itself was an instrument for selling – selling the production of films. However, recruiting large numbers of people to the industry was a key concern of the time – as was the general interest in making the industry attractive, especially to young people. Therefore, all means of making contact with people had to be explored. It is interesting that the engagement in new methods of teaching children does not seem to be as ambitious as for vocational training. In comparison to the Netherlands, for example, a country often referred to in positive terms in the Swedish industrial debate, where the public engagement in educational films seems to have been much more developed, particularly through the Stichting Nederlandse Onderwijs Film (The Netherlands Educational Film Corporation, NOF) (Masson 2012). However, there was no NOF in Sweden. There are certainly similarities, since the same pedagogical theories and 11 Most importantly, SAF’s work on developing an infrastructure for educational and informational tools, primarily films and sound slides.

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methods travelled widely before, during, and after World War II, but I have not found any reference to NOF or any other uses of films in regular schools within the Swedish vocational learning context.

Slides Slides, perhaps more than sound slides, were parts of a system aimed at communication together with speech and sometimes even with dialogue. Without the presence of a teacher or sales representative, the slides had no communicative or pedagogical use whatsoever. Their internal temporal relationship (that is, sequentially without fixed speed or timing) made them into useful tools for pedagogical narration. Vocational training slides helped emphasize causality that was of much use in explaining processes and issues concerning risk and safety. In a discussion on the advantages of slides, educationalist and director of the Stockholm AV Centre Gösta Larsson argued at a conference on audiovisual aids for schools in 1960 that slides were the easiest aid for teaching. Here, for one thing “easiest” meant that slides were an efficient means of conveying information to a group of learners; it also meant that slides were easy to produce and distribute in a centralized system. Films, in comparison, were seen as expensive as and more difficult to distribute than other aids, even if they were useful for reproducing movement and duration. Sound slides were, Larsson argued, better than film because they were easier to adapt to different audiences (for example, by using different sound tapes for the same images). They were also less expensive than film (Audiovisuella sällskapet 1960, 30). Even Förberg wrote about sound slides, or, in his terminology, “still films,” that is, slides with synchronized gramophone or tape recordings (Förberg 1946, 173). According to him, sound slides should not be seen as cheap or simple alternative to films, because the “still film” was the most important technology for selling anything. Förberg then begins to argue for the limitations of film, and the advantage of sound slides. The former directed to the emotions, the latter to the intellect. Posters and flannelgraphs have much in common. They both open up for non-sequential design and interpretation. Both can be used for explaining complex messages. In addition, in contrast to sequential media as film and sound slides, they describe two-way communication. The latter is important because it provides a technology for illustrating and explaining feedback loops and with the help of a human commentator delivers feedback. In an

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26. Examples of slides to explain automatisation (thermostat), from Arbetsgivaren 1956. © Svenskt Näringsliv.

argument for the uses of pedagogical tools for adult education within political organizations, posters were regarded as most useful to show or explain something in a group-work situation, together with written material.12 The discussion on the difference (or, according to some, hierarchy) between audiovisual tools can be summarized thus: while film and sound slides are more fixed, sometimes mass produced, and may suit a passive audience, slide shows and even more so flannelgraphs encourage interactivity and increase involvement of both teacher and student, instructor and instructee.

12 Torgil Ringmar, “Den ‘audio-visuella’ pedagogiken,” Fönstret: ABF:s tidning, no. 3, March 1954, 62–64.

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Manuals as Theory Bildband och film i yrkesundervisningen (Filmstrips and films in vocational education) was a brief but pedagogical introduction to the uses of filmstrips (bildband) and film in vocational training. It was published in 1953 by a public authority, the National Board for Vocational Training (Överstyrelsen för yrkesutbildning), and a joint employer-union driven organization, the Council for Professional Development (Arbetsmarknadens yrkesråd), both of which had interests in learning and communication. One of the authors, Bertil Lauritzen, was a pioneer in film cataloguing and archiving, and is actually one of few specialist from the “regular” film culture that appeared in the industrial context. In the introduction, the reader is introduced to different “forms” of visual material that are used for pedagogical purposes: skioptikon (individual slides), bildband (filmstrips), stillfilm (sound slides), film (16 mm), filmslinga (film loop), and visningsenhet (visual unit). The visual unit was the only one accompanied by an English term, and refers to a combination of a film and a filmstrip (or a series of slides) where the images originates from the film (Lauritzen and Croneborg 1953, 7–8). Then follows two longer chapters on filmstrips and film, and a short concluding chapter on the visual unit. The sound slide chapter introduces what the authors describe as “general pedagogical principles” of student activity, discussions, and drawing one’s own conclusions, and the importance of developing concepts, not only to hear or read about them. Here the reader encounters the first advantage of sound slides: to stop the flow of images to allow students to engage in discussion with the teacher or instructor. The second argument is that engagement in learning is dependent upon contact with the object of learning. Even an image of the object could contribute to the engagement in learning (9–10). Following the general principles is practical advice presented in the form of the preparation and performance process. The teacher identifies an appropriate sound slide for the actual teaching purpose, reads the commentary texts, and maps out where particularly important elements are located that will be of use for the actual group of students. The teacher then looks through the filmstrip, to get an idea of the individual images and the flow of images, and to identify areas for further explanation. When using filmstrips the teacher is reminded to adapt the order of the images to the actual teaching purposes. Finally, the teacher plans how to conduct the instruction by combining explanations, referencing other learning materials, and preparing questions for discussion and further tasks for the students to do (11–13).

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27. Illustrations from Bildband och film i yrkesundervisningen 1953. © Svenskt Näringsliv.

The presentation of the teaching situation begins with an important remark: “the student should see: see and understand, see and study, see and draw their own conclusions” (13, emphasis in the original). The advice to the teacher is not to hurry through the changing images, but to wait until all the students are ready to move forward. This interactive sensibility is followed with a recommendation to either read the instructional text aloud to the students or let one of the students read it. The authors emphasize that questions are more important than explanations, that repetition is an important tool, and that there is the great value in adding in other images or bringing in objects to help enhance the learning. This section ends with two principal remarks; that teaching should relate to “the practical reality,” and that the design of the teaching session is dependent upon an evaluation of the students’ capabilities and the style and content of the images (13). The third section of the filmstrip chapter deals what should happen after the lesson. The main tools are using repetition and giving an assignment to check what the students have learnt, which then should lead to the next teaching moment. The last part of the chapter deals with practical advice concerning how to set up the screening and arrange the lighting and the student seating. As a concluding note, there is a reminder not to forget the importance of allowing for light and fresh air before and after screenings (18–20). The authors describe a rather modern way of teaching, so the fact that they had to write this may indicate that this was not typical for most

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vocational training at the time. The repeated emphasis on student activity and teaching as a form of two-way communication could be found in other descriptions of and guides to vocational training at the time (Håkansson 1953). In the chapter on film the tension between limitations of interactivity and “dramatic stimuli” is only briefly mentioned. The discussion on films focuses almost entirely on modes of instructional films, not the practical details. How to screen a film was obviously a skill that the authors did not even have to repeat.

The Theoretical Context The interest in the social, economic, physiological, and psychological consequences of automation has often been regarded as an ideology of engineering or a technocratic and inhuman way of thinking. Even if some psychological research was quite behaviouristic, it does not follow that all thinking about human behaviour lacked other dimensions. This is particularly evident when looking at contemporary discussions on modern management, as well as at some psychological discourses (Richardson and Walker 1948; Beer 1959). Some cybernetic concepts, particularly feedback, were included in the predominant behavioural perspectives on organizational and educational psychology of the time. The most important book was Norbert Wiener’s The Human Use of Human Beings, published in 1950 (and revised in 1954), but translated into Swedish in 1952. The Swedish book title, Materia, maskiner och människor, literally translated as “Matter, Machines, and Humans,” puts less emphasis on use, but also less emphasis on humans. Without making any far-fetched claims based on a book title and its translation, it still anticipated uses of the book to problematize the tension between technology, systems, and human beings. Many years later psychologist Ernest Kramer claimed that cybernetics and general systems theory helped to make “purpose” respectable among psychologists, even among those “psychologists who took pride in their tough-mindedness” (Kramer 1968, 140). If that were correct, it would mean that cybernetics helped to establish “softer” perspectives on the human mind.13 This helps to explain the otherwise contradictory co-presence of interests in cybernetics and human resources. Within both public debate and research, it is possible to discern both a split and a merger between scientific (and theoretical) sophistication 13 Kramer already refers this approach to the work of E. C. Tolman long before systems theory and cybernetics, in a 1925 article (Kramer 1968, 140).

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and interests in human behaviour. One example of this is the prevalent definitions of game theory as “theoretical,” focused on human behaviour, and based in technological advances during World War II, in contrast to the de-humanized and formal, but less mathematically sophisticated, methods of operation research, based on common sense and long-range industrial development. Game theory was introduced as a strategic tool for business behaviour, especially in what was described as “oligopolistic competition,” where mutual consideration is necessary (Thorelli 1954a, 54). Operation research was discussed as a less theoretical and already established method for formulating goals and methods for analysing process results, as well as measuring how a company could best respond to external changes and solve internal problems. An interesting distinction between game theory and operation research is being made: operation research is a one-person game; the opponent’s choice of strategy is not regarded as opposing one’s own (Thorelli 1954a, 55). Operation research is seen as an applied science without considering “tradition, moral, politics, etc,” which are left for policy-making bodies, “common sense in mathematical forms” (56–57). Both included social and psychological factors; it was the latter that was most preoccupied with complex knowledge about human behaviour. On a superficial level most discourses on psychology, sociology, economics, etc. of the time seems to describe and analyse totalities and systems. Expressions like “patterns of behaviour” had become more and more common even in public debate. Interest in large-scale systems required theoretical discussions on the importance of scale, which becomes evident in most sectors of society from changes in local governance and industrial organization to localization issues. The key questions were: How to handle organizations spread over large areas? How to communicate over long distances? And, most importantly, how to organize management in large and spatially scattered organizations? The medialization of contact, or connectiveness, as Stafford Beer described it in April 1958 in a speech on cybernetics and industry at the Royal Swedish Academy of Engineering Sciences (Kungliga Ingen­ jörsvetenskapsakademien),14 was transferred to the field of communication and learning very early on. Although many attempts were made to measure the effects of audiovisual aids, they were, a decade later, summed up as follows: “In general, it has been concluded that graphic-verbal means of 14 Stafford Beer, “Cybernetics and Industry,” unpublished paper delivered in Stockholm on 26 April 1958, at the Royal Swedish Academy of Engineering Sciences, United Steel Companies Limited, 1959, 7, in the National Library of Sweden.

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communication are better than verbal alone, and that in some cases an appropriate film is equivalent to an average teacher” (Smith and Smith 1966, 140). We have to remember, though, that this claim was not based in empirical research, and it was made in a book about cybernetics in learning. If it really is an argument for uses of film in education, it is not self-evident. If “an appropriate film” is equal to “an average teacher,” a good teacher must be even better. A basic presumption here is that, although many contacts seem to happen at random, there was some level of regularity or some kinds of patterns that could be discerned to form a basis for a systematic understanding of the social life of an organization. These aspects of an organization’s social framework described the context of the functions of industrial films quite well. It is not possible to understand the function of instructional film in terms of workplace safety without knowing the functions and chains of contacts involved, for example, in job requirements and systems of sanctions. This is not only a question of context, but of the mechanisms of feedback between the different parts within the system. A consequence of this approach is that industrial films, perhaps more than other communication tools, are more difficult to treat as stand-alone objects.

Accounting Practices and Information Strategies One example of the complicated relationship between different communication tools would be the attempts to visualize flows of capital, as well as communicate values. Interest in relationships between information and capital, for example, required new accounting methods. As in other areas of society, accounting became increasingly inspired by American standards after World War II, replacing two traditions, one German and one British. In practice, the differences at the end of the 1940s and early 1950s seem minor. The American tradition of budget accounting was introduced in Sweden (and other European countries) by way of the so-called “M-chart.” Budget accounting meant that revenues and costs were budgeted for every cost centre, something that, at least in Sweden, was rarely applied during the 1930s. In spite of its German origin, the M-chart became standard practice after the war. In 1948, at a conference on accounting practices, one of the largest Swedish companies, Svenska Cellulosa AB (SCA), a major commissioner of industrial films, explained that it was using the M-chart, which was especially appropriate, since SCA used punch card machines for its bookkeeping. The uses of punch cards and the M-chart made it easier for

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SCA to make a distinction between sectors, like sulphite-pulp factories, sawmills, paper mills, etc., rather than deal with individual companies (Carlsson 2001, 237). As a result, SCA developed a system that was suited to its actual relationship to different groups of shareholders and facilitated communication. When looking at SCA’s communication practices in the 1950s – films, publications, travelling exhibitions (which often included films), etc. – a more sector-oriented perspective is visible, a result of general trends, but also, most likely, of a better overview of the company’s financial situation and better methods of communicating this knowledge. This interest in and understanding of the technological conditions for efficient communication explains to a large degree SCA’s interest in computer technology and new media.15 According to other companies, the major advantage of a combined use of M-chart and bookkeeping machines was flexibility, which was good for a company facing big changes. It was also easy to use by people within the company who did not work with bookkeeping, but who needed to understand business reports (Carlsson 2001, 338). This shows that the connection between accounting practices and information strategies during the mid-1940s had spread even to mid-sized companies. It also indicates that economic information had become available to a larger group of employees, that is, middle and lower management. Finally, it indicates the influence exercised by the Swedish system of work councils for which many of the films were made.

The Perfect Medium for Economic Information With the need and demand in business and in society, particularly due to the many facets of the Folkhemmet (Peoples’ Home) politics of the time as well as the corporate legislation of information, which resulted in the work councils, the market was open for someone to specialize in economic information. Into this situation came Kursverksamheten Vår Ekonomi (Correspondence School Our Economy, KVE). Although the name makes it sound like a non-profit educational organization, KVE was a regular consultancy firm specializing in economic information and adult education. It was a semi-academic endeavour, eager to apply contemporary methods and practices. 15 See, for example, Arbetsgivaren 1955, 21; 1956, 4, 5; 1956, 8, 6; 1956, 18, 3; 1958, 21, 2; 1958, 22, 6.

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KVE was founded in 1947, parallel to the establishment of the work councils, to provide f inancial staff information, but it soon become an information technology institute. During the 1950s, KVE gradually identified a need for research and development work in the field of staff education and other industrial education. This resulted in a formalized connection to the Stockholm University Education Department, which, under the leadership of Professor Arne Trankell, broadened the business to include both industrial and audiovisual pedagogy. From this collaboration, the KVE Institute for Information Technology was founded. By then the board of KVE reflected its status as a key player between the academy and industry since it included both the vice chancellor of Stockholm University and the chairman of SAF. The KVE facilities in Solna, just north of central Stockholm, was designed as a modern laboratory for adult industrial education. It had a photo and drawing studio, an audio studio, a sound slide laboratory, an educational tool exhibition, a training centre, etc., and about 20 employees. Among the many tools it developed was an interview, conference, and sales training aid and a screen-and-lighting arrangement (that, like a one-way mirror, allowed observers to be unseen) to be used for “protected scenario games.”16 The activities of the first years were devoted to promoting conventional methods of adult education. Soon KVE was focusing on creating on-demand, tailor-made or, as KVE called them, “targeted,” information products for businesses. Theoretically, KVE promoted a quite advanced adult education methodology, focusing on activating participants’ skills, knowledge, and active feedback. In a published brochure, KVE marketed its services as educational consultation, production, and distribution of economic business information. In theory, and seemingly in practice, KVE targeted both information activities in and, consequently, for f inancial information within the company, and more general economically driven information. However, as intimate as the economic, psychological, and technical aspects of a business relationship were intertwined, KVE claimed that its methods could be used to acquire forms of business information beyond the purely economic. The principles and working hypotheses of KVE, was, though, not unique. The see-hear-do model was further theorized when the aforementioned Sten Rosell succeeded the co-founder Christian von Sydow as managing director of KVE.

16 “Utvidgat KVE forskar ihop med Högskolan,” Arbetsgivaren, no. 14, 21 August 1959, 4.

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In an article about the inauguration of KVE’s new location in Solna in 1955, von Sydow proudly declared, “the round table is perhaps our most important piece of furniture, while the speaker’s chair is very modest and best suited for turning a quarter turn to a podium discussion.”17 With the move from the 160 m2 facility in central Stockholm to one with 900 m2 in Solna, KVE acquired space for labs and studios and it developed a course centre. The centre was designed with “rationalized pleasantness” in typical 1950s Nordic interior design style, “with an emphasis on sitting and lying well” and with “great space for an imaginative directors’ desire for scene changes.”18 KVE’s most well known, and probably most innovative, productions were the sound slide series of spring and autumn Economic Journals, a series of sound slides about the national economy commissioned by the SAF’s Agency for Work Councils.19 In about 40 drawn and photographed colour images accompanied by a variety of different speakers’ voices, occasionally even comments by the finance minister, the sound slides visualized their view of the current socio-economic situation. Topics covered by these sound slides series were wide ranging (one reviewer even commented on a particular section of an educational nature devoted to the meaning of the concept of “investment”). Gold and dollars in foreign exchange reserves are welcome in all countries, but they must be sufficient to cover imports of seasonal and cyclical fluctuations in foreign trade – that is why you have a foreign exchange reserve. In this way, the speaker of the autumn edition of 1956 described foreign trade and foreign exchange reserves. The issue also included reviews of the economic situation of Sweden, and reports of the current situation in the major manufacturing industries.20

The sound slides were delivered together with a textbook that included discussion questions to facilitate interactions among the members of the work councils in connection with the display. It was possible to purchase audience copies of the textbook. For companies that lacked tape recorders, they could use the textbook for reading while showing the slides, since the booklet included image shifts. 17 “Kursverksamheten Vår Ekonomi i nya lokaler,” Arbetsgivaren, no. 20, 19 November 1955, 6. 18 Ibid. 19 “Passade importbiten i kakformen?,” Arbetsgivaren, no. 5, 10 March 1956, 12. 20 “Ekonomisk höstjournal klar,” Arbetsgivaren, no. 16, 15 September 1956, 1, 12.

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Just as important as the production of the KVE Economic Journals was their dissemination through the PA Council’s operation, PA Distribution. Economic Journals were primarily intended for sale, but starting in spring 1956, aware of the economic constraints facing smaller enterprises, PA Distribution also had a “limited number of copies” of the sound slides available for rent. Since the copies could be borrowed for only two days at a time, it would appear to be impossible for companies far from Stockholm to avail of this service. However, the efficiency of the Swedish postal system made it possible for companies in most parts of the country to manage it. The picture format of the slides was 24 x 36 mm. The soundtracks were recorded on ¼ inch sound tapes running at a speed of 3¾ inches per second (9.5 cm/s), which meant that they would fit most audio tape players on the market at the time. KVE made versions for other formats as well, but relied on the ongoing standardization of sound tape formats. The playing time was approximately 20 minutes. The spring Economic Journal was mainly based on the regular reports prepared by the Industrial Research Institute called The Economic Situation, which were simultaneously published in print, also on behalf of the Agency for Work Councils. KVE also produced other forms of industrial education sound slides. The series Industrial Information, for example, was designed as a “technical journal” with an educational layout. To present information about the ongoing debates over automation, KVE produced a three-part sound slide. It had three separate sections: a general introduction, a section with examples of automated processes in various stages, and a section that addressed automation in practical production. The speaker emphasized that automation was not only becoming ubiquitous, though gradually and in par with economic development, but also part of Swedish industrial, entrepreneurial history: The thermostat falls well in the context of what today’s debate about “automation” is all about – technically, it is a closed, self-regulatory process that can be set to different work results, through control pulses from the outside. Automation has long been in our telephone network, in our lighthouses through the use of Dalén’s sun valve, in today’s airplanes through the autopilot, which takes over large parts of the human pilot’s work in the air. The continuation is a matter of enduring development in interaction between technical and economic resources. Complete automation is not a new idea and it will not come overnight.21 21 “Stillfilm om automatisering,” Arbetsgivaren, no. 10, 19 May 1956, 8.

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Just like with the Economic Journal, this sound slide production was intended for screening in connection with information and education activities in the companies: at promotional courses and conferences, in trade unions, in work councils, etc. Each section took 8 to 9 minutes, with the intention that the screening could be interrupted for discussions between the sections, based on the special discussion questions that had been prepared. In the marketing of the series, KVE suggested that “in principle, every chairman of the meeting can lead the discussion, even if the participation of a specialist could add more to the exchange. The sound slides result in a few questions for discussion about more wide-ranging concepts.”22 The price was higher than for the Economic Journal, to cover the additional costs of “picture and tape or wire.”23

The Foreman All pedagogical use of media technologies involves an aspect of humantechnology interaction. Even though it is unlikely that there was any specific knowledge of Heidegger’s tool analysis among communication, information, and learning specialists in the 1940s and early 1950s, there seems to have been a growing interest in theorizing tools during the post-war years. The ubiquitous uses of the tool concept in relation to uses of media in industry and organizations invite an object-centred, materialistic analysis.24 References to cybernetics and system analysis may be relevant, but may also be misleading. The ubiquitous theoretical presence of cybernetics and system analysis has to be compared with what was actually happening in the companies at the time. I argue that in most cases the development of practices, regulations, and human resources were stronger than cybernetics, operations analysis, and systems analysis.25 The rapidly increasing Swedish

22 Ibid. 23 The fact that the wire format was included may suggest that KVE thought that the audience for technical information had access to older playback technologies than was the case for the audience for economic information. 24 In the larger context, which this text is part of, the object-oriented approach is more present. See Bogost (2012). 25 The theoretical elaboration described in research on the 1950s development of an “expert society” is not wrong, but hardly relevant for the average firm, and thereby not representative for the average worker’s or manager’s everyday experience. For an elaborate analysis of 1950s expert systems, see Hughes and Hughes (2000).

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literature on management psychology during the 1950s is in indication of that (Westerlund 1952; Boalt 1953; Israel 1954; Lundquist 1957a). With the expansion of human resources, industry debates during the 1950s also included concern for the symbolic dimensions of humanity, and the inseparability of concepts, language, and subjectivity from the world of bodies, machines, and other objects. As the contemporary American anthropologist Leslie A. White wrote in The Science of Culture in 1949: “It was the introduction of symbols, word-formed symbols, into the tool process that transformed anthropoid tool-behavior into human tool-behavior” (White 1949, 45; emphasis in the original). Seen in this way, using media as a tool for learning constitutes a form of industrial or organizational learning culture analogous to White’s tool-based view of human (material) culture: Culture without continuity of experience is, of course, impossible. But what sort of continuity of experience is prerequisite to culture? It is not the continuity which comes from the communication of experience by imitation, for we find this among apes. Clearly, it is continuity on the subjective side rather than on the objective, or overt, that is essential. As we have shown, it is the symbol, particularly in word form, which provides this element of continuity in the tool-experience of man. And, finally, it is the factor of continuity in man’s tool-experience that has made accumulation and progress, in short a material culture, possible. (White 1949, 48)

Many uses of audiovisual media seem to sustain a pedagogical view based on imitation and simulation. The emphasis on visual imagery and spoken words explaining the images and the events represented in the images thus contain a residual world view of Taylorism and Fordism. Seen in this way, the blue- or white-collar worker is just a cog inside the factory or office machinery. The worker consequently becomes less human. Tools for contact thus become vehicles for interaction within the corporate hierarchy. In a 1957 “sociological study of the importance of the work situation and personal qualities for foreman performance” by Agne Lundquist (for the PA Council), the issue of contact was one of many variables. One distinguishing factor was contacts with superiors. Foremen with frequent contacts with superiors were more oriented towards workers’ interests (Lundquist 1957b, 49), but only if the foreman was already worker oriented. The popularity (and effectiveness) of foremen who were not worker oriented was not improved by increasing contact with superiors (68). That is, a weak leader is not strengthened by increased contacts upwards, whereas a strong leader only enhances their strength by upward contacts. This means, in

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my opinion, that Lundquist’s research regards contacts downwards as more determining of the output than contacts upwards. When it comes to contacts with the working group, the results are more complex. Lundquist finds four different correlations: 1. Less worker-oriented foremen in small teams are less liked by the worker than less worker-oriented foremen in large teams. 2. Strongly worker-oriented foremen in small teams are more liked by workers than strongly worker-oriented foremen in large teams. 3. Strongly worker-oriented foremen in small teams are more liked than less worker-oriented foremen in small teams. 4. Strongly worker-oriented foremen in large teams are less liked than lesser worker-oriented foremen in large teams. Here, size of team has overruled worker orientation. One explanation, according to Lundquist, is that worker-oriented foremen tend to give certain workers in large teams preferential treatment (Lundquist 1957b, 75). Interesting here is that an increase in worker orientation makes the foreman more popular, regardless of the frequency of contacts between foreman and workers (76). Another result was that foremen with some leadership education were less popular (84). Foremen with many contacts with their superiors had less worker absence in the groups. Smaller teams had higher worker absence, despite a higher contact between foreman and workers. This result surprised Lundquist. His explanation was that in smaller teams the foreman’s “detailed surveillance” may be more pronounced, which results in higher absence (94–95). Consequently, the cliché of the shouting foreman opened up for social interaction between workers. With the presence of tools for contact, workplace media such as bulletin boards and unofficial discussions around water coolers increased. If combined with possibilities for non-verbal suggestions for improvement, written on paper and put in a box, worker initiative could increase, but were dependent upon the openness of the management (above the shouting foreman). If managers, foremen, and workers, together or separately, from such an organization were to meet at a conference, uses of top-down media as films would result in different processes than interactive events like role-playing or group work.26 Increased interactivity would compensate for the mediated everyday communication and films would just strengthen the formal 26 Compare with discussion in Kibbee et al. (1961).

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hierarchy of the organization. From a cybernetic perspective, a functioning feedback system could compensate for the one-directional communication of films, but would, given the size of such organizations, still depend on a more interactive medium, such as role-play or flannelgraph-based discussion. Modern foremen in small teams became less dependent upon onedirectional (if complemented by feedback systems) tools for contact, but if films were used, those may become manipulative, given the increased presence of the foreman. However, more interactive media like bulletin boards, discussions with slides or flannelgraphs, with or without simulations or role-play could, given a low degree of surveillance, enable the kind of open, creative, and democratic model most human resource theories prescribed. These different attitudes towards different media can perhaps be explained by way of the different level of public culture within different organizations. In general, questions regarding feedback concerning organizational development are rare. Interactivity in the form of mechanical incentive systems were of course frequently discussed in relation to work processes, but rarely in relation to seminars, conferences, or courses. Given the contemporary huge interest in cybernetics and systems theory, its relative absence within organizational development is also surprising. There seem to be little evidence that cybernetics and systems theory were actually used outside very limited specialized contexts (as in military development). Cybernetics and systems may rather be seen as metaphors for an urge to manage companies in a more organized or scientific way; not scientific in a Tayloristic sense, but a gradual move towards social sciences without leaving natural sciences and technology behind. To do that they needed a vocabulary. That is how psychology and social sciences entered into the discourse, and how the need to hold on to technological concepts, if even superficially, became so important for a new vocabulary for industry.

The Political Context The middle-class men in their “grey flannel suits” (Packard 1957) whose inner desires were mapped and exploited by the “deep method” of motivational research were perhaps as much “programmed” by the production process itself, as expressed through the technologies of the industrial public sphere of production of Hollywood and Park Avenue, contrary to what the culture industry model prescribed. Organizational role-play thus created another mode of interaction, focused on rational learning rather than their (house) wives’ interaction through (ir)rational consumption. Thus, the everyday

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manifestation of cybernetics’ feedback model becomes more direct and mechanical in women’s mass mediated shopping than in men’s industrially mediated learning and training. Real organizational learning, and thus a persuasive socializing force, emerged by way of interactive media in the form of slides, posters, and roleplay. The potential playfulness of the flannelgraph later manifested through its missionary and kindergarten uses, and it could have become a most efficient tool for creating contact. Flannelgraphs may be explained by the potential for resistance and alternative interpretations; not by its content, but by the technological foundation of prefabricated parts open for unlimited interaction. That openness for interaction and play was not what the management of the 1950s Western capitalist industry wanted to promote. However, it resonates well with the increased popularity of modular plastic toys (Lego) or prefabricated architecture and prefabricated furniture parts (IKEA). If so, there is a potential conflict between interactivity and mass appeal. Did the flannelgraph become too dangerous, or just too obscure? What is in between?

Conclusion In Sweden, the work council system encouraged companies not only to simplify accounting and financial information, but also to create a new, “total” system for company information. Industrial films could be used for this purpose, and were used, as an efficient tool for making contact. The key challenge was the development of transparent flows of information and money. This resulted in an increased interest in pedagogy, advertising, and public relations with methods that increased transparency, or at least gave the appearance of transparency. The latter was the case because the aspects being made transparent were often not otherwise visible; therefore, making them visible was necessary. This was not a tendency to reveal matters previously hidden, but to visualize abstract processes needed for a better understanding of the new economy. Förberg’s view of film as a tool for contact, and Rosell’s theory of the interactivity of sound slides, as well as the visualization of economic information for the work councils, put an emphasis on the importance of education and pedagogy in business communication. Contact has thus developed into efficient interactive promotion. Since the interactivity involved both people and (non-broadcast) media, contact-creating tools had to be where people were living and working. Consequently, we have to go on the road again.

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References Films Vid sidan av jobbet (Asea, n.d.).

Archival Collections Archive of the Swedish Employers’ Confederation (Svenska Arbetsgivareföreningen, SAF). Centre for Business History, Stockholm, Sweden [documents, minutes, reports, letters, memos, leaflets, and brochures] Lauritzen, Bertil, and Gustaf Croneborg.1953. Bildband och film i yrkesundervisningen. : Kungl. Överstyrelsen för yrkesutbildning och Arbetsmarknadens yrkesråd.

The National Library of Sweden [audiovisual material, reports, leaflets, and brochures] Beer, Stafford. “Cybernetics and Industry.” Unpublished paper delivered in Stockholm on 26 April 1958 at the Royal Swedish Academy of Engineering Sciences. The United Steel Companies Limited, 1959.

Periodicals Arbetsgivaren No. 12, 20, 21 (1955); nos. 4, 5, 8, 10, 16, 18 (1956); nos.16, 21 (1957); nos. 21, 22 (1958); no. 14 (1959). Fönstret: ABF:s tidning No. 3 (1954).

References Ackland, Charles R., and Haidee Wasson, eds. 2011. Useful Cinema. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Audiovisuella sällskapet. 1960. Att se och att lyssna: ljud och bild i undervisningen: studiekurs för nordiska lärare på alla skolstadier, anordnad av föreningen Norden i samverkan med Modersmålsmålslärarnas förening och Audiovisuella sällskapet med stöd av Skolöverstyrelsen: Bohusgården 7-13 augusti 1960. Stockholm: Audiovisuella sällskapet.

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Beer, Stafford. 1959. Cybernetics and Management. London: English Universities Press. Björkin, Mats. 1999. “Industrial Greta: Some Thoughts on an Industrial Film.” In Nordic Explorations: Film before 1930, edited by John Fullerton and Jan Olsson, 263–268. London: John Libbey. Boalt, Gunnar. 1953. Arbetsgruppen. Stockholm: Tiden. Bogost, Ian. 2012. Alien Phenomenology, or What It’s Like to Be a Thing. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Carlsson, Leif. 2001. Framväxten av intern redovisning i Sverige 1900–1945. PhD dissertation, Uppsala University. Förberg, Einar. 1946. Att sälja med film. Stockholm: Förlags AB Affärsekonomi. Hoffman, Hazel Ward. 1956. “The Map Comes Alive.” Journal of Geography 55, no. 2, 77–80. Gipson, Henry Clay. 1947. Films in Business and Industry. New York and London: McGraw-Hill. Håkansson, Nils. 1953. Bild och ljud i undervisningen: Handbok om audio-visuella hjälpmedel. Stockholm: Natur och kultur. Israel, Joachim. 1954. Gruppdynamik och ledarskap. Stockholm: SNS Förlag. Kibbee, Joel M., Clifford J. Craft, and Burt Nanus. 1961. Management Games: A New Technique for Executive Development. New York: Reinhold. Kramer, Ernest. 1968. “Man’s Behavior Patterns.” In Positive Feedback: A General Systems Approach to Positive/Negative Feedback and Mutual Causality, edited by John H. Milsum, 139–146. Oxford: Pergamon Press. Lauritzen, Bertil, and Gustaf Croneborg.1953. Bildband och film i yrkesundervisningen. Stockholm: Kungl. Överstyrelsen för yrkesutbildning och Arbetsmarknadens yrkesråd. Lundquist, Agne. 1957a. Anpassning i arbetet: sociologisk studie av sambandet mellan subjektiva och objektiva kriterier på arbetsanpassning. Stockholm: Personaladministrativa rådets meddelande, 10. Lundquist, Agne. 1957b. Arbetsledare och arbetsgrupp: sociologisk studie av situationens och egenskapernas betydelse för arbetsledarens framgång i arbetet. Stockholm: Personaladministrativa rådets meddelande, 9. Masson, Eef. 2012. Watch and Learn: Rhetorical Devices in Classroom Films after 1940. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. Packard, Vance. 1957. The Hidden Persuaders. New York: David McKay Company. Platt, James. 1959. “Audio Visual Aids in Management Training.” Industrial Film and Photography 3, no. 5, 216.

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Rau, Eric P. 2000. “The Adoption of Operations Research in the United States during World War II.” In Systems, Experts, and Computers: The Systems Approach in Management and Engineering, World War Il and After, edited by Agatha C. Hughes and Thomas P. Hughes, 57–92. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Richardson, F. L. W., and Charles R. Walker. 1948. Human Relations in an Expanding Company: A Study of the Manufacturing Departments in the Endicott Plant of the International Business Machines Corporation. New Haven: Labor and Management Center, Yale University. Rosell, Sten. 1957. Återkopplad pedagogik. Solna: KVE förlag. Shannon, Claude E., and Warren Weaver. 1949. The Mathematical Theory of Communication. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press. Simon, Herbert A. 1947. Organizational Behavior. New York: Macmillan. Smith, Karl U., and Margaret Foltz Smith. 1966. Cybernetic Principles of Learning and Educational Design. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston. Spigel, Lynn. 1992. Make Room for TV: Television and the Family Ideal in Postwar America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Thorelli, Hans B., ed. 1954a. Automation. Ny teknik – nya perspektiv i ekonomi och arbetsliv. Del I. De tekniska utsikterna. Stockholm: SNS Studier och Debatt. Thorelli, Hans B., ed. 1954b. Automation. Ny teknik – nya perspektiv i ekonomi och arbetsliv. Del II. De ekonomiska och sociala framtidsutsikterna. Stockholm: SNS Studier och Debatt. Wasson, Haidee, and Charles R. Ackland. 2011. “Introduction: Utility and Cinema.” In Useful Cinema, edited by Charles R. Ackland and Haidee Wasson, 1–14. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Westerlund, Gunnar. 1952. Behavior in a Work Situation with Functional Supervision and with Group Leaders. Stockholm: Nordisk Rotogravyr. White, Leslie A. 1949. The Science of Culture: A Study of Man and Civilization. New York: Grove Press. Wiener, Norbert. 1950. The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Wiener, Norbert. 1952. Materia, maskiner, människor: cybernetiken och samhället. Translated by Edvin Thall. Stockholm: Forum.

3.

Meetings for Trading Ideas and Goods, New and Old Abstract Chapter 3 grounds in the two contextual chapters and the theoretical intermission through a discussion of how the industrial public sphere evolved though spatial contact, through the use of public relations, industry conferences, courses, and exhibitions. The development triad was challenged by both individual entrepreneurs and controversial state activities, which disrupted harmony by increasing the level and treatment of risks: political, economic, and environmental. Keywords: meetings, conferences, exhibitions, industrial public sphere, productivity

A memo from an executive at SAF from 1948 describes the plan for a school aimed at educating management personnel in small- and mid-sized enterprises in everything from laws and regulations, to industrial policy and policy-making.1 The school soon started in an old castle, Yxtaholm, south-west of Stockholm. It was a response to similar schools run by the trade unions, as well as the social democratic and conservative parties. The main purpose, though, was clear: to counteract contemporary political (social democratic) tendencies to restrain private enterprises and the perceived threats to their existence (Westerberg 2020). Ten years later, at a speech at the Näringslivets Upplysningsverksamhet (Business and Industry Information Bureau) conference at Yxtaholm, one of the key f igures in SAF’s policy-making activities, Folke Haldén, described how the political discourse had become increasingly hostile to private enterprises. Haldén maps a public discourse not aware, or accepting, enough regarding where the public money came from: taxation of companies 1

Chr/Dt, P.M 13.3.1948, SAF’s archive, Centrum för Näringslivshistoria.

Björkin, M., Post-war Industrial Media Culture in Sweden, 1945–1960: New Faces, New Values. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2022 doi 10.5117/9789462984929_ch03

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28. Photo of Yxtaholm from course brochure. © Svenskt Näringsliv.

and people. He criticized the emphasis on class, by arguing that the rapid economic progress of Swedish society meant that the situation for the working class was now so different from before the war, that the old political analysis had become obsolete. The growing middle class, then, must be ideologically moved away from the social democratic hegemony (that had been in government since 1932) towards more business-friendly thinking. He ended with some advice for future communication: “We are judge by what we do [so we need to embrace] active information, transparency, optimism, and the use of a language suitable with whom you are talking.”2 The industrial organizations obviously had a political agenda. If we use the term “industrial (or production) public sphere,” the strategies for its development had to involve the organizations, the networks, the schools, 2 Folke Haldén, “Den politiska opinionen och vägar att påverka den,” manuscript of a speech, no date, SAF’s archive, Centrum för Näringslivshistoria.

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29. “Employers’ Associations’s Educational Activities Topic of Yxtaholm Conference,” Mr. Folke Haldén presenting the organisation of the Employer’s Association’s Public Relation Organisation at Yxtaholm, from Arbetsgivaren. © Svenskt Näringsliv.

and the courses in order to prepare for broader public relations work. It was not enough that a small group of men at the headquarters in Stockholm promoted the interests of Swedish industry. The work had to be done by everyone in the corporate world. Therefore, they needed to reach out, to get in contact with people.

Industrial Novelties at the Beach In May 1954, the Swedish Center for Business and Policy Studies (Stu­ dieförbundet Näringsliv och Samhälle, SNS), founded in 1948 to promote interdisciplinary research in business, economics, and society, hosted a conference for managers in Swedish industries under the title “Business and Industry Plan for the Future” at the summer resort of Tylösand (in southwestern Sweden). The conference focused on automation, atomic energy, game theory, operation research, cybernetics, and the social, economic, physiological, and psychological consequences of automation (Thorelli 1954a

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30. Aerial photo of Hotel Tylösand, 1950s. Photo: Hallands konstmuseum.

and 1954b). Automation in production was already well established and had for decades proved to be important for the development of Swedish industry and a key component in the economic progress of Swedish society after the war. A definition of automation frequently used in Swedish industry and science at the time, though presented at a different context, was formulated by the president of the Royal Swedish Academy of Engineering Sciences, Edy Velander: Automation is defined as advanced application of integrated automatic appliances within production, in the broadest notion of the term. This includes process control within chemistry, repetition and material tests within mechanical industries, computing in offices. It uses instruments, regulators, servomechanisms, calculating machines, etc. Important applications include running of coded programs in a machine memory, automated assessments, adjustments, sorting, and dosage. It relieves the workforce of physical effort, repeated movements, and constant monitoring. It increases productivity through increased speed and improved precision and reduces the demand for human workload. But it demands increased investments, more education and training, more eff icient selection of personnel. It is sensitive to disturbances and it limits the freedom of the constructor at the same time as it creates completely new opportunities, which, to be used optimally, demands new constructions, reorganizations of production, and meticulous development of the market.3 3 “Märklig konferens om framtiden men ej risk för science f iction,” Arbetsgivaren, no. 10, 15 May 1954, 1, 8.

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Atomic energy was new and in political discourses highly controversial due to Cold War politics. 4 These broad topics were frequently discussed within Swedish industry as well as in public debate. Even in the journal of an association for rural women, Budkavle, a UN conference on the “peaceful use” of atomic energy was discussed in 1955, a book about atomic energy was reviewed in 1956, and automation and atomic energy were addressed in 1957. What makes the Tylösand conference interesting is the way it embedded new ideas in technology and business within broader discourses on the role of economic, social, and cultural progress in 1950s Sweden. The conference also indicates a wish for an increased geographical distribution of new ideas and new methods, as well as of people, within industry. The theoretical background for the conference was two publications, frequently discussed in Sweden at the time. In 1952, Norbert Wiener’s Cybernetics was translated into Swedish, which seem to have resulted in a new discussion on communication and signals. In a discussion on cybernetics at Tylösand, a distinction was made between transmission of energy and transmission of signals (or signals as energy within a structure). Power plants, power transmission lines, trains, boats, aeroplanes, and nuclear bombs were mentioned as examples of transmission or transformation of matter and energy, or “power engineering” (English in the original). Radio, telephony, photography, film, television, and “mathematical machines” (that is, computers) represented transmission, or transformations, of signals, “communication engineering” (English in the original) or “informationsteknik” (literally: information technology).5 At Tylösand, “contact” was a concept that became theorized from many perspectives, as were the concepts of “scale” and “feedback.” The issue of scale concerned questions like: How big the production of a series was required to be in order for automation to be successful? and Was it possible 4 Review of a book about how to survive a nuclear war, Att överleva atomkriget – ett problem för oss alla (Riksförbundet för Sveriges Försvar), “Viktigt om atomer,” Budkavle, no. 11, November 1956, 11; “Atomenergin i fredens tjänst,” Budkavle, no. 6, 1955, 4. Two years later automation and atomic energy were discussed positively, “Rädslan för maskinerna,” Budkavle, no. 7, 1957, 2. 5 For an interesting British comparison, see, for example, Agar (2003). In 1949, two studies in Swedish had already been published on the principles and functions of computers (siffermaskiner, literally translated “number machines,” that is, calculator and punch card machines): Fröberg and Kjellberg (1949) and Boivie (1949). Carl-Erik Fröberg and Göran Kjellberg spent one year, 1947–1948, in the US with a stipend from the Royal Swedish Academy of Engineering Sciences to study mathematical machines, Fröberg at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, studying John von Neumann’s work, and Kjellberg with Prof. H. H. Aiken at Harvard. Both were later at the Swedish Board for Computing Machinery (Matematikmaskinnämnden), a government agency responsible for the development and uses of computer technology.

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for small markets (like that found in Sweden) to afford automation? Some argued that the scale of production was important, others that the scale of information and knowledge was more important – that is, that financing, research, and patent strategies were more important than the number of units produced. At the conference, but perhaps not in everyday industrial practice, the latter understanding seems to have been most important. The Tylösand conference was perhaps the first time that ideas about information theory and information technologies were discussed in Sweden, outside scientific or technological research groups. In the many different management, education, and organization conferences that would follow in the coming five or six years, these issues were usually the implied preconditions. The basis for any analysis of the problems and methods on how to develop Swedish industry was: (1) the question of the diffusion and transformation of knowledge, information, and communication, and (2) the question of financing. In other words, the question was: How does information work in an economic system governed by an increased demand for rationalization and a growing public sector trying to control information as well as financial resources? Another aspect of media and communication at the time was an increased interest in corporate archiving. Here we find another selection of companies involved. A course for industrial archivists was arranged by the Federation of Swedish Industries (Industriförbundet), in collaboration with the Swedish Archive Union (Svenska Arkivsamfundet) and the Technical Literature Society’s Archive Section (Tekniska litteratursällskapets arkivnämnd) in November 1954 in Saltsjöbaden (the site of the 1938 agreement between employers and trade unions) on disposal and storage, (micro)filming, etc. The course also included study visits and exhibitions of archive literature and technical aids.6 In 1962 Dirk J. Bakker and Olle MacDonald, both with long experience in the PA Council, published an article about education and conferences with a reference to communication, which more or less summarized the corporate conferences of the 1950s: It is only in recent decades that man, compelled by circumstances, has begun to penetrate the processes of information, which are now summarized under the concept of “Communication.” Psychologists, sociologists, educators, and cyberneticians are slowly searching for a better understanding of the many factors that are part of our way of 6 “Industriarkivarier på Saltsjöbadskurs,” Arbetsgivaren, no. 17, 25 September 1954, 4.

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experiencing the world, of communicating our experiences, knowledge, etc., in relation to others, and to influence others in a desirable direction. (Bakker and MacDonald 1962, 103)

The Model Conference As we have seen, although the diversity of the diligent information and education campaign on the use of audiovisual aids, film remained a main focus for industry – but films required meetings, exhibitions, and festivals. Following the Harrogate Industrial Film Festival in the UK, the PA Council arranged three industrial film days in December 1958 to display the usefulness of using film in industry. The rationale was that fierce competition in the export markets required new means of communication, for both educational and marketing purposes. The event was organized in collaboration with the major business and industry organizations in Sweden.7 Around 20 films and some sound slides from Sweden and abroad were screened, accompanied by written and spoken commentaries, panels gathering people from different parts of the production chain as well as users discussing the advantages of using film in comparison to other media. As often happened, by referring to the US and the planned common European market, the organizers wanted to present issues that they thought would be important in Sweden, in this case the use of film to create goodwill and market expansion. The starting point was general informational films about a company’s production and a company’s role in society, like Operation Ice. However, much more than just films was presented. At the end of March 1957, the PA Council organized a conference on the use of image and audio tools in corporate information and education activities in Stockholm. The event was organized in cooperation with the European Productivity Agency (EPA) in Paris. The conference was aimed at “business leaders, managers, instructors, and other people with special focus on cooperation and information issues.”8 7 Royal Swedish Academy of Engineering Sciences, the European Productivity Board, the Swedish Employers’ Confederation, the Swedish Banking Association, the Swedish Sales and Advertising Association, Sweden’s General Export Association, the Swedish Film Producers’ Association, Short Film Section, Sweden’s Wholesale Association, the Federation of Swedish Industries, and the Swedish Merchants’ Association, “Filmfestival för industrin i PA-rådsregi,” Arbetsgivaren, no. 18, 3 November 1958, 18. 8 “PA-rådets konferens i mars bjuder på många attraktioner,” Arbetsgivaren, no. 3, 9 February 1957, 12.

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31. The management team of the PA Council planning the conference. From left Rolf Lahnhagen (the managing director), Dirk Bakker (communications expert also working for the European Productivity Agency), Bengt Magnusson (head of film unit), Verner Helte, and Gunnar Lindwall. © Svenskt Näringsliv.

The conference was heavily promoted in the Swedish corporate communication community not only as a major event, but also as a summing up of what was known as good practice in, and new technology for, corporate communication at the time. The conference seem to have been successful, but is even more interesting as an “ideal” representation of useful media practices and technologies. The basic theme of the conference was to illustrate the most modern technical possibilities to facilitate internal information and communication activities of companies, such as “movies, still films and slide shows, and displaying the use of flannel material as well as industrial television.”9 The three-day conference featured a 250 m2 exhibition area for media technologies that included a selection of projectors, as well as screens made of new materials, magnetic and plastic boards, sound recorders, a new type of magnetic film, and writing materials. The conference also featured film screenings and study visits to film studios and to the KVE Institute for Information Technology. The conference was not only about new modes of communication and about how to achieve better contact by using communication technologies; it was also supposed to itself be an example of new modes of conference practices that could be used to increase and improve contact. A key 9

Ibid., 1.

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32. “The PA Council Conference Underline the Importance of Film,” article about the PA Council Conference, from Arbetsgivaren 1957. © Svenskt Näringsliv.

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promotional argument was the use of radio technology to create contact between conference management and conference participants during working groups and the use of clickers to get different kind of responses. In order to encourage contact between participants, the conference was promoted as an event without traditional lectures. This “ideal” conference also had a pedagogical agenda, or ideology, behind it. Everything discussed was supposed to be based on real cases. Even if many of the tools and methods had a research origin or at least had been tested scientifically, the main feature of the conference was the appearance of consultants from the PA Council and business and industry practitioners in plenary and group discussions highlighting contact issues within companies. They primarily talked about work councils and other collaborative bodies, but also the regular topics of workplace contact, internal education, etc.10 The conference was held at the Hotell Malmen in Stockholm on 26–28 March 1957 and attracted 225 participants.11 The major conference room was not a regular auditorium with the audience sitting in rows facing the speakers. When the participants arrived, they were asked to gather around tables. This more or less random placement of participants created twelve groups, which then became used during the conference. Initially, the participants seemed to have been a bit surprised to find themselves having to engage in what many regarded as too elementary, obvious, or even superfluous conversations. The idea, though, was to create a common ground for discussions among the attendees by making the seemingly ordinary into something unusual.12 It is probably too much to call what probably was an underestimation of the participants’ knowledge a verfremdungseffekt (literally “alienation effect,” essentially a method for provoking critical reflection by encouraging participants to question the things they assume are commonplace or ordinary), but after a few years of activity, the PA Council was eager to promote a new set of assumptions and practices. A more probable explanation is that the structure of the interactions at the conference were influenced by contemporary marketing principles of simplicity and repetition. The participants at the conference discussed many different aspects of instructional and educational films. The main examples were not Swedish, 10 Ibid., 12. 11 “PA-rådskonferensen underströk f ilmens pedagogiska betydelse,” Arbetsgivaren, no. 7, 6 April 1957, 7. 12 Ibid.

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but came from the English company ICI and the British Iron and Steel Association. The films ranged from straightforward and inexpensive to complex and big-budget productions. Keeping in mind that the conference as well as the PA Council, in general, was largely aimed at small- and mid-sized companies, it was clear that the most well-known industrial films were too expensive for most companies. This comment relating to cost efficiency was taken from the part of the conference report containing an account of a study visit to the Navy schools at Berga, south of Stockholm, begins to make clear what contact was about: The cost to a company arranging to film a process for later discussion without disturbing the environment, [making] noise, etc., and also being able to do that at the desired pace is low compared to the value such an opportunity must have for [industrial] production. This is a completely artless but useful “film production.”13

Although Cold War rhetoric was constantly present in Swedish industry discourse, it is striking how military uses of media constituted an almost entirely separate field. The military industrial complex, in “neutral” Sweden, followed its own rules.14 However, companies like Scania and Vattenfall, as providers of national infrastructure, certainly became indirectly involved in national defence discourses, but from a “civilian” perspective. The last day of the conference intensified the focus on technical equipment. The PA Council Film Service presented an industry-based newsreel designed to disseminate what was being done by industry and its organizations to create well-being and good working habits in its employees. On this day of the conference, SAF’s managing director, Bertil Kugelberg, also spoke about the importance of information and good contacts both within companies and in society. In his speech he summed up most aspects of the new industrial public sphere. He pointed out how the previously often hostile relationship between employers and workers had changed significantly, thus celebrating the importance of the Saltsjöbaden agreement between employers and trade unions of 1938. He said that there had been improvements not only in the way different views and purposes were communicated in industry, but that this was also the case regarding personal contacts and people’s understanding of each other’s ways of thinking and speaking. He argued that continuous contact could smooth out differences 13 Ibid. 14 Compare with Grieveson and Wasson (2018).

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in both opinions and interests. In order to achieve this, however, information was not enough – the ability to listen to each other was equally important. Kugelberg also emphasized the importance of cooperation and pointed to the boost that occurs in a person when they feel appreciated and that they belong to a team: Our technically and economically complicated business life requires cooperation, and if this is to be done well, you must not only know your own task, but also what else happens in other sections. In addition, one must know the others in the team; know how they react in different situations and what they think. However, this teamwork must not be driven by the lack of responsibility. It must be preserved and clearly delimited. The decisions made must rest on in-depth information and on an open and trustful consultation.15

Modern human resources perspectives, discourses on automation and efficiency, and new tools for communication were not easy to combine. This was particularly difficult as meeting technologies gradually merged with technologies of business of administration. At a conference in Tällberg in 1957, the director of KVE, Sten Rosell, explained computing by using his own term, “edebering” (a pun on the Swedish term “elektronisk databehandling” [electronic computing]), in a sound slide production about electronic data processing in collaboration with ASEA. According to the commentator in Arbetsgivaren, the participants are in the position of a kind of intellectual guinea pigs. The reaction was measured by means of a clicker, with approximately one-third of the audience appearing to be a little sceptical of its educational value. The [sound slides] do not leave a response to questions any individual might ask: What will happen to me? What will my job be like? However, this may not be its intention, either.16

We find most of the theoretical background to the PA Council methods in the KVE Institute for Information Technology, but there also some additions. Dirk Bakker and Olle MacDonald, whose views had some impact on designs of conference and adult learning spaces, focused on three important aspects: 15 “PA-rådskonferensen underströk f ilmens pedagogiska betydelse,” Arbetsgivaren, no. 7, 6 April 1957, 7. 16 Lst, “Edebering i Tällberg,” Arbetsgivaren, no. 8, 20 April 1957, 7.

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– Purpose. It was important to find a balance between specialization and flexibility. – Comfort. It must be possible to spend long periods in the rooms. – Proportions/dimensions. They emphasize the problems with long and narrow rooms, particularly the risk of reducing the contacts between teacher and students. There is also, of course, the problem of sight. Added to this was the importance of height, at least 3 to 3.5 m, for enabling projectors. Other important facts were improving acoustics, sound isolation, heating, ventilation, colouring, lighting, and electric contacts. (Bakker and MacDonald 1962, 109) Contact was thus also a spatial, or even an architectural, question. There is certainly a modernist approach reminiscent of the work of, for example, Ray and Charles Eames, or Buckminster Fuller. In this respect the 1950s becomes almost a parenthetical period between the 1930s–1940s and its functionalism and 1960s–1970s with its prefabricated office modules. It was a busy time for conference participants. A prerequisite for this increased corporate networking was the expansion of European and domestic flight routes and the development of more comfortable and faster airplanes. In conjunction with the World Exhibition in Brussels, a European sales conference focusing on market problems in the context of the planned common European market was held on 22–26 June 1958. The congress gathered around 750 specialists from different countries. Among the lecturers were a number of experts on sales and sales management from Europe and North America. From Sweden the bank manager Eric Lindström, of Handelsbanken, was invited. He talked about the company’s external and internal information and contact activities with particular regard to the company’s sales and distribution.17 Certainly, the world exhibitions were important for marketing of larger companies and state authorities, but the development of local exhibitions were most likely more in the minds of smaller enterprises.

Exhibitions on the Road Exhibitions have a long history of being tools for contact, at least ranging back to the world expositions. The increase in the number of exhibition required their organizers to focus on overcoming space constraints and 17 “Svensk PR-specialist till Brysselkonferens,” Arbetsgivaren, no. 9, 25 April 1958, 6.

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promoting mobility; as a result, travelling exhibitions opened up new frontiers in marketing. By the end of the 1950s, many companies as well as the public authorities used buses as sales engines. Again, the concept of contact cost – total cost divided by the number of people reached – was the key argument. The paper and pulp company SCA was among the many that organized touring exhibitions in the north of Sweden.18 In spring 1958 Skånska Ättikfabriken AB, located in Perstorp, a small town in the south of Sweden, started using a bus to promote its different products. The first three-week tour focused on larger communities in south-eastern Sweden.19 The main product on display was perstorpsplatta, a new laminate material used for table surfaces. In the bus, a kitchen with a dining area as well as a complete bathroom featuring perstorpsplatta and other household items were on display. To emphasize the broad range of the company – which had its roots in vinegar production – the bus also displayed different chemical products. It is interesting to note that, as with the housewives’ films, domestic products were often combined with industrial products, which emphasized the scientification and technologization of domestic design and development. To put contact (that is, interactivity) ahead of one-way information, the bus, which was accompanied by two “demonstrators,” was equipped with a do-it-yourself workshop where people could learn how to modernize an old table with perstorpsplatta. In contrast to, for example, IKEA, Skånska Ättikfabriken did not promote the idea that people should throw away old furniture and replace it with new pieces. It would not have been a sales bus from the 1950s if it had not been equipped with a film-screening system. A screen mounted in one of the windows and a projector within the bus made it possible to show films to an audience outside the bus, even in daylight. The bus also featured products from other companies that made related items, such as hobby tools, kitchen machinery, and flooring materials. Thus, the bus was able to appear to the public as a consumer information provider rather than just a sales gimmick, just as the housewives’ films had been. According to the company’s own information, the bus was seen to be a success. The contact cost was low, it reached many people (around 100,000), and sales increased.

18 “Expo i norr: SCA fann ny form för levande kontakt,” Arbetsgivaren, no. 21, 3 December 1955, 8. 19 “Sälj-skjuts och kontakt med 100.000 via sälj-buss,” Info, no. 1, 1959, 11.

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The bus toured around Sweden, from the far south to the far north, for three summer seasons. The main target was not members of the public but wholesalers and retailers. Each stop had been prepared ahead of time with a massive advertising campaign in the local press, by posters, and by invitation cards to special events. Retailers were even invited to bring selected customers to the closed gatherings. Thus, the organizers of the bus not only activated retailers, as in traditional business-to-business marketing, but the retailers got the chance to increase their own contact with their most important customers. In small towns, this fit well into existing social networks, activating and creating contact between the different actors of the entire sales chain in what was described as a “real-life environment.” For several years, Vattenfall had been conducting information activities on the rational use of electricity, especially in homes and households. For this purpose, it equipped an exhibition bus, which visited rural and smaller communities within Vattenfall’s delivery areas from Lapland in the north to Småland in the south. The tour usually started in May and ran until the end of October each year. The bus, of course, primarily found its audience among housewives, and Vattenfall estimated the number of visitors to the bus to be about 50,000 per season. The limited space in the bus meant that only a small selection of the many electrical aids available at the market could be on display. Still, there were some 40 items, including a stove, a water heater, a dishwasher, a refrigerator, a freezer, two washing machines, ironing machines, four different types of irons, toasters, dip heaters, heating elements, boilers, and table fittings. The tour team consisted of a driver, who also served as a demonstrator, a (female) consultant, who often was a rural household teacher, and an engineer. The consultant arranged a demonstration of the electrical appliances and gave lectures on electrical concepts and electrical safety. These demonstrations were attended by 50 to 350 people, depending on the size of the site.20 The exhibition bus created a level of contact that f ilms never could achieve. Films instead became inscribed in a media system based on modelling and interactivity. In other words, they were seen as a kind of live-action social sales game. Companies also designed spectacular viewing environments, such as the cinema located a hundred metres below ground at the Höganäs mine. 21 Another mode of exhibition was the company 20 Ivan Christofersson, “Elbussen har kört 700 mil,” Vi i Vattenfall 4, nos. 5–6, 1951, 20. 21 “Djupfilm i Höganäs,” Arbetsgivaren, no. 9, 7 May 1955, 10.

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33. “The Electricity Buss has Travelled 7000 kilometres,” article on the Vattenfall electricity promotion and exhibition bus, from Vi i Vattenfall 1951. © AB Vattenfall.

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showroom, which was designed to display products or explain manufacturing processes to customers and other visitors. Again, the larger companies took the lead.22

Corporate Communication as Attraction The 1950s was a time not only of low employment levels, but of a serious lack of industrial workers. Many corporate communication measures therefore involved how to successfully recruit foreign workers (primarily from Finland, Italy, Germany, and Yugoslavia) to Sweden, how to get Swedish teenagers interested in working in industry, and how companies could promote their own schools.23 In Strömsnäsbruk, an old industrial municipality in south Småland, the 20 or so associations and organizations within the municipality collaborated with local industry to organize a joint youth activities event in late August 1955. The company CEO, Sten Rasch, spoke at a special industry day on “work and human dignity.” There were also plenary discussions between representatives of industrial unions and local youth. The local industry, Strömsnäs Bruk, organized tours of its premises so that area residents could see what was actually going on there. There was also a family day, a day for sobriety organizations, a day for sports organizations, a day for independent churches, a day for study organizations, a day for iron workers, and a municipality day. Each association involved had their own exhibition. The hobby club built a miniature railway and displayed its members’ model aircraft and stamp collections. The Swedish Women’s Voluntary Defence Service set up a working field kitchen. The children’s traffic school instructed children how to behave around moving vehicles. Other events for children included them building their own playhouse. So, what about moving images? Television programmes were screened, a nonstop movie show for viewing local movies was put on, and the film bus of the national campaign for “responsibility and sobriety” that screened informational films against alcohol consumption was open for visitors.24

22 Å., “Bra företagsnämndsinitiativ: rationaliseringsexpo på jobbet,” Arbetsgivaren, no. 12, 12 June 1954, 1, 8. 23 “Scania-Vabis inviger ny yrkesskola, rekryterar aktivt över hela landet,” Arbetsgivaren, no. 22, 28 November 1958, 1, 8. 24 “Bra initiativ i Strömsnäsbruk: Hela samhället med i propaganda för aktivare ungdomsverksamhet,” Arbetsgivaren, no. 14, 27 August 1955, 4. Ansvar och nykterhet’s most well-known film was Gösta Werner’s short film Att döda ett barn (1953).

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34. Volvo’s modern design concept “plastic” car, Sport (P1900) at Hamnplan, Örebro, 1955. Photo: Örebro Kuriren / Örebro läns museum.

At a time of change and social development, such a range of public relations activities served as good marketing tools for companies. Decades later hosting such activities would be called engaging in corporate social responsibility. The strong and willing involvement of public authorities and the democratic infrastructure also influenced public governance and thus became an example of the development triad. In this way all three actors within the triad collaborated to lower their contact costs. In 1959 two of the most well-known modern Swedish companies, car manufacturer Volvo and off ice equipment manufacturer Åtvidaberg, provided chairs and typewriters to a major export exhibition. Gothenburgbased Volvo had become a strong competitor in the Swedish car market and Åtvidaberg was a very strong competitor with IBM in the Swedish market. Selling cars with the help of typewriters may be seen, on the one hand, as a method of connecting modern products and, on the other hand, as a way to connect companies with an international reputation.25 It also indicates Swedish companies’ engagement in collaborating, particularly when aiming at international markets.

25 “Föredömlig Volvogiv på exportexpo,” Info, no. 10, December 1959, 19.

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35. Facit electric typewriter, designed by Sigvard Bernadotte, 1957. Photo: unknown /Tekniska museet.

Office Efficiency Åtvidaberg was an old metal works that during early and mid-twentieth century achieved international success with its Facit typewriters and office calculators. Function and style were two important components in their sales success. Function, however, was unfortunately combined with an inability to adapt to computerization, and Åtvidaberg’s style could in the end not compete with that of other typewriter manufacturers (for example, with Olivetti, which caused the downfall of Åtvidaberg in the 1960s and 1970s). Nevertheless, in 1957 Åtvidaberg’s new calculator, designed by acclaimed Swedish industrial designer Sigvard Bernadotte, was praised at a Swedish design promotion event at Helmhaus in Zürich.26 Most of the 1957 conversations about office equipment, though, dealt with other technologies. The major site for new communication technologies was the annual Office exposition, arranged by the Swedish Association of Graduates in Business Administration and Economics. The 1957 exposition focused on automation. It was a large exhibition held at the Marble Halls, a modern exhibition venue in central Stockholm. In addition, an office technology course was put on at the same time in the form of a lecture series delivered in a cinema, in this case the Astoria, one of Stockholm’s best. The exhibition had two purposes. First, it was designed to display new technologies and practices; second, it aimed to be a test area, or play area, for those attending the course. The course introduced new practices of office automation, 26 “Formskön kalkylmaskin,” Arbetsgivaren, no. 10, 25 May 1957, 9.

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36. Facit calculator, designed by Sigvard Bernadotte, 1955. Photo: Peter Häll / Tekniska museet.

but also dealt with individuals’ fear of automation. There were deliberate elements of critical human-machine interaction mentioned in the invitation. The course and exhibition were arranged according to the same six functionoriented principles: 1. Writing; 2. Automation using punch tape machines; 3. Duplication and copying; 4. Office communications; 5. Archiving; and 6. Automation using electronic machines. The exhibition attracted around 1,700 people. The companies that sent the most attendees were the two largest communication facilitators in Sweden, Scandinavian Airlines and the Public Service Radio and Television Corporation.27 The number one technical novelty at the exposition was a new computer, the Alwac III-E, brought to the event by Sweden’s most controversial businessperson at the time, Axel Wenner-Gren. By 1956, computer development had been going on for some years. Among the many activities that promoted computing was a series of displays and lectures organized by the Statistical Association’s Study Group for Office Technology. Through his company Autronic AB, Axel Wenner-Gren invited the study group members, as well as experts on accounting problems, to the first Alwac display in Sweden. At the time, it was expected that Alwac would start to be used by Swedish companies the following year, and thus make Sweden the first European country to have access to this data-processing machine. Autronic AB was planning to manufacture it in Sweden as well as to open a school for Alwac repairers. Following the demonstration, discussions took place on new principles and methods used to carry out statistical processing with the help of electronic machines. The lecturer was an expert from the US National 27 “Kontor 57 höstens stora evenemang i automationens tecken,” Arbetsgivaren, no. 16, 15 September 1956, 5.

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37. “Are We Ready for the Office of the Future,” “Machine and Human United at Office 57,” article about Office 57 exposition, from Arbetsgivaren 1957. © Svenskt Näringsliv.

Bureau of Standards, Dr. Samuel N. Alexander. His lecture was sponsored by the Swedish National Data Processing Committee, the Mathematics Machine Board, and the Royal Swedish Academy of Engineering Sciences. To emphasize the constantly present social aspects of corporate events, more than 200 participants were afterwards invited to a dinner under the auspices of the managing director of Autronic AB, Lennart Bruce.28 Another side of the social interaction was present at the exhibition, in the form of number games to illustrate the interactive components of Alwac III-E.29 In 1958 the Off ice exposition moved to larger exhibition hall and showcased even more advanced office machines that required even more complicated courses to handle them. In the 10,000 m 2 hall more than 50 exhibitors showed how office automation was developing faster than ever. More courses were added, one on office calculations, another on office rationalization, one for secretaries, one on local planning and interior design, and a special course for business executives and others who were interested in receiving a review of new technologies without going into the details. The chair of the course council was Carl Johan Lewenhagen, CEO of AB Scania-Vabis. The pedagogical design was carried out by another previously

28 “Svensk Alwac-premiär,” Arbetsgivaren, no. 17, 29 September 1956, 1, 12. 29 “Spel mot robot,” Arbetsgivaren, no. 18, 13 October 1956, 1, 4.

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discussed organization, KVE.30 By the time of the Office exposition in 1959, the technologies seemed to have become too complicated for the regular corporate press commentators: If any criticism is to be directed against the Office 59 exposition, it is that the understandable seems to be in indirect proportion to the performance of the machines. Like the radio dealer who long ago stopped talking about superheterodyne frequency modulation and instead works to sell a good sound, office automation vendors should point out that the inventory can be picked up in a minute, enabling the businessperson to make an immediate decision.31

The Office exhibition in 1959 thus marked the end of the easy-to-understand “filmic” era of industrial communication and initiated a more complex era of business communication. It was also a transition from complicated production processes and straightforward administration, to production and administration intricately linked in gradually more automated systems. However, in order to reach out to potential attendees, without having access to broadcast media, industry needed cinemas and the press. The press for getting attention for the exhibition events, and the cinema for old-fashioned one-way communication.

Modernizing the North The Swedish north, Lapland, was probably the most contested part of Sweden during the 1950s. Mining and hydroelectric power made the area important for the growing welfare society. At the same time, the residual colonial and interwar racist and discriminatory policies against the indigenous Sami people were still present. During the 1950s, Canada became increasingly interesting for Swedish industry. Sweden contributed to British Columbia’s centenary celebration in 1957 an exhibition labelled “The Parallel.” The idea was that a visually elaborate exhibition should illustrate how Lapland had developed into a modern, vibrant, industrial environment during the previous 50 years. “The Parallel” refers to a comparison between what has happened in northern Sweden and what Axel Wenner-Gren planned in 30 “Årets kontorsexpo: Kontorsautomation med världsdebuter,” Arbetsgivaren, no. 11, 23 May 1958, 1, 12. 31 “Det binära,” Arbetsgivaren, no. 18, 3 October 1958, 1.

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38. Axel Wenner-Gren, 1955. Photo: KW Gullers / Nordiska museet.

British Columbia’s most inaccessible area, the Omineca Valley. The exhibition was created by the PA Council Film and Education Service in collaboration with ethnographic experts, engineers, and artists.32 The Wenner-Gren Foundation was at the time investigating the geology and the conditions for large-scale industrial exploitation of the Rocky Mountain area, well known for its harsh climate, poor communications infrastructure, and inaccessibility, as well as for it rich natural resources. The Wenner-Gren British Columbia Development Company was focused on primarily building a monorail (using Wenner-Gren’s monorail company, Alweg) and subsequently constructing power plants and pulp mills. As was often the case with Wenner-Gren projects, it was never realized as planned. Apart from the plans for the exploitation of the Canadian wilderness, the exhibition aimed at presenting an (obviously romanticized) image of the industrialization of northern Sweden – it just happened more slowly and on a signif icantly smaller scale. The PA Council production team, headed by the always present Dirk Bakker, based its work on material and narratives from the major Swedish industrial companies in the north and partly on ethnographic experts. An interesting detail is that Bakker was frequently presented as having previously been employed by the European Productivity Agency’s audiovisual department, probably in order to situate 32 “Industrialiserad lappmark på Kanadaexpo,” Arbetsgivaren, no. 6, 7 March 1958, 1. The word “lappmark” refers today to a derogatory designation of indigenous Sami people.

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his expertise and authority in a European context. Similarly, domestic cultural and academic authority was always used as much as possible. The production included Dr. Ernst Manker of the Nordic Museum, known for his ethnographic work on the Sami people, and Dr. Hans Beskow of the Regional Archives in Luleå (the capital of the northernmost county of Sweden). The photographers and graphic artists (such as Lars Bramberg) involved seem to have done an impressive job with the visual design. An introductory section of the exhibition had the headline “From the Wilderness to the Countryside” and depicted in picture and text the social and industrial development of the region since 1900. In addition, various aspects of the development of Lapland were presented, such as its climate conditions, the emergence of frontier communities, the ore discovery, and the building of communication and social infrastructure. A visually refined background to this image collection was one of Lars Bramberg’s mural paintings, in bright pastel colours, called The Future Wenner-Gren Land, where the artist had painted a vision of what was to come, showing Alweg monorails, power plants, pulp mills, industrial communities, etc. The exhibition also included a cinema department where a film about Norrbotten was displayed. The exhibition was also a model of modern educational design; its different modules could easily be used separately, for example, in different educational and public relations contexts.

Conclusion All the examples discussed in this chapter are illustrations of contact. So, was “contact” just a buzzword, as most uses of “cybernetics” was? Is it anything more than efficient human-centred interactive communication? Or, is it a term that signalled scientific approaches to industrial development? So far, it is both. The post-war ideas of progress was dependent upon both the literal and metaphorical transport of ideas, technologies, and methods. There is not enough evidence to say that the modern office replaced the factory as the site of theoretical development, but at least it seemed to have become as important. It could be described as a bourgeoisification of business, a gradual shift from a blue-collar to a white-collar environment, described as a shift from film to more interactive modes of communication. It is difficult to say if it is a result of a deliberate industry association policy, or if it just suited a gradual development of Swedish industry from production of goods to production of services. Although this change in reality took place decades later, to move the discourse by the late 1950s

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was probably important enough for the industry associations. It became a proof of the possibility to affect social democracy’s hegemonic power of public debate. When Axel Wenner-Gren combined home appliances, new office and transport technologies, entrepreneurship, university research, all at an international level, it soon became too much for all three ends of the development triad. Maybe Wenner-Gren showed the limits of the Americanization of both social democratic and industrial pragmatism. If Wenner-Gren represents the utopian, almost imaginary, designer of communications systems, the state agency for hydroelectric power, Vattenfall, was the opposite. Equally eclectic and advanced in its use of communication devices, but always down to earth and pragmatic. From media technologies to meeting interiors, Vattenfall would take communication one step further: to literally transform the natural and cultural landscape, and metaphorically the human body, into contact tools.

References Films Att döda ett barn (Gösta Werner, 1953, Minerva Film AB/Försäkringsbolagens upplysningstjänst).

Archival Collections Archive of the Swedish Employers’ Confederation (Svenska Arbetsgivareföreningen, SAF). Centre for Business History, Stockholm, Sweden [documents, minutes, reports, letters, memos, leaflets, and brochures] Chr/Dt, P.M 13.3.1948. SAF’s archive, Centrum för Näringslivshistoria. Folke Haldén. “Den politiska opinionen och vägar att påverka den.” Manuscript of a speech, no date. SAF’s archive, Centrum för Näringslivshistoria.

Periodicals Arbetsgivaren Nos. 10, 12, 17 (1954); nos. 9, 14, 21 (1955); nos. 16, 17, 18 (1956); nos. 3, 7, 8, 10 (1957); nos. 6, 9, 11, 18, 22 (1958).

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Budkavle till landsbygdens kvinnor No. 6 (1955); no. 11 (1956); no. 7 (1957). Info Nos. 1, 10 (1959). Vi i Vattenfall [Tidning för personalen vid Statens Vattenfallsverk] No. 1 (1951).

References Agar, Jon. 2003. The Government Machine: A Revolutionary History of the Computer. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Bakker, Dirk J., and Olle MacDonald. 1962. “Miljö för utbildning och konferens.” In Smalfilm: årsbok för amatör-, industri- och undervisningsfilm, edited by Alf Agdler, 103–111. Stockholm: Nordisk Rotogravyr. Boivie, Olof. 1949. Hålkortsmaskiner. Lund: Elementa. Dahlström, Edmund. 1956. Information på arbetsplatsen: Sociologiska studier av företagets kommunikationsproblem. Stockholm: Personaladministrativa rådets meddelanden, 1. Fröberg, Carl-Erik, and Göran Kjellberg. 1949. Siffermaskiner. Lund: Elementa. Grieveson, Lee, and Haidee Wasson. 2018. “The Military’s Cinema Complex.” In Cinema’s Military Industrial Complex, edited by Haidee Wasson and Lee Grieveson, 1–22. Oakland: University of California Press. Hughes, Agatha C., and Thomas P. Hughes, eds. 2000. Systems, Experts, and Computers: The Systems Approach in Management and Engineering, World War II and After. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Rosell, Sten. 1957. Återkopplad pedagogik. Solna: KVE förlag. Thorelli, Hans B., ed. 1954a. Automation. Ny teknik – nya perspektiv i ekonomi och arbetsliv. Del I. De tekniska utsikterna. Stockholm: SNS Studier och Debatt. Thorelli, Hans B., ed. 1954b. Automation. Ny teknik – nya perspektiv i ekonomi och arbetsliv. Del II. De ekonomiska och sociala framtidsutsikterna. Stockholm: SNS Studier och Debatt. Westerberg, Rickard. 2020. Socialists at the Gate: Swedish Business and the Defense of Free Enterprise, 1940–1985. PhD dissertation, Stockholm School of Economics.

4. The New Face Abstract In Chapter 4, The New Face is put into the context of Vattenfall’s promotional and community-building activities around the construction sites as well as its corporate ethnographic and quantitative storytelling. Keywords: propaganda, corporate communities, public relations, film analysis

State-owned Vattenfall, the Swedish hydroelectric power agency, was undoubtedly the major commissioner and producer of corporate media in Sweden during the 1950s.1 It had the resources and competence and was pursuing a purpose. During the interwar period, Vattenfall had “tested” its communication skills, and quite often it failed. Vattenfall had for decades developed a special skill to deal with controversies. And it needed that skill. As a governmental agency responsible for the exploitation of Swedish rivers, particularly in the north, it not only became a tool for state-funded industrialization and economic development, but also a gauge of people’s attitudes towards nature and technology. Vattenfall had to navigate through the growing environmental critique of hydroelectric power, the awareness of its consequences for the indigenous Sami people, and tourists’ concern about the hydroelectric threat to the beauty of the north. For most people, rivers were beautiful, dams and power plants were not. Over the years, our company has become quite large. Unfortunately, the personal contact easily suffers when a company reaches a certain size. Especially at a company like ours, with many workplaces spread 1 At the time the off icial Swedish name was Kungliga Vattenfallstyrelsen. Today it is a state-owned company called Vattenfall, which has been the everyday name of the agency/ company at least since 1940s.

Björkin, M., Post-war Industrial Media Culture in Sweden, 1945–1960: New Faces, New Values. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2022 doi 10.5117/9789462984929_ch04

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practically all over the country, it is difficult to maintain desired contact and inform everyone about what is happening. We are all dependent upon good cooperation, and this cooperation is a prerequisite for the agency to serve its purposes. But in order to cooperate, one must first and foremost know and understand each other. Well-being and job satisfaction are values that we must protect. It is against this background I support a company journal. For a long time I had in mind that we should have one. When the question was raised at the first meeting of the central work council, I was also met with a gratifying, unanimous response. The board supported the journal plans unanimously, and appointed contact persons to assist in the implementation. The board of directors can thus be said to have “sponsored” the journal, and its programme is fully in line with the aims of the board of directors. I hope that the journal will contribute to the understanding of the agency’s endeavours, and to create ever better contact between all Vattenfall employees [vattenfallare].2

With those words, Åke Rusck, the managing director of Vattenfall, introduced the first issue of the new company journal Vi i Vattenfall in 1948.3 Contact was obviously important for him, and not limited to audiovisual media. The first use of the term contact in a corporate communication context thus introduces a printed company journal. Already from its inception, Vi i Vattenfall focused on Vattenfall’s media and technological development. For example, in the journal’s second year we learn that Vattenfall started to use punch cards for accounting and statistical purposes in 1948. 4 Vattenfall was not particularly early in doing this, but given its size it soon became a major user of punch cards in Sweden. In 1952 the punch card system it used for the billing of retail customers contained information on about 20,000 subscribers. It also used punch cards to keep track of certain staff statistics, operational disturbance statistics, as well as post-calculations of secondary station facilities and for work carried out by the electrical building agency for power station installation.5 2 Åke Rusck, “Till alla Vattenfallare,” Tidning för personalen vid Statens Vattenfallsverk, no. 1, 1948, 3. My emphases. 3 After the first issue the journal changed its name to Vi i Vattenfall: Tidning för personalen vid Statens Vattenfallsverk (We at Vattenfall: Journal for the employees at the State Hydroelectric Energy Agency). 4 “Vi presenterar: KM – verkets hålkortsavdelning,” Vi i Vattenfall 2, no. 1, 1949, 10–12. 5 “Hålkortsavdelningen,” Meddelanden från Kung. Vattenfallsstyrelsen, Ser. A, 1952, no. 2, s. 8 (KB OKAT).

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The journal also informs its readers about the use of chronophotographic films and work-study films. There are also stories of how Vattenfall developed its work on modelling and simulation during the 1940s, particularly to understand the movement of water. To manage the process of timber floating, an important issue when rivers became blocked by power plants, it needed to better understand surface currents of rivers.6 In a report from a 1948 hydraulic congress in Stockholm where a Vattenfall film was screened which analysed the introduction of bookkeeping machines, one commentator wrote: When you see such a recording, you get a completely different feeling that the model is correct in comparison to what you see in the laboratory. As in nature, you get a strong impression of the power of water, when you see how water and logs calmly and powerfully descend the chute, spillway, or fall.7

Another topic was Vattenfall’s travelling exhibitions, for example, “The Village by the River,” which was presented in Trollhättan in June 1949.8 Vi i Vattenfall became a tool for contact for both management and employees of Vattenfall, by telling stories about large construction sites and individual employees, but also about others who were affected by Vattenfall, and by providing a lot of statistics concerning both corporate and quotidian aspects of “the agency’s endeavour.” As every reader of Vi i Vattenfall quickly learned, Vattenfall also had a large and ambitious production of instructional and promotional films, among them The New Face from 1959.

The New Face The New Face is a 13-minute-long colour film. It was shot and released in 35 mm by the production company Kinocentralen. It is a fairly straightforward promotional film structured along an argument presented by a male voice-over claiming the importance of recognizing the positive aspects of hydroelectric power plant dams. He argues that “we” need to build the dams because a modern society demands electricity and so, consequently, “we” 6 Ibid., 9. 7 Stig Angelin, “Kraftverksbyggnader i fickformat,” Vi i Vattenfall 2, no. 3, 1949, 10. 8 “Bygden vid älven: Trollhätteutställning med Vattenfallsinslag,” Vi i Vattenfall 2, no. 3, 1949, 16 (back cover).

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need to identify the new value of the changed landscape, to look forwards, not backwards. In short, it presents a typical industrial discourse of progress and modernity. The film differs from most other Swedish promotional films of the era in its deliberate use of linguistic and visual metaphors. Right at the start, during the credits, there is a stylized transition from a woman’s face to a hydroelectric power plant. The first images exemplify changes in nature as seen through a television screen with a landscape in the form of primitive model animations of a volcano, documentary images of forest fires, and other violent scenarios. It illustrates the argument that we must accept changes caused by nature which we cannot prevent. There are images of the seasonal transition from early spring to summer along a river, illustrating an argument of nature’s inherent change and cyclical variation. While listening to the voice-over we enter into a young couple’s home; a living room with a sofa to the right, a television set to the left, and a terrace entrance in the rear. A young woman says goodbye to her husband. Before that, a close-up of her face, a transition to her in make-up as an older woman, then returning to her young face, accompanied by an argument about the subjectivity and contingency of our impression of beauty in nature and of people. Then follows more illustrations of the same argument, childhood meadows, which over the years grow into thickets, and a creek losing its water. Back to the woman’s face. The voice-over makes a f irst claim about memory not accepting the new values imposed by change. The woman leaves and drives away. In slight speed motion, she disappears into the dark and is followed by a quite unrealistic sound of a crash, followed by an image of an explosion in a river. This transition is an example of the many conceptual visualizations that appear throughout the film. Then follows the main argument, that we often have problems accepting a voluntary change, even when we need that change. We see the husband answering the phone, obviously being told about his wife’s accident. Then follows some more spoken examples; we continue to drive cars even though accidents happen; we do not want to do without television even if it leads to shortages of electric power. The voice-over continue to argue that we have to look beyond our own memories and prejudices, and that we have to assist nature in healing itself, and not hide changes. The narrator thus argues that we should see new values created by new circumstances, while we see a surgeon planning the reconstruction of a woman’s face. The parallel between the scarred face and the scarred landscape begins by the voice-over literally comparing the work

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of the plastic surgeons and of the landscape architects, while the images transition into three men creating a model of a landscape. A voice-over sums up by emphasizing “that the landscape must get a new face.” A longer section follows where both the voice-over and the images describe the work of recreating the landscape. Still, once the voice-over has set the parallel, the f ilm does not need to constantly reaff irm the

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comparison. The next cross-cutting occurs between the face and the landscape, and starts when the voice-over describes the landscape during the construction process as a “scar” we never think will heal, while we see the husband exit from the surgery unit looking devastated. We hear how memory makes us lose hope, while closing in on the husband’s face. This is mid-point of the film.

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The second half of the film begins with images of a river without water, and we see construction work going on. A landscape displays its scarred face. Then the transformation starts. The riverbanks are piled with soil, teenage school girls in bathing suits are sewing grass, men in white shirts and dark suits are looking for plants to transplant, workers (not in bathing suits) are preparing the plants. Then the “new face” of the landscape starts

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39-45. Film stills from Det nya ansiktet. © AB Vattenfall.

to appear. The voice-over explains that after a year the riverbanks start to appear similar to the way they used to look. Families are picnicking in the new landscape. Pastoral scenes of sheep, fish, hillsides with fresh grass are followed by the obvious downturn, the river almost without water. Even then, the voice-over tries to convey hope by explaining how the judges at the water regulation court decided to reduce the amount of water in the river for a temporary period because “what has been dead must come to life again.” We then follow how the water level rapidly increases, and how a dry rock slowly becomes covered by a wild stream. The spoken descriptions of the changed landscape is illustrated by the agricultural life of harvesting, men floating timber, women cleaning outdoors, and children playing. When the landscape reconstruction seems to be finished, we return to the stony, empty river, and the voice-over is talking about how the landscape surgeons correct the changes caused “by technology,” while the image transitions into an artificial lake along the river. We are told that “we may miss the old, but the new is a good supplement.” Children are playing, families are exploring the new landscape, young lovers hide behind a rock, a couple is rowing, and there is a close-up of water lilies. The voice-over reiterates that we need to accept deliberate changes of the landscape because we need electric energy. “If every change in nature is represented by a positive value, we have not lost anything. The traces of humans’ ability to gain from nature do not have to be ugly. It is possible

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to transform the changes into values.” Then follows a montage of electric power stations, while the voice-over ask us, What changes will atomic energy cause in nature? What will be the consequences of storing atomic waste? Finally, we return to the young couple’s home, where the husband is adjusting the television set when his wife enters through the terrace door. While we see her come into the room and approach the camera, wearing a new hairstyle, refreshed make-up, and a different dress, the voice-over finishes his argument: “Let us abandon the prejudices of memory and learn to see the positive values of the new face. It is not less beautiful just because it is different.” The film ends with her face transitioning into the power plant dam construction.

Vattenfall Few aspects of the welfare state was more emblematic than affordable electricity. In Sweden, electricity was produced by hydroelectric power plants in the north of the country, but since their construction and operation radically changed the surrounding landscape, there was consequently a price to pay for energy. In other words, the value for the nation had to be measured against the value of nature, as well as the value of local culture. Consequently, the film argues for the many different “values” involved. What was lost? What was gained? How should we then understand the allegorical functions of comparing landscape reconstruction to cosmetic surgery? Is it a comparison of nature with the female body? Was it a comparison of the appreciation of nature with the appearance of a woman’s face? If it was a question of gaze, the role of the woman’s face is rather obvious – it’s a male gaze. But who were those people who were allegedly looking nostalgically at nature? Women or men? Or should we understand the function of the woman’s face from her perspective? If so, does that mean that the nostalgia criticized in the film should be understood as a negation of nature’s inherent – of humanity’s independent – value? Even if these questions are theoretically tempting, I have to say no, there is no reason to argue for either a posthumanist or a feminist understanding of the film’s existence. In consequence of previous chapters, four main frames of interpretation are, according to me, more reasonable: – – – –

The value of post-war, urban consumption The value of export industry infrastructure The value of the welfare state The value of general economic progress

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46. Article on four new films, among them Det nya ansiktet, in Vi i Vattenfall, December 1958. © AB Vattenfall.

These four sets of values were communicated through four different modes of contact: – Individual meetings generated by company marketing – Workplace engagement with audiovisual material

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– Interactive corporate events – Interactive corporate meetings The New Face is depended upon these four sets of values, and these four modes of contact, because Vattenfall’s main business challenged people’s everyday lives. The use of natural resources and the destruction and construction of communities forced Vattenfall to develop strategies to address issues that we today would say fall into the realm of corporate social responsibility. Vattenfall summed it up in the credo of The New Face: just because science and technology resulted in natural, social, or cultural change, things (and people) do not become less beautiful, just beautiful in another way, gauged to other values. Or, as was written in Vi i Vattenfall, “a New Look” in nature preservation. And as for the “new look” in post-war fashion, it was not that new. Vattenfall, of course, had to negotiate rather concrete values when dealing with damage assessment regarding landowners. In these discussions, it is obvious that it was even more demanding when they also had to replace “cultural values” with money, even when it could apply to things that could not be valued in money.9 The New Face, as a f ilm, was, of course, a case of “old media.” But most media at the time, with the exceptions of television, the flannelgraph, and the computer, was old. As we have seen, in contexts of the transformations of consumer-citizen values (TV Boman and Housewives’ Films), industrial values (Operation Ice, Scania, and Asea), public policy and new technologies values (Wenner-Gren), and economic communication values (flannelgraphs), we can give both old and new media new meaning, by new combinations of use. The metaphor of contact made it possible to design a discourse that could create new values by transforming information into economic assets, enhanced by the contemporary theorizing and uses of sound slides, f lannelgraphs, and new meeting aids and environments. When face-to-face interaction no longer was the only way of communication either in politics or in companies and conceptual, psychological, and physical distance had to be overcome, modern media determined the characteristics of that distance. As we have seen, with theories and practices of information emanating from the post-war apparatus, an ideology of a new economy became possible. In this quest for the new, an old medium such as film could become redefined for new purposes. The industrial film did not 9

“Skadestånd vid sjöreglering,” Vi i Vattenfall 2, no. 3, 1949, 4.

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47. “New Look in Nature Preservation,” “A Nice Shock,” article in Vi i Vattenfall, January 1958. © AB Vattenfall.

become a “new medium,” but it was treated as if it was – not because the uses were new, but because they were inscribed in new fields of knowledge, theory, and practice. Makers of housewives’ films had used local cinemas and domestic spaces to form their media experience; Vattenfall extended the field to the physical landscape, the human body, and people’s lived experiences.

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Television and Nature as Tools for Corporate Communication Most of the actions taken by Vattenfall during the 1950s seem in retrospect to have been a preparation for what was to come around 1960 – the building of the Suorva Dam. If there was competition and sometimes hostility between those promoting industrial films and those promoting television, Vattenfall embraced all media. As a government agency, it did not depend upon traditional public relations and advertising only; it could go directly to the public service news programmes. In November 1960 the Swedish television news programme Aktuellt presented the story of a rather unique construction project: the building of a hydroelectric power plant in the far north of Sweden, at Stora Sjöfallet (Great Lake Falls). Great Lake Falls was Sweden’s most magnificent waterfall, a landmark of northern Sweden and an emblematic Swedish site, a true representation of a “national landscape,” that is, a natural landscape wellknown within a nation-state, as well as an important iconographic motif in visualizations of the national identity (Nordlund 2001, 268–270). The terrain encompassing Great Lake Falls was also one of Sweden’s first national parks, founded in 1909. Despite this protection, in 1917 the government commissioned Vattenfall to use the falls to produce electricity. A small part of the national park was excluded from exploitation, but it was not an insignificant part; what was excluded was the waterfall itself. Some minor falls in the area were transformed into power plants in the 1920s, but it was not until the 1950s that massive exploitation began. In the following 20 years the once magnificent falls were replaced by a giant dam. The Suorva Dam flooded thousands of acres of land used by the Scandinavian indigenous people, the Sami, to pursue their livelihood as semi-nomadic reindeer herders. The building of the dam was not the end of Great Lake Falls as a national landscape. Rather, it was the beginning of a new career, so to speak, for the falls. Today, the Sami communities of Baste čearru, Unna tjerusj, Sirges, Jåhkågaska tjiellde, Tuorpon, Luokta-Mávas, and the Udtja, Slakka, and Gällivare Forest Sámi community, as well as Great Lake Falls/Stuor Muorkke, and three other national parks nearby, Padjelanta/Badjelánnda, Sarek, and Muddus/Muttos, as well as other protected areas close to the parks have been included in the World Heritage Site Laponia.10 10 Area: 9,400 km 2 . Consists of: Stora Sjöfallet (national park, 1909), Sarek (national park, 1909), Muddus (national park, 1941), Padjelanta (national park, 1962), Sjaunja, Stubbareservatet, Rapadeltat, Thultadalen, Sulitelmaområdet.

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This particular area at a this particular time – from the building of the Suorva Dam and the destruction of Great Lake Falls to the establishment of Laponia as a World Heritage Site – relates to the birth of environmental TV journalism and the rise of the Swedish environmental movement. Vattenfall certainly was in need of efficient communication. The television news film mentioned above was partly made by Vattenfall, the same agency that was building the dam and the hydroelectric power plants. Vattenfall shot all the construction scenes, the interviews were conducted by Swedish television, and the archive footage of the Great Lake Falls and the surrounding area were taken from newsreels, primarily from the late 1940s. When the Swedish government increased the exploitation of the country’s natural resources, and thus transformed them into national natural resources, it became a potential problem for both the national and the regional discourse. Conflicts between indigenous people, small-scale rural societies, and national government, according to the regional discourse, were usually described in terms of imperialism and brute force. Most of the time this was true, but from the national perspective, it was a question of democracy and solidarity. The problem was not whether or not to exploit the natural environment, but who was going to control the exploitation. For the politicians, technological development had to be linked to environmentalism with care, and not be diametrically opposed to it– “nature protection as creativity.” This point is reminiscent of the observation by Leo Marx who, when talking about the American landscape, speculated that America aspired to a “middle landscape” created from the knowledge of technological progress “cease[ing] to be progress” (Marx 1966, 226). In other words, Marx hoped for a society that understood limits and pursued sustainable ends whenever possible. Such restraint may become more likely if we reflect upon moments of such an achievement (or a lack thereof),11 for example, in the case of the Great Lake Falls. Since hardly any issues are as connected to regional identity as environmental issues, state-owned public service television often plays a crucial role in setting the agenda. The introduction of television in Sweden in the mid-1950s coincided with a general centralization of governmental functions. The result of this was increasing discrepancies between, on the one hand, state-controlled exploitation of natural resources and, on the other hand, an awakening regionalist movement as well as local and regional environmental movements. Public service television, even though a state-owned national 11 Examples of this perspective are White (1995) and Wallace (1980).

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48. “Nature Protection=Creation,” article in Vi i Vattenfall, May 1957. © AB Vattenfall.

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media company, was supposed to stand in between opposing forces in society and, if anything, argue for a “middle landscape,” that is, not react to environmental disturbances as long as they were possible to explain within both the national and the regional discourse. The news programme mentioned earlier can be interpreted as part of the mid-twentieth-century national discourse that combined national economic interest, a national desire to preserve nature, and tourism. More specifically, we may understand the programme from the perspective of a “middle landscape,” that is, as an expression of the necessity to build dams and power plants. At this point the fascination for technological wonders becomes a form of technological sublime, to invoke David Nye (1994). The fact that the dam itself soon became an important tourist site in itself is an argument for that. The outcome was, at least from Vattenfall’s point of view, very successful. For more than two decades, Vattenfall’s public communications had transformed the community, at least at the national level, and built communities at the local level. Those local “frontier” communities accompanying the construction sites can also be analysed as separate media systems and cultures. I will argue that these construction site communities functioned as Vattenfall’s (and maybe also the government’s) real-life laboratories for societal change.

Stories from the Riverside Consequently, among other challenges, Vattenfall had to acknowledge critical voices and then turn them into friendly accounts. “After all, you have listened to the songs of the rapids and tried to elicit their innermost melody. How do you feel now, when our ponds and rapids have been silenced forever?” I asked the old musician. He thought for a while. “Well, it does not make me angry – it belongs to the past, as do folk music and folk musicians, by the way. It would be futile to fight against development. The power plants, they are probably good to have!”12

The veteran folk musician Albert Brännlund from Hammarforsen surprised the interviewer from the Vattenfall journal with his lack of nostalgia. For the 12 H. Behmer, “Melodier vid älven,” Vi i Vattenfall 2, no. 3, 1949, 12.

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readers, the employees of Vattenfall, such a story must have been somewhat confusing. They were certainly aware of the critique of how new hydroelectric power plants changed landscapes. Many probably shared the concern, but still favoured the value it created for modern society. This contradiction is what The New Face was all about: The importance of not letting emotions stand in the way of progress. However, an understanding of the constant residual effect on the landscape was also important. “I’ve lived here at the rapids all my life,” the musician continued. “Seen it live and die. Certainly it felt difficult when the blast shots thundered for the first time and horrible it was when the people in the barracks made the river beaches unrecognizable. But then, in all the destruction and haste, I heard [sounds] like the rapids complaining and its swan song forcing the violin. And so came the last of the tunes bearing the name of this rapid. These tunes are the history of the rapids.”13

The interview with Albert Brännlund thus illustrates that landscape reconstruction was not actually reconstruction but a construction of something new that embodied both the old and the new simultaneously. It worked well in film, but not, it seems, according to Brännlund, in music. His music, at least, ended with the river. The interviewer interprets the music as the story of the (lost) river. He put the violin to his chin and started playing. That was not to be mistaken for the story. The violin tones depicted the entire course of events – from a roaring waltz in the brightest major key, the music transformed into a hot polska to end in a mellow melody. I myself ended up far distant in time, where I had heard the same tunes on stages and from lodges.

His interpretation is not, though, of very old music. Waltz and polka became popular with the ideas of national landscape in the second half of the nineteenth century. The music of the old river’s history was still rather modern and contemporary, like industrialization and electrification. “No, it doesn’t matter to me that the waterfalls are destroyed. Everyone has become accustomed to the power plant now. By the way, there is so much else to look at and enjoy. An old musician has his songs and his memories.” 13 Ibid.

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“I will never forget when I f irst performed a tune I named after the rapids here 34 years ago. It was at a folk music festival in Östersund, and I was nervous because [the famous composer Wilhelm] Peterson-Berger himself was in the audience. But I was glad when the big man came to me afterwards and congratulated me on my success.” “But I feel gloomy when I think about how it is now and how it used to be in the past. Then people believed in something. They had something to hold on to. Yes, I think of the old rural culture and the rural traditions. Fine values have been lost and there is soon silence in the houses of memory. Where will it go?”

The lost values for Albert Brännlund was not the landscape, but the culture. His lack of nostalgia for the rapids may have its roots in his deeper feelings of loss for the rural culture of the past, which was lost even before the power plants arrived. It was most likely not intentional to associated the change in the landscape caused by the building of the power plants with an elaboration of how the area may have already been changed, culturally. The interview thus constructs a story of a deeper cultural change than the visual, and geological, landscape. The visual change was for the public, the cultural change was for those who worked to actually perform the visual change. The question of the (re)construction was, however, a key public relations concern. Many experts in preservation and cultural heritage worked for Vattenfall, among them the most senior public official in cultural heritage, the director of the Swedish National Heritage Board, Professor Sigurd Curman. In a 1950 interview for Vi i Vattenfall, Curman discussed how important it was that the power plant construction project should include a final act, to heal the wounds in the scarred landscape. He was then asked what he wanted to accomplish with this healing procedure. “Is it a ‘restoration’ of the former state?” “I’m not sure. It would be a hopeless enterprise. It is a matter of urgency to tie in the new plant in the surrounding landscape, so that it does not appear foreign to the area, but has the right conditions to grow beautifully into it, and become rooted there.”14

14 Sigurd Curman, “Kraftstationen och landskapet,” Vi i Vattenfall 3, no. 4, 1950, 14–15.

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Here we see the roots of the cosmetic surgery discourse. It may come as no surprise that Sigurd Curman was the scientific advisor of the production of The New Face.

Communities as Tools for Communication Vattenfall was one of the first organizations to establish the system of work councils, officially from 1 January 1948 after an agreement between Vattenfall and the unions. As mentioned earlier, a work council was a platform for discussing company issues between management, the board of directors, and the workers’ representatives. Vattenfall had in all sixteen different councils; one central (in Stockholm) for the board, and the other fifteen for the local organizations and the construction companies.15 The Vattenfall work council thus became engaged in media from the start. A summary of the first year of activity, 1948, included discussions on safety, health, and well-being at work. There were requests from several committees for easy-to-read brochures and instructions on safety issues regarding the speedy reporting of accidents and better information for staff on the dangers of negligence regarding “minor accidents.” Further training on medical care was also sought, including instructional lectures with film screenings.16 Another common topic was vocational training, the creation of company libraries, support for workers attending distance courses, uses of film for education, and access to specialist literature and courses. The budget for educational and informational materials was also significant.17 The level of ambition was not always met in reality. In an interview, Albin Zetterqvist, a local union leader in Västerås, describes that even if he and the union stressed the importance of further vocational and general education – he particularly mentioned a course in business administration – because of the competition with football and other forms of entertainment getting the attention of the employees was always a challenge.18

15 “Samarbete på arbetsplatsen. Vad vi hoppas av företagsnämnderna,” Tidning för personalen vid Statens vattenfallsverk 1, no. 1, 1948, 4. 16 Hans Nordmark, “Samarbete ger gott resultat. En sammanfattning av företagsnämndernas verksamhet 1948,” Vi i Vattenfall 2, no. 3, 1949, 13. 17 “Kraftnytt,” Vi i Vattenfall 1, no. 2, 1948, 6. 18 “Vi trivs bra med jobbet men . . . ,” Vi i Vattenfall 2, no. 4, 1949, 4–6.

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Vattenfall Community Culture The building of the dams and power plants took place where few people lived. As with the building of the railways during the nineteenth century, but on a much larger scale, temporary communities were constructed nearby, thrived for a decade or so, then disappeared. Vi i Vattenfall tried to present the new communities in an almost poetic manner: Before the power plant construction started in Harsprånget there was only wasteland. There was no settlement; there were only the large forests, which sought rocky opportunities from rocky ground. The forest was buzzing, the wilderness song sounded over the great expanses, the rapids’ powerful, millennial music accompanied the song. But people came to the neighbourhood. Soon the wilderness atmosphere was disturbed by the bursting blast. Forests fell, roads broke through, and a community grew up on a wooded slope above the rapids. The development of the community took place at great speed. Worker and family housing rose up, society was electrified – the power of the mid-winter darkness was broken. The fall is now a well-planned and appropriate society of the highest social standards, and it can be compared to places that have taken a much longer time to develop.19

The new communities were certainly focused on work, but the many housewives and children, as well as the fight against drinking and gambling among the workers, made planned leisure activities a key ingredient of the community design. When Vattenfall described community activities, it became an exercise in statistics. Everything was counted. If the material and physical threat of the environmental damage caused by the construction of the dams was narrated in aesthetic terms, the details of social life were reduced to numbers. During winter the National Touring Theatre (Riksteatern) performed the operetta Die Csárdásfürstin (Emmerich Kálmán, 1915), and a ballet by Birgit Cullberg. Vattenfall arranged evening schools for the adults and regular schools and nursery schools for the children. It organized choirs and established a public library which was filled with books. Particularly popular were travelogues and stories about the countryside, but also international and Swedish classics and contemporary quality literature, such as 19 E. V. Härshammar [socialkurator], “Året runt i Harsprånget,” Vi i Vattenfall 2, no. 5–6, 1949, 7.

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49. Harsprånget, residence area (1945-1952). Photo: Unknown / Tekniska museet.

Zweig, Lagerkvist, Hellström, Martinsson, as well as Shakespeare, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Dickens, and Gorky. There was a bridge club, described as “one of the community’s most stable associations.”20 The cinema had a large and faithful audience, and ambitious programmes with new films from Hollywood and Sweden were shown. The construction society provided an amusement hall, the Hölleborg. From the start of the construction of the dam in 1945 to its opening in 1949, films were screened there about three times a week, in all 544 films were shown in 779 performances, selling 54,207 entry tickets (of which 7,405 were children’s tickets). Each performance had an average of 69 attendees. Of the films shown, 272 were American, 152 Swedish, 33 French, and 38 from other parts of the world. Between 1948 and 1950, the National Touring Theatre seems to have performed at every construction society, both operettas and classical theatre, such as August Strindberg’s Miss Julie and Easter. Adding to this, lectures and sports events were hosted. When the power plant opened, a dance was even held in the machine room.21 An article in Vi i Vattenfall ends with a lament of the ephemeral characteristics of a community such as the one in Harsprånget:

20 Ibid., 8. 21 “Från fall till fall,” Vi i Vattenfall 3, no. 4, 1950, 18–19.

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This community, of which I have now given a few glimpses and which began to be built in the fall of 1945, will be largely gone by 1952. The life of the community will be short. So far, and for some time to come, society is living with so much greater intensity. You are undeniably experiencing an uncomfortable feeling when you think of the day when everything will be gone. Then you have come almost full circle; the mood of the wilderness is coming back, though more civilized and artificial than it was at the beginning.22

After construction came celebration. At the opening of Höllebygget in November 1948, films (made by Vattenfall) were shown and stage shows, music, and dancing were provided.23 When the Harsprånget hydroelectric power station opened in 1952, King Gustaf VI Adolf conducted the inauguration. The event screened films for children and the adults, among them Vattenfall’s film about Harsprånget, a newsreel from the opening of another power plant, Porjus, as well as a short film by famous Swedish documentary film-maker Arne Sucksdorff, Ett hörn i norr (1951). Music was played and, before the gala dinner, a sermon was delivered by Bishop Bengt Jonzon. Harsprånget was one of the largest construction communities of the period. In 1950, 1,244 men and 690 women lived there. From 1947 to 1951 there were 31 theatre performances which attracted an audience of 7,019 people. During the same time, 650 films were shown at 1,347 screenings, adding 139,249 visits. In addition to theatre activities and film performances, there were lectures, concerts, and art exhibitions. During these four years, 2,913 people moved in and 1,528 moved out; 179 babies were born; 143 couples were married, and in 1950, 356 families lived there. In 1950, 52,010 loaves of bread were sold, as were 89,630 buns and 220,650 pastries. There were 44,600 visits to the public bath, and 8,858 visits to the solarium, and throughout the period 24,195 books were loaned by the library. In 1950 the inhabitants made 6,000 manually linked local calls per day, and 400 national calls per day. Throughout the period 2,746 persons sought medical care; in total there were 11,562 visits to medical providers. The local hospital had 776 inmates over the period for a total of 6,378 days, including 653 X-ray patients, 40,478 disease cases, and 37,496 persons treated for injuries due to accidents.24 And so on.

22 Ibid., 9. 23 L. Krook, “Taklagsfest vid Höllebygget,” Vi i Vattenfall 1, no. 2, 1948, 11. 24 “Från fall till fall,” Vi i Vattenfall 3, no. 4, 1950, 18–19.

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50. “More than 100.000 have seen exhibition,” article in Vi i Vattenfall 1953 on the exhibition about Harsprånget. © AB Vattenfall.

The recurring fascination with quantitative data is interesting in comparison to the interest in “soft” values. However, in a technology company, quantification is an indication of success. Another reason may be that the Vattenfall community-building endeavour competed with those managed by the public authorities. The need to quantify therefore becomes a way to

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show the company’s societal importance. That a state-owned agency can compete with local and state institutions is only logical within the Swedish private-state-cooperative development triad discussed earlier. Communication of concerns related to electricity usage involved a mix of media formats early on. In 1948, the Swedish Fuel Commission, together with the Swedish State Information Agency and FERA (Föreningen för elektricitetens rationella användning, Association for the Rational Use of Electricity), created a campaign to encourage voluntary electricity savings. A “savings board” designed the campaign with specialists from FERA, the Fuel Commission, and Vattenfall. The campaign revolved around the figure Kalle Watt, and consisted of a four-page brochure, Kalle Watt Does Not Like Electricity Rationing. The brochure was distributed together with the new (post-war) food ration cards, in order to make its dissemination less expensive and not to compete with the ongoing national election. In the brochure, Kalle Watt talks about the cause of electricity shortages as well as how to save power and reduce the power consumption of the most common electrical appliances. National advertisement campaigns followed the brochure. The f irst one was called Kalle Watt Clarifies the Autumn Electricity Situation. Together with the ads, a number of informative and advisory press service articles were distributed. Furthermore, two posters were produced, one for industry with the slogan “Save Power – Switch Off When You Can” and one for outdoor advertising with the slogan “Help Kalle Watt – Save Kilowatts.” They also used the major film newsreel SF-journalen to publicize current power plant construction and electricity savings efforts, as well as radio to share information on the electricity situation.25 Radio even reached into the construction vehicles. In a 1952 article about a “55-year-old excavator operator Henry Bellman and the giant excavator Marion” at Höllebygget, there were many references to the music, such as his working to a samba rhythm as he listened to music and cabarets from London. The interviewer also commented that Bellman referred to his excavator as “she,” which resulted in yet another cultural reference. Bellman shared his name with the popular eighteenth-century poet Carl Michael Bellman, who often wrote and sang about his muse, Ulla Winbladh. Consequently, the interviewer suggested if it would be more appropriate for the excavator to name the machine Ulla instead of Marion.26 The Bellman reference thus connects the national landscape of northern rivers with the “national poet.” In one single article, nature, technology, and cultural heritage meld together. 25 “Kampanj för elsparande,” Vi i Vattenfall 1, no. 2, 1948, 15. 26 Falcon, “Bellmans stora kärlek,” Vi i Vattenfall 2, no. 3, 1949, 11.

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51. The winning contributing to the Vattenfall interior design contest, the Fallström family in the low-rise apartment building, in Vi i Vattenfall 1951. © AB Vattenfall.

At this time, Vattenfall was probably the most frequent user of exhibition buses, which demonstrated good practices regarding the use of electricity and new household appliances. In parallel to Housewives’ Films, Vattenfall had its own venture to reach housewives, most often using female staff:

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52. “To live as the Fallström family costs 3.785 SEK, including furnitures”, article in Vi i Vattenfall 1951. © AB Vattenfall.

Miss Birgitta Montan, who leads the cooking demonstrations and showcases various electrical appliances to facilitate households, says that she has rarely seen such a grateful audience as up north.27

Vattenfall’s marketing department thus seemed to have carefully designed the propaganda bus and meticulously planned the tour according to this mix of public, domestic, and industrial efficiency as the stakeholders of the housewives’ films.28

Conclusion With its resources, and central position in Swedish society, Vattenfall could do things most other state, industry, or cooperative organizations could not do. Vattenfall had to be innovative, because even if its main product, electricity, was popular, the environmental, cultural, and sometimes individual consequences could become controversial in the public debate. Being geographically dispersed, technologically advanced, and politically controversial seem to have been motivating factors for Vattenfall’s broad deployment of corporate media. Consequently, The New Face is maybe not as surprising as we may think.

27 “Från fall till fall,” Vi i Vattenfall 3, no. 5, 1950, 2. 28 “Från fall till fall,” Vi i Vattenfall 4, no. 3, 1951, 2.

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References Films Det nya ansiktet (Alex Jute, 1959, Kinocentralen/Vattenfall).

Archival Collections The National Library of Sweden [audiovisual material, reports, leaflets, and brochures] “Hålkortsavdelningen.” Meddelanden från Kung. Vattenfallsstyrelsen, Ser. A, 1952, no. 2, s 8 (KB OKAT).

Periodicals Arbetsgivaren No. 1. Vi i Vattenfall [Tidning för personalen vid Statens Vattenfallsverk] Nos. 1, 2 (1948); nos. 1, 2, 3, 4 (1949); nos. 4, 5 (1950); no. 3 (1951).

References Marx, Leo. 1966. The Machine in the Garden. New York: Oxford University Press. Nordlund, Christer. 2001. Det upphöjda landet: vetenskapen, landhöjningsfrågan och kartläggningen av Sveriges förflutna, 1860–1930. PhD dissertation. Umeå universitet. Nye, David E. 1994. American Technological Sublime. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Sörlin, Sverker. 2000. “Upptäckten av friluftslandskapet.” In Friluftshistoria: från “härdande friluftslif” till ekoturism och miljöpedagogik: teman i det svenska friluftslivets historia, edited by Klas Sandell and Sverker Sörlin, 16–26. Stockholm: Carlsons. Wallace, Anthony F. C. 1980. Rockdale. New York: W. W. Norton. Wasson, Haidee, and Charles R. Ackland. 2011. “Introduction: Utility and Cinema.” In Useful Cinema, edited by Charles R. Ackland and Haidee Wasson, 1–14. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. White, Richard. 1995. The Organic Machine: The Remaking of the Columbia River. New York: Hill and Wang.

Conclusion Abstract In the conclusion, The New Face’s creative treatment of the concepts of beauty, surgeons, landscape, and, most of all, values are put into the context of an industrial public sphere with its own mix of eff iciency and rationalization, human behaviour and networks, and multifaceted understandings of value and contact. Keywords: development triad, contact, communication, flannelgraphs

The Swedish public service broadcast media, lacking commercial alternatives, resulted in a consumer-oriented industry that had to exploit radio and television topics and celebrities indirectly while continuing to press advertising, as well as focus on establishing local contact via film screenings, exhibitions, etc. The Swedish social democratic, third-way vision of state, commercial, and cooperative interests acting in harmony (which I summarize using Michael Hård’s concept of the “development triad”) is best expressed in the sober consumption discourse found in and around the housewives’ films. Small- and mid-sized enterprises had interests that were different from those of export-oriented large industries. Larger companies had more resources, but also broader promotional interests. They choose traditional industrial promotional films screened in cinemas, but also within the companies themselves, as well as at industrial film festivals. Smaller companies focused more on internal communication and interactivity because they needed media for training, recruitment, and corporate communication. The Swedish Employers’ Confederation (Svenska Arbetsgivareföreningen, SAF) took initiatives to promote uses of media, particularly through a collaboration with unions in establishing the human resources consulting agency the PA Council, which supported business and industry to develop their own rhetoric and vocabulary, exemplified by applications of the term “contact.” The 1948 regulations of work councils (företagsnämnder) boosted

Björkin, M., Post-war Industrial Media Culture in Sweden, 1945–1960: New Faces, New Values. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2022 doi 10.5117/9789462984929_con

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the demand for economic information, thereby creating an opening for SAF’s policy work on increasing the public interest and acceptance of private enterprises and private ownership (in line with international trends pushed forward, for example, by the Marshall Plan). Industry representatives, often management and communication consultants, developed theories of corporate media and pushed them though manuals and instructions, which also functioned as promotional material for the consultants. Key debates on the media specificities of film, slides, sound slides, and flannelgraphs gave theoretical backgrounds to initiatives to increase human involvement in organizational processes. Interactive media started to compete with narrative media as tools to describe and embody organizational processes. At the same time, a four-step learning framework – see, discuss, draw own conclusions, and create concepts – was developed. The instructions, debates, and uses of media, together with new theories of learning resulted in a training in theorization. Added to this was an increased interest in middle management, particularly the role of the industry foreman. Enter what I call a particular Swedish industrial public sphere; a combined theoretical framework of organizational, aesthetic, and media theories developed through organizational practice at a national level, but intricately connected to other European industries. In accordance with the discourse on contact, industry organizations arranged numerous conferences, courses, and exhibitions during the midto late 1950s, aimed at business and industry representatives. The result was a strengthened industrial public sphere, through national networks, where middle management learned and practiced new ways of thinking, talking, and performing communication. At the same time, SAF intensified its political propaganda work to promote industrial interests. Individual entrepreneurs and controversial state activities challenged the development triad. For example, Electrolux founder Axel Wenner-Gren’s geographically ambitious projects involving international partners, research collaborations, and new technologies disrupted the harmony by increasing the level of risk. Another challenge was the increased public awareness of the conflicts and complexities of the state’s exploitation of northern Sweden for its natural resources, including its rivers for hydroelectric energy production. This leads to the actions of Vattenfall, the state agency for hydroelectric energy production and distribution. Vattenfall was at the forefront of communication not only through its uses of corporate publications and films, but by community building (around the construction sites), telling individual life stories, and quantitative data. In sum, Vattenfall never challenged the development triad – rather, it did the opposite. Its communication strategy

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emphasized its status as a state agency, with a strong focus on economic values, that engaged in collaborations with local cooperative movements. Consequently, it used all available media to reach the best possible level of contact, providing a total view of the national, and all its citizens’, interests. More than all the theorists at the PA Council, Vattenfall created a democratic surround (to reference the work of Fred Turner). Perhaps this was not surprising, since it tried to combine science not only with psychology, but also with social and artistic ambitions. With all this in place, Vattenfall’s film The New Face was not only possible to produce, it sold a hard message by a domestic and bodily comparison. It used the most well established medium, film, relied upon metaphors, both visual and linguistic, put nature, technology, and people in the same system, and combined all sides of the development triad. The New Face exploited both ethnographic and systemic perspectives (Steward). It was also a prime example of the risks of popularized science, while accepting the conflicts of disruption and harmony (McLuhan). Its creative treatment of the concepts of beauty, surgeons, landscape, and, most of all, values, could not have been made without an industry discourse focused on the importance of redefining terminology and (re)conceptualizations of terms. Finally, The New Face could not have been made without an industrial public sphere with its own mix of efficiency and rationalization, human behaviour and networks, and a multifaceted understanding of new values with new faces.

Index accounting 15, 18, 116-17, 125, 148 M-chart 116-17 Ackland, Charles R.: 104 n Active Housekeeping 45 advertising 12, 14-15, 33, 35, 39-47, 53, 62, 71, 93, 95, 107, 109, 125, 143, 167, 178 agents 106 film 26, 41, 43, 45-46, 107, 109 magazine 57, 63 newspaper 40-41, 183 television 26, 41, 46-47, 51-52, 60, 62, 74, 83, 95-96, 103 theory 46 affluent worker 57-58, 60-61 Aktiv Hushållning see Active Housekeeping Alandh, Lizzi 79 Älvkarleby 79-80 Alwac III-E see computers Andersson, Sven 25 Andersson, Sven-Erik 75 Andrén, Sven 91 annual reports 91-92 Arbetsgivaren (periodical) 79, 81, 83, 108, 140 Arbetsmarknadens yrkesråd see Council for Professional Development Archive 134, 152 Armé-, Marin- och Flygfilm 86 ASEA 74-76, 84, 102, 105-6, 140, 165 Association for Forestry and Farming Films 87 Association for the Rational Use of Electricity 178 Atlas Copco 84 atomic energy 10-11, 131, 133, 163 Att döda ett barn 145n Åtvidaberg 84, 146-47 Audiovisuella sällskapet (Audiovisual Society) 110 automation 10-11, 111, 114, 120, 131-34, 140, 147-50 Autronic AB 148-49 Bahco 84 Bakker, Dirk 134-36, 139, 140-41, 151 Balsamo, Anne 23-24 banking 42, 54 loan 54 savings accounts 52 Beer, Stafford 114-15 Bernadotte, Sigvard 147-48 Berner, Boel 45 Beskow, Hans 152 Bignell, Jonathan 47, bildband see filmstrips Billesholms Glasullsbolag 70-71

Björkin, Mats 74, 85, 99 Blomgren, Bengt 79 Boal, Gunnar 122, Boel, Bent 17 Boivie, Olof 133n Bogost, Ian 23, 121n Boman, Kjell 26-27, 33-39, 64, 165 Bondeson, Gustaf 91-93 Bordwell, David 15n, 18n, 85-86 Brandt, Hans-Jürgen 16n Bourdon, Jérôme 16n, 51 Bramberg, Lars 152 British Iron and Steel Association 139 Bruce, Lennart 149 Budkavle (periodical) 46n, 63n, 133 bulletin board 123-24 Business and Industry Information Bureau 129 British Columbia (Canada) 150-51 Canjels, Rudmer 76, Carlsson, Leif 117 Castillo, Greg 58-59 Celevision 41 Central Film 84 children 12, 44, 46-47, 109, 145, 162, 174-76 clickers 108, 138, 140 communication 12, 16, 25-26, 50, 70, 72-74, 77, 83, 87, 91-96, 100-1, 110, 112, 114-17, 121-25, 130, 139-40, 151-53, 155, 164-65, 170, 173, 178, 183-84 consultants 81, 83, 107, 117-18, 138, 184 corporate 52, 62, 81, 99-100, 104, 117, 135-36, 145, 156, 167-68, 183 office 147-50 theory 19, 23, 71, 104, 107-8, 133-35 computers 15, 77, 83, 117, 132-33, 140, 147-48, 165 Alwac III-E 148-149 edebering 140 punch cards 50, 63, 77, 106, 116, 133n, 156 punch tape machines 148 Confederation of Professional Employees 83 conferences 15, 25, 28, 76, 81, 118, 121, 123-24, 134, 140, 184 accounting practices (1948) 116 audiovisual aids (1960) 110 Brussels (1958) 141 PA Council (1957) 135-40 PA Council (1958) 84 PA Council (1960) 86 Sales and Advertising Association (1958) 84 Scania-Vabis (1953) 69, 72-73 Swedish Rationalization Association (1959) 75-77

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Tällberg (1957) 140 Turin (1957) 69 Tylösand (1954) 10-11, 131-34 Yxtaholm (1958) 129 Construction Industry Agency for Worker’s Protection 84 consumption 14, 19, 26, 40-41, 47, 50, 54-61, 63, 103, 124, 145, 163, 178, 183 conspicuous 55, 57-58 contact 11-13, 17, 25-26, 28, 62, 64, 73-74, 76-78, 83, 91-93, 96, 104, 107-9, 112, 115-16, 122-25, 131, 133, 138-43, 152, 155-56, 164-65, 183-85 costs 46, 71, 139, 142, 146 tools for 12, 24, 26, 83, 95-96, 100, 103, 122-25, 136, 141, 153, 157 vs mass communication 12 Council for Professional Development 112 Croneborg, Gustaf 112 cybernetics 10, 21-22, 24, 100, 104, 114-16, 121, 124-25, 131, 133, 152 Dahlström, Edmund 74, Davidsson, Bengt 43 Det nya ansiktet 9, 11, 13, 27-28, 157-65, 171, 173, 180, 185 development triad 27-28, 53, 55-57, 63-64, 95, 146, 153, 178, 183-85 domestic research see home research edebering see computers Edin, Per-Anders 91 Electrolux 26, 33-40, 54, 64, 184 Electrolux rapport (periodical) 38 En djungelsaga 36 En vanlig vardag 79 Engblom, Lars-Åke 47n entertainment 14, 25, 43, 51-52, 73-74, 173 Eskilstuna 86 Ett praktiskt kök 52-55, 61 European Productivity Agency (EPA) 17, 135-36, 151 European Recovery Program see Marshall Plan Ewertsson, Lena 47n exhibition 28, 41, 94, 118, 134-36, 141, 145-46, 176, 183-84 buss 143-44, 179 corporate showroom 145 Expo Harsprånget 177 Human Factor, The 79 Office ‘57: 147-49 Office ‘58: 149-50 Parallel, The 150-52 travelling 117, 142 Village by the River 157 Federal Republic of Germany 13, 16, 40-41, 44, 46, 51, 92, 95, 145 Federation of Swedish Industries 135n feedback 95, 100, 107, 110, 114, 116, 118, 124-25, 133

Fickers, Andreas 16n Film i näringslivets tjänst (catalogue) 80, 89-91 film loop 112 filmslinga see film loop filmstrips 112-13 Findus (company) 43 Finland 26, 145 flannelgraph 25, 28, 80-81, 101-3, 106, 110-11, 124-25, 136, 165, 184 Flayhan, Donna 21 Florin, Bo 86 Flytande frukt 61 folkhemmet see welfare state foreman 25, 28, 106, 121-24, 184 France 13, 16, 44 Fröberg, Carl-Erik 133n functionalism 46, 141 företagsnämnd see work council Förberg, Einar 103, 106-7, 109-10, 125 Föreningen för electricitetens rationella användning (FERA) see Association for the Rational Use of Electricity Föreningen Skogs- och Lantbruksfilm see SoL Film Gabon 10, 71 game theory 10, 12, 115, 131 Gillberg, Jan 40 Gillet (restaurant) 73 Gipson, Henry Clay 103n Glassvatt 10, 70 Grieveson, Lee 139n Göteborg (city) 40, 48, 71, 146 Business School 59, 86 Göteborg och Bohus (region) 48 Hadénius, Stig 40, 91 Haldén, Folke 129, 131 Hallandsposten (newspaper) 44 Halmstad 44 Royal (cinema) 44 Hanner, Per V.A.: 91 Hansson, Gun 36 Handelsbanken 11n, 141 Hatzfeld, Nicolas 77 Hediger, Vinzenz 91 Hemmens forskningsinstitut (HFI) see Home Research Institute Henell, Olof 59 Hirdman, Yvonne 56 Hobsbawm, Eric 13 Hoffman, Hazel Ward 101 Home Research Institute 44-45, 55-56, 58-59 household 42, 45, 47-48, 50, 53, 63, 142-43 appliances 26, 33, 54, 179 consultant 52, 180 income 59 teacher 143

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housewife 12, 19, 26, 42, 44, 46, 54-55, 57, 59, 62-64, 143, 174, 179 working-class 59 housewives’ films 26-27, 36, 42-47, 50-64, 142, 165-66, 180, 183 HSB (Hyresgästernas sparkasse- och byggnadsförening) 54 Hughes, Agatha C 121n Hughes, Thomas P.: 121n human resources 27, 81, 99, 114, 121-22, 140 consultants 81, 83, 183 Husmors Filmer AB 43, 64, 179 husmorsfilm see housewives’ films Husmors-Journalen (periodical) 44 hydroelectric power 9, 27, 150, 153, 155, 184 dams 155, 157, 163, 168, 174-75, 178 Harsprånget (power plant) 174-77 Hölleborg 175 power plants 9, 157-58, 163, 167, 168, 171, 174 Suorva dam 167-68 Hyland, Lennart 50-51 Håge, Douglas 73 Håkansson, Nils 114 Hård, Mikael 53, 64, 183 ICI (company) 139 IKEA 54, 125, 142 Industrial Screen (periodical) 100 Industriens utredningsinstitut see Industrial Institute for Economic and Social Research Industriförbundet see Federation of Swedish Industries Industrial film 10, 15-16, 26-27, 72, 74, 76-77, 85, 90, 93, 99-101, 103n, 104, 106-7, 109, 116, 125, 139, 165, 167 archive footage 158, 168 documentary film 71-72, 104, 176 educational film 16, 76, 87, 109, 138 feature film 74, 77, 104 festivals 84, 86, 135, 183 memo filming 75-76 micro film 134 PA Council Film Days (Stockholm 1960) 86 PA Council Film Days (Gothenburg 1960) 86 producer 9, 106 Industrial Institute for Economic and Social Research 48, 120 International Road Union Technical Committee 69 Info (periodical) 42 Israel 16n Israel, Joachim 122 Italy 13, 34, 44, 51, 145 Jansson, Puck 43 Jonzon, Bengt 176 Judt, Tony 14

Jute, Alex 9 Juvel (company) 43 Jönköping 86 karusellprogram 51 Kibbee, Joel M 123n Kinocentralen 9, 157 kitchen 45, 52, 55, 58-60, 142, 145 Kjellberg, Göran 133n Kligler-Vilenchik, Neta 16n Kluge, Alexander 24 Kramer, Ernest 114 Kugelberg, Bertil 139-40 Kungliga Ingenjörsvetenskapsakademien see Royal Swedish Academy of Engineering Sciences Kungliga Tekniska Högskolan (KTH) see Royal Institute of Technology Kungliga Vattenfallstyrelsen see Vattenfall Kursverksamheten Vår Ekonomi (KVE) see KVE KVE 107-8, 117-21, 136, 140, 150 Lahnhagen, Rolf 81, 136 landscape see national landscape Lauritzen, Bertil 112 Lewenhagen, Carl Johan 149 Lindström, Elsa 44 Lindström, Eric 141 Lindvall, Gunnar 108 LO see Swedish Trade Union Confederation Lundquist, Agne 122-23 MacDonald, Olle 134-135, 140-41 Magnusson, Bengt 86, 136 management 16, 41, 72, 74, 79, 81, 83, 93, 95, 101, 104, 115, 123, 125, 129, 134, 136, 138, 141, 157, 173 consultants 25, 140, 184 manager 10, 70-71, 79, 93, 106, 121n, 123, 131, 135, 141 middle 28, 117, 184 theory 12, 15, 71, 77, 104, 107, 114, 122 Manker, Ernst 152 Marabou 72 Marx, Leo 168 marketing 12, 26, 33, 38, 62-65, 74, 103, 106-7, 121, 135, 138, 141-3, 146, 164, 180 Marshall Plan 17-18, 58-59, 184 Masson, Eef 109 mathematical machines see computers Matematikmaskinnämnden see Mathematics Machine Board Mathematics Machine Board 133n, 149 McLuhan, Marshall 18, 21-24, 60-61, 185 The Mechanical Bride 21, 23, 60 Meschke, Michael 44 Michel, Alain P.: 77 middle-class 58-61, 61, 124 Mo i Rana (Norway) 71

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Nanus, Burt 123n National Bureau of Standards (US) 148-149 national landscape 85, 167, 171, 178 National Board for Vocational Training 112 National Telecommunication Agency 40 Negt, Oskar 24 new look 165-66 Nilsson, Anders 91 Nilsson, Gösta 69 Nordlund, Christer 167 Nye, David 170 Näringslivets Upplysningsverksamhet see Business and Industry Information Bureau Oldenziel, Ruth 17, 59-60 Olhagen, Folke 45 Olsson, Jan 44, 48 Operation is (Operation Ice) 70-71, 78, 135, 165 operation research 10, 100, 115, 131 Organisation for European Economic Co-operation (OEEC) 17, 83 Östergötland (region) 48 Överstyrelsen för yrkesutbildning see National Board for Vocational Training PA Council 27, 81-83, 95-96, 120, 122, 134-40, 183, 185 PA Distribution 120 PA Film 86, 89-91, 139, 151 Packard, Vance 124 Parikka, Jussi 15n Personaladministrativa rådet see PA Council perstorpsplatta 142 post-war 14, 24, 26, 38, 45, 47, 56, 59-60, 100, 121, 152, 163, 165, 178 cosmetic surgeons 9, 11, 158 economic reconstruction 26, 38, 100 landscape reconstruction 162-63, 171 welfare societies 22 posters 41, 79, 101, 110-11, 125, 143, 178 productivity 132 produktionsffentlichkeiten see public sphere public relations 10, 15, 28, 70, 87, 91, 95, 100, 105-6, 125, 131, 146, 152, 167, 172 public sphere 24-25 industrial 24, 27-28, 52, 124, 130, 139, 184-85 punch card see computing quantification 28, 71, 104, 177, 184 radio 10, 14, 36, 45, 48, 62, 65, 70-71, 138, 150, 178, 184 Karusellen (radio show) 51 license 48 public service radio commission 47 Radio Luxemburg 10, 70 Swedish public radio 40, 71, 133, 148 Rau, Eric P.: 100

Renault 77 Richardson, F.L.W.: 114 Roine, Jesper 56-57 role play 108, 123-25 Rosell, Sten 107-8, 118, 125, 140 Rouen (France) 84, 86 Rot, Gwenaële 77 Royal Institute of Technology 47-48 Royal Swedish Academy of Engineering Sciences 115, 132, 133n, 135n, 149 Saab 54 Sandvikens Jernverk 84 Sällfors, Carl Tarras 72 Scandinavian Airlines (SAS) 72, 84, 148 Scania-Vabis 10, 54, 64, 69-73, 77, 84, 139, 149, 165 Shannon, Claude E.: 104 Shell 70, 76 Simon, Herbert 100 Sjöström, Victor 85-86 Skandia (company) 43 skioptikon 112 Skogsvårdsstyrelsernas filmförening see Association for Forestry and Farming Films Skånska Ättiksfabriken AB 142 slides 28, 41, 101, 106, 110-12, 119-20, 124-25, 184 Smith, Karl U.: 116 Smith, Margaret Foltz 116 social democracy 13, 17, 27, 40, 47, 50, 55-56, 59, 63-64, 77, 95, 129-30, 153, 183 Socialdemokratiska arbetarpartiet (political party) 10n, 26 Soila, Tytti 45 SoL Film 87-88 SoL-Film-Nytt (periodical) 87-88 Solna 118-19 sound slides 25, 28, 83, 89, 95-96, 108, 109n, 110, 112, 119-21, 125, 135, 140, 165, 184 Sparfrämjandet 84 Spigel, Lynn 63, 103 state 14, 27-28, 47, 50, 57-58, 61, 64, 87, 91-92, 141, 153, 155, 168, 178, 180, 183-85 State Organisation Board 84 statistics 18, 43, 71, 79, 88, 156-57, 174 Steinmo, Sven 47 Steward, Julian 19-21, 24, 185 Stichting Nederlandse Onderwijs Film (The Netherlands Educational Film Corporation) 109 stillfilm see sound slides Stockholm (city) 34, 36, 40, 47-48, 56, 82, 86, 115n, 119-20, 129, 131, 135, 157, 173 Astoria (cinema) 147 AV Centre 110 Berga Navy schools 139 Hotell Malmen 138 Kungsträdgården 35, 39 Marble Halls 147

191

Index

Merchant’s Club 72 Nacka 47-48 Rigoletto (cinema) 35 Stockholm region 48 University 118 Stora Sjöfallet 167-68 Stornorrfors 84, 90 Strömsnäsbruk 145 Sucksdorff, Arne 36, 176 Svensk Cellulosa AB (SCA) 116-17, 142 Svenska annonsörers förening see Swedish Advertiser’s Association Svenska Arbetsgivareföreningen (SAF) see Swedish Employers’ Confederation Svenska Arkivsamfundet see Swedish Archive Union Svenska Flygmotor 84 Sweden’s General Export Association 135n Sweden’s Wholesale Association 135n Swedish Advertiser’s Association 35, 41 Swedish Archive Union 134 Swedish Association of Graduates in Business Administration and Economics 147 Swedish Banking Association 135n Swedish Employers’ Confederation 27, 79, 81, 83, 95, 109n, 118-19, 129, 139, 183-84 Swedish Film Producers’ Association 135n Swedish Fuel Commission 178 Swedish Merchants’ Association 135n Swedish Newspaper Publishers’ Association 42 Swedish Rationalization Association 75 Swedish Sales and Advertising Association 84, 135n Swedish State Information Agency 178 Swedish Statistical Association 148 Swedish Trade Union Confederation 83 Swedish Women’s Voluntary Defence Service 145 Säffles Boman see Hansson, Gun Söderblom, Åke 73 Sørenssen, Bjørn 59 Sörlin, Sverker 85 TCO see Confederation of Professional Employees Technical Literature Society 134 Tekniska litteratursällskapet see Technical Literature Society Television 10, 12-16, 25-26, 33, 36, 42-43, 77, 90, 95, 133, 145, 158, 163, 165, 167, 188 advertising 26, 40-41, 45, 52, 60, 62, 74, 83, 95-96, 103 Aktuellt (news programme) 71, 168 American 42, 45-46, 50-51, 60, 62 audience 26, 50, 95, 104 commercial television 16n, 26, 40-41, 44, 46-48, 50-52, 91-92, 96 Danish 48

European 47, 51 governmental commission 40, 48, 89 industrial 136 Kvitt eller dubbelt 33, 35 public service 16n, 25-27, 40, 46-52, 57, 62-64, 91-92, 148, 167-168, 183 quiz show 26, 33-35, 38 rural 88-89 Sandrew Television Week 44, 48 Telegrafverket see National Telecommunication Agency: Tenow, Kay 79 third way 13, 17, 26-27, 43, 47, 53, 59, 183 Tidningsutgivarna see Newspaper Publishers’ Association Thompson, Kristin 85-86 Thorelli, Hans 10n, 115, 131 Tonårsmodet 55 Trankell, Arne 118 Turner, Fred 14, 53, 185 TV-Boman see Boman, Kjell Tylösand 10-11, 131-34 Tällberg 140 Törnqvist, Gunnar 48, 50 United Kingdom and Northern Ireland (UK) 13, 16, 20n, 25, 41, 46-47, 51, 57-60, 81, 100, 103n, 107, 116, 133n United States of America (US) 13-14, 16, 20n, 25, 47, 61, 63, 72-73, 81, 86, 93-95, 100, 103n, 106, 133n, 135, Uppsala (region) 48 Vardagsmiddag 42-43 Vattenfall (Kungliga Vattenfallsstyrelsen) 9, 27-28, 72, 79, 84-85, 90-91, 139, 143, 153, 155-57, 163-80, 184-85 Veblen, Thorstein 57 Velander, Edy 132 Veterinary College 84 Vi i Vattenfall (periodical) 174-75, Vid sidan av jobbet (film) 106 Vignaux, Valérie 16n visningsenhet see visual unit visual unit 112 vocational training 15, 77-78, 109-14, 156-57, 165, 172 seeing and learning 46 seeing, listening, and doing 108-9 Volvo 54, 146 Vonderau, Patrick 91 Västerås 74, 79, 105, 173 Västmanland (region) 48 Waldenström, Daniel 56-57 Walker, Charles R.: 114 Wallander, Jan 11n, 52 Wasson, Haidee 104n, 139n Weaver, Warren 104n

192 

Post-war Industrial Media Culture in Sweden, 1945–1960

welfare state 52, 58, 60-61, 64, 95, 163 peoples’ home 55, 117 social engineering 45, 59, 64 Wenner-Gren, Axel 33, 148, 150-53, 165, 184 Wenner-Gren Foundation 151 Werner, Gösta 145n Westerberg, Rickard 27, 129 Westerlund, Gunnar 122 White, Leslie A.: 122 Wiener, Norbert 22-24, 104, 114, 133 Wiesen, S. Jonathan 94-95 Wirén, Karl-Hugo 40, 91 work council 27, 92-94, 109, 117-21, 125, 138, 156, 173, 183 work/worker 19, 24-25, 48, 58, 60, 63, 72, 74, 80, 94-95, 121n, 122-23, 132, 139, 161, 173-74, 178 affluent 57-58, 60-61 blue-collar 122 domestic 56, 87 homework 47

housework 47, 63 industrial 105-6, 145 mechanization 72 media workers 17 office 35, 106 recruitment 72, 95, 106, 109, 145, 183 regulation 13, 18, 72 safety 25, 60, 78-80, 84, 106, 110, 116, 173 studies 72, 74-76, 81, 157 white-collar 58, 122 women’s 57-58, 62-63 working class 52, 60-62, 130 Workers’ Safety Board 84 Wormbs, Nina 47n Wretman, Tore 45 Yugoslavia 145 Yxtaholm 129-31 Zachmann, Karin 17, 59-60 Zürich 147