By drawing on a five-year ethnographic study of Sweden’s premier elite community Djursholm, involving extensive field observations, interviews with residents and service staff, surveys, archival material and official statistics, Mikael will discuss the power of elites through the spaces they command and control. Djursholm is a place of beauty, calm, security—and impressive economic wealth. In this pastoral idyll of some nine thousand people located close to Sweden’s capital Stockholm, there are large houses with extensive grounds; charming, winding lanes, surrounded by a varied and beautiful landscape; and a small commercial center with high-class shops, restaurants, and other services. Possessed of a higher educational level than anywhere else in the nation, the residents work primarily as executives and decision makers in the corporate and financial sectors; but there are also famous artists and academics living there. A number of the country’s superrich who figure on Forbes’s “The World Billionaire’s” list also live (or have lived) there. Income levels are at the top of official national league tables. Property prices are the highest in the country. However, Djursholm is not only a privileged place that promises its residents “a good life” materially, economically and socially, but also a place that has aura through the extreme accumulation of cultural and aesthetic capital that has the effect of enabling a consecration of its residents.
Biography
Professor Mikael Holmqvist is based at the Stockholm Business School in Stockholm University. His work focuses on economic elites, elite institutions, organisational change and occupational disability. His most recent work has examined the key institutions implicated in the decline of social democratic state, with significant projects examining an elite business school, life in a pre-eminent neighbourhood and the Swedish king as a means of tracking the emergence of neoliberalism. He is the author of Leader Communities: The Consecration of Elites in Djursholm (Columbia University Press, 2017) and Elite Business Schools: Education and Consecration in Neo-liberal Society (Routledge, 2022).
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