The purpose of this study is to investigate how the Swedish government socially constructed its citizens in a number of opinion polls during the year 1999. The last decade of the twentieth century was a bewildering one in a Swedish context, that included a number of new presuppositions for the Swedish society. The economic crisis that was rooted in the 1990s was slowly stabilizing, while new governance and organizational structures were introduced into the welfare system. Sweden, among a number of other states were increasingly computerized which was met with both anticipated delight and some concern. The widespread computerization involved possible problems that could be linked to the millennium change, which in the vernacular was referred to as the Millennium Bug. Through discourse analysis, this paper examines six citizen studies initiated during the years 1999-2000. The studies had the purpose to examine the Swedish citizen's perception and attitude towards the turn of the millennium. Using Thomas Osborne’s and Nikolas Roses’ theory of opinion polls active part in the constitution of the general opinion this study analyses phenomena such as anxiety levels, the perceptive human being, the notion of consensus and what elements that compose threats to society. This study shows that the Swedish government through these initiates public opinion polls attenuated the civic interest and concern of the millennial shift at the expense of other social problems.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UPSALLA1/oai:DiVA.org:sh-34456 |
| Date | January 2017 |
| Creators | Nasiell Holm, Hedvig |
| Publisher | Södertörns högskola, Institutionen för historia och samtidsstudier |
| Source Sets | DiVA Archive at Upsalla University |
| Language | Swedish |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Student thesis, info:eu-repo/semantics/bachelorThesis, text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Rights | info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess |
Page generated in 0.0022 seconds