The Yuppie, the Young Urban Professional, is a social type closely linked to the popular historical conception of the 1980s. The type is characterized as a young person working in banking, media or finance with expensive tastes in consumption and an individualistic, vapid mindset. Considering the popular conception of the Yuppie as a sort of manifestation of all things 80s, this paper explores how the Yuppie was represented in Swedish newspapers in the period 1984 to 1991. Using Bourdieu’s concept of the classificatory struggle this study charts how the Yuppie was invoked in the social world of its day. Contrary to the mythic belief of the 1980s as the decade of the Yuppie, the social type is represented only as a culturally dominant type between 1985 and 1987 and becomes a historical concept by 1988. The Yuppie was channeled as opposed to the socially conscious Hippie-type of the 1970s and the traditional Swedish working class. Furthermore, the Yuppie was viewed by contemporary commentators as a sort of amalgamation of various social and economic trends that they meant characterized the 1980s, such as the growth and deregulation of the financial sector, rising prices of housing in central Stockholm, and the rise of new forms of labor starkly different from the traditional swedish industry. This contemporary ‘historization’ of the Yuppie attests to a view of history as a sort of pendulum of zeitgeists, where Yuppie replaces hippie, individualism replaces social conscience, seemingly of its own volition.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UPSALLA1/oai:DiVA.org:uu-475071 |
| Date | January 2022 |
| Creators | Sundin, Tobias |
| Publisher | Uppsala universitet, Institutionen för idé- och lärdomshistoria |
| 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 |
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