In the mid-1950s, Vattenfall, the Swedish State Power Board, faced a severe acceptance crisis. In the postwar years, Vattenfall had become one of the main drivers of Sweden's technological modernization through electrification and the exploitation of hydropower resources in Northern Sweden. Yet, this postwar hydro boom faced increasingly powerful protests from both civil society and local communities, putting Vattenfall's construction plans at stake and spurring an intense public relations campaign. This paper examines Vattenfall's PR materials, and especially the large body of films produced in the context of this acceptance crisis. The first half of the paper offers a close reading of these materials, demonstrating how Vattenfall addressed conflicts around hydropower exploitation as a matter of individual "adaptation" to modernity. With this framing, Vattenfall drew upon a much broader adaptation discourse, analyzed in the second half of the paper. This discourse shaped public and political debates about technological and social modernization in postwar Sweden and corresponded with the social engineering ideals of the "people's home" (folkhemmet) and Sweden's welfare state. Social scientists, politicians, managers, trade unionists, and others developed the idea that the challenges of modernization should be met by the adaptation of people's individual behaviors and emotions to their rapidly changing social and technological environments. Arguing for a history of emotions approach in the study of histories of "technology acceptance," this paper thus demonstrates how river engineering in postwar Sweden relied on emotional engineering techniques through PR: framing social conflicts over hydropower as individual adaptation processes facilitated the depoliticization of technological choice.
Fabian Zimmer (Tue,) studied this question.