From community building to commodity production: the political economy of the Swedish housing and building industry

The Swedish building industry has been going through a neoliberal transformation from community building to commodity production. In this article, we employ mixed-methods research aiming at addressing what this structural transformation entails and what its (adverse) effects may be. Based on a contemporary historical materialist approach, we draw on the principal contradiction in the labor theory of value and the respective contradictions in housing commodification and production fragmentation to conceptualize an integrated framework (referred to as a triaxial threat space), which we then situate in the socio-historical context of the Swedish building industry. Finally, we employ this framework and demonstrate how the structural transformation from community building to commodity production is threatening the famed Swedish high-road model, leading, among others, to labor deskilling and exploitation, lower productivity, and production quality issues. We also posit that these phenomena are exacerbated when moving towards the extremes of fully exploiting labor for profit, universally commodifying housing production, and completely fragmenting production through multilayered subcontracting. Our contributions include integrating relevant scholarship into a coherent framework for understanding transformations in housing production and labor relations in Sweden, as well as linking labor degradation and the potential collapse of high-road production with the gradual change in the political economy of Swedish construction.