Commodifying the Nordic Welfare State in the Age of Cognitive Capitalism: The Journey of Nordic Childcare Know-how to China

Commodifying the Nordic Welfare State in the Age of Cognitive Capitalism investigates how the Nordic welfare state is turned into a commodity in contemporary global capitalism. In this dissertation, this is explored through the phenomenon of ‘welfare export’ of Nordic childcare know-how from Denmark to China. Through this phenomenon, the dissertation explores how Nordic childcare know-how is the outcome of a prevalent reconfiguration of the welfare-state construction, as capital has to ‘capture’ the productive aspects of abstract and common resources such as cultural products, traditional knowledges, or social institutions in its process of valorisation. Tracing each step of Nordic childcare know-how, the dissertation illustrates how such phenomenon cannot be perceived as an isolated phenomenon but as something that involves several societal transformations, both historical and contemporary in different local contexts. With concepts such as the pedagogical factory, the subjective figure of the pedagogised and the total subsumption of the pedagogical, the dissertation illustrates the political economy of welfare export which is tied to current tendency of cognitive capitalism.