The low income earners. Expertise, politics and mediation in the shaping of a new category around 1968

This article discusses changing usage of words and concepts following the political radicalisation of the 1960s in Sweden. Following the concept of laginkomsttagare, low-income earner, mainly in newspapers, I show how different meanings were attributed to this term by different users on the political spectrum. The theory and method used was inspired by historians like Reinhart Koselleck and Dror Wahrman in their history of concepts. The term low-income earner was first used by social scientists and bureaucrats in the state commission "Laginkomstutredningen" (1965-1971), initiated to map low-income earners in Sweden. These actors, mainly from the political left, described and statistically counted Swedish society according to income groups, but they also shaped the political debate to focus on what they described as growing inequalities and a society in social conflict. The concept of ldginkomsttagare saw a remarkable rise in usage in all sorts of contexts, pointing towards how widely the political radicalisation of the late 1960s had spread the concept became a part of the everyday Swedish vocabulary. Soon, however, the concept was overtaken and transformed by actors with different political goals in a struggle concerning the definition of who really were low-income earners. Ldginkomsttagare gained somewhat of a moral status as society's forgotten social group and many wanted to claim that they belonged to this group.