A sovereign abode – Democracy, discipline and deliberation in a Swedish housing association from 1943 to the present

Sammanfattning: Since its inception, the discipline of sociology has struggled to bridge the gap between structure and agency. How is it that individuals can be free whilst also part of a larger context that determines their actions? This study aims to make a small contribution towards solving this conundrum. It departs from the theories of Habermas, Arendt and Machiavelli, and ventures into an archival study of a Swedish housing association, chronicling how it grappled with this very issue over the eight decades of its existence. It concludes that autonomy – and the agency that follows from it – is something that has to be deliberated into being in a collective setting. It also concludes that housing associations as an organizational form, whilst structurally a potential site for such deliberations, do not guarantee that they take place, and that the hard-won lessons of deliberative decision-making have to be kept alive in practical use, lest they be forgotten.