Shaping Taxpayers

How do you make taxpayers comply? This ethnography is a vivid account of one of the most esteemed Swedish bureaucracies – the Swedish Tax Agency. Shaping Taxpayers focuses on how fiscal strategies and relationships, as well as diverse knowledge claims – legal, economic, cultural – compete to shape taxpayer behaviour.

Lotta Björklund Larsen currently holds the position of Associate Professor at the Department of Thematic Studies – Technology and Social Change, Linköping University, Sweden.

Lotta Björklund Larsen currently holds the position of Associate Professor at the Department of Thematic Studies – Technology and Social Change, Linköping University, Sweden.

“How tax compliance is shaped merits much more attention than it has received in anthropology and the social sciences. The book offers a wonderful rendering of the true strangeness and contingency of familiar routines – something the best social theory does.” · Liz McFall, Open University

“Shaping Taxpayers will be a significant, indeed, ground-breaking study that will propel this vein of interdisciplinary scholarship, concerned with social studies of finance, cultural economy, fiscal sociology and bureaucratic practice, into the mainstream.” · Bill Maurer, University of California, Irvine