Self-regulatory investments among private actors in the era of regulatory capitalism: the licensing of Swedish finance and securities industry employees

Abstract

This article analyses the growth of the Swedish finance and securities industry’s employee licensing programme to advance our understanding of the growth, conditions, and function of various forms of self-regulation in the era of regulatory capitalism. It examines how the situations that are significant for private actors’ initiation and implementation of self-regulation are connected with the development of a particular form of self-regulation. The article argues that the licensing programme in question is an example of self-regulation characterized by impersonal trust, identity assurance, and integrity. This type of self-regulation is related to the conditions that characterized the finance and securities industry before and at the time of the initiative and its implementation, in particular, economic confidence, normalization and expansion, and increasing complexity and heterogeneity. The article is based mainly on document analysis and market statistics supplemented with interviews.