Populations as Brands / Progress in Mathematics (PDF)

Population branding gives the Nordic States a new way to transform both their citizens and their comprehensive welfare state records into desirable assets on the global innovation market. With forensic precision and scholarly depth, Tupasela calibrates the similarities and differences between the consumer data strategies of the FANGs (Facebook, Amazon, Netflix, Google) and the much more contested and politicised process of State capitalisation on citizens' health information. This book is essential reading for anyone interested in Big Data studies, critical innovation and business studies, Science and Technology studies and Twenty-First century Biopolitics.

- Catherine Waldby, Director, Research School of Social Sciences, College of Arts & Social Sciences, The Australian National University, Australia

In Populations as Brands Aaro Tupasela extends the fields of critical data studies and nation branding into the realm of state controlled biobanking and healthcare data. Using examples from two Nordic countries - Denmark and Finland - he explores how these countries have begun to market and brand their resources using methods and practices drawn from the commercial sector. Tupasela identifies changes during the past ten years that suggest that state collected and maintained resources have become the object of valuation practices. Tupasela argues that this phenomenon constitutes a novel form of nation branding in which relations between the states, individuals and the private sector are re-aligned. The author locates the historical underpinnings of population branding in the field of medical genetics starting in the early 1960s but transforming significantly during the 2010s into a professional marketing activity undertaken at multiple levels and sites. In studying this recent phenomenon, Tupasela provides examples of how marketing material has become increasingly professional and targeted towards a broader audience, including the public. The book will be of particular interest to scholars of critical data studies and nation branding, as well as students of science and technology studies, sociology and marketing.

Aaro Tupasela works as a research fellow at the Faculty of Social Science, University of Helsinki. Previously he has held positions at the Faculty of Law and The Centre for Medical Science and Technology Studies (MeST) at the University of Copenhagen.