Open seminar at Score
Welcome to a seminar on Thursday, 8 October 2026, with Johan Nilsson, Associate Senior Lecturer in Social Anthropology at School of Global Studies, University of Gothenburg.
Serving responsibility: Qualitative situated judgement in market regulation
Alcohol is an exceptional good: it is valued for the pleasure and conviviality it enables and for the livelihoods it sustains, yet its consumption is also considered a threat to public health and social order. Today, Swedish alcohol service is regulated by municipal administrations who put both national legal code and city policies to practice. This street-level bureaucratic work aims to allow only trustworthy actors to serve alcohol, encouraging responsible service and censoring those who fail to live up to the rules of the market. In short, it relies on auditors perceiving and interpreting responsibility of license holders and serving staff.
This paper draws on my ongoing ethnographic fieldwork in the municipal licensing administration in Stockholm. Following the work to grant licenses, and inspecting the rules adherence of license holders, I discuss ethnographic examples such as casework meetings, walking the beat on licence inspection rounds, and the interaction between administrators and elected officials in the licensing board. I argue that the administrative officers and inspectors who audit responsibility in alcohol service rely on embodied qualitative interpretation in deciding on who is a responsible actor in alcohol service (thereby allowed to act on the concerned market for alcohol). The integrity of assessments matter because they connect patrons’ conduct to responsible service, licit market participation, and the fair application of public policy.
