IKEA encapsulates to an exaggerated level many of the icons of a truly modern trans-national store. It is undoubtedly global, accounting for over 253 stores in 24 countries. It was visited by over 565 million people in 2008 and has made its founder, Ingvar Kamprad, the head of a multi-billion empire. As a global organization, IKEA's success, we are told, lies not only in high-quality, low-cost sales pitch but on its insistence on centralized control, product standardization and homogeneous Scandinavian corporate culture.  However unlike other many trans-national corporations and their products - the Coca Cola can, the Mc Donald's burger - it is not popularly iconic of cultural homogenization or corporate greed in quite the same way. Why?

This project focuses on local, contemporary versions of the world's largest furniture retailer. From the blue and yellow exteriors, to imported meatballs in cross-global cafes, the marketing image of the store links common icons of 'Swedishness' with a non-hierarchical, non-elitist modern solution for the purchasing masses. A recognisable theme runs through IKEA's 'vision' such as its claim to deliver democratic design at affordable prices. This vision may be experienced in contradictory ways however, espousing corporate values of rationalisation mass-production and efficiency on the one hand but given a laudable human face of Scandinavian lifestyles, Swedish modern living and practicality on the other. As shoppers labour under the inconsistencies of a particularising discourse experienced as flat-pack rationisalisation, lengthy queues, maze-like stores and frustrating re-assembly, anthropological interviews firstly question the degree to which the cultural origin of the design process makes its way from the production floor to the everyday contexts of household living spaces.  By comparing Stockholm with Dublin shoppers' experience of the first store in Ireland (opened 2009), research will secondly shed light on how trans-national products are situated within local diversity.  More importantly, the materialization of contested frames (such as how to be modern) or socio-political ideals (such as democratic design) is placed under analytical focus.