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The recent reform in Norway on the gender composition of boards of directors in public firms, requiring boards to have at least 40 per cent of each gender, inevitably raises general questions concerning state regulation of property rights. What are the normative limits to state intervention? And more practically: how far could and should such interventions go? The question may be approached from several angles. The line followed here is to look into recent history in two Scandinavian countries – the most state-friendly of all existing democracies – to explore the differences between political interventions which have gained a high degree of legitimacy and those that failed or were never put into practice. In the discussion, both economic efficiency and normative concerns are evoked. Successful reforms introducing employee representatives into health and security committees, as well as to the boards of enterprises, are contrasted to the failed cases of quasi-nationalization of commercial banks in Norway and the wage-earner funds in Sweden. These results throw light on possible democratic justification and political viability of the gender quota reform.

Autonomy, unity, identity: these three themes and ideals have been pursued by nationalist thinkers everywhere since Rousseau and Herder (Hutchinson & Smith, 1994). Zionism, founded in Europe at the end of the nineteenth century,¹ is a particular case of a national movement, putting into practice the idea of a political community located within the boundaries of a single nation-state. Yet, at the same time, the Jewish nation-building process, which began in Palestine in 1881 and achieved its aim of independence in the spring of 1948, with the establishment of the State of Israel under the political leadership of the Labor movement, was unusual in its complexity and marked, from its inception, by dramatic struggles over the distribution of power.

Lack of women in boardrooms and management has been a common feature of corporate and agricultural sectors in Norway. In both sectors, quota reforms have been implemented in order to change this situation. This chapter analyses the reasons given for applying gender quotas. While public limited companies were enforced by law to elect a minimum 40 per cent women or men to their boards in 2008, the board of the Federation of Norwegian Agricultural Co-operatives (FNAC) voluntarily decided that a minimum of 40 per cent women or men should be represented in their boards by 2009. How could it be that the agricultural cooperatives introduced this voluntarily, while the business corporations were to be forced by legislation? Public documents, governmental papers, media texts and interview data are analysed to identify and compare the reasoning for gender board quotas. The comparison sheds light on our understanding of the boardroom quota as more complex than simply to deal with gender equality. Traditional gender equality arguments did play a role, but in different ways, articulations and emphasis. More pragmatic reasoning played a role. In FNAC, we saw that the process of organisation-building and modernisation played an important role in the decision to voluntarily introduce gender quotas on boards. Within the corporate sector there were no advocates for introducing gender quotas before profitability arguments came to the fore, but even though such arguments were acceptable to the corporate sector, they did not have the same effect in terms of getting volunteer support for gender quotas.