Equal Opportunities? Gendering and Racialising the Politics of Entrepreneurship in Swedish Eldercare

ABSTRACT

This paper contributes a Swedish perspective on how selected feminist movement ideas, such as women’s right to economic independence, are being appropriated by neoliberal policies. Swedish governments have argued that opening up the publicly funded eldercare sector to private providers would advance entrepreneurship undertaken by women and immigrants. In this article, we critically explore the ambiguity of the gender equality and ethnic diversity arguments used to justify private sector involvement in publicly funded eldercare in Sweden. We draw upon Carol Bacchi’s theory of policies as gendering practices to argue that the discourses of equal opportunity underpinning the politics of entrepreneurship in the home care sector obscure and recreate inequalities. Our analysis, based on interviews with politicians, public officials and interest organizations involved in the market for Swedish eldercare, shows that the politics of entrepreneurship in the home care sector privilege entrepreneurs who reflect the white masculine gendering of entrepreneurship and disadvantage those with subject positions deviating from the normative entrepreneur. Our findings suggest that policy-engineered entrepreneurship is a poor tool in the struggle for gender equality, as this kind of policymaking is likely to operate in tandem with gendering and racializing practices that impede socioeconomic progress.

KEYWORDS:

• Care work
• feminism
• gender equality
• marketization
• neoliberalism

Introduction

In Sweden, as elsewhere, feminist scholars have raised concerns regarding “the flirtation” (Medina-Vincent, 2018) between feminism and neoliberalism (Ahl, Berglund, Pettersson, & Tillmar, 2016; Elomäki, 2018; Fraser, 2009; Newman, 2013; Prügl, 2015; Rottenberg, 2014). Given its celebration of entrepreneurship, some scholars have argued that neoliberalism risks ensnaring feminism in political projects promoting the entrepreneurial success of individual women instead of challenging and changing broader inequalities in society (e.g. Ahl et al., 2016; Fraser, 2009). Others have emphasized that neither feminism nor neoliberalism are uniform movements; accordingly, the ways they might overlap are both complex and ambiguous (e.g. Newman, 2013; Prügl, 2015). Feminism draws upon a diversity of voices and includes conflicting interests based on class and ethnicity, and differing political ideas of equality, drawn from both liberalism and socialism (Prügl, 2015). Neoliberalism is also multi-vocal, and is, according to Larner (2000, p. 12), more a “complex and hybrid political imaginary” involving a set of beliefs, techniques and practices selectively adapted to different local contexts than a coherent political philosophy. In view of this, it is important to consider nuances in how feminism and neoliberalism may overlap in different political contexts (Newman, 2013).

In the Nordic countries, a growing number of studies has found that the neoliberal promise to support women’s independence through entrepreneurship is yet to deliver (e.g. Ahl and Marlow, 2019; Ahl et al., 2016; Authors, 2019; Berglund, Ahl, Pettersson, & Tillmar, 2018; Erlandsson, Storm, Stranz, Szebehely, & Trydegård, 2013; Hedberg & Pettersson, 2013; Kovalainen & Österberg-Högstedt, 2013; Sköld & Tillmar, 2015; Sundin & Tillmar, 2010). Developments in Swedish eldercare, the analytical subject of this paper, may serve as an example. Swedish governments have argued that opening up the publicly funded health and social care sector to private businesses would support women’s opportunities for entrepreneurship (Ahl et al., 2016). Furthermore, in the context of policy-engineered business opportunities in publicly funded eldercare, immigrants have been encouraged to start up ethnically niched firms to meet the growing need for culturally adapted care services generated by an increasingly diverse older population (Authors, 2019; Hedberg & Pettersson, 2013). However, although the number of women-owned businesses has increased in Swedish eldercare (Sköld & Tillmar, 2015), most are small and low-profit companies (Ahl et al., 2016; Erlandsson et al., 2013; Sundin & Tillmar, 2010) struggling to survive the competition from the large and internationally owned care corporations that dominate the private care market in terms of size, growth and profit (Meagher & Szebehely, 2019). Moreover, studies indicate that immigrant women care entrepreneurs are often mistrusted by financial institutions (Hedberg & Pettersson, 2013) and the local authorities that regulate the private care market (Authors, 2019).

Although previous research clearly shows that gender shapes policy-engineered entrepreneurship in the Nordic welfare sector, how gender intersects with other categories of difference in this context has been less well explored. So far, studies on how gender intersects with, for example, ethnicity in the business of eldercare has focused on the experiences of entrepreneurs (e.g. Authors, 2019; Hedberg & Pettersson, 2013), leaving out the perceptions of politicians and policy-makers. Furthermore, studies of how neoliberal policies affect women’s business opportunities in the Swedish welfare sector have generally explored national developments (e.g. Ahl et al., 2016; Berglund et al., 2018) and only rarely linked these to local policies and practices (e.g. Erlandsson et al., 2013; Sundin & Tillmar, 2010). Given that Swedish eldercare is funded, organized and regulated at the local level, we need further studies that connect national developments with local policies in order to shed light on how neoliberalism operates in practice.

This study aims to fill these empirical gaps by exploring how gender and ethnicity shape the politics of entrepreneurship in publicly funded home care services for older adults in the capital city of Sweden, Stockholm. We investigate how politicians, local authority officials and interest organizations involved in the market for publicly funded home care services in Stockholm construct entrepreneurs and entrepreneurship in the sector. Specifically, we explore how policies simultaneously construct gender and ethnicity in relation to; 1) home care as an occupation; 2) opportunities to establish and run a business in home care; and 3) home care as a business.

The paper draws upon Bacchi’s (2017) conceptualization of policies as differencing practices that make political subjects, such as “women” and “men” or “native-born” and “immigrants”, come into existence. According to Bacchi, this way of thinking about policies helps shift analytical focus from excluded and marginalized groups to the political processes that make social inequalities. Moreover, viewing policies as constitutive practices, in which gender is accompanied by other processes of oppression and subordination, may contribute to overcoming some of the dilemmas associated with the ongoing feminist debate about categorical distinctions. By employing this analytical approach, we seek to add an account of how women’s business experiences are entangled with other processes of domination and subordination to the growing field of Nordic and international research on women’s entrepreneurship.

Defining care entrepreneurship in Sweden

Nordic research on women’s entrepreneurship (e.g. Ahl and Marlow, 2019; Ahl et al., 2016; Berglund et al., 2018; Hedberg & Pettersson, 2013; Kovalainen & Österberg-Högstedt, 2013; Sköld & Tillmar, 2015; Sundin & Tillmar, 2010) has thoroughly demonstrated that neoliberal policies reinforce the masculine gendering of entrepreneurship, leading to a continuing undervaluation of women’s enterprises and the positioning of women in small-scale and low-profit businesses in the domestic service sector. However, a growing literature on intersectional approaches to entrepreneurship (e.g. Dy, Marlow, & Martin, 2017; Harvey, 2005; Holvino, 2010; Knight, 2016; Pio, 2007; Valdez, 2016) shows that the masculine gendering of entrepreneurship is closely related to other power relations, notably class and ethnicity. Because the normative entrepreneur is typically a white, middle-class man, entrepreneurs whose subject positions do not reflect the white masculine gendering of entrepreneurship face particular challenges in the pursuit of legitimacy and funding of their business ventures (Harvey, 2005; Knight, 2016; Valdez, 2016). Drawing upon these insights, we seek to explore if policies in the publicly funded home care sector in Sweden reinforce the white masculine gendering of entrepreneurship, and thus benefit specific groups of entrepreneurs and disadvantage others (cf. Bacchi, 2017). In this context, both the feminization of home care work and the increasing employment of immigrants in the sector play crucial roles.

The status of home care work

Similar to other Nordic countries, home care has been an integral part of the Swedish welfare state since the 1950s (Erlandsson et al., 2013). Responsibility for funding and organization lies with politicians in local councils and services are provided following needs-assessment by local authorities. Through the years, home care has changed from mainly providing domestic services to include help with personal hygiene and professional nursing tasks, such as managing prescription medications.

Although public responsibility for eldercare services has turned unpaid care work traditionally performed by women in the domestic sphere into formally paid jobs, it has not changed occupational segregation and hierarchies of the labour market (Koskinen Sandberg, 2018). In the Nordic countries, as elsewhere, care work remains a feminized occupation, valued less than jobs and sectors associated with masculinity and male bodies (Huppatz & Goodwin, 2013; Koskinen Sandberg, 2018). Consequently, although home care work has developed into a job requiring skills in multiple areas, it continues to be an undervalued and female-dominated occupation characterized by little recognition of competencies, low status and low pay (Meagher, Szebehely, & Mears, 2016).

These gender biases overlap with ethnic inequalities. In Stockholm, for example, approximately half of all home care workers are immigrants, whose weak bargaining position on the labour market forces them to take jobs attributed as less valued (Authors, 2019). Hence, in Sweden, as in other European countries, it is no longer possible to see home care as a feminized occupation; it is increasingly also becoming an ethnic niche in the labour market (Storm, 2018; Williams & Brennan, 2012).

Care entrepreneurship: a tool for supporting women and immigrants?

In Swedish public policies, implementation of entrepreneurship into the publicly funded eldercare sector has been framed as a way to raise the status of home care work (e.g. Government bill 2008/09:29, 2008). This outsourcing of the provision of publicly funded eldercare services to private business operators is in essence part of the neoliberal political imaginary (Larner, 2000), and its favouring of logics and techniques taken from the private market and the private business sector.

As in other Nordic countries, entrepreneurship in Swedish eldercare has been introduced through reforms that have gradually opened up publicly funded home care to private providers (Erlandsson et al., 2013). Entrepreneurship was first introduced into Swedish eldercare in the 1990s, when local authorities were allowed to outsource the provision of eldercare and other welfare services to for-profit as well as not-for-profit organizations. A key piece of legislation was the Public Procurement Act (LOU), which was introduced in 1992 and amended in 2007 and 2016.

LOU builds on competitive tendering, which favours large companies that have the resources to engage in complex procurement processes and can use economies of scale to drive down the price (Erlandsson et al., 2013). As a result; a few large and mainly internationally owned corporations dominate the private eldercare market in Sweden, alongside a vast number of small, local companies struggling to survive (Authors, 2019). In contrast to multinational care corporations, which generally reflect the white masculine gendering of entrepreneurship, smaller, local care companies are mostly owned and run by women and/or immigrants (Ahl et al., 2016; Erlandsson et al., 2013; Hedberg & Pettersson, 2013; cf. Nazareno, 2018).

Against this backdrop, the right-centre coalition Swedish government elected in 2006 and re-elected in 2010 tried to stimulate small-scale entrepreneurship in eldercare by introducing choice-based regulation of service provision with the Act on System of Choice (LOV) (Government bill 2008/09:29, 2008). Implementing this piece of national legislation is optional for local authorities. LOV regulates the conditions that apply if local authorities decide to allow older adults to choose between public and private providers competing in tax-funded and locally regulated care markets. Eligibility to become a care provider is open to all legally recognized organizations that meet the relevant criteria, which are decided by the local authorities. Furthermore, LOV sets no limits on the number of providers or the duration of the approval local authorities can authorize. Government policy-makers explicitly argued that this way of organizing provision of publicly funded eldercare would support small-scale entrepreneurship undertaken by women and immigrants, especially in home care (Ibid.).

Although LOV drew upon liberal feminist ideas of empowering women as economic actors, it was also part of the right-centre government’s economic policy to stimulate employment growth through increasing low-paid and weakly regulated jobs in the private service sector (Schnyder, 2012). The left-green coalition government elected in 2014 rejected LOV at the rhetorical level, and promised stricter regulation of the private care market. In practice, however, LOV has remained in place and the red-green coalition government has not acted decisively to reduce the involvement of private enterprises in publicly funded welfare services, particularly not the representation of the biggest international corporations (Meagher & Szebehely, 2019).

Although previous research has demonstrated that neoliberal policies disadvantage women care entrepreneurs, no studies have so far systematically explored how gender is interconnected with ethnicity in the doing of entrepreneurial policies in publicly funded eldercare in Sweden. To further explore the intersection of gender and ethnicity in the politics of entrepreneurship in Swedish home care, we introduce an analytical framework using Bacchi’s (2017) conceptualization of policies as gendering practices.

Policies as gendering practices

Bacchi argues that “policy” refers to governing in its broadest sense in her collected works (e.g. Bacchi, 1990, 1999, 2009), which offer a Foucauldian analysis of how taken-for-granted truths about women and gender equality structure and inform politics. On this view, policy includes not only legislation, government institutions and reports but also discourses about social problems and their relation to particular identities and subject positions. Accordingly, policy comprises the whole field of policymaking, including the role of professionals and their knowledge. Bacchi (2017, p. 27), therefore, conceptualizes policies as practices ´from the inside´. By this she means that policymaking is a discursive practice, and, as such, a form of knowledge production, during which political objects and subjects come into existence and continuously are (re)made.

Building on this framework, Bacchi (2017) argues that men and women come into being through policies. By this, she means that policies encourage behaviours; characteristics and expectations associated with those conventionally marked as men and women, which result in the making and remaking of unequal identities and subject positions of men and women, and gendered inequalities in society. This understanding of policies as practices that actively make rather than impact people is also why Bacchi defines policies as gendering practices.

Moreover, Bacchi (2017) proposes that as a gendering practice, policymaking is entangled with other processes of oppression and subordination. For example, gendering may coincide with racialization—the process of attributing characteristics regarded as inherent to members of a group based on their physical or cultural traits—and/or classing—the process of ascribing features considered characteristic for members of a group because of their socioeconomic position (cf. Harvey, 2005; Knight, 2016).

We draw upon Bacchi’s (2017) analytical framework to study how policies make men and women and native-born and immigrants come into being as home care entrepreneurs, including the qualifications attributed to these various subject positions. Additionally, by using this approach, we explore home care entrepreneurship as a policy practice. That is, we investigate home care entrepreneurship as a discursive practice that creates specific truths about who is qualified to set up and run a business in home care and what distinguishes good from bad business operators in home care. Hence, we do not explore the underlying interests of different actors involved in the market for publicly funded home care services or how actors may use discourses for their own purposes. Instead, we explore how policies create home care entrepreneurship and home care entrepreneurs as political objects and subjects and the gendering and racializing effects inherent in these constructions.

Methods and data

Part of a larger study, which included a mapping of home care companies and interviews with home care entrepreneurs operating in Stockholm, this article is based on 18 interviews, conducted in 2017 with politicians, interest organizations and local authority officials at the city and city-district levels in Stockholm.

Stockholm was chosen for three reasons. Firstly, Stockholm has been a forerunner in promoting entrepreneurship in the home care sector (Erlandsson et al., 2013) and so has a considerably higher proportion of entrepreneurs operating on the local care market than the country in general (Authors, 2019). Secondly, Stockholm introduced choice-based regulation of service provision in home care in 2002 and implemented the Act on System of Choice in 2010 (Erlandsson et al., 2013). Thirdly, the political rule in Stockholm has mirrored the political majority at the national level from 2006 to 2018. Accordingly, a right-centre coalition was in majority in the local parliament from 2006 to 2014, while a left-green coalition held the power from 2014 to 2018. Altogether, this makes Stockholm an interesting case for exploring the politics of entrepreneurship in Swedish home care.

The interview sample consisted of four politicians representing both right and left-wing political parties in Stockholm; six local authority officials responsible for contracting with and monitoring of private care providers in the city; and eight interest organizations: the Association of Private Care Providers (Vårdföretagarna); the Association of Non-Profit Providers (Famna); the employer organization for regional and local authorities, the Swedish Association of Local Authorities and Regions (SKL); the Municipal Workers Union (Kommunal) organizing home care workers, and representatives of the two largest organizations for senior citizens, PRO (organizing supporters of left-wing parties) and SPF (organizing supporters of right-wing parties). Whereas the interest organizations included both national and local representatives, the sample of politicians and authority officials only included locally situated actors.

All interviews were conducted by the authors. Interviews followed a semi-structured topic guide organized around six themes; (1) the role of the organization and involvement in public–private relations in home care; (2) market entry requirements and criteria companies need to fulfil; (3) obstacles and problems in service delivery; (4) the organization of home care work; (5) older adults’ needs for care; and (6) significance of gender and country of birth in home care entrepreneurship. All interviews were recorded and transcribed. This paper analyses responses to all themes except (5).

Our analysis of the interviews proceeded in four steps. First, we each coded the transcriptions and then compared our coding, revising as appropriate, to ensure the trustworthiness of this step. Second, the agreed coding was used to find common themes arising from the individual interviews. Third, the themes were conceptualized by extracting what behaviours, characteristics and expectations they signified in relation to men and women and immigrants and native-born. Fourth, the analytical framework was used to generalize how entrepreneurial policies in Swedish eldercare make care entrepreneurs as unequal subjects based on gender and ethnicity.

In each of these four steps, we used a delimited version of Bacchi’s (2009) what’s the problem represented to be (WPR) model to analyse our interview data (see Table 1). The reasons why we excluded the sixth and final question included in Bacchi’s original model were that we considered this question to be outside the aim and scope of this article. An overview of our analytical approach is summarized in Table 1.

Table 1. Analytical approach based on Bacchi (2009).

The WPR model (Bacchi, 2009)	Our analytical approach
Q1: What’s the problem represented to be in a specific policy?	How do the informants describe “the problem” of entrepreneurship in home care?
Q2: What presuppositions or assumptions underlie these representations?	What behaviours, characteristics and expectations are attributed to various groups of care entrepreneurs (i.e. men and women and immigrants and native-born)?
Q3: How have these representations of “the problem” come about?	Are different groups of care entrepreneurs ascribed specific behaviours, characteristics and expectations (i.e. are these representations related to the white masculine gendering of entrepreneurship and/or the feminization and ethnic niching of care work)?
Q4: What is left unproblematic in this problem representation?	What power relations are omitted in the informants’ accounts?
Q5: What effects are produced by this representation of the problem?	Do the informants’ accounts reproduce or criticize the white masculine gendering of entrepreneurship and/or the feminization and ethnic niching of care work?
Q6: How have these representations of “the problem” been produced, disseminated and defended?	Not included in our analysis.

Gendering and racializing the politics of entrepreneurship in Swedish home care

In the following, we present the different representations of home care entrepreneurship and groups of home care entrepreneurs that emerged in our analysis of the interviews. The representations are summarized in three central themes identified as recurring in the interviews: home care as an occupation, equal opportunities and home care as a business. These themes should not be understood as distinct but rather as interconnected, and the informants characteristically moved between the themes when they described the problems they perceived as related to home care entrepreneurship and/or certain groups of home care entrepreneurs. Each of the three themes is also closely related to the doing of neoliberal policies but in different ways. While the theme of equal opportunities relates to the neoliberal imagery of the ideal market, home care as an occupation and home care as a business relates to the creation of entrepreneurial subjects. To illustrate findings from the interview data, we have translated quotes in this section from Swedish to English.

Home care as an occupation

Home care as an occupation was a key issue in the informants’ representations of entrepreneurship in the sector. Most informants constructed home care as a complicated job that was both undervalued and underpaid. Concurrently they argued that the low status and poor conditions of home care depend on the fact that it is job dominated by women. Hence, the informants articulated occupational gender segregation as central to home care being undervalued. However, at the same time, most informants omitted hierarchical gender relations in their explanations of the low status of home care. Instead of problematizing the unequal positioning of men and women at the top of organizations, they located the undervaluation of home care work in wider social attitudes. For example, the representative of the Municipal Workers Union (Kommunal) claimed that:

The problem with structures can’t be located at that level—who owns and makes money. The problem with structures relates to the perception of work in itself, care work in itself, as feminine coded or whatever you call it, and therefore less valued in society.

This tendency to treat occupational segregation as separated from vertical gender hierarchies in work and business and to locate problems in a cultural domain detached from economic wealth and control also echoed in the accounts of other informants. For instance, one local authority official reported that, to overcome occupational segregation in home care, “I think it’s some other things you’ll have to work on there, it’s more about attitudes, I guess”. Similarly, one right-wing politician used the expression “to cultivate women as leaders, managers and entrepreneurs” when talking about how the choice regulation contributed to counteract occupational segregation. Hence, informants constituted home care as a feminine job characterized by low status and low pay without relating these characteristics to vertical gender relations, including the unequal distribution of power between men and women in work and business.

In this context, informants generally argued that professional training would raise the status of home care work. By increasing professional training, employment and working conditions would improve. For instance, one left-wing politician stated:

Overall, I think that we must professionalise home care in that sense [we have to] start talking about professional learning and start seeing home care workers as a profession. And in a profession […] you must have the opportunity to influence your work, well; you must have the space to use your professional knowledge, and to make your own judgements. […] So we must stimulate leadership, [raise] wages, and also [change] how we talk about home care.

As this quote illustrates, the informants’ proposals for professionalization mixed calls for training of home care workers with calls for recognition of the existing skills home care workers have as equivalent to professional skills. At the same time, most omitted the weak correlation between the existing skills of home care workers and better pay. Therefore, in suggesting professionalization, informants again placed cultural revaluation of care work before reallocation of power and resources across gender, occupations and business opportunities.

The only informants who were sceptical about professionalization were the local authority officials responsible for contracting with and oversight of care providers. They rejected professionalization as political rhetoric, and argued that both municipal and private care providers employ anyone they like regardless of the city’s requirements for training. For instance, one official working at the city district level reported:

It’s like this with professional training. We have especially one company. We’ve followed-up this company at the district level and concluded that no, they don’t have the minimum level of professionally trained employees. So, we tell this to the city’s central office. What do they do? They go there and nothing happens!

Although representations of immigrants generally were more implicit than those of gender, constructions of immigrants frequently appeared in proposals for professionalization. All groups of informants constructed home care as a temporary job in which immigrant workers lacking proficiency in Swedish were over-represented, in particular women immigrants. Whereas politicians and authority officials claimed that this created administrative problems, for example, in maintaining client records, the senior citizens’ organizations argued that this affected service provision. For instance, one informant representing left-wing supporters among senior citizens (PRO) said:

There’s a lack of trained staff and then you get immigrants and without making any further valuation of that they perhaps get it as their first job. Then maybe you require that they know the language because that’s a prerequisite for going to older people—that you can make yourself understood.

Although other informants were not so explicit in their accounts, most returned to the problem of immigrant women lacking linguistic skills in Swedish in their creations of home care as an occupation. In doing so, they also concurrently gendered and racialized the existent low status of home care work.

Altogether, the informants constituted home care as a low-status occupation dominated by women and/or immigrants. These issues were also entwined; the low status of home care was constructed as being caused by the overrepresentation of women and/or immigrant workers. The informants’ proposal to change this undervaluation of both home care work and the women and immigrants working in home care was professionalization. Although this suggestion might appear to raise the low status of home care work, as a discursive practice this proposal also simultaneously genders and racializes women and immigrants working in home care as lacking skills and competencies. As shown in the following analysis, this representation of home care as an occupation also had consequences for how the informants characterized opportunities for different groups of care entrepreneurs and home care as a business.

Equal opportunities?

When reflecting upon possibilities to start a business in home care, informants frequently returned to how The Act on System of Choice has contributed to creating a care market generally characterized by equal opportunities. Nearly all argued that this act had enabled small companies to enter the home care market and that there were no differences between social groups because all had the same opportunities to start a business in home care. Hence, in their discourses, the informants created the home care market as unbiased and there was accordingly no need to support any specific group of care entrepreneurs. For example, even representatives of left-wing political parties, who were sceptical towards the act, argued that women are not “disabled” and therefore should not be given any preferential access to the care market:

Women aren’t disabled in any way, and we shouldn’t support them by making it easier in any way. But we’ve to see what’s needed. What do they need? I’m guessing they need just what I was talking about—greater challenges to enter [the market] and more freedom once they’ve entered.

Similarly, the representative of the Association of Private Care Providers (Vårdföretagarna) claimed it was more important to create a well-functioning system than to support women:

What you should do, I think, is to arrange conditions and prerequisites for [publicly-funded] care activities so they’re good enough so that as many as possible would like to participate. So you get those established and robust companies of good quality that can participate and contribute to eldercare in the long run. That’s much more important than [supporting women] because then we get [gender equality] into the bargain, because care entrepreneurship among women is already big.

Hence, in contrast to proposals for professionalization of home care work, which constructed women as unskilled care workers, discourses about equal opportunities to enter the market and run a business in home care created women as independent actors and equal to men. However, the same isolation of occupational segregation and gender hierarchies reappeared in the informants’ discourses about the home care market. Thus, in their discourses about the market, the informants made women equal to men because women work in home care. Concurrently, they disregarded power relations in business, including the white masculine gendering of entrepreneurship. For example, one left-wing politician reported:

No gender has any particular formal advantages. Then again, women are already [working] in home care and women have more experiences and then women are probably more likely to start up a business.

Consequently, the informants’ discourses about equal opportunities to enter the care market located women’s possibilities to start a business in their working experiences. At the same time, they overlooked the masculine gendering of entrepreneurship and the unequal positioning of men and women entrepreneurs. The only informant who explicitly rejected ideas of equal opportunities in entering the market was the representative of the non-profit providers (Famna), who instead argued: “[…] I don’t think men and women ever have the same preconditions or opportunities.”

In relation to country of birth, nearly all informants expressed ideas that immigrants and native-born have equal opportunities to start a business in home care. Here, however, the arguments were reversed compared to gender: the informants located immigrants’ capacity to set up a company in home care in their ability to run businesses, particularly small-scale businesses, and not in their competence in care. For example, one right-wing politician claimed that:

Of course, on the basis of experience, if you look at this about starting up small businesses, there are very, very many foreign-born or immigrants, who have very many small companies. And then I’m not only talking about home care, but in general. They’re a very large share nowadays.

Likewise, one local authority official argued that immigrants have equal opportunities or even advantages in starting home care businesses because, compared to the native-born, immigrants have never been “spoiled” by the Swedish welfare system:

Why should there be a difference between foreign-born and native-born? It’s only about knowing [the language]. On the contrary, I’d say. They’re more enterprising than us, those who come from another country. They’re not brought up with [the idea that] society takes care of everything, and fixes and helps. […] Why should they be promoted? Everyone has the same opportunities! They don’t need to be promoted. We see that. There’s a lot who have [home care] companies who come from another country than Sweden.

In contrast to their construction of women as equal to men because of their work experience in home care, the majority of the informants made immigrants equal to native-born because of their experiences in running businesses, in particular small-scale businesses. The only inequality informants identified was language, but once this obstacle was removed they saw no differences between native-born and immigrants. Hence, as with gender, the informants’ discourses about equal opportunity in relation to country of birth disregarded power relations. Immigrants were constructed as being more entrepreneurial than the native-born, without reflection on how this relates to the difficulties immigrants experience in obtaining regular employment or the relatively weak position of small companies in the market. Once again, the only informant who explicitly rejected ideas of equal opportunity was the representative of the non-profit providers (Famna), who in relation to country of birth argued: “But they [immigrants] never have [equal opportunities] because of language or other barriers, which make things unequal and [generate] greater challenges.”

Overall, the informants’ discourses on equal opportunities to enter the market and start a business in home care gave the impression of fair play, such that access is the same regardless of gender and country of birth. Although women and immigrants were positioned differently in care work and business, the problem representations (or rather lack thereof) created an understanding of the home care market as fair. This discourse of equal opportunity not only obscures concentration of power and resources within familiar gendered and ethnic structures in the economy but also turns market performances into anecdotal rags-to-riches stories or shortcomings of individual home care entrepreneurs.

Home care as a business

In relation to home care as a business, the informants’ problem representations were more complex than those of other themes. For example, informants might start by presenting the benefits of competition and choice between varieties of providers and later complain about the abundance of companies operating on the home care market in Stockholm. Similarly, they might begin with articulating how they disliked The Act on System of Choice and end in descriptions of how privately provided home care could be of higher quality than publicly provided services. This tendency to slip between inconsistent meanings was most noticeable in the informants’ discourses about company size in relation to gender and country of birth. Consequently, the same person could represent one particular category of companies as especially good or bad in one passage and then express an opposite view in another part of the interview when reflecting upon gender or country of birth. For example, one left-wing politician first declared that “I’m not particularly fond of small companies […]” because many small companies “[…] are rather dubious, maybe even money laundering companies.” Then at the end of the interview this person said:

There are plenty of men who run home care companies, and maybe it’s not entirely true, or partly true, that it’s more women than men, who run, what shall I say, more serious small businesses, and more men in this sector [who run] whitewash companies.

Other informants also mirrored this construction of small companies as, in general, fraudulent but those run by women as serious businesses. For instance, one right-wing politician started with an appraisal of The Act on System of Choice and how this act had contributed to development of “companies where women are managers, and where women are owners.” Then, later on the same person admitted that maybe there were some particular problems with small companies, because “when you open up a new market, there are unfortunately also adventurers.”

This tendency to produce small companies in general as suspicious and at the same time praise small-scale businesses run by women also resonated with how local authority officials, who interacted with care entrepreneurs on a daily basis, constructed them. Nearly all said that there were many small and women-led care companies, who provide good quality care, but they also described them as bad employers because they were too nice to their staff and overlooked it when employees did not show up at staff meetings or failed to write reports. For instance, one official working at the city’s central office reported:

I would say that many of our [private] providers too many times are too nice. They’re not employers in its real meaning, you know. Not many but some. Well, they’re too nice.

In a similar vein, another local authority official working at the city district level stated:

Those tiny home care [companies] that have maybe four people [temporary employed] and one in half-time employment or something, it’s not really the same preconditions. It doesn’t have to mean that a small company actually is worse. I’ve met a lot of tiny home care companies that, in fact, seem to be very good. […] It’s also so individual. But I guess I think that the big companies more often are more serious than small home care companies. […] Then there’s also the talk of the town, if you put it like that. Stockholm isn’t that big.

In the accounts of the informants, therefore, small home care companies were constructed as dubious, either because they were associated with financial irregularities or were too small to function properly. Although women-owned small companies were represented as businesses producing quality services (in contrast to small care companies owned by men), they were also constructed as failures as employers. This ambivalent positioning of small-scale and women-owned care companies reflects the informants’ discourses on equal opportunity, which located women’s entrepreneurship capabilities in their caring competencies. Small-scale and women-owned care companies were thus, with a few individual exceptions, produced as good at caring but bad at business, while companies represented by men were either constructed as cheats (small companies) or serious (large companies). The informant representing the employer organization for Swedish local authorities and regions (SKL) took this gendered discourse about home care as a business to its extreme. Based on anecdotal examples from a municipality other than Stockholm, this informant argued that small home care companies had outmanoeuvred the big (and male-led) companies on the home care market: “It’s the small companies that influence the market […] it’s the women who started and run and successively built it.”

In this context, the senior citizens' organizations articulated somewhat different discourses. Although the organization for left-wing supporters (PRO) has been critical of The Act on System of Choice, the representative of this organization argued that: “Sometimes, what I’ve seen, small companies can actually have better preconditions for providing good quality care than the giants, the private equity firms.” Moreover, the representative of the organization for right-wing supporters (SPF) argued that it was wrong to portray small companies as cheats, as the largest companies owned by private equity firms more often occurred in media scandals of tax evasion:

Then it’s these big companies reported in the press now, it’s these multinational companies that put their money on the Cayman Islands and other places. Really, it’s not the small companies who do that. And their profit margins aren’t that big either.

Aside from political rhetoric about the benefits of ethnic diversity, the informants’ discourses were generally vague about home care as a business in relation to country of birth. A few, however, were more explicit. The informant who articulated the most positive constructions of immigrant care entrepreneurs was the representative of the Association of Private Care Providers (Vårdföretagarna). This person argued that home care companies owned by immigrants worked as “integration engines”, as immigrants employ other immigrants:

We can also conclude that health and social care are integration engines, as we used to say. First of all, there are many with immigrant backgrounds who start up health and social care companies. We see that. And in turn, many times they employ people with immigrant backgrounds.

In other cases, informants tended to give anecdotal examples of companies run by immigrants as either very good or very bad. For instance, two politicians (one left-wing and one right-wing) indicated that small home care companies run by immigrants cheated more often by using the opportunity to employ family members of older persons as caregivers. This form of employment has been prohibited by the city, because it was associated with insecure terms of employment, low wages and frequently used in city districts with highest shares of immigrants. In this context, the left-wing politician admitted that: “Yes, partly we do have problems today with that category [foreign-born] of persons.”

In contrast, however, two local authority officials argued that more and more immigrant women own home care companies and that they are usually good service providers. For example, one of them reported:

Seven of those [companies] I oversee are [owned by] foreign-born women so that’s a rather large share […] Then there are, of course, also better and worse providers in that category, who are more or less serious. Of those I’m in contact with anyway. But it seems like most want to be serious and do a good job. But then again, maybe not all have, what shall I say, the knowledge.

Although the discourse on immigrant care entrepreneurs was ambiguous, it followed the overall tendency to slip between inconsistent meanings in the construction of what distinguishes good companies from bad companies in the business of home care. In this context, therefore, the same person could also both express the positive value of ethnic diversity among care providers and describe immigrant care entrepreneurs as more inclined to be cheats. Or the accounts reflected the discourse on equal opportunity and the positioning of immigrant care entrepreneurs as competent in business. Consequently, immigrant care entrepreneurs could be defined as serious businesspeople but as lacking skills in care.

To conclude, the problem representations of home care as a business were concurrently complex and ambivalent, illustrated by the fact that informants even expressed contradictory views during the interviews. Beneath this inconsistent surface, however, the accounts of the informants followed the same line of reasoning as in the discourse on equal opportunity. Women care entrepreneurs were, therefore, produced as good at care but unskilled in business, whereas immigrants care entrepreneurs were constructed as good at business but unexperienced in care. The norm against which both women and immigrants were weighed and measured was the large care corporations. With the exception of one of the senior citizens' organizations, these big and male-led care organizations were exclusively represented as “serious” in relation to both service provision and employment of home care workers. This representation of home care as a business encapsulates the politics of entrepreneurship in Swedish eldercare. The omission of gendered and ethnic hierarchies in the economy and the location of occupational segregation in cultural domains also produce problem representations that normalize the white masculine gendering of entrepreneurship and subordinate the value of care work and care entrepreneurship undertaken by women and immigrants.

Concluding discussion

Outsourcing the provision of publicly funded care services to private business operators is essentially part of the neoliberal favouring of logics and techniques taken from the private market and the private business sector. The former right-centre coalition Swedish government mixed this neoliberal rationality with selected ideas of liberal feminism by introducing legislation justified as advancing small-scale entrepreneurship among women and immigrants. The succeeding left-green coalition government downplayed the value of small-scale businesses in eldercare, leaving the dominant position of care corporations unchallenged. Against this backdrop, we have explored how gender and ethnicity shape the politics of entrepreneurship in the home care sector in Stockholm.

Similar to previous Nordic studies, our study confirms that neoliberal policies reinforce the masculine gendering of entrepreneurship, resulting in devaluations of women’s entrepreneurial undertakings even in sectors as female-dominated as eldercare. However, our findings also show the importance of multi-layered analyses that take into account differences in women’s entrepreneurship. As our findings indicate, immigrant women risk being caught in the middle of racial stereotypes of care workers and gendered stereotypes of entrepreneurship, which disqualifies them both as care workers and as entrepreneurs. These findings illustrate the need for moving beyond a male-female comparative framework when exploring how neoliberal policies might shape women’s business opportunities.

Furthermore, our findings indicate the importance of anchoring national policies in local practice to show how neoliberalism hollows out feminism through promises of supporting women’s entrepreneurship (cf. Ahl and Marlow, 2019; Newman, 2013). As the data from our interviews show the policy-engineered business opportunities in publicly funded eldercare, which have been promoted as “feminist” and “empowering” at the national level, emerge as paradoxical and fragile in the local practice. Moreover, as our findings illustrate, these inconsistencies produce ambivalent and contradictory subject positions of care entrepreneurs in relation to gender and ethnicity. As our findings show, women are created as decent care entrepreneurs because they are supposed to have long working experiences in home care. At the same time, however, the association between women and care work reproduces women as amateurish entrepreneurs with little knowledge of how to run a business. In contrast, immigrants are created as capable small-scale entrepreneurs but as unskilled care workers. As mentioned, these paradoxical positions of entrepreneurial subjects in the home care sector above all exclude immigrant women, who risk becoming depicted as entrepreneurs who both lack competencies in care and in business (cf. Nazareno, 2018).

Finally, our study shows that the norm against which both women and immigrant care entrepreneurs are being compared is the large care corporations. With the exception of one of our interviews, these big care organizations were exclusively represented as serious businesses. This unequal positioning of care entrepreneurs also produces gendered and racialized hierarchies of different forms of entrepreneurship. While care corporations, which reflect the white masculine gendering of entrepreneurship, are constructed as “serious” business, small-scale care entrepreneurship undertaken by women and immigrants is constructed as second-rate (cf. Nazareno, 2018). Consequently, our study demonstrates that although policy-engineered entrepreneurship in publicly funded welfare services may support some individual women’s business opportunities, it is likely that this sort of policymaking will recreate taken-for-granted truths about gender and ethnicity at the societal level.

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to express their deepest thanks to Gabrielle Meagher for her reading of this paper and her helpful comments and suggestions of how to improve the paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work was funded by Forskningsrådet för hälsa, arbetsliv och välfärd (Forte) under the grant Sustainable care in a customer choice model? Dilemmas and possibilities of small homecare enterprises [Dnr 2014-4913] led by the corresponding author.

Notes on contributors

Helene Brodin

Helene Brodin is Associate Professor in Social Work at Stockholm University and holds a PhD in Economic History. She participates in several international projects and networks focusing on how New Public management (NPM) recreates inequalities in eldercare and disability care, and she is currently PI of the project Workplace violence in home-based social services: approaches, responses and reporting of client-initiated threats and violence in four different fields of social work, funded by Forte.

Elin Peterson

Elin Peterson is researcher at the Department of Social Work, Stockholm University, and holds a PhD in Political Science from Complutense University of Madrid. Recent research projects include Sustainable care in a customer choice model? (Forte, PI Helene Brodin), Individualised care and universal welfare (Forte) and Social Inequalities in Ageing (Nordforsk). Peterson’s research has been published in International Journals in the Fields of Care, Gender and Migration.