Productive resistance in public sector innovation – introducing social impact bonds in Swedish local government

ABSTRACT

This article contributes to debates on public sector innovation by empirically analysing and conceptually unpacking organizational resistance. It is based on research following the attempts to launch a particular public sector innovation, Social Impact Bonds (SIB), in Swedish local government. Drawing on the literature on productive resistance, the analysis shows how a range of different actors, from consultants and investors to local civil servants, are entangled in interactions, negotiations and new organizational settings. The study concludes that SIB, beyond dichotomies, such as resistance/compliance, is continuously circumscribed, widened, reformulated and reassembled to grow the potential market and increase the local applicability.

KEYWORDS:

• Word
• resistance
• public sector innovation
• social impact bonds
• productive resistance
• social innovation

Introduction

There is an increasing demand on public sector organizations to find innovative ways of organizing both administrative practices and the provision of public services (Hjelmar 2021, Bragaglia 2020, Osborne 2014, Pollit and Hupe 2011). These demands are often expressed in tandem with the perceived necessity of ‘opening up’ service delivery to new actors and new forms of collaboration (Eriksson et al. 2020, Ek-Österberg and Qvist 2020, Ansell and Torfing 2016). Despite a general ‘pro-innovation bias’, emphasizing the potential of innovation (Sveiby, Gripenberg, and Segercrantz 2012), many attempts fail (cf. Torfing 2019, Dudau, Kominis, and Szocs 2018), sometimes even in the very early or initial stages of the process (Cinar, Trott, and Simms 2019, Cinar, Trott, and Simms 2021). In broader debates on public sector innovation (PSI) there is a tendency to explain implementation problems with reference to deep-rooted organizational short-comings: innovation requires flexibility and risk-taking – traits that the public sector, sarcastically referred to as “the ‘ugly sister’ of the supposedly more effective and more efficient private sector”, - are perceived to be lacking (Czarniawska 1985; cf, Styhre 2007; Du Gay 2000). As such, failure to implement innovations has been attributed to path-dependency, organizational inertia, or even sluggish bureaucrats.

The failure to adopt innovations is generally considered to be a problem, and resistance is seen as something organizations need to overcome. Yet, this assumption is being questioned. In tandem with a more problematizing approach to resistance, we argue that it is important to recognize that public sector organizations are comprised of agents who may resist innovation (cf. Wirtz et al. 2016), not as a consequence of organizational conservatism or bureaucratic procedures, but because they – based in their professional knowledge and experience – consciously keep bad ideas out (cf. Hernes 2014, Edman and Arora-Jonsson 2022). When ignoring this aspect, we miss out on actors’ well-founded motivations for resisting innovations (cf. Oreg 2006, 73). Following this line of thought, ‘resistance can be [regarded as] a resource for change’ (Ford, Ford, and Dámelio 2008, 362) and concepts such as ‘compliance with’ or ‘resistance to’ are much more complex than what first meets the eye (Thomas and Davies 2005, 683). Based on the literature on productive resistance we find processes of launching and resisting public sector innovations to be entangled in various forms of interactions between ‘change agents’ and ‘recipients’ where innovations are negotiated, reformulated, disassembled and reassembled.

Aim and empirical case

The aim of this article is to theorize and empirically analyse productive resistance in processes of public sector innovation. A majority of the literature on organizational resistance concerns private sector organizations and relations between employers and employees (Wirtz et al. 2016, Lundy and Morin 2013). In this article, we re-read this literature within the context of PSI to increase our understanding of processes of innovation and the role of resistance therein. Our ambition is to contribute to studies of the barriers to PSI (Cinar, Trott, and Simms 2019, Cinart, Trott, and Simms 2021, Wirtz et al. 2016) by nuancing our understanding of public sector inertia. In addition, the study echoes previous attempts to elevate both the innovative capacity of public sector organizations (e.g. Pfotenhauer and Juhl 2017, Mazzucato 2013, Diefenbach 2012) and the inherent tendency of public actors to safeguard public values and the public interest in processes of change (Meyer et al. 2013Bryson et al. 2015).

The empirical study consists of an analysis of the attempts to launch a public sector innovation – Social Impact Bonds (SIB) – in Swedish local government between 2018 and 2020. SIB is an organizational and financial innovation where the basic idea is to incentivize private investors to invest in policy initiatives or public sector projects by providing a return on the investments if the projects outperform conventional interventions (Sinclair et al. 2021,11). Despite its name, SIBs are a pay-by-result (or pay-for-success) model and not a bond, as it does not follow the financial logic of a bond but is contingent on the out-turn of the initiatives being financed (Fraser et al. 2018, 5). In this, the SIB-model also has strong ties to the evidence movement’s preference in policy initiatives with predictable and measurable results which can determine the impact of the policy at hand. In terms of PSI, several of the core characteristics of SIB, including the introduction of outcome-based contracts and investments by private or venture capital, are new phenomena in Swedish local government.

Since first making its appearance in the UK, in 2010, the SIB model has travelled both between countries (India, USA, Peru, Australia, etc.) and policy areas, including crime (Williams and Treffer 2021), homelessness (Cooper, Himick, and Himick 2016) and unemployment (Lavee, Kahn, and Fisher 2018). Even though only a limited number of SIBs have yet been finalized and evaluated (Millner 2021), studies have shown that the majority of SIBs are ‘only partially or marginally compliant with the SIB prototype’ (Arena et al. 2016, Carter 2020). This is also the case in Sweden, where the SIB attempts have produced several local interpretations and varieties of the original prototype. This study contributes to the literature on SIB both with its analysis of the Swedish context and in its theorizing of how (more or less compliant) local interpretations of SIB are emerging.

The next section outlines the concept of productive resistance, sets it in a public sector setting, and teases out the key concepts, collectives of resistance, scripts and editing. Thereafter, the case, methods and material are described before proceeding to the empirical analysis and the concluding discussion.

Innovation, change and resistance in public sector

Our analysis builds on a strand of resistance studies found in the context of critical organization studies (e.g. Courpasson, Dany, and Clegg 2012, Thomas and Hardy 2011, Thomas and Davies 2005). Even though resistance is intrinsic to organizational life (Courpasson, Dany, and Clegg 2012, 802), there is a general ‘demonizing’ tendency towards it, relating it both to organizational inertia and to”shortcomings in an individual’s attitudes, emotions and/or behaviour” (Thomas and Hardy 2011, 323; cf. Dobosz-Bourne and Jankowicz 2006). Yet, there is also a strand of literature celebrating resistance and/or emphasizing the change that resistance may bring about. In this context, the intended recipients are instead seen as to “‘resist’ by making a counter-offer” (Thomas and Hardy 2011, 324), which opens up for possible negotiations, as well as a situation where the outcome may be something other than what the change agents first had in mind. Here, resistance is not only seen as something that happens in the receiving organization (Ford, Ford, and Dámelio 2008, 362), instead, it is a process where both change agents and the receiving organizations may need to alter what they bring to the table.

The vast majority of previous studies of organizational resistance takes its point of departure in firms and private companies. These generally address processes of resistance against internal management, rather than resistance against external processes of change. In processes of PSI, innovations are often perceived as a force coming from the outside, containing elements that are new to the receiving organization. With a variety of understandings of what innovations are supposed to achieve – from the reduction of public spending to addressing specific societal problems (cf. Vigar, Cowie, and Healey 2020, 524), the change agents promoting PSI vary from organizations driven by a commitment to address a particular social challenge (Meijer 2014), to consultancy firms selling a new model or launching a new organizational fix (Gaglio 2017, Segercrantz 2012).

Even though the importance of aligning change initiatives in “basic constructs and values’’ (Dobosz-Bourne and Jankowicz 2006, 2031–2032) is noted in the literature on resistance in firms (Wirtz et al. 2016; cf. Oreg 2006, 74), the importance of social identities and common values is to a higher degree emphasized in the literature on change in a public sector context. Processes of change and resistance have been theorized in neo-institutional theory where norms and organizational cultures are regarded as something that ‘guide behaviour and resist change’ (Scott 2014, 57; cf. March and Olsen 1989). Actors in public organizations are not merely employees, instead, they act in a certain “‘[p]ersonae’ tied to roles – to their official duties, obligations, and associated areas of autonomy and discretion” (Du Gay 2017, 157). Processes of resistance can in this sense be conceptualized in terms of acting within the realm of different institutional logics or ‘socially constructed, historical patterns of material practices, assumptions, values, beliefs, and rules by which individuals produce and reproduce their material subsistence, organize time and space, and provide meaning to their social reality’ (Thornton and Ocasio 1999, 804). In a related discussion on public sector motivation, the motives of public sector actors have been understood as going ‘beyond self-interest and organizational interest’ and instead ‘concern the interest of a larger political entity […]’ (Vandenabeele 2007, 547), including a strong motivation to serve the public interest (Meyer et al. 2013, 864). Even though some of these scholars have raised a concern that a more traditional public sector ethos is being challenged by a market model (Meyer et al, 2013, 864), the institutional logic perspective suggests that these intersect with (rather than replace) a prevailing public sector logic. Empirically, this is evident not least in the Nordic countries, where this study is set (see e.g. Fred 2019, Agger and Sørensen 2018). Even though the aim of this article is not to derive or understand why individuals resist, the environment or the context of a ‘public sector logic’ is an important backdrop and interpretative framework to understand processes of resistance and change in the context of PSI.

Finally, and in continuation with previous resistance studies, we propose a shift away from thinking of change agents and recipient organizations as discrete entities acting in opposition, towards a perspective where the actors involved are constantly producing and reproducing themselves and each other (cf. Courpasson, Dany, and Clegg 2012, 816). As noted by Thomas and Hardy processes of change do not necessarily unfold ‘in a bi-directional way, with change agents against change recipients, but in multiple, transversal, iterative ways’ (Thomas and Hardy 2011, 328). In this, our ambition is to show how productivity and resistance operate together in ways that are constitutive of organizational change (cf. Thomas and Hardy 2011). The next section elaborates on the theoretical approach and its application.

A conceptual framework – collectives and objects of resistance

Our analysis builds on notion of collectives of resistance as it has been formulated by David Courpasson, Dany, and Clegg (2012). In addition, we utilize the concepts scripts and editing from the translation literature (Latour 2005, Czarniawska and Joerges 1996, Lavén 2008). In their analysis, Courpasson and his co-authors (Courpasson, Dany, and Clegg 2012) describe collectives of resistance, which they call enclaves, as groups of actors ‘explicitly communicat[ing] and enact[ing] alternate visions rather than merely sabotage[ing] the viewpoints of others’ (Courpasson, Dany, and Clegg 2012, 814). These collectives can have several forms, be temporary and shifting, and are formed through resistance. In their analysis, Courpasson, Dany, and Clegg (2012) focus on a collective of actors within a specific firm. Our context is the public sector, where the change-agents are situated primarily outside the organization, selling concepts to the municipality. In accordance with our theoretical approach, where the line between change agents and recipients is problematized, this study analyses how new collectives are continuously forged between different organizations. As such, we merge the work of Courpasson et al., with the theoretical approach developed by Thomas and Davies (2005) and Thomas and Hardy (2011), where resistance is seen as a creative process where all actors involved may need to shift positions (Thomas and Hardy 2011, 324). As such, we understand these collectives as temporary alliances of both recipients and change agents that interprets, explores, negotiates and enacts alternate visions.

Courpasson, Dany, and Clegg (2012) also identifies a specific ‘object’ of resistance in ‘reports’. The report offers the ‘opportunity to articulate and formalize claims about issues that were hitherto not recognized, as well as to suggest possible ways to solve the tensions’, and as such, reports are a way to push claims forward (Courpasson, Dany, and Clegg 2012, 814). To be able to say something about how the collectives work productively through resistance, we use the concepts of scripts and editing instead of report to analyse how these collectives are assembled and work together towards a common understanding (Lavén 2008). Just as a report, a script is commonly understood as something written, but in addition, it may also be a plan or a program-for-action (Lavén 2008, 28) - a piece of technology - ‘inscribed’ with a script, which means that it carries the intention of the authors or engineers that conceived it. Scripts may be formulated as ‘written step-by-step instructions for what to do’ or function as ”ordering devices” (Lavén 2008, 34), and in this capacity, they are also central to the processes of organizing collectives of resistance.

As processes of change are set centre stage in this article, the ability to, and the process of, changing scripts are highly relevant, and as such, so is the concept of editing. Based in the translation literature, editing refers to the assembly or rearrangement of scripts, and ‘the adaptation or alteration of something for a purpose […]’ (Lavén 2008, 35). Following Lavén, we use editing to explain ‘how scripts are altered and adapted in ways that are seen as appropriate’ (Lavén 2008, 35f). The conceptual pair of scrips and editing are thus used to analyse the productive side of resistance when PSI schemes are launched, and the analytical concept collectives of resistance is used to theorize the particular configuration of actors. Hence, processes of editing scripts are an important aspect of how the collectives of productive resistance are assembled. Concerning our specific context, scripts and editing emerge as strategies within collectives consisting of people from within the municipal organization as well as the actors – e.g. companies and consultancies – that are promoting change. In that sense, we agree with Courpasson, Dany, and Clegg (2012) that these collectives are reminiscent of ‘boundary objects’ or artefacts that create ‘the material and social conditions for building common ground and shared understandings’ (Courpasson, Dany, and Clegg 2012, 815). However, where Courpasson, Dany, and Clegg (2012) focus on the why and how of resistance, we focus on the how, in addition to analysing that which is being produced through resistance.

Summing up, our analysis takes its departure in a discussion on the productive sides of resistance, situated in the context of PSI. We analyse how collectives of resistance are assembled in processes of PSI by looking both at the change agents that promote innovation and the receiving local government actors, yet we understand the processes that unfold as interactive and integrating, thus dissolving divisions between the two. The analysis of the collectives is aided by the conceptual pair of scrips and editing. This approach, and the case selection, are described below.

Case, methods and material

In order to theorize and analyse productive resistance, we used the efforts to launch SIB in Sweden as a case. Below we first describe SIB and then position the study in previous literature, thereafter the methods and material are described.

Introducing the case

The first SIB was introduced in the UK in 2010 and there are now more than 220 SIBs around the world (see INDIGO, 2022). SIB has been described in different ways: as a way to overcome public sector funding problems (Nicholls and Teasdale 2019, Arena et al. 2015), expand financial markets (Dowling 2017) and create investment opportunities by advertising financial and social gain to private actors (Chiapello and Knoll 2020).

As mentioned above, SIB is a pay-by-result model where a government body – the commissioner – specifies the desired social impact related to a specific target population (example: 8 out of 10 unemployed people back to work). When the desired impact is outlined, a service provider is procured to suggest and implement an evidence-based intervention to manage the problem at hand and deliver outcomes. An investor shoulders upfront costs for the intervention (takes the financial risk) and an independent evaluator is contracted to assess the impact. If the intervention fails to meet its stipulated objectives, the investor loses its investment and the government body pays nothing. If the project is successful, they pay the investor their principal investment and an additional return based on the monetary gains achieved for the government body. Finally, an intermediary agent arranges this complex collaboration.

The literature on SIB consists of a growing body of academic articles as well as ‘grey’ papers. Many of the early papers have a descriptive (and some even prescriptive) character or an ambition to map SIB activities (see Arena et al. 2015), including describing pros and cons from the perspective of involved actors (see also Pastore 2020). The advocates regard SIB as ‘a solution to postulated public sector sluggishness by introducing private sector entrepreneurship’ (Boaz, Davies, and Fraser 2019, 5). They forward the argument that SIBs can promote innovation in social services and bring external funding to public services previously funded by traditional government grants (Cooper, Himick, and Himick 2016). Critics instead argue that most SIBs are ‘kept alive through underpinning by a constant program of Government subsidies and promotions … [and] many SIBs demonstrate little innovation in service delivery’ (Huckfield 2020, 162). Other argue that SIBs, despite being portrayed as a political funding instruments are in fact deeply ideological ‘and mark the over-extension of market principles […]’ (Sinclair et al., 2021:11; Joy and Shields 2018), others have raised ethical issues in relation to the individuals targeted by interventions (McHuge et al. 2017).

As noted in the literature, SIB appears to be promoted by public sector actors (Arena et al. 2015, 175). This is not the case in Sweden, where promoting actors have mainly been not-for-profit organizations, consultants and investment companies. Sweden is an interesting case for its institutional setting and organization of PSI. The country has a strong tradition of local self-governance, including local authority over major welfare services (where we often find SIBs). Innovation is generally placed high on the agenda of local governments, and there is a plethora of funding opportunities available for different innovation projects and pilots (Mukhtar-Landgren 2021). Finally, Sweden is an interesting case as the SIBs that have been launched only marginally resembles the prototype – which is also the case of the majority of implemented SIBs worldwide (see Carter 2020, Arena et al. 2016). As such, an analysis of Sweden can help us unpack how local processes of productive resistance unfolds.

Method and material

The analysis is based on a research project following actors and actions associated with the introduction of SIB in Sweden between 2015 and 2020. Without restrictions to organizational boundaries, we have followed a range of overarching processes such as conferences and webinars, as well as attempts to initiate SIBs in local settings. We have three main sources, (i) participatory observations, (ii) interviews and (iii) documents.

(i) Following and observing actors and their actions can be described on a scale ranging from ‘participatory’ to ‘observational’ (cf. Fred 2019). Our study has been situated somewhere in the middle of these two: We attended local and national seminars, webinars and conferences on SIB, social innovation and impact assessment during the years 2015–2020. Here we observed, and occasionally interacted, with actors promoting SIB. We were up-front with us being researchers trying to make sense of the efforts to introduce SIB. (ii) We conducted 41 semi-structured interviews (cf. Devault and McCoy 2006) with actors surrounding these events and key persons involved in the attempts to implement local SIBs (see appendix 1). The first interviews were conducted in Municipality D and functioned as a pilot study where we wanted to make sense of what SIB in a local government context was (or could be). This gave us a good idea of how local governments interpreted SIB but it also gave us access to a larger network of SIB actors. Municipality D did, however, not turn out to be a good case to analyse productive resistance. Even though they were engaged in many meetings with different SIB promoting actors, their actions did not materialize in a SIB. The people initially interested in SIB left the organization and the idea appears to have vanished from the agenda after that. When selecting municipalities for our analysis, we chose cases where some version of SIB did materialize – i.e. where a contract was signed and an intervention implemented. These were cases from which we could build an analysis – where some municipalities just said no to SIB, people and organizations related to Municipality A, B and C signed contracts and some kind of SIB-related practice had started to take place.

The ambition has been to interview all key actors involved in the introduction of SIB in Sweden up to 2020. The selection of interviewees has been the result of one interviewee referring to another until they all (more or less) referred to people we already have interviewed. Some of these municipalities are small organizations with comparatively few employees and as such also few people involved in SIB work. Each interview began with us describing our research aim including how the interviews were to be used, stored, and whether or not they would consent to be cited in academic publications. The interviews revolved around questions of when they first got in contact with SIB, why and how initiatives were taken, who the key actors involved were and the attractive as well as less attractive features of SIB. The respondents then received an email where we requested permission to use the interview, including permission to use specific quotes when applicable. The interviews lasted from 30 to 90 min and were recorded and transcribed. Finally (iii), the analysis draws on policy documents from municipalities and actors promoting SIB, including evaluations, procurements, and various types of best practice descriptions, handbooks, reports, and material presented at webinars and seminars.

Through this material, we have teased out not only the key actors involved but also how SIB has been portrayed and presented throughout the years. Although our research aimed to follow the local implementation of SIB in Sweden, we came to understand that it was difficult to launch, and when it did finally materialize it was fundamentally altered from the original script. We also noted an inventive and creative (albeit frustrated) spirit amongst both the persons ‘selling’ the idea, and that municipalities picked the bits and pieces they found attractive. As such, the concept of organizational inertia or resistance alone did not seem to capture the multitude of productive actions associated with the SIB efforts. Instead, we found that the concept of productive resistance captured the productivity inherent in resistance.

The material was arranged and coded in an iterative process using the concepts collectives of resistance, scripts and editing. We first mapped actors and their perceived role, and then we systematically teased out how they were connected to each other. In relation to scripts, we analysed the empirical material in the search for (i) key definitions of SIB, (ii) descriptions of roles and (iii) programmatic texts (descriptions, instructions, best practices – how ‘to do’). We paid particular attention if these differed between actors, and if they were changed (edited) over time.

The analysis is presented in three parts, which are also partly chronological. First, we describe how the change agents have tried to persuade local governments of the merits of SIB, and how they are met with what they perceive as resistance. In these processes, collectives of productive resistance take shape and SIB is edited to increase local applicability. Second, we move from idea to practice and analyse how SIB is enacted into three local government settings. Third, we follow the development of the Swedish SIB market as we interpret it to have gone from a focus on the SIB-model to an emphasis on social impact and impact assessment as an overarching idea. All quotes are translated from Swedish by the authors.

Analysis

The concept of SIB was first introduced in Sweden in 2015 by an informal working group with representatives from large consultancy firms with personal ties to Social Finance in the UK, and one of Sweden’s largest banks. This group received funding from the Swedish innovation agency to investigate the possibility of implementing SIBs in Sweden. Yet they did not manage to persuade any local governments to get involved. Simultaneously a non-profit organization received funding to pilot SIB in a local government context, but again did not manage to initiate a local SIB. Since then, the attempts to launch SIBs have taken the form of different actors, often consultants (aspiring for the role of intermediary), trying to persuade local governments to pilot SIB, while at the same time trying to attract investors. Although these first attempts did not result in any actual SIBs, they did attract attention from consultancy firms, investors as well as public sector organizations.

Part 1: Introducing, resisting and editing the idea of SIB

We detected great enthusiasm in our initial meetings with the change agents promoting SIB in 2017–2018. These consisted of civil society organizations, consultants and organizations working strategically to support public sector innovation. SIB was described as an innovative idea and a great opportunity for Swedish municipalities. Yet, SIB was difficult to launch, as one representative from an investment company describes it:

We have probably been in contact, with the help of consultants, with well over 40 municipalities … And from that, we got approximately 12 projects that we looked into where there was some sort of agreement in terms of what we’d like to do. But from those, there were 3 projects […] where the municipality expressed real interest. But when we started to look more closely into the details of how to set the whole thing up … it all fell apart in one way or another (interview, 38).

The same problem was described by the non-profit organization that received funding to pilot SIB. They formalized an ‘institute for social impact’ to which they recruited large consultancy firms, banks but also politicians in order to promote social innovation. They teamed up with a well-known Swedish academic, a familiar figure in many municipalities and a person, that some argue, has managed to describe SIB in an understandable fashion. This collective of actors scripted SIB in a similar way to the UK-developed prototype, while simultaneously tweaking it into a local government context by discursively connecting it to the more locally familiar concept of social investment. A representative describes how this strategy resulted in meetings with several local governments, but again, these did not result in the actualization of an SIB:

… it took us a year and a half to get there, one and a half years! All those calculations, descriptions and everything … It takes a long time to set up an SIB. We tried to find a municipality to pilot it, but it did not work. It just takes too long to get it into place (interview, 33).

The Swedish association of local authorities and regions (SALAR) is another actor that has played an important role. SALAR is an employers’ organization that represents and advocates on behalf of local governments. On their web page, they describe how their ‘ambition is to be one step ahead and to shed light on important changes outside local government that affect our members’ (web page). Together with consultants, they have taken on the role of knowledge producer and organized SIB-seminars, conferences, and networks. They have also published SIB-related reports and have played a prominent role in scripting what SIB is, or can be.

When attending events related to SIB, such as webinars and workshops, we observed that the same actors (e.g. consultants and investors) often returned as participants, yet local government actors rarely participated. Here, we observed collectives taking form as they gathered to explore, script and edit SIB in Sweden, yet to a large extent without the involvement of the (expected/presumed) commissioner, local governments. In interviews, several of the change agents described municipalities as generally reluctant (e.g. interviews 31, 32, 34). One of the promoters describes this as a general characteristic:

There are aversions towards change [in municipalities …] there is an opposition towards all sorts of change, good or bad

(interview, 37).

Labelling actions as ‘resistance’ (rather than perhaps ‘valid concerns’) is of course not a neutral description of the events at hand (Thomas and Hardy 2011, 325). In addition, resistance was also attributed to features of the SIB-script: One of the consultants expressed that municipalities immediately pull back when private capital was mentioned as ‘[p]rivate finance in the public sphere is considered provocative’ (interview, 31). Thus, two different explanations to the difficulties to launch SIB were scripted, one regarding perceived organizational inertia, and one regarding how features inherent in the SIB-model were perceived to conflict with prevailing public sector norms.

Part 2: resistance and editing – from idea to local government practice

As the difficulties to implement SIBs became increasingly evident, the edited practices developed from just being ‘told in stories’ to becoming ‘enacted in practice’ (cf. Lavén 2008, 36). In addition to the many ‘failed’ attempts to launch SIBs, described as ‘endless meetings’ by the consultants quoted above, three SIBs – albeit edited ones – have been established. The first is Municipality A, a case often referred to as a best practice. The second example is a case where two municipalities, Municipality B and Municipality C, joined SALAR and some consultancies in their attempt to launch an SIB – but ended up funding and organizing the interventions themselves. These cases are discussed in more detail below.

Editing SIB

SIB was first introduced and marketed as a ‘best practice’ from the UK. In July 2015, the Forum for Social innovation announced that ‘Social Impact Bonds are being introduced in Sweden’ (web page) and advertised a breakfast meeting that was to be held at a large annual public national event (web page Forum for Social innovation, 2015). However, in response to the difficulties in conjuring local government support for SIB, SALAR edited the script – or how it was communicated – and described it in terms of Social Outcome Contracts and as ‘a local adaptation’ of the Anglo-Saxon innovation. Editing SIB from a bond to a contract caught on amongst other actors in the emerging network around SIB. One example to this end is a debate article entitled ‘Social outcome contracts develop welfare’ that was co-written by a local politician and an investor in 2017 (Stjernkvist and Leksell 2017) – an example of how a ‘program-for-action’ was scripted (see Lavén 2008). Our informants described how they saw ‘contract’ as a more accurate description of what SIB is, and a contract is indeed a more familiar concept and thus a ‘better fit’ for local government civil servants and prevailing public sector logics.

Despite these attempts to edit the script, there were continued difficulties to launch the innovation. At a recent international social impact conference, one of the leading Swedish SIB-promoting agents described how they have stopped referring to SIB and Social Outcome Contracts altogether. In addition, the person described how they had begun to down-play the incidence of external funding and service providers when meeting local governments, instead they focus on the intervention as a particular solution to a particular problem and present the actual SIB-model afterwards.

In our interpretation, these processes of editing are expressions of productive resistance constructed between different actors within a collective. They are not necessarily the result of explicit objections raised by local government actors, instead the sheer lack of interest and absence of materialized SIBs indicated a need to edit the model. However, even though municipal actors were reluctant towards SIB as a model, they were keen on finding solutions to particular local challenges (such as unemployment, troubled youth or long-term sick leave). There was, in other words, a perceived necessity to edit the script to better ‘fit’ the challenges of local governments. Hence, editing the script from ‘bond’ to ‘contract, and toning-down the role of venture capital in favour of an emphasis on the intervention, was a process developed interactively within a collective consisting of change agents and (sometimes, and to a lesser extent) municipal actors – pointing towards the complexities of productive resistance.

Municipality a

In Municipality A we found Sweden’s first SIB (or what they call a social outcome contract). On the municipality’s webpage, it is described as:

an example of how society’s actors in a concrete way can jointly stimulate and support social innovation with a focus on improved living conditions but also with the aim of finding socio-economically sustainable solutions

(2018, webpage Municipality A).

This case is the result of a long-standing relationship between SALAR and the municipality. Municipality A have profiled themselves as an organization at the forefront of innovation. Together with an investment company (which specializes in social entrepreneurship and social investment), a consultancy firm (that were responsible for the impact assessment) and the municipality, SALAR assembled a collective that scripted the contract at hand. The scripted ‘outcome contract’ was set up as a project within the field of social care. In contrast to the SIB prototype, the service (intervention) was not solely provided by a procured ‘service provider’ – instead, a bigger part of it was delivered by a project organization within the municipality, and a small part was delivered by a consultant. When asked about this, the CFO simply stated that they ‘didn’t need an external service provider’ (interview, 22). In addition, the respondent continued to say that they didn’t really need external funding either. Instead, the choice to enter a contract with an investor was more motivated by ‘getting the best possible impact for the efforts we make and in a credible way be able to evaluate it’ (interview, 22), and as such, situating the activities into already prevailing public sector procedures and priorities. The fact that this outcome was ‘off-script’ was also noted by the somewhat resigned consultant involved in the process, stating that the solution bore more resemblance to an externally funded project than to a SIB (interview, 35). Externally funded projects, such as EU projects, are also an organizational solution familiar to Swedish municipalities, including the municipality at hand.

In scripting the contract, the actors involved also scripted and enacted their respective roles within the prototypical understanding of SIB. The role of the intermediary (which is key in the SIB-model) was claimed by both SALAR and a consultancy firm (which also used it in branding themselves as one of the initiators of SIB in Sweden), and the role as (independent) evaluator was instead taken on by the investment company themselves. In this, the scripting and editing of SIB involved not only the model but also the roles and self-perceptions of the actors involved.

The interviewees also revealed different motivations for their involvement: For the investment company, it was an investment in a potential future financial market, as well as an ambition to ‘make a difference that is visible and noticeable’ (interview 36). For SALAR, the ambition was to develop and launch a best practice for how to work with social impact in Swedish local government. For the municipality, the motivation appears to have been two-fold; both to try something new (including being modern and innovative), but the involved municipal actors also described their involvement as a way to push the municipality in a more impact-focused direction and finding models for how to measure (the impact of) social initiatives (interview 22). In relation to our theoretical framework, the SIB model was thus configured and made possible through a process where a collective of different actors inscribed it with different intentions and meanings (cf. Lavén 2008, 28).

Summing up, this edited and scripted version of SIB (as a model and an allocation of roles) was the result of a suggested PSI and processes of productive resistance through long-lasting interactions and negotiations between the investor, SALAR, a consultancy firm and the municipality – which together can be seen as a collective. These relations and scripts continue to be edited as the actors involved market and present the model in reports, and at webinars and conferences in Sweden and abroad.

Part 3. Collectives of productive resistance and scripts in tandem – the birth of an impact culture

In just a few years (from 2015 to 2020) we have observed the construction of several different collectives take shape, re-shape and dissolve in relation to SIB. So far, we have tried to describe how these collectives have constructed, negotiated and edited the SIB scripts to find a solution that they could materialize into local government practice. In this section, we will focus on examples that imply a shift in the Swedish SIB market from the promotion of a specific and delimited model, to a wider focus on impact and impact assessment.

The concept ‘impact’ is not necessarily associated with New Public Management in Sweden, yet, in recent years there has been a growing interest in various aspects of impact in the context of PSI and social innovation. The concept also resonates with broader management trends including not only the evidence movement, which has a strong position in social work, but also an emerging ‘what works’ movement (cf. Boaz, Davies, and Fraser 2019, Mosley and Smith 2018). Against this backdrop, the processes of launching an SIB (or any edited versions of SIB) becomes the introduction of one, out of several, payment-by-result models and as such, it can also be scripted as a way of introducing or facilitating impact assessment schemes.

One example of the movement away from a specific model to a greater interest in impact assessment comes from a collective consisting of SALAR, several local governments, a consultancy firm, and the European Investment Bank (EIB). This collective scripted and enacted an impact-based procurement model which aimed to allow local governments to procure ‘impact’ instead of ‘activities’ (Interview, 22, 35, 36, 37). Briefly put, aspiring service providers were asked to respond to service delivery impact – and outline how, and at what cost, their solution/intervention could contribute to the requested impact. In our interpretation, this is a script, or ‘ordering device’ (Lavén 2008, 34), that aims to cultivate a different ‘mindset’, or ‘culture’ centred around impact. In interviews, the need for both ‘clients and the service providers’ to reach ‘a common understanding’ about impact, is emphasized (Interview 35, 37–38). Subsequently, change agents scripted SIB merely as a vehicle delivering impact and a tool for impact assessment. Instead of emphasizing a particular model, the emphasis was placed on the value of measuring ‘impact’. This wider perspective opens up for a greater variety of products, investments and activities such as handbooks and courses.

To date, we are witnessing a range of capacity-building projects around social impact and impact assessment in Sweden, often externally funded by the Swedish innovation agency. As an example, we find ‘platforms’ for social innovation that organize conferences, seminars, courses and publications where social impact is a recurring theme and where SIB (or some edited version of it) not rarely is used as an illustrative example thereof. Often, SALAR or one of the before-mentioned consultants, are invited as keynote speakers or ‘experts on impact assessment’. Yet, when attending social impact events, we noted that the ‘market’ of social impact is still relatively small, and despite the increasing network activities we kept bumping into the same actors.

Municipality B and C

In Municipality B (and Municipality C) we find yet another edited version of SIB. These SIBs are the result of a public procurement project on sick leave. In an interview, the head of HR described how they had been trying to reduce sick leave in their organization for quite some time when they were approached by SALAR:

their [SALARs’] starting point is the alternative forms of financing. That is what they are most interested in. We are interested in reducing sick leave … but as we haven’t seen the result we want [in our own work], we were interested in trying something new

(Interview, 1).

This process started with a pilot study aimed at mapping sick leave in six municipalities (including Municipality B, C). The work was led by SALAR in collaboration with a consultancy firm (who had an ongoing relationship with SALAR). The mapping resulted in a description of the sick-leave problem and a proposed intervention. Financially, a non-profit credit institution, owned jointly by the Swedish local governments, was initially involved (interview 41). However, as the work progressed, they withdrew due to “the few actors interested and the extensive work that we saw had to be done’’ (interview, 41). This was of course frustrating for the municipalities, but perhaps even more so for SALAR, as they ‘really wanted to test the financial model’ (interview, 1). In addition, Municipality B already had an ongoing discussion regarding a possible intervention to reduce sick leave:

to put it bluntly, money is cheap today! Money is not the problem! In the [SIB] model there are three parties who should share the profit … but if we believe that the project will deliver results for us … well, if we fund it ourselves, we also take all the profit” (interview, 1).

So, this was exactly what they did. They funded the sick leave project themselves but made use of the pilot study conducted by the consultant and SALAR, where the intervention was proposed. In addition, they used an already procured organization (for occupational health services) to run the project. As such, the SIB prototype was almost completely re-scripted into a project that was funded internally, organized internally – but based on a solution that was provided externally, which again is not unusual in a Swedish local government setting.

The case of Municipality C is quite similar. Here, the problem of sick leave amongst municipal staff had constituted a continuous struggle for quite some time. This was also, in the words of the head of HR, the municipality’s primary motivation for joining the venture (Interview, 40). Just like Municipality B, Municipality C opted for funding the intervention themselves. According to the head of HR, SALAR showed them calculations of possible savings for up to SEK 40 million/year if the intervention was successful (Interview 40). Those same calculations were then used to convince the local politicians to invest municipal money into the project, indicating the importance for public actors to democratically anchor the endeavour. Thus, when finally launched, only parts of the offered SIB script were taken onboard – the proposed intervention, the calculations and argument of future saving – but the bulk of the script was edited out. Similar reasoning as in Municipality B took place – if we believe this much in the project, then why not invest our own money?

Summing up, SALAR invited a number of municipalities to join a project aiming to reduce sick leave through SIB. Two of the municipalities that joined, did so first and foremost to battle sick-leave – which was a political priority in the municipalities – not to implement an SIB. Through processes of productive resistance, these local collectives of actors produced scripts that resonated with the SIB prototype, albeit to a very limited extent and in a way that could ‘fit’ both ongoing municipal priorities (sick-leave) and local procedures (already procured service providers and organizational solutions). Through this, the collective of (productive) resistance managed to script SIBs in a way that made it possible to materialize in practice, and fit into a public sector logic. This brings us to the third example of the productivity in productive resistance, the re-scripting of SIB from a model to a broader approach to local government work.

Concluding discussion

In this article, we have presented results from research following the efforts to introduce a particular innovation – SIB - in Swedish local government. The change agents involved in promoting SIB generally interpreted the lack of clear results as organizational inertia, and in the literature, there is a tendency to demonize resistance-to-change and treat it as something organizations need to overcome (Thomas and Hardy 2011; Courpasson et al. 2012). The aim of this article was to problematize these assumptions by theorizing and empirically analysing productive resistance in PSI.

The empirical analysis presented here illustrated that SIB was first scripted and promoted by actors situated primarily outside the realm of the public sector. When entering a dialogue, and forging collectives with local government actors, it became evident that the script lacked in applicability and needed editing in order to fit municipal priorities and procedures. Analysing this as productive resistance illuminated how both public and private actors were configurated in collectives in which processes of productive resistance took place through scripting and editing programs-for-action to match the local public sector setting. Yet when a SIB eventually was implemented, it was not only significantly different from what first was proposed – it was also inscribed with different meanings by the different actors: Public sector actors emphasized the importance of the specific intervention while SALAR and the investors instead highlighted the SIB as a model and best practice. In this, the analysis contributes to the SIB literature not only as it shows how local varieties of SIB are developed in practice. It also illustrates difficulties in inscribing new roles for ‘old’ actors, such as the efforts to rescript local governments as ‘commissioners’, or civil society actors as ‘service providers’. When we zoom out from the more delimited idea of SIB as a model to be applied, we see a range of activities, including a growing market for tools and models for social impact and impact assessment where new organizations, funding opportunities and networks comprising both public and private actors construct new collectives and scripts.

Moving to the more theoretical conclusions, our perspective of productive resistance draws attention to how organizational change in PSI is a ‘complex, messy, day-to-day’ practice (Thomas and Hardy 2011, 329). Our study shows that simple dichotomies, such as ‘resisting/complying’ to innovation fail to capture the complexities of what happens in the processes of promoting and implementing innovations in the public sector. It also reveals that public actors do not necessarily innovate less than private actors. Instead, resistance/innovation is an intertwined process where scripting and editing are shaped in temporary collectives of actors including both public and private actors. With this, the analysis indicates that resistance to change in public sector organizations is not a straightforward or one-dimensional process moving from ‘innovative ideas’ to ‘resisting public actors’ (cf. Courpasson, Dany, and Clegg 2012, Thomas and Davies 2005), instead, the approach forwarded here contributes to our knowledge of PSI by showing how change/resistance is a dynamic that unfolds between both public and a range of different private actors and civil society organizations.

As PSI unfolds in the context of a public sector logic, it is important to recognize that public sector organizations may resist – and want to edit innovations – based on their professional knowledge, experience and their sense of public sector ethos. As noted in critical innovation studies, there is an increasing tendency to neglect the important role of innovation as an ‘act for the common good’ (Pecis and Berglund 2021), including the role of public sector actors upholding and defending the public interest. From this perspective, the messy processes of productive resistance in PSI are not necessarily a problem to be solved, but rather a value to be defended.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed at https://doi.org/10.1080/14719037.2022.2123027

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Additional information

Funding

The work was supported by the FORTE [].

Notes on contributors

Mats Fred

Mats Fred is an Associate Senior Lecturer at the Department of Political Science at Lund University. His research revolves around experimental and temporary forms of organization in local and regional government.

Dalia Mukhtar-Landgren

Dalia Mukhtar-Landgren is an Associate Professor and Senior lecturer at the Department of Political Science and CIRCLE at Lund University. She is involved in research on experimental governance, temporary organizations and governing through pilots within the fields of urban planning and public sector innovation.