Conference Program

Neoliberal restructuring has shifted welfare provision from state responsibility to a market-driven model involving private actors (Harvey, 2005; Jessop, 2002). This has transformed the management and understanding of social issues. Increasingly, entrepreneurial actors are seen as key drivers of innovation and responsibility within evolving policy networks (Rose, 1999; Ball, 2012). Social entrepreneurship that creates social value through different business methods, positions private providers as essential in addressing gaps within the welfare system (Dees, 1998). However, as Bandinelli (2020) observes, the term 'social enterprise' captures a tension between market-oriented profit motives and traditional public sector norms. This raises questions about how social entrepreneurs reconcile such tensions and what their motivations can reveal about the welfare state more generally.

In this presentation, we aim to address these questions by listening to private actors in the Swedish School Health Service (SHS) field. In Sweden, all students must have access to SHS, including medical, psychological, psychosocial and special‑education support. Private actors offer their services to schools and principal organisers who struggle with the complexities of various health promotion strategies and preventative measures, addressing increasing problems such as declining mental health, bullying, absenteeism, and low academic achievements. Services may include staffing, CPD, methods, programmes, and digital tools (Lindgren et al, forthcoming).

The presentation analyses interviews with 18 private SHS actors representing companies with varying sizes and focus. The interviews addressed how the private actors described their work, mission, aims and experiences from collaborating with schools and the principal organisers.

To analyse the interviews, we draw on the notion of illusio, i.e. the collective conviction that the stakes within a particular field are worthwhile (Bourdieu & Wacquant,1992). Illusio describes a practical engagement, interest, and emotional investment that connect individuals to the field, rendering their involvement meaningful.

The tentative results show that the private actors act based on a distinctive illusio, shaped by a mix of economic, symbolic, moral, and professional motivations. They pursue expansion and contracts, and they seek legitimacy and recognition from schools and principal organisers. They are committed to narratives of care, child wellbeing, and social responsibility, and their engagement is characterised by expertise, evidence-informed practices, and innovation. Their convictions help explain why they prioritise branding that prioritise care over commerce, accept regulation and share professional norms, tolerate slim profits, and present expansion as a means rather than merely an end. Taken together, we argue that illusio offers a powerful theoretical tool to analyse SHS as hybrid welfare–market field, where economic, professional, moral, and regulatory logics are intertwined.

The SHS field is a “state-constructed market” (cf Bourdieu, 2014), and the results display a close relationship between state policy and actors’ illusio. Regulation and procurement practices thus serve to produce the ideals and stakes worth believing in. In sum, these results provide important insights to understand the transformation of the welfare state, including how the dominance of New Public Management has colonised and instrumentalised professional domains – a situation where a social entrepreneurship-career may constitute an alternative and even an act of resistance.