Elisabeth Sundin

What's special about highly educated women entrepreneurs?

The article deals with Swedish well-educated female entrepreneurs (Swefees), that is entrepreneurs with a education exceeding 12 years. The Swefees seem to differ in some interesting ways both from other female entrepreneurs, from male entrepreneurs and from other women on the labour market. But it also turns out that they are of two kinds, Loner-Swefees and Family-Swefees. The Loner-Swefees are single, living in a big city environment and have an interrupted career in the public or private sector behind them. They are extremely career-oriented. The Family-Swefees are also career-oriented but try to run a family and a firm at the same time. Swefees go into business with strong feelings both of a push and pull kind. They are very professional in their way of running the firm. The population of Swefees were found through a big questionnaire sent to a sample of 1,440 of the population of over 64,000 Swedish female entrepreneurs. A little more than 1,000 (of the 1,440) were still in business when receiving th...

Masculinisation of the public sector: Local‐level studies of public sector outsourcing in elder care

Purpose – The paper aims to explore the consequences of new public management (NPM) inspired reforms in general and outsourcing of traditional public sector responsibilities in Sweden to private organizations in particular. At centre stage are the roles of entrepreneurs, women‐owned small and medium enterprises (SMEs) and socially constructed paradigms of gender in this process. The papers aim is to explore, through a local‐level case study, the currently ongoing process of gendering and regendering in a female‐dominated sector. This is done by a qualitative real‐time study of the introduction of a customer‐choice system in elder care in a Swedish municipality.Design/methodology/approach – The formal decision in Spring 2008 to introduce a “customer‐choice model” into home‐based elderly care in the municipality is the formal starting point of the research. The authors are given full access to all relevant information and informants including all questions and suggestions from the potential suppliers who w...

Masculinisation of the public sector

Purpose – The paper aims to explore the consequences of new public management (NPM) inspired reforms in general and outsourcing of traditional public sector responsibilities in Sweden to private organizations in particular. At centre stage are the roles of entrepreneurs, women‐owned small and medium enterprises (SMEs) and socially constructed paradigms of gender in this process. The papers aim is to explore, through a local‐level case study, the currently ongoing process of gendering and regendering in a female‐dominated sector. This is done by a qualitative real‐time study of the introduction of a customer‐choice system in elder care in a Swedish municipality.Design/methodology/approach – The formal decision in Spring 2008 to introduce a “customer‐choice model” into home‐based elderly care in the municipality is the formal starting point of the research. The authors are given full access to all relevant information and informants including all questions and suggestions from the potential suppliers who w...

Entrepreneurship and the reorganization of the public sector: A gendered story

This article is about how the international New Public Management (NPM) trend is influencing the cleaning unit and cleaners employed in a Swedish municipality. Before the change, more than 500 cleaners were employed. The municipality wanted former employees to become the providers of the cleaning services. One male manager did so and was welcomed by the leading actors of the municipality. Although the law obliged employees to be transferred to the new provider, they were not. Instead, more than 140 employees, a great majority of them women, established a joint stock company together with the municipality as a temporary co-owner. This company had problems from the very beginning. Both new companies were sold after some years – the man’s at a profit and the women’s at a loss. This article analyses their story drawing on theories on incentives for entrepreneurship, networks, social capital and gender. The study was conducted for more than 10 years using multiple methods.

Organizational Conflict, Technology and Space: A Swedish Case Study of the Gender System and the Economic System in Action

Organizational Conflict, Technology and Space : A Swedish Case Study of the Gender System and the Economic System in Action

Social Entrepreneurship : Leveraging Economic, Political, and Cultural Dimensions

This contributed volume features state-of-the-art research from ten different countries on implementation, institutionalization and the future prospects of social entrepreneurship. This volume aims ...

Social Entrepreneurship, Gendered Entrepreneurship

In recent decades, the gendered dimensions of management, organizations, and traditional entrepreneurship have been disclosed by research. The expanding practice of social entrepreneurship raises questions about whether similar patterns are reconstructed there too, or whether gender is constructed differently in this field. In this chapter, the results from a number of studies are combined with a problematization of social entrepreneurship’s specific context—its close connection with how welfare services are organized, including both the public sector and the third sector—to address questions about gender. There are challenges in the shape of the complexity of the issues and a lack of sufficient data, which means it is as much an exploration as an analysis of such practices, but even so it is possible to indicate the gender systems and gender order in the emerging field of social entrepreneurship.

The suicide of the social sciences: causes and effects

The social sciences have undergone profound changes. The causes of these changes are many, and in this article we discuss the most important ones. First, we discuss the shift to a situation where the American tradition is the norm and European and national traditions are vanishing. Secondly, we discuss the shift from a focus on the empirical context to a pure internal research focus. These and other changes cause dramatic effects for the social sciences. In our article we analyze these effects on the topics, results, methods and values of the social sciences. We especially focus on the career system and the PhD education. Our conclusion is that changes implemented to gain higher quality have instead caused decreasing quality to a point where the social sciences as a whole are at risk.

Gender-determined Jobs and Job-rotation - Problems and Possibilities

The aim of the article is to discuss and analyse the strategy for quality introduced by a Swedish daily-ware retailer and especially what role organisational rationality, irrationality and gender plays for some aspects of this strategy. The strategy was motivated by the intense competition. One of its key components was work rotation in the stores. Six out of 90 stores were studied. In five of these work rotation was selective: the most female-labelled duty, cashier work, and the most male-labelled, butchering, were excluded. In the sixth store the work rotation was total. Before analysing the results, the national, sector and company contexts are presented. The analytical tools and concepts are drawn from different feminist organisational researchers. The main conclusions are that decisions made by top managers are necessary but not sufficient to create changes in organisations. The importance of middle management is emphasised although it is obvious that power is present everywhere. These findings indicate that there is not one all-embracing decision behind the outcomes but rather many small decisions made by both women and men on all hierarchical levels. The outcome also suggests that economic rationalities are weaker than gender rationalities, an outcome which ought to influence organisational theories.

Old Age as a Market Advantage: The Example of Staffing Agencies in Sweden

This chapter is about age, gender, and labor market activities and takes its standpoint from those enterprises that offer seniors as providers of services. Elderly people (defined as over 50) in Sweden are working less than the middle-aged. The reasons for this are much discussed: some people blame the elderly for this situation while others blame the organizations—the employers. As ageism is a common phenomenon and age has negative associations, an enterprise that specializes in offering older individuals as workers into the market does not seem to be a viable proposition. The aim of the chapter is to describe and analyze the enterprises that market themselves as employers of older individuals, seniors, in Sweden. A starting point for the discussion and conclusion is why the owners of these enterprises decide to present their businesses as “staffing agencies” and not through the services and products that they provide. Positive characteristics are emphasized in these presentations, but they also include negative stereotypes of age. Gender stereotyping dominates the way in which the enterprises present and market themselves, but both for men and women the negative stereotyping of age is challenged. The majority of the owners of these staffing agencies are not seniors themselves. Their target group seems to be young and middle-aged customers. The chapter ends with a discussion of the findings, especially about how the negative associations with old age are transformed to something positive in the study context.