Projects with keyword: Entrepreneurship

This project aims at describing and analysing the reorganization of the Swedish public sector from ethnic, gender and age perspectives. The Swedish public sector is in a process of transformation. The current changes are often in line with the international New Public Management trend. As the welfare services in Sweden are an obligation to the 290 municipalities, empirical studies have to be conducted on the local level. Improved democracy in terms of freedom of choice to the citizens, increased diversity in services available, lower costs for the local community, and development of new markets are often the aspired goals from the promoters of the changes. These new markets are expected to encourage local entrepreneurs and especially former employees. As women are overrepresented among the employees, the new strategies are expected to be very positive for women and, due to an assumed demand from the clients, for 'ethnic specialists'. This means that the reorganization might entail new possibilities for entrepreneurs with a business profile different from 'the mainstream entrepreneur' but to this point we find a domination of large organizations rather than small.

The project analyses how changes in policies and regulations affect conditions and opportunities for small business development in different industries over time, and how self-employed persons act in response to changes in opportunity structures. We study strategies of growth and survival within specific industries and markets, but also transitions of self-employment across industries and types of markets. The project will contribute new knowledge through a systematic and coherent longitudinal and spatial investigation of the dynamics of self-employment among immigrants in Sweden. The project systematically applies and develops instruments from recent international research on ethnic minority businesses (EMB). Theory in the field is developed through the integration of entrepreneurship theory and new theoretical contributions from EMB research. Theoretical perspectives on strategies and self-employed as actors is combined with theory on opportunity structures (the framework of ?mixed embeddedness?). Methodologically, the approach implies coordinated analyses of different dimensions on different levels, using a combination of policy studies, case studies and quantitative analyses.

This project examines circular movement in Southern Africa in the context of entrepreneurship, multiple logics of legitimacy, and everyday interaction between travelers and state functionaries. The project builds on the ideas of the human economy and embodiment as a way to investigate how movement can be understood by those that are involved in its everyday practice. The projects specifically focuses on the practice of private transporting of goods, people and ideas between South-Western Zimbabwe and South Africa. A focus on practices of movement has some implications for the understanding of migration in Southern Africa, of economic livelihoods and of the continued development of the African state in general.

This project will explore the internationalisation of the Swedish private security industry in the contemporary period. The mixed methods research project employs qualitative and quantitative register-data research and ethnographic interviews of working private security guards, or vaktare and ‘safety-entrepeneurs,’ or trygghetsentreprenör. Looking at the internationalisation both here in Sweden in the working profession as well as the business model allows for a multilayered contextually informed project in who, how, and in what ways 'safety' and 'security' are commodified, marketed, and provided in Sweden.

In the context of an expansion of digital infrastructures driven by the impact and recovery of the pandemic, we bring together perspectives from queer feminist technoscience, migration and cultural studies, social and political theory, from the EU and the UK, in order to investigate how infrastructural imaginaries (re)configure democratic sovereignty, imagined communities, and practices of bordering of the European Union. We propose to think and investigate sovereignty through (a) infrastructural and entrepreneurial ways of constituting and imagining e?thnos and demos through technological innovations, and (b) conflicts that emerge where efforts to create new infrastructures meet existing ones. Is it possible, we ask, that new constitutionalities are being imagined, practiced, and produced here?