• They have a humble approach to what they do and look upon their asso- ciates and partners as the major contributors to their success.
Interpreting and analysing these results seems to require a more thorough understanding of citizenship, its recent history and present complexity. Our results also suggest that normal–abnormal is a distinction of importance for practicing public entrepreneurship. The results also imply that understanding public entrepreneurship demands from us a sensitivity before the political and ethical sides of citizens-becoming-public-entrepreneurs. The political effort to create space in the public for actualising ideas is intimately related to the ethics of sociality as a life-enhancing collective investment, a heterogeneous multi- plicity united by co-functioning, by sympathy.
through schooling (Burchell, 1999). From Aristotelian and Roman concep- tions based on the presence of virtues guiding ‘man’s building of character’, we have moved – with the help of Machiavelli and Hobbes – towards a disci- plinary society of citizen-subjects (Foucault, 1979, 1988, 1991a). The neo- liberal redescription of citizenship along lines of individuals’ rights to practice their participation in society according to the role of consumer is represented as a move towards freedom and as characteristic of an enterprising society. But the ‘enterprising subject’ is still a governable subject, the object of manage- ment knowledge. Our case stories exemplify entrepreneurship changing the ordering forces of public space with its ambition to reorganise and transform what the public is taken to be: Home Service is possible only because ‘so- called’ public institutions (municipal real estate owner; social security office;
job-office) break a number of rules of conduct and re-compose the status of money from simply social security support to funds helping people to start their companies. This exemplifies the citizen-becoming-entrepreneur process that led to us characterises the case stories.
Spinosa et al. (1997) is an example of an attempt to discuss the entrepre- neurial aspect of citizenship. In their discussion – Disclosing New Worlds – both ‘virtuous citizens’ and entrepreneurs create social change. Our case stories exemplify what we call ‘public entrepreneurs’ driven by a desire to arouse a sense of responsibility in their fellow citizens for creating sociality in public space characterised by abundantia and aequitas. That is, they become public entrepreneurs in the process of uniting the two roles discussed by Spinosa et al. Becoming a public entrepreneur starts with what they name the
‘virtuous citizen’. The point is not a universal virtuousness but a locally based practice. A practice of ‘virtuosity’ is only meaningful when it is based upon the work of translating universals into the local-historical-cultural context. It seems that the universal side, that it is translatable into most contexts, of abun- dantia and aequitas is important for political reasons of creating space for creation, whereas the local-historical-cultural translation is ethically important as sociality anchored in public space.
Public entrepreneurs do not change reality primarily through products/services but by creating the organisational possibilities for people to take up new practices. It is for this reason – that they need new practices to be taken up – that an ethical side of public entrepreneurship is important. The normal has to be relativised in order for public entrepreneurs to change/create sociality. But sociality is where the normal is effective, which makes ‘public entrepreneurship’ into a creative resistance against forces of normalisation.
As Dreyfus and Rabinow (1982, p. 195) point out, normalisation works through being part of the system of classification and control of anomalies in society. ‘Social entrepreneurship’ is today used successfully in an increasingly influential discourse on how to ‘fix’ the problems of the withering ‘welfare
state’. Accordingly, control and efficiency are now being pursued in ‘social sectors’ where things and people are normalised according to the knowledge- power of the enterprising citizen’s discourse. This ‘social entrepreneurship’
discourse will therefore, to an increasing extent, determine whether people are to be considered competent members of a political community, that is, whether they are citizens proper. This is characteristic for normalising technologies that
‘. . . operate by establishing a common definition of goals and procedures, which take the form of manifestos and, even more forceful, agreed-upon examples of how a well-ordered domain of human activity should be orga- nized’ (Dreyfus and Rabinow, 1982, p. 198). In contrast to this normality of
‘social entrepreneurship’, establishing the good examples of practicing management knowledge to solve ‘social’ or ‘public domain’ problems, our cases exemplify a much more citizen-driven process. The ‘social’ is never represented as a form of the economic that lacks a few ‘clicking’ mechanisms, but instead operates as part of the targeted result.
It is against this background that our cases of public entrepreneurship can further be understood as examples of transforming anomalies into actualities.
The normal, according to the ‘social entrepreneurship’ discourse, would be to respond as a consumer – as Hirschman (1982) has discussed – to ‘malfunc- tions’ in society. The organisers of the Home Service project would ‘normally’
have sought ‘external’ funds to set up financial means for start-ups. Instead, they chose to suggest an anomaly – to redefine social security money into (part of) a start-up fund. With the help of White and Hunt (2000) and Burchell (1999) we have been able to contextualise such ‘normalisation’ as part of a certain form of citizenship, practiced as a form of liberal government.
However, with Spinosa et al. (1997), we have also seen the creative and productive sides of citizenship, operating between the social – as traditionally maintained and structured by state-institutions – and the civil society of every- day practices. There, in the public, entrepreneurship operates as the creation of sociality through which people can enhance their lives.
Creating Sociality as a Public Entrepreneurship Achievement
Our initial difficulties with reading our cases in conversation with the litera- ture on social entrepreneurship drove us into the project of contextualising two moves (see above): from social to public and from consumer to citizen. This allowed us to problematise ‘the social’ as a historically situated construct of political potential, used to make visible problems of unequal distribution of power and poverty.
We could then ask how the social is created today in everyday processes. A partial conclusion tells us that the social is predominantly produced as a form of the economic, with the effect that existing political tension is transformed
into a discussion of active citizens as responsible consumers. However, this study has told about public entrepreneurs that don’t opt for public action for economic reasons as do Hirschman’s consumers, but for the kind of opportu- nities that are created in participating in the public space guided by abundan- tia and aequitas. Whereas ‘social entrepreneurship’ produces the ‘social’ as something needing to be fixed (re-described as forms of the economic and subject to management knowledge), ‘public entrepreneurship’ creates social- ity as something missing and socialises risk in local communities as part of public space.
The public entrepreneurs studied people as citizens of Southern Sweden and ask them to co-create a sociality that extends the possibilities for people to practice creative citizenship. The driving individuals often seemed moved by frustration over the lack of sociality in public space and lack of collective investments in desired functions.
1. Aluma: Why do homeless people not meet people who have homes in ways that help the former to a better life? Aluma creates such a space for interaction in the everyday life of Malmö through the practices of selling the journal;
2. The Old Shipyard/The Brewery: Why can’t the city of Malmö and its youth interact in creative ways so as to engage young people in democra- tic processes of co-creating public space? The Skateboard Shipyard Park and The Brewery are both public entrepreneurship stories driven by this desire;
3. Home Service: Why must we accept the hopelessness of long-term unem- ployed and their gradual dependence upon social welfare programs; how can we create a sociality in which these people can find a bridge back to
‘society’, where they participate in other forms than as passive recipients of money? The Home Service project organises resources in new ways in order to actualise new possibilities for unemployed ‘new-Swedes’ in this sense;
4. The Green Room: How can stressed-out and burnt-out people of big city life get access to space for contemplation and spaces of nature, of gardens where care-taking of life includes ones own? The Green Room project works towards actualising this idea, summoning investments in this common image of nature as recreational;
5. Fair Play: How can the joy of doing sports be recreated anew? The Fair Play project has done so, throwing off the shadow of elitism and creating a sociality in which the sport = fun idea rules, and where sports again become part of a useful learning experience – participating and relating are more important than doing your own thing.
The Aluma project illustrates the formation of a necessary community without which the problems of homeless people in Malmö never would have been possible to deal with in a way that provides social, and not simply economic, support. The social opportunity, rather than some market opportu- nities, drives the project. Aluma creates a public space in between the state- institutionally structured society and civic practices. In this space the possibilities for practising citizenship are extended.
The Old Shipyard Park is more directly targeting the relationships between youth and public space. Also here we find it to be of central importance that the project seeks to provide young people with possibilities to practice citi- zenship in ways that they can participate in and relate to.
In the case of the Brewery it is the social opportunity of providing a public space that has driven the project. The Brewery does not approach consumers and provide a different choice. They approach people searching for ways to practice their citizenship together with people of their generation and via prac- tices they feel are central to life. Freedom is exercised as social rather than private. This is also, like Aluma, a necessary community in the sense that with- out it, young people without any prospects for educating themselves or meet- ing others with similar passions, would most likely have felt excluded from public space.
The Home Service project is stepping in where society traditionally has posi- tioned itself as the risk taker par excellence. Home Service creates opportunities for people to move from long-term dependence upon welfare and to become self-employed. This is done as a social process, though, and not as a traditional start-up program. There is a whole network of organisations participating in redistributing the social risk, from the wider society to a local sociality constructed by participants in the project and supporting agencies in a network.
In the Fair Play example, abundantia and aequitas are related to ideas of non-elitism in sport. The common – and often considered quite legitimate – isolation of sport from societal values, making possible the structuring of sport-exercise and training into elitism and pure result-orientation, is here resisted. The Fair Play project seeks to shift focus from results towards the joy of sharing responsibility.
We do not read our cases as exemplifying a Tönnies-inspired claim that we need to move from Gesellschaft/society to Gemeinschaft/community. The concept of community (see Wenger, 1998) has indeed been revitalised during the last decade, but is well described by White and Hunt as a romantic impulse used by neoliberal concerns for citizenship as a technology of government. If, however, we understand communities as a ‘presupposition’ as to what being with others means (as in Goodchild, 1996), it instead exemplifies what Deleuze calls ‘socius’. As such – as a socius – it represents a virtuality, the fullness of the becomings of new formations of sociality.