practice. The idea of developing such a vocabulary is based on what we think is important for entrepreneurship today, namely languaging (Normann, 2001, p. 253) and even the possibility of seeing entrepreneurship as a language- making practice (Bjerke, 2005). The exercise of developing a vocabulary peaked about halfway through the workshops and was genuinely appreciated for providing a terminology to the participants, enabling them to talk about what they were doing and to imagine how it could be moved beyond the limits of the present.
Short Description of Cases and Workshop Outcomes Aluma
This is a monthly journal in the city of Malmö and its surroundings. This jour- nal is sold only by homeless people in public places (apart from being subscribed to by some regulars and official institutions). The object of the project is, apart from providing some finances and a bit of pride to the sellers, to be a strong instrument in creating opinion in the issue of being without a home. The journal consists mainly of articles on public issues, but it also contains discussions about culture and leisure-time activities in the area.
Aluma is not associated with any political party or any religion. The journal sells about 20,000 copies per month in an area of Sweden where a bit more than a quarter of a million people live.
The person who founded Aluma, Elisabeth, had been out travelling and became inspired by and curious of similar types of journals in other parts of the world. As there is a journal of the same type in Stockholm, the capital of Sweden, she went there to study the process. By coincidence she came in contact with a homeless drug addict in Malmö, who became one of her friends.
Through him she gained entrance to the world of homeless people.
The old shipyard park
A vision to develop a whole youth park in a former premises of a major Swedish shipyard, now being closed, has grown in Malmö. The main provider of fuel for this process is John. His ambitions include building Europe’s largest outdoor skateboard arena in the park. He has gained support for his idea that the city of Malmö can, through such a construction, provide a raw model for co-operation between the city and its young people. The purpose also includes involving these people in creating new public space and to do this in a demo- cratic fashion. John is working hard to get assistance from various sponsors for his project and he is well on his way to realise his dream.
The Brewery
The Brewery (the name comes from the fact that the premises were previously
occupied by a brewery) is an unusually successful example of people getting together to create things of a physical nature (such as an indoor skating arena and space for different educational activities) as well as of a more abstract nature (building networks in the city).
The Brewery was inaugurated in 1998 by the tax minister of Sweden at that time. The main part of its physical space consists of an indoor skating arena – 1,800 square metres large – filled with ramps constructed by the skaters them- selves. The arena is seen as one of the best in Europe. There is also a café, an engineering shop, a media shop and 500 square metres of educational facili- ties.
Home Service
Long term social welfare is a central problem in large-scale big city areas.
Home service is a cooperative project where a number of local actors in Malmö are involved in an experimental group aiming at bringing some people out of long term dependence on welfare. The ideal is to assist fifteen long term unemployed immigrants for 22 months in their attempt to be able to start func- tioning as self-employed entrepreneurs in the home-service sector. The main organisation behind this project is the local community real estate owner and administrator. The main leader of this project in practice is called Stig. The project has suggested that social security money be re-coded as start-up services providing people with support for starting their own home service companies. It is described as a model for ‘growth, employment, and integra- tion’. The pilot study comprises four persons being supported in their start-up process (within the home-service sector). The results include being better at speaking Swedish, higher self-esteem, personal networks including people outside their own immigrant group, and higher income. Now fifteen more persons are brought into the same process (and hundreds are standing in line).
The Green Room
The project aims at cooperation between researchers, society, artists and entre- preneurs to establish Österlen (the eastern part of Scania, to a large extent devoted to horticulture) as a centre for knowledge, recreation and therapy nestled among all the fruit trees in the area. This process is driven by Monika, who lives in the area and loves the place.
The tourist industry in the area is based to a large extent on horticulture, among other things through what are called ‘Open Gardens’, where the public gets access to private gardens in season. A pilot study is underway to find out about similar experiences in other parts of Sweden and abroad, employment numbers in various parts of horticulture in the country, and to find out about ongoing research in the field. The project aims to systematically seek out and exploit knowledge of gardening already developed in the area and create
networks and arenas where this knowledge can be diffused in order to boost the development of this horticultural sector and, in effect, create more jobs.
Fair Play
This projects aims at running a program in order to foster an interest in sports in the broad sense (not to screen for the elite) among members in a junior soccer club in Lund. The project started in 2004. There was much turbulence in the club at that time. An ex-juvenile was recruited to lead the program. This was a lucky draw.
The initiator of the program, Gunilla, is proud to say that ‘her’ team today plays in the first soccer division in Sweden for boys at that age, a level that any soccer team of any kind in that particular city never have reached.
Apart from moving these projects ahead through sharing their stories in the workshops, a second result of the workshops is that the participants found it important to elaborate on a vocabulary that they thought could be used to char- acterise what they were doing – public entrepreneurship is one result of this discussion.
A third set of activities of interest to this chapter took place in a two-day workshop in May. After having been part of the process since August 2003, the participants were given the opportunity to tell us what they thought they had learnt about what we refer to as ‘public entrepreneurship’. The task was to, in teams of two, work on specific questions like what, in their opinion, charac- terised ‘their version of’ entrepreneurship, how they differed from business entrepreneurs, what the obstacles to their kind of entrepreneurship in Sweden today were and what could be done to improve on the situation. Some state- ments from the presentation of the results were:
• ‘Obstacles to public entrepreneurship include nostalgic people, who have a cemented opinion of a “good” society, a society which in their opinion once existed’.
• ‘The fact that every expense belongs to an account somewhere compli- cates a holistic view’.
• ‘Differences between public entrepreneurs and business entrepreneurs are part of a moving target for discussion’.
Some opinions among the organisers of the workshops as to what characterises the public entrepreneurs in those workshops are:
• They have no overall plan for what they are doing. Having had one, they would not have succeeded.
• They look at what they are involved in as the most natural thing to do in societies of today and they are very surprised that not more people are doing it.
• 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.