Narrating Care and Entrepreneurship

This is a study of entrepreneurial care services in Finland, guided by an interest in foregrounding the societal and cultural context in which care entrepreneurs are operating through their personal accounts. The ongoing reconstruction of the Finnish social service structure forms the background of this study. The study therefore addresses private care providers' narrated and experienced cultural expectations and positions in the conflicting context of care and market logics. In particular, this is a narrative study situated in the fields of social psychology, gender studies and social policy. The intertwining theoretical and methodological framework is based on cognitive narratology. Moreover, narratives are understood as performances, and as comments on the expected and ordinary. The empirical material in this study consists of 33 written narratives collected by written request from care entrepreneurs who provide different kinds of social service around Finland.