The winners of marketisation: Welfare profit-makers legitimising private profits in publicly funded welfare services

Abstract

Recent decades have witnessed the expansion of market mechanisms and private service providers in publicly funded care sectors. In this article, we examine how elite actors benefitting economically in this transition in Finland rationalise and legitimise their role as profit-makers. Drawing on 22 in-depth interviews of such welfare profit-makers, who have gained significant wealth or income in the social and healthcare sectors, we investigate the changing moral economies concerning such welfare profit-making in a Nordic welfare state. Moreover, we analyse how the image of the public sector is constructed in these legitimisation narratives. We show how the interviewees not only legitimise their own profit-making in the increasingly centralised quasi-markets created by public funders and private service providers, but also simultaneously delegitimise public sector’s service production. While legitimising their publicly funded, but private, profit-making, the interviewees shift accountability for excessive profits and the pitfalls of marketisation and outsourcing to the public sector. This way we describe a phenomenon in which private sector symbolically delegitimises public sector while retaining it as the financier of private profit-making.