Working for the public, for-profit and non-profit sector:

Views of managers in residential care for children and youth

Abstract

During the last few decades, the field of residential care for children and young people in Sweden has undergone vast changes. From being dominated by the public sector at the end of the 1970s, it has been transformed into a market on which public, not for-profit and for-profit residential care organizations compete for public contracts, and where for-profit companies own the majority of residential care units. In light of this, this article sets out to investigate how managers of residential care units in the different sectors – for-profit, non-profit and public –reason about working in a market, how they view the relationship between quality of care and profit-making, and how they handle the varying and sometimes competing institutional logics of the field. The results, building on qualitative interviews, indicate that the managers’ attitudes to the marketization of residential care for children and youth vary depending on which sector they work in. They are keenly aware of the discussion regarding profit-making in publicly-financed social care services, and their arguments for and against are recognizable from the public debate. It is also clear that the managers experience conflicts between the different institutional logics that exist in the field; perhaps the most obvious conflict is that between a market logic and a professional logic. In describing these conflicts, the managers emphasize their inclination to make decisions in line with professional logics. In that sense, it is possible that common professional logics could mitigate some of the effects of the other logics on the field. On an overarching level, however, the market of residential care for children and youth is fragmented and largely influenced by market logic.