Abstract
In this chapter, I focus on lower educated and local language weak unemployed women immigrants in the Swedish labour market. Facing cultural and ethnic diversity, socio-economic poverty, and exclusion, this group does not respond to standardised labour integration programmes. Instead, creative new solutions are needed. One such solution may be work integrating social enterprises, often run as social cooperatives with democratic involvement and a hybrid business model related to both economic and social goals. Leaning on new institutional theories, the chapter highlights the Swedish welfare state, where the public sector caters to individuals’ employability but has not promoted work integrated social enterprises as a possible solution. Through interviews with seven such enterprises, I identify three phases in coping with institutional challenges and suggest that there are post-pandemic signs of a more resilient societal contract. This might open for a rebalancing of the roles of the public and private sectors in favour of new models for immigrant women-labour integration in the future.
