Welfare Imaginaries 2.0: Future-Making Practices in the Social Economies of Athens and Berlin

The European Commission re-discovered the social economy (SE) sector as an important answer 'from below' to the social, economic, and ecological challenges the EU is facing. The Commission adopted the Social Economy Action Plan in December 2021, following the launch of a High-Level Expert Group on the Future of Social Protection and the Welfare State in the EU in November 2021. Policy-makers assume the SE can do both: alleviate the precarizing impacts of crises by delivering care and social needs provision (CSN), thereby generating jobs and growth; and transform current models of the economy and CSN, for an inclusive and sustainable future. Here, social entrepreneurs are attributed a “visionary” role by both policy-makers and scholars, because they are assumed to innovate solutions that put social and environmental concerns at the heart of their business model: prioritizing social impact over profit. How social entrepreneurs themselves imagine and enact the future of society, however, remains understudied.This paper addresses this gap, through a comparative study of social entrepreneurs’ future-making practices in Athens and Berlin. Situated between political sociology and cultural economy, I ask: How do social entrepreneurs imagine the future of the economy and CSN, and what role do they attribute to themselves and the social economy to this regard? How to they enact this future? Answering these questions contributes to advancing our knowledge about expectations in the market and the state for care and social needs provision, if and how expectations are changing in (post-)pandemic times, and what consequences these changes may have for how social needs and care-work are understood, and provided for. A central claim is that social entrepreneurs’ experiences with economic uncertainty put them in a position where they reproduce some of the forms of inequality they intend to alleviate and overcome in the first place.