Welfare Visions 2.0: Future-Making Practices in the Social Economies of Athens and Berlin (WELFAIR)

• Applicant: Dr. Dimitris Soudias
• Subject Area: Empirical Social Research ; Political Science
• Term: since 2022
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 511316556

Faced with COVID-19, the European Commission re-discovered the social economy (SE) sector as a central answer to the social, economic, and ecological consequences of the pandemic. 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 social needs provision, thereby generating jobs and growth; and transform current models of the economy and social needs provision, 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.The project WELFAIR addresses this gap, through a comparative study of social entrepreneurs’ future-making practices in Athens and Berlin. Situated between economic sociology and cultural political economy, this project asks: How do social entrepreneurs imagine the future of the economy and social needs provision, and what role do they attribute to themselves and the social economy to this regard? How to they enact this future?Answering these questions will contribute to advancing our knowledge about expectations in the market and the state for social needs provision, if and how expectations are changing in (post-) pandemic times, and what consequences these changes may have for how social needs 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. WELFAIR is designed as a pilot study that will feed into a larger project on welfare policy-making in governmental ‘policy labs’.WELFAIR is based on abductive analysis: a qualitative research strategy for producing theoretical hunches for unexpected findings, and then developing them into theories with a comparative examination of variation. Abductive analysis does justice to the qualities of potentiality in future-making practices, because it is based on the pragmatist presumption that meaning-making occurs in tracing practices and their imaginable consequences. Data collection is based mainly on interviews with social entrepreneurs, and analysis is based on grounded-theory coding. The cases of Athens and Berlin promise analytically insightful variation because of their contrastive configuration regarding welfare systems and social economy funding. This variation arguably influences the ways in which social entrepreneurs envision and enact the future of the economy and social needs provision.

• DFG Programme: WBP Position