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Politicians and regulators have recurrently launched market-inspired reforms to attract various kinds of organizations as private providers in public sectors across Scandinavia. Outcomes of these reforms are noticeable in Swedish eldercare, where previous research indicates almost all private providers throughout the 2000s and 2010s operated as for-profit actors. Researchers have, however, neglected potential variation among private providers in other management dimensions than the core purposes of conducting for-profit or not-for-profit activities. The authors mapped all private providers of residential care services in Sweden during 2024 to develop a comprehensive analysis describing organizational variation across three important management dimensions: business types, core purposes, and external funding sources. Findings show most private providers operated as publicly traded companies, engaged in for-profit activities that were supported with credit institute loans. This article advances previous research through multidimensional evidence of the low organizational variation persisting among private providers in Swedish eldercare, despite repeated reforms.
Edlund et al. (Wed,) studied this question.