Polyphonic Welfare: Challenging Hierarches in a Norwegian Social Entrepreneurship Incubator

Norway is often portrayed as a hold-out of the postwar welfare state, sustained by the country’s democratic socialist politics and large sovereign wealth fund. Yet, like other European welfare states, it has undergone significant reforms in the past several decades. These include contracting services out to private businesses or to non-profit volunteer organizations that have had to become increasingly professionalized. Since the decline in oil prices in 2014, policymakers have also increasingly promoted (social) entrepreneurship as a means of creating jobs, imagining a post-oil economy, and addressing social issues previously seen as the domain of social workers. These shifts place new pressures on welfare professionals in Oslo, who must balance emerging discourses of innovation and entrepreneurship with skepticism toward “welfare profiteers,” companies seen as using government contracts for private gain.

This presentation looks at how one public-adjacent social entrepreneurship support organization, which Janet Connor calls “Inspire,” navigates this shifting welfare landscape and legitimizes its work as most closely connected to the needs of people living in a multicultural Oslo neighborhood. Connor examines how staff and members use polyphony, bringing multiple voices from their social networks in the neighborhood into their narratives about their work. She argues that this strategy is not only a tool for legitimation, but also part of a larger project among Inspire staff and members to challenge standard distinctions between welfare providers and receivers, innovators and others.

What        

Janet Connor, “Polyphonic Welfare: Challenging Hierarches in a Norwegian Social Entrepreneurship Incubator"

When       

7 Octobor 2025, 15.30-17.00, followed by drinks at CREA Café. 

Where      

REC B5.12, Common Room Anthropology (Roeterseiland, B-building, 5th floor) 
If you are not able to join in person, you can also follow the talk and discussion via the live stream. 

Bio Janet Connor

Janet Connor is an Assistant Professor at Leiden University. She is a linguistic anthropologist whose work brings together a close focus on communicative practices, particularly modes of listening, with questions of democratic political action, migration, and the nation. Her current book project, which builds on her doctoral research in Oslo, Norway, explores how claims to be able to listen well to others, as opposed to speaking for oneself, became key in debates over the future of a gentrifying neighborhood and imaginations of the future Norwegian state. She is also beginning a new project on water and democracy. Janet has previously done research on the politics of regional languages in France and AI as a tool for deliberative democracy.