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Is entrepreneurship always contributing positively to society? This chapter demonstrates the relevance of raising this question by highlighting negative political entrepreneurship that can occur in close collaborations between entrepreneurs from the private sector and political entrepreneurs. We problematize negative entrepreneurship and its societal impact by linking it with the effects of conflicts of interest and corruption. Our general conclusion is that changes to the way public administration operates create opportunities for political entrepreneurship, but may also entail risks in terms of negative political entrepreneurship. We discuss negative political entrepreneurship by linking it with research on conflict of interest and corruption and thereby we focus the discussion on aspects that research shows has particularly negative impacts on society.

The political entrepreneur is to be found in the public sector. However, the public entrepreneur not only acts in relation to other public actors, but also in relation to the business sector with entrepreneurs. To discuss and understand who is the political entrepreneur is therefore to explore the relationships and networks between the public sector and the business sector, the entrepreneurs involved and how the political entrepreneur must act to promote favourable conditions for entrepreneurs. In times of global economic competition, economic recession and transformation of the urban and rural economic landscapes, it is important from local and regional perspectives to have political entrepreneurs that seek new opportunities for growth. This is done by changing traditional norms and values of who the entrepreneur might be and how entrepreneurship is to be conducted. It is about identifying windows of opportunities and exploring new formal and informal favourable conditions for existing and potential entrepreneurs.

For several decades, Sweden has been a country of immigration, during which process multicultural diversity has been built up. Nevertheless, equal opportunity despite ethnic or national origin seems to be a distant goal, rather than something indisputably safeguarded in a democratic welfare society of the globalization era. In light of unequal preconditions, not least in the labour market, there has for a long time been a political ambition to cultivate entrepreneurship in the immigrant population. An increasing level of self-employment – most preferably in groups that otherwise struggle hard to compete in the labour market – is expected to stimulate employment, both to the benefit of the actual entrepreneur, thus being able to make a living, and in terms of the possibility for small businesses to expand and contribute to the creation of new jobs in the economy. The attractiveness of such a win-win plan notwithstanding, reality seems to be hard to comprehend and influence. This chapter describes and discusses conditions for entrepreneurship among immigrants in Sweden. Specifically, the question of the role of public policy initiatives in this regard will be addressed. As the results from this analysis will show, there may be reasons to suspect housing segregation to be an independent factor influencing the entrepreneurial level of ambition in Sweden.

Women as entrepreneurs are on the political agenda in most European countries. The creation of businesses is considered to be an important way to keep the economy growing. Women are especially targeted as a potential group in order to increase the number of self-employed on the labour market since they are comparatively few. Policies to promote entrepreneurship have rapidly been more and more directed towards higher education. This approach has resulted in an increase in the number of entrepreneurship education programmes at universities and a higher expectation for graduates to become self-employed. There is, however, limited empirical research into how political entrepreneurs in Sweden pushed for, and succeeded in, promoting employment and entrepreneurship among women. Political entrepreneurs in the area of women’s entrepreneurship act within a policy frame that almost exclusively limits policy and action to the individual; that is, it focuses on ‘changing the women’ in order to fit them into the expectations of society, and lacks structurally oriented actions to really change the possibilities for women’s entrepreneurship. How these political entrepreneurs act and interact to support female entrepreneurship needs to be studied more closely in the future in empirical studies at the micro level to provide greater knowledge of political entrepreneurship.