Introduction

In this contemporary age of migration, millions of people are moving around the world as refugees or workers (Nail, 2018). Once they reach their host societies, immigrants still encounter numerous barriers: from housing to education, from poverty to political exclusion, and from unemployment to work discrimination (Cheng et al., 2021). These challenges are, however, experienced differently by various groups. Migrant women—a heterogeneous category in itself—are among the most vulnerable. They usually run a higher risk of social exclusion, are offered fewer job opportunities, and have family and childcare obligations that can hinder their access to education, local language tuition, and labour market integration (Anthias & Lazaridis, 2020). Because these women have been ignored for decades in integration policies, civil society-driven initiatives (e.g. work cooperatives, networks of foreign-born citizens, and neighbourhood associations) have been experimenting with various methods and organizational forms to facilitate these women’s socio-economic inclusion, in a “local turn” of integration policies (Emilsson, 2015; Zapata and Zapata Campos, 2023).

The expansion of civil society organizations providing welfare services is in part a response to growing criticism of the inefficiency of state-driven “activation programmes”, which treat work as an obligation rather than a right (Strindlund et al., 2020). Such large-scale labour market integration services are often perceived by the participants as too broad or insufficient (Bucken-Knapp et al., 2018; Schierenbeck & Spehar, 2021). Activation programmes often ignore the numerous impediments that foreign-born people face, such as family obligations, personal traumas, inadequate levels of literacy, and housing or economic problems (Bucken-Knapp et al., 2020), jeopardizing migrants’ human rights. These standardized education methods and activation programmes can, in this context, become oppressive rather than empowering (Chandra, 2017; Norbäck & Zapata Campos, 2023). Citizen-driven initiatives have pushed the agenda to develop alternative forms (Battilana et al., 2018; Resch & Steyaert, 2020) of organizing labour market integration (Davies, 2009) that invert the priorities from “work first” to “life first” (Lindsay et al., 2021), and that nurture more equal, ethical, and humane methods.

Undeniably, the expansion of social initiatives ingrained in an ethic of care (Tronto, 1993), such as alternative forms of organizing labour market integration, beyond their local origins is regarded as among the most important challenges (see, e.g. André & Pache, 2016; Dahles et al., 2020; Dorado & Fernández, 2019; Lunenburg et al., 2020). Usually operating in resource-scarce environments, these initiatives must mobilize resources such as material inputs, skills, and networks that are necessary to support their spread (Murray et al., 2010).

In resource-poor environments, translating such ideas to fit a local context involves a myriad of actions: putting pieces of the puzzle together, and engaging multiple actors to compensate for the scarcity of resources. This intensive mobilization recalls the practice of “bricolage” (Lévi-Strauss, 1967), defined in the social innovation literature as “the making do with any resources at hand to provide innovative solutions for social needs that traditional organizations fail to address” (Janssen et al., 2018, p. 450). For example, studies have shown how the local embeddedness of bricoleurs in superdiverse (Phillipmore et al., 2020) neighbourhoods with predominantly migrant populations gives access to a wide range of resources, practices, and ideas to tinker with, all of which support the stability of such initiatives (Barinaga, 2017; Glick Schiller & Çağlar, 2011; Zapata & Zapata Campos, 2023). Migrants are thus not seen as “mere victims” or as passive subjects of activation policies (Vesterberg, 2015), lacking agency (Agustin, 2003). Rather, they can play an active role and access a broad repertoire of resources and practices that stem from the diverse local/global contexts and backgrounds in which they interact.

Paradoxically, these studies have also shown how the same local embeddedness may hamper the expansion of these novel practices beyond the spaces where they arose (Barinaga, 2017; Çaglar & Glick Schiller, 2018). The ambiguous role of local embeddedness in spreading such caring initiatives deserves further research, as the literature on scaling social enterprises shows (Glunde & Lyon, 2015; Lunenburg et al., 2020). Although bricolage is relevant to the early stages of organizing, its role in spreading novel caring initiatives has been largely neglected (for exceptions, see, e.g. Busch & Barkema, 2021; Resch & Steyaert, 2020).

This paper attempts to bridge these gaps by examining how alternative forms of organizing labour market integration in resource-scarce environments expand across settings, by considering the role of local embeddedness and an ethic of care in enabling this expansion. The analysis has been informed by studies of imitation (Czarniawska, 2005) in institutional theory (DiMaggio & Powell, 1983; Meyer & Rowan, 1977), in combination with theories of ethics of care (Tronto, 1993) and bricolage applied to social entrepreneurship (e.g. Janssen et al., 2018), welfare, and migration studies (e.g. Phillimore et al., 2021). The fieldwork was conducted in Yalla Trappan, a work cooperative of immigrant women in the City of Malmö, Sweden, and encompassed the attempts to diffuse this organization and its methods in seven larger and smaller cities in the country.

The findings indicate that the expansion of alternative labour market inclusion methods into resource-scarce contexts is enabled by simultaneous practices of imitation and bricolage, ingrained in an ethic of care. The argument presented here consists of three parts. I start by showing that many important practices aimed at taking care of immigrant women were developed by imitating accounts of the original ideas, through a broadcasting mode of imitation. Next, I explain why the local translation of these caring practices in resource-scarce contexts, consisting of “bricolage work” on material, market, institutional, human, and cultural elements, was necessary. Finally, I discuss how the expansion of novel and more humane forms of organizing the labour market inclusion of migrants requires imitation, but of a kind that entails the bricolage of local translations. Such bricolage is always collective (which does not diminish the importance of individual agency), multi-spatial and not just local, and wrapped in an ethic of care, rather than in economic logic.

The paper contributes to scholarship on ethics and migration by showing how women engage in collective bricolage to address the challenges of their migration journeys. They do so through cooperative forms of organizing work that are embedded in an ethic of care and put “life first”, unlike traditional methods of labour market integration. This ethic of care also serves as a moral compass that prevents the risk of mission drift while helping recognize, revalorize, and mobilize immigrant women’s resourcefulness.

In the following section, the literature on imitation and bricolage is presented, followed by the methods used to conduct this study. The case of Yalla Trappan and its expansion is then described and discussed, leading to the conclusions.

Imitation and Bricolage: A Theoretical Framework for Examining the Organizing of Migrant Integration

The expansion of alternative forms of organizing intended to address grand challenges of our time, such as migration, has been the focus of research both in new institutional theory and in bricolage and social entrepreneurship scholarship. These two bodies of theory provide a relevant framework with which to better understand the expansion of organizations supporting migrant integration, and the implications for migrants’ rights and for an ethic of care, as elaborated on in the following.

New Institutional Theory and Imitation

When immigrants and refugees reach the receiving country, they engage with complex and multi-layered institutions of integration including language training, civic orientation, validation of previous educational experience, and manifold labour market initiatives (Bucken-Knapp et al., 2020). In recent years, these traditional institutions of integration have been widely criticized for their negative effects on the lives of those who take part in them (Chandra, 2017; Schierenbeck & Spehar, 2021; Norbäck & Zapata Campos, 2023); among such institutions are national activation programmes redefining work as an obligation rather than a right (Strindlund et al., 2020). In response, new institutions, that is new practices, methods, and organizations supporting the integration of immigrants, have emerged, and competed with traditional institutions of integration (Zapata & Zapata Campos, 2023).

Institutional theories offer a theoretical framework for understanding how new practices, such as more human and ethical methods for the labour market integration of immigrant women, can become norms (i.e. institutions) that are disseminated, taken for granted, and accommodated by other actors in the field (DiMaggio & Powell, 1983). Imitation is thus seen as a basic mechanism for circulating taken-for-granted ideas, methods, and models, for example, in the labour market integration of immigrants (Czarniawska & Sevón, 2005). While the imitation of models and practices perceived as successful is often described as the opposite of innovation, in practice there is no clear conceptual difference between an original model and an imitation. What is new “is often the result of an attempt at combining old ideas” (Sahlin-Andersson & Sevón, 2003, p. 250). From this perspective, the expansion of new models, such as collaborative methods for language tuition in the workplace developed by social cooperatives, results from imitation that requires translation (Corvellec & Eriksson-Zetterquist, 2016). Imitated ideas are translated, transformed according to local needs, meanings, or traditions, often leading to unexpected consequences. The final result is not a copy of the idea or organizational model as such, but rather local versions of both the idea and its materializations (Sahlin & Wedlin, 2008).

To realize these emergent forms of organizing integration in new settings, for example, via the expansion of migrant women’s cooperative organizations, various actors must be persuaded to join the effort: awareness must be created; supporters and users must be recruited; practices must be anchored, and so on (Czarniawska & Joerges, 1996). This study shows that when such translation occurs in local contexts characterized by resource scarcity as well as complex and superdiverse settings (e.g. neighbourhoods and cities where many immigrants live), and when actors predominantly believe in social goals and are guided by an ethic of care (e.g. as in work cooperatives), the practice of bricolage becomes essential to the process of imitation and translation for the social and economic inclusion of immigrant women.

Social Entrepreneurship and Bricolage

In the social entrepreneurship literature, the expansion of novel emerging institutions of integration, such as the work cooperative Yalla Trappan, is shaped by interrelated dynamics, including resourcing strategies, and the institutional environments in which they operate, as described in the following.

First, the spread of novel forms of organizing integration is challenged by the difficulties of operating in resource-scarce environments and of the consequent mobilization of resources needed for their local translations (Murray et al., 2010), resources such as material inputs, skills, and networks (Lyon & Fernandez, 2012). Here, the concept of bricolage offers valuable insights when striving to understand how such resources are created and used in resource-scarce environments. The term was introduced into English by Lévi-Strauss (1967) to denote the process of “making do with what is at hand”, and it has been applied in many disciplines and contexts.

Social bricoleurs, particularly in the welfare and integration fields, rely on locally available resources to solve local problems and to create and exploit new opportunities. Often, bricolage requires social networking activities and spontaneous collective action in order to respond rapidly to specific social problems (Johannisson & Olaison, 2007). Bricoleurs also use previously unrelated experiences, ideas, and knowledge in order to mobilize as well as to create resources (Desa & Basu, 2013; Di Domenico et al., 2010; Molecke & Pinkse, 2017) in resource-scarce environments (Desa & Koch, 2014; Linna, 2013). Typically, bricoleurs also develop intimate knowledge of their local environments (Zahra et al., 2009). That is the case in superdiverse neighbourhoods where many foreign-born residents live, and that provide a broad range of resources such as language, culture, and local knowledge of societal institutions, residents, and communities (Phillimore et al., 2016, 2021). Research on this matter has also shown how migrant workers can creatively draw from broad repertoires of resources (e.g. ethnic, national, and political traditions) in their countries of both origin and destination through “transnational bricolage” (Castellani & Roca, 2022). Bricoleurs can therefore extract value from resources that were not perceived as such before, being hidden or invisible to most people (Gutberlet et al., 2016), such as skills traditionally developed by migrant women working at home, as we describe below.

Second, recent literature has also shown how the ambition of social entrepreneurs to scale up their social impact, rather than simply grow, is shaped by the institutional environment in which they operate (Scheuerle & Schmitz, 2016). Typically, social bricoleurs do not have the ambition to scale up their solutions, as their interest lies in the local embeddedness of the problems and needs of the communities they care about (Smith et al., 2017; Zahra et al., 2009). Yet, the “institutional entrepreneurship” of certain social bricoleurs can help expand successful social innovations beyond their original settings, by introducing changes in their institutional environments (Gutberlet et al., 2016; Westley et al., 2014). It is precisely their commitment to creating social value and their unconditional caring about the well-being of the community that makes bricoleurs refuse “to enact limitations” (Baker & Nelson, 2005; Garud & Karnøe, 2003). Such refusal can take different forms, such as seeking ways to counteract limitations imposed by institutional or political settings, or by institutional voids (Di Domenico et al., 2010) caused by austerity cuts in welfare and migration services. Building legal and institutional infrastructures to support the conditions and well-being of foreign-born individuals and women is an example of such institutional entrepreneurship.

Tronto’s (1993) ethic of care offers a valuable lens through which to understand and address the ethical dimensions of the social bricoleurs supporting migrant communities. Caring is defined as the activities “to maintain, contain, and repair our ‘world’ so that we can live in it as well as possible” (Fischer & Tronto, 1990, p. 40). This practice of repairing recalls the work of bricolage. Tronto emphasizes the importance of recognizing care as a societal and political issue, advocating for a more inclusive understanding of ethics that incorporates caring practices within public and private domains. Tronto’s conceptualization of caring involves four interconnected phases, each contributing to a comprehensive understanding of care as a moral and political concept. Tronto’s four phases of an ethic of care encompass recognizing care-related issues (caring about), planning for concrete actions to address them (taking care of), actively providing care to meet specific needs (care-giving), and acknowledging and reciprocating care received within a community (care-receiving). While the first two phases imply a predisposition for caring, encompassing the planning of activities and ensuring that legal and institutional frameworks are set in place, the other two (i.e. care-giving and care-receiving) refer to the actions of translating these predispositions into practice. These phases of an ethic of care resonate with the activities that constitute imitation and bricolage, as I develop in the discussion section.

To conclude, while bricolage embedded in local practices and in an ethic of care can initially enable the mobilization and creation of resources, they can paradoxically also hinder the scaling of emergent initiatives and institutions supporting migration and integration in later stages (Baker & Nelson, 2005; Bojica et al., 2020; Senyard et al., 2014; Smith et al., 2017). Bricolage can compromise the quality and effectiveness of the learning process necessary for organizational expansion (Johannisson & Olaison, 2007; Senyard et al., 2014). Also, social bricoleurs are challenged in their attempts to expand their innovations by the fact that they are constrained by their unique local knowledge of their particular communities, lacking such knowledge outside their settings or origin (Phillimore et al., 2016). Ethical challenges to the geographical expansion of these initiatives can also emerge if bricoleurs abandon their ethic of care to the detriment of, for example, standardizing the initiatives necessary for their expansion (André & Pache, 2016).

Despite these challenges, it is possible to overcome them, for example, when local communities develop practices that address both local and more systemic problems and solutions (Smith et al., 2017). Also, the introduction of organizational care principles may allow social enterprises to avoid the ethical traps of their expansion (André & Pache, 2016). Busch and Barkema (2021) further revealed that bricolage can be achieved by “replicating bricolage heuristics in a low-cost way, enabling a fit with a diversity of resource-constrained contexts” (p. 743). Migration scholars have also noted that simultaneous processes of global and local bricolage have been underexamined, which is a real shortcoming, “as individuals with transnational connections make use of global resources to address local problems or vice versa” (Phillimore et al., 2016, p. 1; see also Castellani & Roca, 2022; Glick Schiller & Çağlar, 2011). The study reported here is an attempt to bridge these gaps, advancing our understanding of the expansion of alternative forms of organizing labour market integration by bringing together the theoretical frameworks of bricolage and imitation, and linking them to the ethic of care and migration literature.

Research Setting and Method

The paper is informed by the critical case (Flyvbjerg, 2006) of Yalla Trappan Cooperative and its expansion to other settings in Sweden. Informed by this “critical case” approach, I have selected as favourable a setting as possible, i.e. one of the leading initiatives for the labour market integration of immigrant women in Sweden, in which to examine the role of local embeddedness and an ethic of care in the expansion of this alternative method. A critical case approach provides the opportunity to draw valid insights from a single case that has strategic importance for a general problem, such as the challenges that nascent methods face in their expansion across settings.

This study is based on 40 interviews with leaders of and participants in the newly created cooperatives, and with officers of local governments, state agencies, and supportive organizations. It also includes an analysis of documents and websites produced by the studied organizations. Finally, a focus group was conducted with participants in one of the new Yalla Trappan groups. Most women participating in Yalla Trappan’s activities were in their forties, being housewives and mothers of several children. Many were initially illiterate even in their mother tongue, and most could not speak Swedish fluently and suffered various physical and psychological conditions. Interviews with these women were conducted with the support of other women and the cooperative leaders, who helped with translation.

Interviews were conducted mostly via Zoom from March 2020 to April 2021. In a follow-up, additional interviews were conducted in the spring of 2022. There were two interviewers, including the present author. The interviews, which lasted an average of one hour, were recorded and transcribed.

The researchers also observed two virtual meetings between women in one cooperative, while the focus group discussion was supported by photo-elicitation (Harper, 2012). Women who participated in the focus group were asked to bring photographs illustrating the personal significance of their entering the cooperative. The photographs helped to create a common basis for discussion, and to overcome potential cultural and language barriers between the women and the researchers. The results were then validated during a virtual workshop, with the officers mobilizing the creation of the new Yalla Trappan groups in different settings.

Texts of interview transcripts and meeting observations were subjected to content analysis, with a focus on the expansion of the social innovation. The first coding (first-order concepts) sought issues related to the travel of the Yalla Trappan model, the infrastructure enabling the model’s spread through the country, and the local implementation of the model. In a second-order analysis (Gioia et al., 2013) consisting of an iterative process shifting between data and theory, the practices were grouped into broader categories (second-order concepts): “replicating”, “institutional infrastructure”, and “broadcasting” constituted the first broad category of imitation, while tinkering with “materials and infrastructures”, “markets”, “cultural identity”, and “institutional arrangements” constituted the second. It was at this point that the practices of imitation and bricolage were identified in the two aggregate dimensions/concepts relevant to explaining the expansion of the Yalla Trappan model.

Yalla Trappan: A Migrant Women’s Cooperative in Sweden

In Sweden, almost every third woman born outside Europe is excluded from the labour market (Jämy, 2022). Despite Sweden being a country with high gender equality, the intersection of gender and ethnicity results in “double disadvantages” (Bradley & Healy, 2008) that contribute to an increasing gap in labour market participation between foreign-born women and other groups. The reasons for this are structural (e.g. difficulties accessing childcare, lack of information about labour market inclusion, poor knowledge among welfare workers of these women’s needs and competences, spatial and social segregation, and systemic discrimination) as well as individual (e.g. poor language skills, little formal education or previous work experience, and health problems) (Jämy, 2022).

Traditional methods of labour market integration characteristic of public work activation programmes have not reached this group, as these methods are difficult to align with these women’s family duties, learning processes, and capacities (Andersson Joona, 2020). Because these women have been ignored for decades by most public policies in Sweden, civil society organizations have started experimenting with new forms of organizing social and economic inclusion for them (Zapata & Zapata Campos, 2023). One of the best-known such organizations is Yalla Trappan, a women’s work cooperative founded in 2010 in Rosengård, a superdiverse neighbourhood with among the highest concentrations of residents of immigrant background in Malmö, Sweden. Yalla Trappan targets immigrant women who are left behind by activation programmes: those who have no work experience, are often illiterate, lack formal education, have experienced numerous migration-related illnesses, are mothers of many children, are burdened with caring responsibilities and patriarchal gender norms, and have difficulties speaking Swedish, usually even after years of living in the country.

Yalla Trappan’s main activities consist of cooking, sewing, and cleaning services, as many of these women, when working as housewives, had developed important, but publicly under-recognized and unpaid, skills in these areas. Yalla Trappan’s methods draw on knowledge that these women feel confident in, transferring it to the working space outside the household. The method purposefully uses this knowledge to clear a path for these women to learn the Swedish language and transform their domestic practices into professional skills, empowering them by rendering visible their knowledge and engaging them in reciprocal learning (see Norbäck & Zapata Campos, 2023, for a more detailed account).

The cooperative has engaged in several partnerships with the City of Malmö and the Swedish Employment Agency to provide work training services using its “Yalla method”. It has also developed collaboration with Swedish multinational corporations such as IKEA and Hennes & Mauritz, providing sewing services to their customers. In the other two large Swedish cities, Yalla Rinkeby (Stockholm) and Yalla Hjälbo (Gothenburg) have been created, in connection with Yalla Trappan in Malmö, and are described below.

After several presentations of the Yalla Trappan concept in different settings in the country, local delegations of Coompanion asked Coompanion Sweden to develop a project to expand the use of the Yalla Trappan method. Coompanion Sweden is a national umbrella organization, a cooperative with 25 independent local cooperatives as members. Its purpose is to support labour cooperatives and social entrepreneurship in Sweden. Together with five local delegations (from Jönköping, Skellefteå, Fyrbodal-Mellerud, Borlänge, and Karlskrona) and Yalla Trappan, Coompanion Sweden prepared an application for a project called Trappan Upp National with the purpose of creating new Yalla Trappan organizations in other settings. The project, which was partly financed by the Swedish Agency for Economic and Regional Growth (Tillväxtverket), started in January 2019 and ended in April 2021.

Yalla Trappan Malmö participated in the project via a mentorship contract with the new Yalla Trappan organizations. During the first year, this meant four two-day sessions of “coaching future trainers”, who were learning the Yalla Trappan method through the book Yallas väg till arbetet (Yalla’s way to work) and the video Yalla vi lever (Yalla we live), which covered such themes as management, personnel, and finances. Some meetings were combined with study visits to the local group Yalla Trappan Rinkeby in Stockholm and Yalla Trappan Malmö. The training also included ongoing support through coaching, weekly virtual meetings, and desk help from Yalla Trappan Malmö. The Yalla Trappan Malmö coaches also visited all the local settings to provide advice. In each city, a project leader and a professional trainer were employed. During the creation of the Yalla Trappan cooperatives, a network called Yalla Family was also created. Via this network, the cooperatives joined group discussions via the messaging programme Slack and held two Zoom meetings each month to update one another and address particular themes.

Findings and Discussion

This section presents and discusses the findings of the study. It shows how the expansion of Yalla Trappan was enabled by simultaneous practices of imitating the original model and tinkering with its components through bricolage. This leads to the discussion of what it is in the nature of bricolage that enables such spread, and of the role of local embeddedness and an ethic of care in this expansion.

Imitation

Novel forms of organizing the labour market inclusion of foreign-born women, such as Yalla Trappan, initially grow slowly because they are unfamiliar, making them less likely to survive due to the “liability of newness” (Freeman et al., 1983). Gradually, Yalla Trappan started being appreciated as an alternative method for “taking care of” immigrant women’s integration, in contradistinction to traditional and standardized public methods that failed to attend to their needs:

Many others have tried but failed to develop the right method … [these women] cannot benefit from the traditional methods we have in Sweden. To be able to write, to attend the standard Swedish for Immigrants courses, to register at SEPA, to make a CV, and go to a job interview—it is the wrong model. It does not deliver anything to them. It’s like trying to press a square into a triangle, it does not fit. Yalla Trappan has in fact designed and tested a method that suits this particular group. And we all believe so. We are all absolutely convinced. And this is why we initiated its expansion … we see that the model is right. It is the right combination for these women. (Interview B)

The model gained attention and legitimacy (Czarniawska & Joerges, 1996), attracting proliferating adopters. Yalla Trappan was visited by many interested actors and succeeded in “reaching key people in the public sector and politicians who become ambassadors” (Interview M), that is, institutional carriers of the idea (Wedlin & Sahlin, 2017). Yalla Trappan’s methods thus became widely diffused in the field of labour market integration and social cooperatives in the country (Green, 2019) and were increasingly perceived as an effective solution to the challenge of the social and economic inclusion of migrant women in Sweden. This widespread agreement about the value of Yalla Trappan’s methods was a prerequisite for their initial institutionalization—that is, for the diffusion and increasing self-replication of these novel practices (Tolbert & Zucker, 1996).

The pre-institutionalization of the Yalla Trappan model made it desirable for still more actors to imitate its methods and try to adapt them to new settings:

I have followed Yalla Trappan in Rosengård for many years. One must be proud of it, of Yalla Trappan in Malmö. And I think it’s good … instead of doing something new and making your own, to look at … what the others have done, and adapt it to the local context. Yalla Trappan is a good brand to use, because they are already known in many circles and have agreements with IKEA and Hennes & Mauritz. So we can build on that in an agreement with Yalla Trappan. Thus even commercially, it was good to follow them. (Interview H)

As a new organizational form, Yalla Trappan gained strength, visibility, and legitimacy as it “be[came] more common, crystallizing new communities of practice and prompting others to embrace innovations” (Schneiberg, 2013, p. 656). One can say that Yalla Trappan became a fashionable idea (Czarniawska, 2005) that circulated through imitation:

I have followed Yalla Trappan for many years. And I think that instead of doing something new, we should look to what others do. (Interview H)

The idea was set in motion and its expansion accelerated, aided by the theorization of the Yalla Trappan method (as can be seen in the handbook, videos, or contracts) and of its adopters (i.e. the immigrant women as the target group). Theorization (Strang & Meyer, 1993) refers to the process of simplification, abstraction, embodiment, and inscription that makes it possible for ideas to travel (see also Czarniawska, 2002). Such theorization facilitated the “unpacking” and the consequent imitation of the method by various local actors:

All this happened, including a partnership with IKEA to provide sewing services to customers, thanks to the Yalla Trappan model. With this model, all the problems, all the hindrances, all the challenges we had [were solved] … We can just replicate their actions … We have all the documents, agreements, IOPs—everything we need. (Interview B)

The Yalla Trappan method was malleable (Barinaga & Zapata Campos, 2024) and relatively simple, as illustrated by the three professional activities: cooking, housekeeping, and sewing (Busch & Barkema, 2021). The model was transparent (De Andrés, et al., 2015), easy to understand and decode, and easy to translate into new local contexts (Peck & Theodore, 2012). As the method addressed similar problems across the country, its goals, tactics, and repertoire of practices could be used anywhere (Castaneda, 2012; De Andrés et al., 2015). This purposeful malleability of the model and its open-source character manifest a predisposition of the original entrepreneurs, the theorists, to “take care of” (Tronto, 1993) these migrant women by openly sharing and facilitating its spread.

The expansion to distant settings was also facilitated by the existence of a nationwide institutional infrastructure (Hinings et al., 2017) for the governance of the labour market integration field, built over decades by a myriad of actors. More recently, and strengthening this infrastructure, new regulations have been introduced, providing tools for social cooperatives and enterprises to bid for reserved public procurements “as a result of years of work by social enterprises organizing themselves and doing political advocacy, with supportive organizations” (Interview B). At the local level, long-term relations have already been built between social cooperatives and local governments. Of particular importance was the infrastructure provided by Coompanion Sweden, which facilitated the travel of Yalla Trappan to new settings:

The Coompanion CEO met Yalla Trappan in Almedalen [i.e. an annual national meeting in Sweden for politicians and governance stakeholders] and thought “our organizations should do something together. We could make use of our national network of 25 Coompanion offices to diffuse the Yalla Trappan concept”. (Interview Bl)

This is consistent with how organizational ideas follow “well-worn routes” (Czarniawska & Sevón, 1996) and “editing infrastructures” (Sahlin & Wedlin, 2017) that determine the spread and accommodation of models such as Yalla Trappan to new contexts. It is the connections between these actors in the field (Rogers, 1983), primarily Yalla Trappan and Coompanion, that explain the routes through which the Yalla Trappan model travelled across the country. The formation of these networks, routes, and then editing infrastructures in each setting enabled the idea to flow (Sahlin & Wedlin, 2017). These networks and infrastructures also constitute what Tronto considers the ethic of “taking care of”, whereby circuits of care and solidarity are constructed to support the conditions and well-being of foreign-born individuals and women, and for the travel of associated models.

Once the Yalla model reached each setting, the tactics of the expansion relied mostly on what March (1999, p. 137) has called the broadcasting mode of imitation whereby the model is broadcasted directly from the master idea to the new settings without intermediaries or other chains of imitation. During the broadcasting of the model, the talented entrepreneur who launched Yalla Trappan in Malmö, and the leaders of the other cooperatives were systematically in contact with the new settings, sharing their well-packaged solutions, procedures, and even contacts with supportive organizations as part of the local caring infrastructure (e.g. a representative of the Church of Sweden who was a former advisory board member) and corporations (i.e. IKEA and Hennes & Mauritz). The direct participation of the theorists, that is, the original creators, in coaching, mentorship, and the expansion of Yalla Trappan was a major factor facilitating the close imitation of the original model, as could be seen, for example, in the collaborative relations between Swedish multinational corporations and the new cooperatives in Hjällbo and Borlänge. The expansion of Yalla shows that when theorists are the carriers of the model, “when theoretization itself is the diffusion mechanism”, models flow better (Strang & Meyer, 1993, p. 487):

The participation of C was fundamental in this. We got all these foundational components and experience directly … She’s been in all the settings where new Yalla Trappan groups have been created. (Interview M)

Also, as Sevón (1996) has observed, in the broadcasting model of imitation of Yalla Trappan, both those imitated and those imitating are active shapers. It was the imitators’ desire “and not ours” (Malmö) to reproduce the Yalla model. The contact between the original Yalla Trappan and the new organizations was constant during the expansion:

We have extensively used Yalla Trappan’s model. They are really good. We visited them, they have expertise in sewing, cleaning, cooking. And we can call them when we have questions. For example, we called H, who is responsible for cooking in Yalla Trappan Malmö, when we needed to buy food supplies to start selling our catering—“What do you use?”, “This and that” … We also get questions answered via Zoom about cleaning. Or they come back with recommendations—“Don’t clean like this, but like that”. And C started all this, she has been here for a visit for several days. They are easily accessible people to contact. I can call her whenever I need to [laugh]. (Interview M)

The broadcasting model of the imitation of Yalla Trappan was, in other words, driven by the active participation and commitment of those engaged in the imitation and by the direct inspiration of the original model. Theorists can also become central conduits of diffusion; their persuasion is fundamental to understanding the imitation and expansion of the model (Strang & Meyer, 1993). This persuasion emanates from their ethic of “taking care of” the collective of migrant women. The total availability of the “ethical” bricoleur (i.e. the theorist of the original model) and the followers in the other settings, together with their unconditional commitment, are fundamental for the spread of the model through broadcasting.

In sum, imitation practices are ingrained in an ethic of “taking care of” migrant women by keeping the model open and accessible, by building an institutional caring infrastructure, and by the unconditional readiness and availability of the engaged bricoleurs.

Such imitation led to considerable homogenization of practices in the new organizations. However, being central to broadcasting the Yalla model as it was, the implementation of imitation in each setting required further resourcing and translation efforts, as elaborated on below.

Bricolage

So … the pieces of the puzzle went together like this. (Interview H)

We have been testing … we have done many quite different things. (Interview J)

Despite the general acceptance of the practices, structures, and solutions developed by Yalla Trappan, adaptations and local translations were always necessary in the new locations. What is more, the grant funding provided by the Swedish Economic Growth Agency proved insufficient to cover the costs of starting up new cooperatives and their activities. Project leaders had to mobilize all the resources at hand to implement the activities and start up the cooperatives. These various resourcing and translation efforts resonate with the concept of bricolage (Baker & Nelson, 2005; Di Domenico et al., 2010). In a situation of scarcity, constant and intensive bricolage was needed to gather resources and tinker with new solutions. Project leaders improvised and experimented with their professional and personal networks, exploiting their cultural background and identity as “foreign-born women”, their language skills, and whatever resources they could find (Johannisson & Olaison, 2007; Zahra et al., 2009). The expansion of the Yalla Trappan model was enabled as much by the strength of the broadcasting mode of imitation as by the local translations resulting from local bricolage. Local bricolage embraced tinkering with material resources and infrastructures, human and knowledge resources, and markets and other institutional arrangements. These multiple bricolage practices were also ingrained in an ethic of “care-giving” and “care-receiving” (Tronto, 1993), as described below.

Material and Infrastructural Bricolage

Translating the Yalla Trappan method to the various local settings required material bricolage. In the town of Mellerud, women started patch-working to convert old curtains into new bags, facilitated by collaboration with the Red Cross; they also began rescuing food about to expire, transforming it into catering products, with a local supermarket as a partner.

Another example is from Jönköping, where unproductive lands in the city suburbs were used for urban farming. Rendering hidden resources visible is in fact a typical bricolage practice for enacting new resources (Gutberlet et al., 2016). This ability to see value-to-be is fundamental to bricolage, and represents an important part of translating the original model to a local setting.

The availability of local physical facilities, such as kitchen facilities or professional sewing equipment, also became decisive, so that various projects had to either adapt their plans to what was available, or improvise creative solutions (Zahra et al., 2009). For example, in Börlänge, a partnership contract was negotiated with the Church of Sweden, through which Yalla Trappan participants provided cleaning services in exchange for access to kitchen facilities.

In Jönköping, the local organizers decided to test urban farming, an activity that was not part of the original Yalla Trappan concept. The project was initially located in the suburbs, due to a partnership with a municipal housing company in a diverse neighbourhood, where there was land available for farming. However, the market for the products was insufficient, so the group decided to return to the original Yalla Trappan template.

Market Bricolage

This shift from urban farming in Jönköping’s city suburbs to the original economic activities in a central location of the city illustrates how project leaders also had to tinker with markets (Baker & Nelson, 2005). In Jönköping, market bricolage seemed to offer a better solution than the infrastructural bricolage.

Under the influence of a new partner, in Yalla Hjälbo (Gothenburg), a superdiverse neighbourhood similar to Öxnehaga in Jönköping or Rosengård in Malmö, the introduction of the model also required the testing of economic activities outside the original template, such as hair dressing, skin care, henna painting, and repair services. In fact, it is quite common for new actors joining in bricolage to bring in new market activities not originally scripted in the template to be imitated (Sahlin-Andersson, 1996, 2000).

Another illustration of the need for bricolage with markets was from Karlskrona, where the Yalla Trappan food concept was adapted to “Swedish tastes”. Food services in the original Yalla Trappan concept were grounded in the multicultural culinary richness typical of superdiverse neighbourhoods such as Rosengård in Malmö, where the original idea was born. The project leader in Karlskrona decided to tinker with this activity to adapt the Yalla Trappan concept to the local market, as described by these words of one woman: “Here in Karlskrona [i.e. a small town], we can cook potatoes [i.e. a classic ingredient found in Swedish kitchens] [laughs]”. Karlskrona is a smaller and more homogeneous town than Malmö, which has obvious market implications. In comparison with market preferences in big cities such as Malmö, where large foreign-born populations live in superdiverse neighbourhoods and people are more open to trying international products, in Karlskrona, the food production aligned itself with traditional Swedish tastes. As Sahlin and Wedlin (2017) argued, as circulating models such as Yalla Trappan become disembedded from their original context and scale (i.e. a big city with large diverse populations and markets), they might require adjustments, or edits, to adapt to the context and scale of the new settings—that is, tinkering with the markets.

Knowledge and Identity Bricolage

Bricolage was also helpful in recruiting women to the project. For example, in Jönköping when neither the Swedish Public Employment Service (SPES) nor the local government provided a participant list (which was supposed to happen, according to the project application), project leaders had to recruit participants themselves, drawing on their personal contacts (Johannisson & Olaison, 2007), local embeddedness, and the associated knowledge of the local institutional environments (Zahra et al., 2009): “Luckily, there were people who said ‘Wait a second, I know somebody who could be good!’” (Interview J).

Most project leaders were professionally and personally embedded in the setting where the cooperative activities were carried out. Their social embeddedness (Granovetter, 1985) became a source of ingenuity. In Mellerud, the project leader mobilized her family ties (typically strong ties, according to Granovetter, 1985) to find sewing machines, fabrics, and even a place to sell through the local Red Cross, thereby tinkering with both material and infrastructural resources.

When the necessary knowledge and competences were not available, the project leaders themselves would create them. Finding trainers who could speak “easy Swedish” and communicate their knowledge successfully was not always easy, as the integration policy literature has shown (Bucken-Knapp et al., 2018; Schierenbeck & Spehar, 2021). For example, in Karlskrona, due to the impossibility of finding a cleaning trainer, the project leader herself embarked on a theoretical education. She bought a handbook on professional housekeeping and cleaning and went through it with the women providing such services, even though she had no previous experience in this area. This example also illustrates the attitude of not giving up in the face of challenges, looking for any kind of solution, and refusing to accept limitations (Baker & Nelson, 2005; Garud & Karnøe, 2003), because of her commitment to caring for these women, which resulted in the enactment of new competences and resources when needed (Gutberlet et al., 2016).

Another resource mobilized by project leaders was their common cultural background and identity as foreign-born women as a communication device to facilitate the women’s learning process, supporting their empowerment:

When I was talking to the women whom I was trying to recruit, all the time I was showing them that I was one of them … One day I said that we would cook rice with chicken as we do in Cameroon. I was completely open to their criticism, assuming that they could suggest changes that would improve my skills. (Karlskrona)

The Yalla Trappan concept itself concerned the transformation of traditional women’s household practices such as housekeeping, sewing, and cooking into professional knowledge. In other words, it required tinkering with amateur, tacit, local, non-professional knowledge developed at home, in order to transform the women’s care-giving work (Tronto, 1993) into professional knowledge suitable for the workplace. Mobilizing immigrant women’s resourcefulness, rendering their hidden resources visible and revalorizing them, again showcases bricolage as a practice of enacting new resources (Linna, 2013).

Also, the women participating in the activities actively engaged in knowledge bricolage by taking advantage of their common cultural background and language skills, and becoming trainers themselves. For example, one experienced participant was sent to improve her proficiency in reading and writing Swedish, and six months later she became the cleaning trainer for the other women. With the extra effort of these women, traditional professional knowledge could be translated into knowledge to which the other women could easily relate. This identity bricolage involved inverting their identities and roles: either project leaders emphasized their identities as foreign-born women, like the participants, or the participants became trainers. Being an immigrant woman can advantageously enable the exploitation of the ambiguities coming from belonging to different worlds, and the consequent articulation of a broad repertoire of resources, such as language, culture, and local knowledge (Phillimore et al., 2021; Zapata & Zapata Campos, 2023).

Beyond inverting roles, bricolage was also embedded in an ethic of care-giving and care-receiving (Tronto, 1993), whereby migrant women actively engaged, supporting each other through reciprocal learning, acknowledging the care the women received, and contributing positively to the learning of other members of the group.

“We help each other”. “We do this together”. (Focus group K)

“Our motto is, one learns one thing, one teaches it to others”. (Interview C)

“Here I have taught other women. I have helped as a teacher in the housekeeping programme. It felt good. First time around women did not understand anything I was saying! But I have learnt how to be a teacher”. (Focus group K)

Care-giving thus leads to care-receiving and vice versa. Together with the revalorization of their previously unrecognized skills, the inverting of roles, and active contribution to reciprocal learning, this recursiveness contributes to the women’s empowerment and emancipation.

Institutional Bricolage

Local translations of the Yalla Trappan model were also shaped by pre-existing relationships and historical pathways of collaboration (Spencer et al., 2005) in each particular setting—between social enterprises, civil society organizations, SPES, local governments, and local Coompanion offices.

Project leaders had to tinker with such local institutional arrangements (Zahra et al., 2009). For example, as a result of the centralization of SPES and the closure of hundreds of local SPES offices, many public officers liaising with local actors such as the Yalla Trappan initiatives disappeared. This disruptive event (Hoffman, 1999) affected the quantity and quality of the participant recruitment, for instance, in Skellefteå and Jönköping, forcing project leaders to find new venues for recruitment.

Our first contact [at SPES] was very good. She was very good at recruitment, fantastic. And then she quit, like many others. This was no good at all … We are dependent on the fact that somebody at SPES knows what we are doing and thinks well of it. And that somebody must have time to do a good job, which they didn’t have recently. (Interview J)

In other cases, it was the local government that failed to deliver what it initially promised. For example, despite recent legislation that provided a wider repertoire of instruments for collaboration between local governments and social enterprises, either these novel tools for economic inclusion were still unknown to municipal officials and politicians, or local governments were competing to recruit similar target groups, so that they could deliver work training services under their own umbrellas (Norbäck & Zapata Campos, 2022):

There were many other projects in our municipality that were targeting foreign women. So then there was almost a tug of war here—a bit silly on the part of the municipality, in fact. (Interview J)

In other cities, new collaborative governmental arrangements were developed as a result of long-standing and ongoing bricolage with governance structures. For example, despite the fact that in Mellerud the initial relationship with the local government did not run very smoothly, the project leader managed to develop a “community–public partnership” with the municipality, providing cleaning services to a cultural centre in exchange for using its professional kitchen. The inventiveness of tinkering with new collaborative governmental arrangements (see also Ek Österberg & Qvist, 2022; Zapata & Zapata Campos, 2023) brings “people into new constellations across the boundaries between the private, public, and non-profit/voluntary sectors” (Johannisson, 2018, p. 394), at the same time multiplying resources in contexts characterized by scarcity.

Even in settings where previous social and professional relations were rare, and local institutional arrangements were unsupportive, local project leaders refused to give up:

The project leader there, she is a fantastic young lady who worked so hard … with very little help … I truly admire her, for her ways of managing this activity. But … she must feel like that lion that goes around and roars and nobody else cares. (Interview M)

This confirms that the bricoleur’s identity is grounded in the principle of “making it work”, whatever the implications (Janssen et al., 2018; Stinchfield et al., 2013), driven by an ethic of care-giving (Tronto, 1993). Driven by this ethic, bricoleurs assume responsibility for and commitment to migrant women, undertaking necessary actions and assembling resources with which to replicate, adapt, and translate the model to the local context “no matter what”. While the original bricoleur in Malmö and other actors such as Coompanion Sweden took concrete actions to address the needs of these women through “imitation” (“taking care of”, in Tronto’s [1993] terms), it is the local bricoleurs in each setting who actively provide care both to meet women’s specific needs and to translate the initiative to the local context where care-giving is recursively transformed into care-receiving.

Expansion Made Possible via Imitation and Bricolage

The findings thus illustrate how the expansion of Yalla Trappan to other cities in Sweden was possible, thanks to simultaneous practices of imitation and bricolage. While an important part of the activities was developed by replicating a successful model known through its broadcasting and based on an emergent institutional infrastructure (i.e. “taking care of”), other activities were locally translated through material, human, cultural, identity, market, and institutional bricolage (e.g. care-giving and care-receiving) (see Fig. 1).

Fig. 1
figure 1

…

Full size image

The study also shows that the bricolage necessary for expanding this alternative form of organizing labour market integration is of a particular kind. First, it is collective, despite the unquestionable importance of individual agency. Market, institutional, identity, and material types of bricolage all require intensive and unconditional commitment in order to perform collective action that addresses the societal responsibility to support migrants in the receiving society (Nail, 2018). This collective approach to bricolage is permeated by an ethic of care (Tronto, 1993) whereby actions are conducted jointly through reciprocal engagement, drawing on group dynamics and at times blurring the boundaries between roles such as trainers and trainees, care-recipients, and care-givers.

Second, it is a bricolage that is multi-scalar, not just local. While the local embeddedness of social bricolage is essential, the scope of action of bricoleurs goes well beyond the local. Bricoleurs’ work cuts across multiple governance scales, for example, extending from the individual and city scales, through the regional and national, to the EU scale (see also Banerjee, 2020). It also embraces a broad repertoire of skills and other multicultural resources, such as languages and identities, typical of migrant communities. This is possible as migrants in superdiverse neighbourhoods have access to a wide range of resources, from global to local (Castellani & Roca, 2021; Glick Schiller & Çağlar, 2011). It is also possible as bricolage builds on multi-scalar infrastructures of caring—for example, local, regional, or national associations—that facilitate the expansion of alternative methods of integration across settings.

Third, this bricolage is embedded in an ethic of care-giving and care-receiving, rather than in a market logic (André & Pache, 2016; Gibson-Graham, 2008; Tronto, 1993). Trainers, the women themselves, and other supportive stakeholders showed a remarkable sense of responsibility for the well-being of the women and the Yalla Trappan officers. These ethics of caring served as a “moral compass” (Interview M) preventing the risk of mission drift (André & Pache, 2016; Ebrahim et al., 2014) resulting from the tensions of navigating between social and commercial activities. For officers supporting the cooperative, close contact with these migrant women increased this sense of “individual responsibility, not to drop these women again” (Interview S). For the immigrant women participating in the cooperatives, bricolage reinforced their ability to take care “and help others too” (Interview K), moving beyond being merely recipients of help to giving care as well (Tronto, 1993). The engagement in ethical bricolage work came, however, at a price. The officer creating each Yalla Trappan cooperative was at times seen as “a lion that goes around and roars”, making it work, no matter the implications (Janssen et al., 2018), as the moral value of her goal of supporting the women outweighed the material resources available for her duties. This approach to organizing the work resulted in more humane and ethical training methods, based on an ethic of care, in which the women felt for the first time, often after years of living in Sweden, that they were part of the host society:

And I began to see [i.e. after participating in Yalla Trappan] that there is an opportunity for me to succeed in this society after all. My place is not just at home, waiting for somebody to get something for me. I can contribute to this—you can look for help from me too. And I belong as a person in this society. (Focus group K)

Scaling Locally Embedded, Alternative Practices

The findings reported here also foster new insight into the ambiguous role of local embeddedness in the expansion of social entrepreneurship (Busch & Barkema, 2021; Resch & Steyaert, 2020). First, they illustrate how bricolage does not necessarily compromise the quality and effectiveness of the learning process for organizational expansion (e.g. Johannisson & Olaison, 2007; Senyard et al., 2014). Quite the opposite was the case. This is because local adopters combined the faithful replication of the standardized practices of the original model (imitation practices) with their locally embedded knowledge in the multiple new settings (bricolage practices). These simultaneous practices supported the organizational expansion beyond the original setting and helped overcome the militant particularism (Harvey & Williams, 1995) of local bricoleurs, their lack of interest in scaling beyond their home communities (Smith et al., 2017; Zahra et al., 2009), and their lack of knowledge of the new settings (Phillimore et al., 2016).

Second, the study also illustrates how local embeddedness and bricolage in resource-scarce but superdiverse immigrant communities (Castellani & Roca, 2021; Phillimore et al., 2021) open up access to a wide range of practices and resources to tinker with, resources otherwise invisible to non-local actors (Gutberlet et al., 2016; Scheurle & Schmitz, 2016), all of which supports the expansion of such initiatives in different settings (Glick Schiller & Çağlar, 2011).

Conclusions

The paper demonstrates how the expansion of alternative and more ethical forms of organizing labour market integration is enabled by simultaneous practices of imitation and bricolage. The concept of bricolage is particularly useful for explaining the expansion of alternative forms of organizing the social and economic inclusion of migrants in resource-scarce, deprived, complex, and superdiverse contexts, in which resources often invisible to the state or the market can be made visible and mobilized by committed actors, driven by an ethic of care for the migrant community. The paper also demonstrates how both local embeddedness and an ethic of care not only facilitated the development of the original model but also enabled its expansion to other settings, making an original contribution to the literature on social entrepreneurship and bricolage (e.g. Dahles et al., 2020). In the remainder of this paper, we discuss the implications of these findings for the labour market integration of immigrants, and for the ethic of care and migration.

Labour Market Integration of Immigrants

Traditional activation methods and programmes prioritizing work are reported to be insufficient (Strindlund et al., 2020), potentially oppressive, and thus unethical, instead of empowering, thereby jeopardizing migrant rights. For practitioners such as public officers, nongovernmental organizations, social enterprises, and cooperatives supporting the labour market integration of foreign-born citizens, a better understanding of the role of imitation and bricolage could improve the potential to expand more ethical methods to support migrants’ rights and “repair our ‘world’ so that we can live in it as well as possible” (Fischer & Tronto, 1990, p. 40). The study reported here also shows that such expansion requires, as a prerequisite, the construction of national and local institutional infrastructures of care (e.g. legislation, reserved procurement, non-profit–public partnerships, and intermediary organizations). More systematic and sustained support is necessary at the macro-level of business, ethics, and migration, to facilitate the fluid and rapid expansion of these caring initiatives, and generally to address our societal responsibility to migrant communities (Carens, 2013).

The start-up and expansion of alternative approaches is often associated with multi-level governance processes, for example, when EU funds support the development of the social and solidarity economy. Yet while the intervention of multi-level governance in labour market integration enables the development of novel practices for taking care of these collectives, it also challenges their stabilization once resources are exhausted. Although local bricolage can enable the expansion of alternative approaches to labour market integration, the stability and reach of such initiatives will be jeopardized if the actors involved must constantly tinker with resources and improvise solutions. To avoid this risk, we urge the construction of institutions of integration (Gregson et al., 2020) conducive to bricolage (Carstensen et al., 2022) and embedded in an ethic of care (Tronto, 1993). That is, institutions characterized by a degree of flexibility that facilitates improvisation, experimentation, and joint learning in collaboration with bricoleurs such as migrant organizations, and with an ethic of care as a moral and political compass.

The Ethics of Migration

Previous literature has amply shown how migrants are not “just mere victims” (Agustín, 2003), subjects of activation policies (Vesterberg, 2015), or care-recipients (Tronto, 1993). Rather, they are resourceful and have agency. This paper follows up calls to emphasize the productive manifestations of migrant agency (Agustín, 2003), shifting the focus from individual to collective agency. It deepens scholarly discussion of the ethics of migration (Rajendra, 2017; Shanahan, 2021) through work (Carens, 2013) in contexts in which migrants themselves collectively create their own working spaces (Cañada et al., 2023) and self-organize their working rights (e.g. Jiang & Korczynski, 2016). Immigrant women engage in collective bricolage to address the challenges of their migration journeys and their social and economic inclusion (Segarra & Prasad, 2020), via an ethic of care. We have shown how migrant cooperatives can develop alternative and more ethical forms of organizing work, striving to put “life first” (André & Pache, 2016), based on principles of open-source sharing, unconditional commitment, reciprocal engagement, democracy, equity, and participation.

This paper shows how migrant cooperatives can play a pivotal role in restoring the human rights of immigrants in the receiving communities through their emancipatory power. The marginalization of these women can paradoxically generate the conditions for “a new place and a new time” (Nail, 2018, p. 18) in which more ethical forms of organizing work and inclusion, for and by migrant women, can emerge. This study particularly highlights the emancipatory potential of migrant cooperatives, emphasizing the virtue of collective bricolage (Phillimore et al., 2021). This involves recognizing, revalorizing, and integrating women’s resourcefulness, transforming previously overlooked and unpaid traditional female skills into professional competences with value in both the labour market and the public sphere (Authors, 2023). This revalorization of caring work resonates with the calls from feminist economists (e.g. Federici, 2018) to collectively reinvent caring activities essential for social reproduction (e.g. sewing, housekeeping, or cooking) as collective and revalorized practices.

The study further demonstrates that the emancipatory potential of migrant cooperatives is grounded in the creative mobilization of inherent repertoires of resources characteristic of migrant communities, including language, culture, and local knowledge of their neighbourhood institutions. Through bricolage, migrant cooperatives can render visible the otherwise concealed value of these resources (Phillimore et al., 2021). By rendering visible the skills and resources of both women and migrants, these forms of self-organizing work contribute to the emancipation of migrant women and align themselves with the moral imperative to restore the rights and value of these communities. Finally, the potential of migrant cooperatives to emancipate individuals from oppressive structures and standardized activation policies hinges on their transformative power, turning victims into agents of change (Agustín, 2003). This transformation empowers individuals to become advocates of their rights, and to transition from being mere care-receivers to becoming proactive care-givers, as observed through the lens of an ethic of care (Tronto, 1993). This perspective offers a valuable lens through which to understand and address the ethical dimensions inherent in migration.