Entrepreneurship and institution-building in the case of childminding.

Abstract

This article considers institution-building by 'childminder organizers' who rearranged local childminding services away from state-imposed, market-based relationships into localized co-operative arrangements instead. It explores how, through the introduction and enforcement of unified pay and conditions and of a childminding brokering system, institutions for establishing norms of practice were established. It shows how childminder organizers deployed social capital to reform local childminding institutions, even though they appeared to have little from their introduction, and how the new institutions structured relationships between childminders within them.