In this article, we analyse the striking resilience of for-profit care and service provisionin what has often been seen as the archetypical social democratic welfare state:Sweden. We focus on the strategic discursive activities of private companies andtheir business organizations as they try to influence perceptions, organize actorsand facilitate communication to defend profit-making in the welfare sector in theface of increasing conflict and opposition. We argue that taking such organized actioninto account changes dominant perceptions about the characteristics of theSwedish political economy, and carries important lessons for analyses of changesin the organization of the welfare state in general.