The days are long gone when public service broadcasters were the sole players on a monopoly market and the only producers of broadcasting content. In today’s media landscape (in Sweden and elsewhere) there is a growing market for commercial producers of radio and TV. This paper addresses how people who are working in television production projects where commercial producers are collaborating with the Swedish public service TV broadcaster, SVT, relate to and make sense of what public service means in this context. The empirical material is taken from two Swedish collaborative programme projects and show how programme makers retrospectively make sense of what a good public service programme is, and how the social identities of the various actors are played out during the making of such a programme.

In order to understand the programme makers’ sensemaking processes it is vital to take into account the institutional context in which this takes place. In collaborative production projects there is a duality embedded in the organizing form: collaborators are supposed to act both according to a competitive logic (they are negotiating contracts in which scarce resources are to be divided amongst them) as well as a collaborative logic (they are in this together and making a good programme is in everybody’s interest.) These “contract relationship” differentiates in-house productions from external productions. Here two institutions are present at the same time: on the one hand a “public” institution that evokes such values as openness, collegiality, enlightenment of the public and on the other hand a “market” institution that evokes values such as competitiveness, secrecy, audience orientation. The programme makers (to a large extent the SVT employees but also the commercial producers) involved in collaborative projects thus live their working lives at a crossroads where these institutions meet and have to be dealt with.