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Dealing with the Dilemmas: Integration at the Street‐level in Norway
Author(s) -
Hagelund Anniken
Publication year - 2010
Publication title -
international migration
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.681
H-Index - 64
eISSN - 1468-2435
pISSN - 0020-7985
DOI - 10.1111/j.1468-2435.2008.00497.x
Subject(s) - diversity (politics) , immigration , sociology , nature versus nurture , welfare state , cultural diversity , social integration , refugee , work (physics) , civil society , welfare , space (punctuation) , public relations , task (project management) , political science , economics , law , mechanical engineering , linguistics , philosophy , management , politics , anthropology , engineering
In Norway, as elsewhere in Europe, the debates about immigration, increasing cultural diversity and the need for integration, are heated and polarised. For welfare state workers and institutions, the perceived task and challenge of integration has to a large extent been to both provide space for cultural diversity and to promote social equality through participation in the labour market, education, and civil society. Amidst all this ongoing debate, a large number of people deal with these issues as a part of their daily work. This paper focuses on the dilemmas such street‐level bureaucrats, or diversity workers, encounter in their work with refugees, immigrants and their children. Most of all, it explores the strategies they have developed to handle such situations. Street‐level bureaucrats have a range of strategies to get around integration dilemmas, which are presented here as five distinct response repertoires. The analytical construction of these repertoires is useful because it provides us with a tool to describe and understand what is going on when policies are translated into institutional practices. It shows how public sector employees are handling the everyday dilemmas that policy does not provide the solutions for. Finally, this analysis of repertoires can also be useful in thinking normatively about what kinds of strategies particular institutions ought to nurture and how they can achieve this.