Despite the growing importance of local action to counter violent extremism (CVE), empirical research on the local organization and management of CVE is scarce, especially regarding public administrators' strategic work to translate policies and recommendations into frontline practice. Based mainly on ethnographic data and departing from new institutional theory, the paper refines our understanding of the symbolic, material, and relational work used to translate a diverse flow of ideas into concrete action in diverse institutional settings. Due to the institutional complexity, the cultural skill of the local CVE coordinator is identified as pivotal to successfully legitimizing and implementing CVE efforts.

Interagency collaboration among social workers, teachers, and police is key to countering violent extremism in the Nordic countries by securing comprehensive assessment of cases of concern. Yet, previous research indicates that different institutional logics—perceptions of fundamental goals, strategies, and grounds for attention in efforts to counter violent extremists—exist across professions and challenge collaboration and trust building in practice. In this article, we empirically investigate these claims across social workers (n = 1,105), teachers (n = 1,387), and police (n = 1,053) in four Nordic countries: Denmark, Sweden, Norway, and Finland. Using results from online surveys with professionals, we investigate the distribution of a ‘societal security logic’ and a ‘social care logic’ across professions and the degree to which these institutional logics translate into mutual trust. Through a comparison of institutional logics among practitioners with and without practical experience of interagency collaboration, we investigate whether and how institutional logics tend to mix and merge in hybrid organizational spaces. We conclude that differences in institutional logics across professions are differences in degree rather than in kind, but that such differences are important in shaping mutual trust and that experiences of interagency collaboration are correlated with a convergence toward a ‘social care logic’ conception of countering violent extremism.

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National approaches to prevent terrorism, extremism, and radicalisation have changed considerably over the last decades. Previous studies mapping these changes have primarily relied on empirical analyses of formal policy and political processes. This case-study of Sweden takes an alternative route, and analyses a dataset of 1405 Swedish newspaper articles (1985-2019) using a new institutional theory and social movement theory framework. Therethrough, the paper is able to provide new insights into the emergence and development of an institutional issue field concerned with the prevention of terrorism, extremism, and radicalisation. More specifically, the paper highlights the unstable, fragmented, dynamic and contested character of the field's development. Frames containing the problems and solutions considered most important during each of the field's five stages are identified, and the subsequent institutional and organisational consequences are discussed. The paper also considers how terror attacks and other extremism-related events impact the institutionalisation and alternation of dominant frames, and identifies the translation and development of an inclusive vocabulary as pivotal to mobilising a broad and diverse set of actors to co-produce preventive efforts.