Shifts from professionals to volunteers are observed across national contexts and in various types of public services, particularly in long-term care and social work. This article examines how professionals and volunteers in the Netherlands perform boundary work to construct, maintain and dissolve boundaries between them in the context of social service reform. Two types of boundary work were found: demarcation work and welcoming work. Demarcation work relates to a situation where differences in knowledge, authority and reliability between professionals and volunteers are emphasised. Welcoming work involves the efforts of professionals to welcome specific volunteers to their professional domain. This study examines the implications of the second type of boundary work for structural characteristics of the social service sector. It concludes that although welcoming work can lead to deprofessionalisation, it can also promote the professionalisation of nurses and social workers.

In this paper we scrutinize the social networks and the social capital invested within these, of a relatively new and understudied immigrant group in the North-European context. We show how the social networks of Brazilian immigrants in Amsterdam are segmented along strong dividing lines, especially surrounding legal status. We show that this segmentation has different outcomes for migrants belonging to the different segments of the community, and that within these segments, variation also exists. By analyzing indepth interviews with 30 Brazilian immigrants in Amsterdam, we find that a Brazilian community does not exist, and that assistance, non-assistance, and a commercialization of social relations all take place at the same time among the social networks of Brazilians in Amsterdam. In doing so, we also uncover some of the mechanisms related to these processes and hence provide relevant insights for literature that studies the contexts in which immigrant social networks provide for social mobility and the contexts in which such networks do not.

Relations between Jews and Muslims in Amsterdam grew tense after the conflicts between Gaza and Israel in 2014, the violent attacks on Jewish targets in Brussels (2014), Paris (2015) and Copenhagen (2015) and local incidents of online, verbal and sometimes physical discrimination. Nevertheless, these factors also inspired Jews and Muslims to launch cooperation projects and strengthen the bonds already existing between them. Cooperation in turbulent times is not always easy. The data collected for this research show how Jews and Muslims in cooperation projects use to strategies to solve some of the problems confronting them. The three most widely used strategies that were found are 'searching for similarities', 'decategorizing' and 'avoidance'. These strategies do not emerge in a vacuum, however, but at a certain moment in time, in specific fields. Therefore, this article, will describe the usage of the three strategies and explain the interaction between strategies and their contexts. ARTICLE HISTORY