Performing as a professional: shaping migrant integration policy in adverse times

Abstract

Migrant integration policies in the Netherlands have become increasingly restrictive over the past two decades. This development has been prompted chiefly by the strong politicization of the subject of integration and, as a consequence, a growing political interference with policymaking. Policy design and construction is predominantly carried out by policy officials in state bureaucracies. Some of these actors, however, have great difficulties with the restrictive turn in integration policies and the associated political discourse. Policy officials use the concept of professionalism to describe how they cope with the ambiguity between their personal convictions and the professional role they are expected to play. Thus, professionalism symbolizes cultural orientations, norms and values that are important in the bureaucratic organization. In this paper, we argue that the discourse of professionalism functions as a disciplinary logic that controls policy officials, but that simultaneously endows their work with meaning and creates a feeling of belonging. ARTICLE HISTORY

A multi-level perspective on trust, collaboration and knowledge sharing cultures in a highly formalized organization

“…This allowed us to control for the organizational context, and thus, focus on understanding in depth the complex topic of organizational culture and its facets. Our research question also required a formalized organizational context, and such contexts involve a bureaucratic system (Swinkels and Van Meijl, 2020;Saparito and Coombs, 2013). Banks represent a typical example of such context given their well-established routines and procedures.…”

Responsive professionalism in post-NPM reforms: the case of the Swedish police

“…Other studies addressing attempts to manage strains between formalized governance and occupational expectations of autonomous expertise (Hanlon 1998;Fournier 1999) have described how public reforms forge new forms of hybrid professionalism, blurring the distinction between occupational and organizational professionalism (Kirkpatrick and Noordegraaf 2015;Kirkpatrick 2016). In most cases, however, a strained relationship between occupations and management continues to condition occupational expertise, authority, and ability to autonomously translate knowledge and standards to the needs and features of the case at hand (Styhre 2014;Noordegraaf 2020;Swinkels and van Meijl 2020).…”