Defying boundaries: The problem of demarcation in Norwegian refugee services

Abstract

Abstract This article discusses how professionals’ efforts to reach policy goals engender boundary work. Analyses of interviews with service professionals in three welfare services in Norway which collaborate to implement the Introduction Program for refugees show how conflicting logics in services pose dilemmas for service professionals, and that political ideals of collaborative governance and integrated services are hard to put into practice. Service professionals resolve these dilemmas by engaging in various forms of boundary work, and the scope for boundary work is conditioned by the different service logics they operate under. Welfare service professionals collaborate to reach three policy goals—qualification of refugees, empowerment of users, and providing equity in services. The analysis shows that conflicting service logics result in boundary work practices that make coordination of, and collaboration between, services difficult, as services do not agree on how to interpret, and share responsibility for enacting, policy goals. The outcome of boundary work practices is a reshuffling of responsibilities—and a redelegation of tasks—which in principle should be shared, onto specific services. Different interpretations of policy goals instigate boundary work among welfare service professionals, which not only involves struggles over jurisdictional boundaries, but also negotiations over whom owns a policy problem, and over how to define and represent the problem. The findings from this study encourage researchers to further explore how policy goals are used as boundary objects in professionals’ negotiations over jurisdictional boundaries, in order to further understand what triggers and shapes boundary work among professionals.