Exploring sensemaking of trust through the lens of time: Finnish welfare professionals’ perspectives on institutional encounters with forced migrants in the neoliberal welfare state

Abstract

While attention has recently been given to the time sensitivity of trust, current research seems to fall short of examining welfare professionals’ experiences of the relation between trust and time. Therefore, this article employs an analytical lens of time and temporality to explore how welfare professionals make sense of trust and distrust in encounters with forced migrant service users in a changing neoliberal welfare state. Empirically, the analysis draws on semi-structured individual interviews with welfare professionals in employment and social service institutions in Finland. Theoretically, I apply a dual framework that leans on the interplay between trust and time. Recognising trust as relational yet fragile, contextual and dynamic, and viewing time as increasingly commodified and accelerated, I show how time impacts and shapes trust in institutional encounters. My analyses uncover four ways in which welfare professionals’ sensemaking of trust was linked to time. First, I show how the welfare professionals perceived the foundations of the trusting relationship in relation to time. Second, time and trust were interconnected in the efficient institutional tempo of encounters. Third, when the welfare professionals were replaced, trust was shaped negatively through disruptions to service user relationships in the series of institutional encounters. Fourth, I show how flows of institutional encounters shaped trust both positively and negatively. Thus, this article contributes to the literature on the intersections of trust, time and migration research, particularly in the transformation of the neoliberal Nordic welfare state context.