Suchergebnisse

This article contributes to theoretical discussions on how immigrant integration is produced as a part of redefining national policy to local everyday practice, and what this tells us about the society in which the policy is formed. Integration is from this perspective a way to understand imagined social communities, how they are produced, who is considered to belong, and who is not. Document analysis and interviews with immigrants, local politicians, and officials in small- and medium-sized Swedish towns give insights into both what taken-for-granted assumptions the integration policy builds on and reproduces, and what consequences the integration policy have for the persons the policy is intended for. It is shown that the Swedish integration policy is itself a part of the production of a Swedish space as a container with closed doors, where immigrants are not given equal access and possibilities. This is created by putting sameness and difference at the core of the integration policy and by describing integration as an act of entering the Swedish space.

Society needs to find new ways to utilise its resources in the best possible way in order to enable satisfactory services for its citizens in the long term. This is particularly important in sparsely populated areas, and in cities and municipalities with a declining population. This study contributes to this field by analysing a project for collaboration between the rescue service and the home-care service that has been introduced in a number of Swedish municipalities. The collaboration is intended to ensure welfare and safety for citizens, to guarantee a more efficient use of municipal resources, and to contribute to improved emergency management and civil protection. The rescue service and the home-care service are two clearly gender-coded occupations that also operate on gender-coded work places and places of work. An overarching aim has therefore been to study gendered obstacles and possibilities of the collaboration. In our analysis of the empirical data – interviews with persons involved in the collaboration – place emerged as an important aspect of the collaboration processes, and is therefore elaborated in this article to contribute with knowledge of how conceptions and gender-coding of places and occupations affect sustainable and well-functioning collaboration processes. The results show that collaboration processes between municipal services are complex and challenge ideals of the organisation, content and responsibility of work and who should perform certain work tasks. Notions of gender and gender differences are reproduced through the collaboration, which affect the efforts of municipalities to ensure welfare and safety for citizens.