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The refugee crisis of 2015 can be characterised as an exogenous shock, an immigration shock, which according to institutional theory may create a window of opportunity for path-breaking policy change. In all three Scandinavian countries a range of new policy proposals were made in order to stem the incoming migration. Although the direction of policy change pointed in a similar restrictive direction, the choice of policy instruments differed, as did the style and content of policy actors' legitimizing and coordinating discourses. Drawing on the analytical framework of discursive institutionalism, the three cases illustrate how a similar kind of external shock (the refugee crisis) was construed differently in different national public spheres, and generated different kinds of policy responses – in particular with respect to the social rights of refugees. The emphasis on legitimizing communicative discourse and coordinating discourse differed between the countries. In Sweden, the need to legitimize policy change normatively was acute. This mattered less in Denmark, where emphasis was on creating stable political support for a range of specific measures. Norway takes a mixed position between the two. Data includes a selection of media texts from six newspapers in 2015 as well as policy texts from 2015 and 2016.

Purpose
Activation policies are key elements of contemporary welfare reform throughout Europe. The purpose of this paper is to explore the consequences of more active and individualised welfare policies for conceptualisations of professionalism and competence in the welfare services.


Design/methodology/approach
The primary data are 25 qualitative interviews with street-level bureaucrats (SLBs) conducted in two local offices in The Norwegian Labour and Welfare Administration (NAV). These data were supplemented by relevant policy documents. A distinction between the authorities discourse of organisational professionalism and the SLBs discourse of occupational professionalism is applied to structure the analysis.


Findings
Efforts to professionalise activation work takes place in the absence of a specific professional knowledge base to guide daily work. The paper explores how relevant competence and skills are defined in such a context, both from the perspective of the authorities and from the front-level workers themselves. A key finding is that such competence tends to be defined in terms of the ability to manage communicative processes and relations. Paradoxically, the active turn in social policy with its emphasis on work and activity seems to entail a competence ideal that is inward looking and psychologised.


Research limitations/implications
The qualitative approach implies limited generalisability in terms of statistical representativity. Furthermore, the results invite closer studies of the practical effects for social security users of the identified patterns.


Practical implications
Policy makers who aim to make welfare services more work orientated should look for ways of increasing SLBs concrete relations with and practical experience from collaboration with employers. This may entail reviewing the practice of outsourcing the implementation of active measures to private actors.


Originality/value
The paper adds to a small literature on the implementation of activation policy in contemporary welfare states.

AbstractIn Norway, as elsewhere in Europe, the debates about immigration, increasing cultural diversity and the need for integration, are heated and polarised. For welfare state workers and institutions, the perceived task and challenge of integration has to a large extent been to both provide space for cultural diversity and to promote social equality through participation in the labour market, education, and civil society. Amidst all this ongoing debate, a large number of people deal with these issues as a part of their daily work. This paper focuses on the dilemmas such street‐level bureaucrats, or diversity workers, encounter in their work with refugees, immigrants and their children. Most of all, it explores the strategies they have developed to handle such situations. Street‐level bureaucrats have a range of strategies to get around integration dilemmas, which are presented here as five distinct response repertoires. The analytical construction of these repertoires is useful because it provides us with a tool to describe and understand what is going on when policies are translated into institutional practices. It shows how public sector employees are handling the everyday dilemmas that policy does not provide the solutions for. Finally, this analysis of repertoires can also be useful in thinking normatively about what kinds of strategies particular institutions ought to nurture and how they can achieve this.

Abstract In Norway, as elsewhere in Europe, the aim of policy‐making is to ensure the integration of immigrants into mainstream society. This paper focuses on one of the most concrete and practical measures Norwegian authorities have ever taken in this field, namely the recent establishment of a compulsory two‐year introduction programme for newly arrived refugees. This is an activation‐style programme involving both a financial and an educational component, where out‐payments depend on participation in a full‐time training programme aimed at enabling participants to become self‐sufficient members of Norwegian society. In the first part of the paper the establishment of this policy is located within a broader context of integration crisis, before it moves on to look more specifically at the background for the programme and the problems it is set up to address. The latter part of the paper addresses the implementation of the introduction programmes in one medium‐sized Norwegian city. The local discourse here is one of before and after, where the failings of previous policies have been overcome and new and productive practices have been established. Connections can be made between public and political discourses on integration crisis and the local discourses of implementation through the notion of kindness and the idea that kindness has hampered the integration efforts of the state. Herein lies a story not only about views on immigrants and diversity, but also about how immigration has challenged the Norwegian welfare state model.