Boundaries of collaboration – the case of a temporary housing complex for refugees in Sweden

ABSTRACT

Integration of recent refugees is gaining much attention in the aftermath of the European ‘refugee crisis’ and collaboration is often seen by public officials as vital to promoting integration. At the same time, achieving successful collaboration in practice is regarded as difficult. In this paper we explore the challenges in detail by tracing how collaborative work unfolds in practice as ongoing, dispersed and collective boundary work. We draw on a longitudinal study of a collaboration project involving a number of municipal and state organizations in Sweden, and aimed at integrating recent refugees into the labour market and society.

KEYWORDS:

• Collaboration
• integration
• refugees
• boundary work

Introduction

Today public organizations face societal challenges that are assumed to require increased collaboration across boundaries (Torfing and Ansell 2017). Challenges such as climate change (Pollitt 2015), sustainability (Zeemering 2018) or integration (Ager and Strang 2008; Chen 2020; Geuijen et al. 2017) are often referred to as ‘wicked problems’ (Rittel and Webber 1973) that, as Trist (1983) argued, necessarily sit within the inter-organizational domain and cannot be tackled by any organization acting alone. Collaborative setups to address wicked problems have been described using different terms and concepts such as network governance, partnerships, collaborative public management, cross-sector collaboration or collaborative governance (e.g. Doberstein 2016; Vangen, Hayes, and Cornforth 2015; Ansell and Gash 2008; Emerson, Nabatchi, and Balogh 2012; Osborne 2010; Purdy 2012; Bryson, Crosby, and Stone 2006). These concepts are often used interchangeably to describe similar phenomena (Ran and Qi 2018).

Regardless of the definition used, tackling wicked problems entails work at, through and across boundaries in the hope of achieving positive results. While a growing amount of research has moved away from static conceptions of boundaries as stable and given, separating people and organizations (Hernes 2004), and has opened up to the idea that boundaries are rigid and fluid, divisive and permeable (Glimmerveen, Ybema and Nies 2020), and enacted (Quick and Feldman 2014), the processual micro-dynamics of the multifaceted and mutual relationship between boundaries and the practices from which they emerge remain under-researched in the context of inter-organizational collaboration within the public sector.

Instead, collaboration in the public sector has been studied extensively with a focus on the goals and outcomes of collaboration (Thomson, Perry, and Miller 2008) and how to design an effective collaborative setup (Bryson, Crosby, and Stone 2006; Ulibarri et al. 2020; Ansell et al. 2020; Bitteman and Koliba 2020) as well as on the barriers to accomplishing the intended results (Rigg and O’Mahony 2013; Rodríguez et al. 2007; Huxham et al. 2000; Vangen 2017a, 2017b; Strindlund, Dahlgren, and Ståhl 2020). Barriers such as lack of trust (Willem and Lucidarme 2014; Doberstein 2016), issues of communication and information sharing (Vangen 2017a; Cuganesan, Hart, and Steele 2017), unbalanced power relations between the involved partners (Purdy 2012; Ran and Qi 2018), lack of leadership (Sullivan, Williams, and Jeffares 2012) and transparency and accountability issues (Ryan and Walsh 2004; Waardenburg et al. 2019) have been seen as evoking challenges that must be managed as part of the collaborative work (Mandell and Keast 2007; Van Oortmerssen et al. 2014).

Among other things, these challenges have been explored by pointing to the paradoxical nature of collaborations as containing ‘contradictory, interrelated, mutually-exclusive elements’ (Vangen 2017b, 264; cf. Lindqvist 2019). These challenges need not be negative. In fact, paradoxes are a central part of organizing, and while they may paralyze and lead to inaction, they may also be co-opted into the existing order, leading to no change in action, or they may enable actions that subvert existing understandings and transform the status quo (Czarniawska 1997). It all depends on how paradoxes are managed – for example, by giving collaborators space to reflect on the underlying assumptions guiding their actions (Waardenburg et al. 2019). In a similar vein, Vangen (2017b, 270–271) suggested that the acceptance of the paradoxical nature of collaboration ‘can lead to realistic rather than idealistic expectations of what can be achieved’. While many researchers have outlined the challenges brought by the paradoxical nature of collaboration, there still exists little research on how these challenges are addressed (Ospina and Saz-Carranza 2010).

Thus, while we do know much about the reasons for collaborating, the design and governance of collaboration within the public sector, its intended goals and its challenges, we know less about its micro-interactions and how its processes unfold over time (Vangen 2017b; Glimmerveen, Ybema and Nies 2020).

Building on a longitudinal study of public officials’ efforts to provide integration support services to recent refugees, we aim to fill this lacuna by tracing how collaborative work unfolds over time as sequences of ongoing, dispersed and collective boundary work practices. More specifically, we set out to illuminate how boundaries are enacted collectively over time through dispersed, yet interrelated, boundary work practices, and how disparate boundary enactments evoke new challenges requiring further boundary work. This allows us to shed further light on how boundary enactments performed at one stage influence boundary enactments at a later stage, as well as on the efforts to manage these disparate boundary enactments in collaborations.

By empirically grounding our analysis in the micro-dynamics we observed throughout our fieldwork we are able to further build on the insights of recent scholarly work by demonstrating how collaborative work unfolds through attempts at boundary work, and how such attempts at connecting incongruent boundaries to enable collaboration unintentionally trigger the disconnecting of boundaries, their enactment as barriers in collaboration.

The paper is structured as follows: First, we review the boundary work literature and present boundary work as a meaningful concept for the study of collaboration. Second, we present our research methodology. Third, we present our findings from a collaborative project involving public organizations in Sweden intent on improving the integration support services offered to refugees living in a temporary housing complex in Gothenburg. While the project had grand ambitions when it was launched in 2018, it failed to achieve any notable results and was terminated ahead of time in December 2019. The findings show the complexities of collaborative work and how boundaries as part of these efforts may become enacted simultaneously as barriers inhibiting collaboration and as junctures facilitating new opportunities for shared activities. We conclude that while collaboration is often hailed as an organizational panaceum, its enactment in practice may complicate organizing when its results resemble the practices that the collaboration initially sought to overcome.

Boundaries and boundary work

Boundaries are ‘important facets of social life’ (Gracia and Oats 2012, 306) and have been positioned as central to organizations in that they support the establishment of categories of objects, people or activities (Zietzma and Lawrence 2010, 191). While they have traditionally been understood as given consequences of differences (Abbott 1995), a growing body of research perceives boundaries as emergent, active, relational and constantly changing (Kaplan, Milde, and Cowan 2017; Levina 2005; Hernes 2004; Hirschorn and Gilmore 1992; Lamont and Molnár 2002; Quick and Feldman 2014; Tilly 2004). Such an understanding means that boundaries are not the consequence of given stable entities (e.g. an organization and its boundaries), but that ‘[b]oundaries come first, then entities’ (Abbott 1995, 862). In other words, everything starts with actions which over time constitute and reconstitute boundaries that, if connected, create what is consequently distinguishable as an entity (Quick and Feldman 2014).

At a practical level, boundaries act as ‘tools by which individuals and groups struggle over and come to agree upon definitions of reality’ (Lamont and Molnár 2002, 168). Boundaries and practices have been seen as interdependent within organizations and therefore of pivotal importance when attempting to understanding both institutional change and stability (Zietzma and Lawrence 2010). Moreover, studies of everyday work have shown how formally-understood roles and jurisdictional boundaries may be blurred or reinterpreted as they are enacted in practice. For example, in their studies of occupational groups in health care, Allen (1997) and Apesoa-Varano (2013) show how some professionals (nurses or health care assistants) step in and do the work of others (doctors or nurses respectively) when needed to ensure adequate patient care, resulting in a process of ongoing boundary-blurring.

Increasingly, boundaries are seen as dynamic rather than stable and as ‘sites of connection as well as separation’ where these boundaries are negotiated as a form of ‘boundary work’ (Quick and Feldman 2014; Glimmerveen, Ybema and Nies 2020). The concept of boundary work can be traced back to the work of Thomas Gieryn (1983), who used it to describe problems of demarcation and the dynamic negotiation of sites of difference in the context of professionalization. Through boundary work, power relations among groups, organizations and society more generally are maintained or disrupted (Arndt and Bigelo 2005; Barrett et al. 2012). More recently, boundary work has been understood as the ongoing and interactive efforts by individuals and groups to influence the boundaries, demarcations and distinctions emerging as part of organizing (Glimmerveen, Ybema and Nies 2020; Langley et al. 2019; Lindberg, Walter and Raviola 2017). Importantly, this definition allows for boundary work to be explored as a collective, ongoing work unfolding over time at, through and across boundaries.

Langley et al. (2019) distinguished between three interrelated forms of boundary work: competitive, collaborative and configurational. In competitive boundary work, boundaries are mobilized to establish some kind of advantage over others, e.g. when scientists from different disciplines interact with each other and when scientists distinguish themselves from non-scientists. Collaborative boundary work is concerned with how boundaries become aligned to enable collaboration. Configurational boundary work involves differentiation and integration among groups to ensure that certain activities are brought together and others are kept apart to enable effective collective action (Langley et al. 2019). Instead of viewing boundaries as given and well-defined, and the actions undertaken to establish linkages and interactions across these boundaries (Marrone 2010), the notion of boundary work draws our attention to boundaries as subject to human agency and examines how boundaries are constructed, defended, extended, negotiated, blurred, aligned or manipulated by agents as part of ongoing processes of organizing (Langley et al. 2019). Aided by such a conception of boundary work, Glimmerveen, Ybema and Nies (2020), who studied a professional care provider’s efforts to engage local citizens within one of its care homes, were able to show the processual and paradoxical effects of how boundaries are enacted, their contingency upon boundaries drawn elsewhere and the political implications of their dispersed negotiations in the context of inclusionary public management. They suggested that the inclusionary efforts by the care provider paradoxically evoked exclusionary effects as actors came to contest and, eventually, redefine ‘appropriate’ insider-outsider relationships.

Similarly, and connecting to the work of Gieryn (1983) and Abbott (1995) on boundaries as sites of negotiating differences, Quick and Feldman (2014) identified two broad orientations towards boundaries among people engaging in collaborations as a means of addressing public problems: a) treating boundaries as barriers – as firm demarcations between groups or organizations, and b) treating boundaries as junctures that may connect across a variety of differences – as permeable and tenuous. Quick and Feldman (2014) highlighted how these understandings of boundaries influence the boundary work undertaken by public managers to facilitate collaboration. Importantly, they argued, boundaries can be as much facilitators of collaboration, as they can be inhibitors.

Subsequently, Quick and Feldman (2014) identified three general boundary work practices used to facilitate collaborative public management through the establishment of junctures: translating across differences, aligning among differences and decentring differences. Translating across differences involves processes of using another language or way of expressing understandings to create a new shared domain (Quick and Feldman 2014), for example when experts refrain from using scientific terminology when engaging with citizens, thereby opening up for a new way of making sense of the issues at hand. Such translations thereby become multidirectional and involve the ‘collaborative production of new ways of expressing understandings that diminish the barriers created by differences’ (Quick and Feldman 2014). Translation boundary work is different from unidirectional translation whereby one domain of understanding becomes privileged over others (e.g. when scientific ways of knowing become privileged over non-scientific ways of knowing) and involves a high degree of multivocality and pluralism (Quick and Feldman 2014).

Aligning among differences involves the recognition of differences and attempts to enhance connections across them. Differences emerging within collaborations here become accepted and are used as a basis for pursuing new, shared interests. These differences may be understood as unchangeable, or as useful and worth sustaining. Quick and Feldman (2014) argued that in collaborative management, aligning among differences may by the most familiar form of boundary work to create junctures, as the ideal of collaboration is usually that it brings together different organizations to gain an advantage and produce synergies from their different interests and resources (Emerson, Nabatchi, and Balogh 2012). Importantly, aligning among differences does not mean abandoning one’s key differences and giving in to others’ key interests, but more of a focus on discovering and acting on junctures of shared interest when moving forward.

Finally, decentring differences involves finding ways to work that do not activate distinctions as meaningful. In other words, junctures are facilitated through this boundary work by deleting or ignoring boundaries that have been enacted as barriers. Public managers who decentre differences may be aware of potential differences, in interests or otherwise, but act in ways that make these differences less important. They may also attempt to remove attention from the differences or change their meaning altogether (Quick and Feldman 2014). By finding new ways of working together, or by decentring the established primacy of one entity or understanding over others, differences can be rendered inconsequential.

Drawing on Quick and Feldman’s (2014) conceptual framework and typology of boundary work, we explore how collaborative work unfolds at, through and across boundaries, and how disparate boundary work practices connect and disconnect over time to temporarily produce organizational outcomes. Quick and Feldman (2014) suggested that creating junctures through collaborative boundary work is often better for managing collaborations than boundary work which enacts boundaries as barriers through sustaining or strengthening distinctions – often, but not always, as the enactment of boundaries as barriers may, for example, sometimes protect certain individuals from harm (e.g. in the context of lawmaking). Whereas Quick and Feldman (2014) focused on the opportunities for making connections provided by boundary work, our focus lies with the challenges brought about by the interplay between enactments of boundaries as barriers and junctures as part of collaborative work.

The setting and methods

The study’s setting is a two-year project aimed at supporting the integration of recent refugees into the labour market and Swedish society. The initiative is one of many that have been implemented by the Swedish state and other public actors, private companies and community organizations over the past two decades in the hope of improving the integration process for refugees. As results continue to provide little evidence of improvement (Spehar and Berg 2011), increasing calls have been made for better collaboration between public, private and non-profit organizations as a solution to these challenges of integration (Qvist 2016, 2017).

The initiative examined here focused on the group of around 140 refugees who had recently arrived in Gothenburg, Sweden’s second largest city, in 2018 and had moved into a temporary housing complex with 57 apartments in Askimsviken. The complex is managed by a municipal housing company and is to be demolished after ten years. The refugees signed four-year contracts for the apartments; some had shorter contracts as they had previously stayed in other apartments managed by the city of Gothenburg.

In Sweden, recent refugees can register for a two-year settlement programme run by the Swedish Public Employment Service (SPES) and aimed at helping them into employment or education. During this time, they receive financial support from the state if they participate in integration activities, such as Swedish language courses, civic orientation courses or other training programmes. If at the end of the programme they are not in employment or education, they are transferred to the local social security services and become eligible for welfare benefits. The local district officials were daunted by the prospect of 140 unemployed persons on social welfare, as this would put a severe financial strain on the district’s finances. Envisaging the need to provide additional support they invited senior public managers from the city district, the SPES, the municipal Real Estate Office, the municipal Adult Education Administration (ArbVux), and the municipal Social Resources Administration, which was in charge of the city’s integration efforts, to discuss a possible future collaboration (see Table 1).

Table 1. Overview of the collaborating organizations (Source: the authors)

	Swedish Public Employment Service	Adult Education Administration (ArbVux)	Social Resources Administration	Real Estate Office	District
Main integration-related activities	Organizing the national settlement programme for ‘recent refugees and other immigrants’; activities aimed at increasing employability	Arranging Swedish for foreigners (SFI) language courses; organizing educational and training activities	Arranging civic orientation courses	Administering the real estate owned by the city	Assisting local residents with their daily challenges; making welfare payments
Expertise into the project	Organizing integration activities for participants on the settlement programme; experience of working with recent refugees	Knowledge of the labour market and of educational and training activities	Integration support in a general sense and in collaboration with other actors in the city administration	Experience from the housing market, from helping people to find housing and knowledge of rules and regulations in relation to housing	Knowledge about the local context and activities and organizations
Interests	Reaching recent refugees more easily and maintaining contact with them throughout their settlement period	Reaching refugees more easily and assigning them to language courses and/or other training activities	Distributing resources earmarked for integration correctly; to remain informed about the project	Be informed about the project	Avoiding future financial burden; to take responsibility for residents in need of support
Perspective on integration	Finding employment or beginning studies that may result in future employment	Learning Swedish and/or finding employment and/or beginning studies that may result in future employment	Participating in society (e.g. membership of associations and sports clubs; leading a healthy lifestyle)	Finding a sustainable housing solution and looking after the neighbourhood	Participating in society and finding a sustainable housing solution

The workshop resulted in an agreement to collaborate. A project leader who worked for the city district was assigned to a working group and was to report to a steering group regularly on their progress. The project did not have a budget of its own and all activities were to be financed within the regular budgets of the collaborating organizations. However, the city district agreed to finance a secondment (50%) for the project leader and a part-time position (25%) for a communications specialist, and the SPES financed a part-time position (50%) for a caseworker.

The project had grand ambitions, as its vision statement suggests:

Together we think in new ways, for quicker integration, self-sufficiency and independent living for recent refugees in Gothenburg and Sweden.

These ambitions were translated into two goals:

• Everybody living in the temporary complex at Askims Strandväg 2, 4 and 6 will have had the opportunity to take advantage of the city’s resources for integration, will have found a sustainable housing solution and will be in employment* once the collaborative project ends, with an individual plan for sustainable integration into Swedish society. *(Employment refers to work, education, internship and parental leave).

• The result of the project will also underpin a model for collaboration to better integrate recent refugees. The results will contain recommendations for how the model can be adopted as part of the work of integrating recent refugees regardless of whether they live at the above address or at a different address in the city.

As is often the case when grand ambitions are translated into practice, the initiative soon faced a number of unexpected challenges, which will be discussed below.

The research methods

The field material was collected throughout the duration of the project between 2018–2019 through participant and non-participant observation, semi-structured interviews and document analysis. In total, we observed 22 meetings of the working group and steering group. This corresponds to 75% of all working group meetings arranged by the project as well as 100% of steering group meetings. We undertook 15 formal interviews with public officials, see Table 2, and analysed a multitude of documents produced as part of the project, including minutes from meetings, emails, project plans, newsletters, working documents and newspaper articles. Furthermore, we conducted 11 informal interviews to obtain additional knowledge about the project and its development over time and had continuous conversations via email, telephone or in person with the two project leaders and other project members. The frequency of the informal conversations was higher during the first 12 months of the project (between May 2018 and May 2019) when the first project leader and the researchers were in contact at least once a week, in addition to the formal meetings. The frequency of formal interviews on the other hand was higher during the second half of the project (between May 2019 and December 2019). Our questions changed over time as we gained more insights into the project and its development. For example, early on we asked questions about expectations and previous experiences of collaborative work while later we asked about the accomplished results and what could have been done differently.

Table 2. Interviews

Interviews (formal)	Date
Project leader 1	May 2019
Project leader 2	December 2019
Civic guidance counsellor	May 2019
Employment officer 1 SPES (on three occasions)	Between March 2019 and December 2019
Employment officer 2 SPES (on two occasions)	Between March 2019 and June 2019
Manager, SPES (on two occasions)	Between November 2018 and June 2019
Manager, City of Gothenburg, Social Resources Administration	June 2019
Manager, City of Gothenburg, Adult Education Department	December 2019
Public official, City of Gothenburg, Adult Education Department	April 2019
Public official, City of Gothenburg, Integration Centre	May 2019
Manager, City of Gothenburg, Real Estate Office	December 2019
Manager, local district	December 2019
Interviews (informal)
Eight residents at Askimsviken	April 2019
Project leader 1	Between April 2018 and August 2019
Project leader 2	Between August 2019 and December 2019
Employment officer 1 SPES	Between June 2018 and November 2019

The observations of meetings were evenly distributed over the duration of the project following the frequency established by the steering group and project leader. The authors were given full access to the initiative, which implied an ‘interactional expertise’ – a knowledge of how to engage in the setting (Langley et al. 2013). Oral and written consent was obtained from all participants, who were informed about the background to the study. The study received ethical approval from the Swedish Ethical Review Authority as part of a larger research programme on labour market integration of foreign-born persons (No. 638–17). The authors were not formally part of the decision-making processes in the project. However, initial findings were discussed with the working group and the steering group at a workshop, where the participants reflected on past and present activities in the project and where the project was heading.

Our data analysis consisted of three main stages. The first stage involved transcribing the interviews conducted with the collaborators, going through our fieldnotes taken during observations and the coding and close reading of the material. Each interview transcript amounted to between 30 and 70 pages (1,5-spaced text). The fieldnotes from the meetings, initially handwritten and later converted into a digital format, each consisted of 5–10 pages (1,5-spaced text). The descriptions which emerged from the fieldnotes were compared to the interview transcripts and the documents produced as part of the project, such as the minutes written by the project leader and distributed to the project members shortly after the working group meetings. We aimed initially to gain a broad understanding of the field, including the activities that constituted the collaborative work, the goals pursued, the challenges encountered and the actors involved in the activities. Importantly, we both engaged with the field material, reading transcripts and fieldnotes, and discussing the emerging codes regularly. We conducted additional interviews with respondents who could provide supplementary information about aspects which had emerged. Emergent codes from our material during this stage revolved around the idea among the collaborators of finding common ground in their efforts. For instance, it became evident that the collaborators made efforts to promote a shared solution for the integration of refugees as well as a shared definition of what integration meant in the first place.

The second stage of the analysis focused on how the collaborators engaged with one another. The results pointed to the emergence of differences; project members were finding it increasingly difficult to relate as part of the collaboration. To check this observation, the analysis continued with a close reading of the fieldnotes and the interviews. It was striking that, with few exceptions, interactions between the collaborators shifted over time, from achieving better integration for the residents at Askimsviken (the ends) to the possibilities for measuring collectively-achieved results (the means) and for removing ‘bugs in the system’ – organizational barriers inhibiting collaboration. While we initially made sense of our material in terms of boundaries that emerge as part of collaboration, we were challenged during the review process to shift our focus from the boundaries themselves to the practices through which collaboration is simultaneously enabled and obstructed as boundaries emerge.

In the third stage, we focused on the practices through which the collaborators proceeded to remove barriers in the project. Using Quick and Feldman’s (2014) framework on boundary work practices, we revisited our material, carefully analysing it again according to the activities that were triggered in response to the challenges identified. Through this categorization a clear pattern appeared: the activities and interactions enabling collaboration at one point evoked the enactment of boundaries as barriers at another point giving rise to further tensions.

Findings – efforts to connect organizational boundaries in integration support efforts

In this section, we will describe how the collaborative work unfolded in practice at, through and across boundaries.

Efforts to align differences

In April 2018, the head of a local district of the city of Gothenburg invited senior officials from a number of city departments and the SPES to a workshop. The district faced the arrival of a larger than usual number of refugees, and the district officials sought to discuss how to handle this challenge. The city officials attending the workshop were initially unconvinced that this question concerned them, as any solution would be directed solely at the refugees in the temporary housing complex at Askimsviken. For one senior public manager (Interviewee 8), they were ‘such a small and special group’ and not representative of the entire population of refugees living in the city, for which the city officials were responsible. Furthermore, the city officials were unhappy about the focus on labour market integration. One of them recounted:

I told them that if we joined this [project], the focus had to be broadened. The district representative replied that it was really important that we joined, and so we started brainstorming and we eventually managed to include the three pillars. [Senior Public Manager, Interviewee 8]

It was important for the district officials to involve the city officials in their efforts, partly because the city had the overall responsibility for the settlement of refugees in the municipality (which included the district) and because it would give the project the legitimacy it needed. Concurrently, the city officials regarded the district’s efforts as unimportant since they concerned only a small group of people living in a temporary housing complex, rather than the entire population of refugees in the city. Furthermore, the city officials were primarily concerned not with labour market integration – the domain of the SPES – but with integration into society via housing, schools, participation in sports associations etc. This provoked the idea of scaling up the project. One city official recalled:

There was such a strong engagement from the local district, which is easy to understand. […] But I said several times that if we were to do something [together] it needed to be from a learning point of view, so it could be scaled up. Then we could justify giving it so much time and trying different models, and it could be applied to the whole of Gothenburg. [City Official, Interviewee 9]

The project was thus framed as a way of developing new solutions; a best practice model for how to work with integration that could later be applied throughout the city, based on a definition of integration as resting on ‘three pillars’: employment/education, a sustainable housing solution and participation in civil society. Hence, officials from both the city and the SPES could be persuaded that the project would be in the interest not only of the district but also of the city. The outcome of the workshop was an agreement between the senior public managers to establish a collaboration project involving the city district, selected city departments and the SPES to work for quicker integration for residents at Askimsviken and to develop a new model for integration, which was to form the basis (best practice) for how to work with integration throughout the city. It was decided that the project would be financed through the ordinary budget systems of the collaborating organizations, as this would ensure the meaningful involvement of the line organizations. While differences and interests among the senior public managers had become temporarily aligned, another challenge lay ahead: translating the agreement into concrete actions.

Efforts to translate differences

While the broader focus on integration had managed to convince the senior city officials to join the project, negotiations on what integration in fact meant, and what activities to undertake, continued. One interviewee recounted:

The idea [of the project] was good, but broad. It focused on the labour market, but also on integration in general, whatever that means. We had lots of discussions about what we meant: schools, the children, sports organisations and everything … [Public Manager, Interviewee 5]

When engaged in core activities, the collaborating organizations based their operations on differing views of integration. For the SPES, integration meant employment and education, a focus shared by the city’s Labour Market and Adult Education Administration (ArbVux), while for the city’s Social Resources Administration, integration meant cultural and societal integration – health issues, schooling, learning about life in Sweden and becoming an active member of society. And finally, for the city’s Real Estate Office, integration was about finding sustainable housing solutions. These different understandings, which had become temporarily connected through the agreement to collaborate, turned out to be a challenge for the working group, which intensified when it became clear that the collaborating partners were not all in the same position to undertake activities within the project. Hence, even though the aim was to come up with new solutions to shared problems, each member needed to translate the project in terms of their own core activities in order to motivate their participation. The time the city district and the SPES spent on the project was compensated from resources within the budget of their home organization since the project was already an integral part of their core activities related to the support given to refugees. Referring to a fast-track internship programme for refugees, for example, the SPES official told us:

We collaborate on this. And ArbVux finds internships for them. Normally, we recompense the refugees, but ArbVux finds local companies for them … That’s how it has worked before. [SPES Official, Interviewee 3]

However, the project lay further away from the daily operations of the Real Estate Office representatives. They ran the housing complex, but it constituted a small part of their activities. And, while the other collaborators saw the Real Estate Office as an important element of one of the three pillars of the project – supporting integration through sustainable housing solutions – the office found it difficult to justify the project within their own organization. When translating the project into activities, the participating organizations connected the work to their core activities, and also to their prior experiences of collaborative work. Thus, the competencies assembled and the financial setup of the project framed the translation of the project’s goals into concrete practice. As this setup privileged the collaborators who viewed integration in terms of the labour market, activities related to labour market integration resurfaced as a privileged goal. In other words, the agreement’s goals were translated into concrete activities undertaken by the working group unidirectionally, privileging the labour market as the main domain of understanding the project’s aims and failing to express understandings that supported and further entrenched the broader definition of integration agreed on at the initial workshop.

Efforts to decentre differences

Evoking new solutions and shared activities also proved challenging due to the absence of earmarked funding. During working group meetings, the project leader repeatedly called for a ‘small budget’ to fund minor activities which were deemed meaningful for the refugees, but which fell outside the collaborating organizations’ core operations. At one meeting, the project leader proposed hiring an instructor to teach the residents to cycle, a skill deemed useful for some jobs in the health care sector. The request was declined by the steering group, since none of the involved organizations could accommodate the costs within their budget. The absence of funding led the project leader to search for activities beyond the project. For example, at one meeting, the working group members were asked to write all the integration initiatives in Gothenburg they were aware of on the whiteboard. As it turned out, a myriad of initiatives ran simultaneously, many of them targeting recent refugees. The project leader approached one of them, ‘Health in Sweden’, an initiative run by the regional administration of West Sweden, that informed refugees about the Swedish health care system and health promotion. ‘Health in Sweden’ agreed to hold information meetings for the residents at Askimsviken as part of their routine activities. Informing refugees about the Swedish health care sector and health promotion is a widespread practice in integration, and far from a novel solution.

The efforts to find new solutions were not influenced solely by the lack of available funding, but also by regulatory issues. During working group meetings, three such regulatory issues were discussed repeatedly: a) regulations stipulating that some organizations should actively approach their clients while others are barred from doing so; b) the data security legislation (the Swedish Sekretesslagen and its successor, the European General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR)); and c) the legal requirement for state and municipal organizations to treat everyone equally. These laws and regulations impacted the efforts to reach the goals initially agreed on. For example, to support the refugees at Askimsviken, the collaborators needed to know more about them. The SPES caseworkers usually collect extensive information about the personal and professional backgrounds of their clients, including information on health-related issues and previous education. However, data security legislation barred the SPES caseworker from sharing this information with fellow collaborators via email or the project’s IT platform. How to proceed became a fervently debated topic at working group meetings. Eventually, the working group asked the SPES caseworker to prepare a large Excel sheet before meetings, including updated information collected during her meetings with the residents, and hand out a hardcopy to each member. For data protection purposes, the documents had to be destroyed after each meeting. However, the SPES representative questioned this practice at one of the first meetings in September 2018, saying that the residents were already registered in their system, and that they could use the time better than to create a parallel system (Fieldnotes, working group meeting 3/9 2018). As this way of sharing information was eventually rejected for being too time-consuming, other suggestions were raised. One was to ask the residents to sign an agreement allowing the collaborative partners to share information. This was, however, criticized by some members, mainly due to uncertainty as to what to do with the information once gathered. One municipal official explained that too much information about the residents would not be helpful:

I thought, we should document what is going on in the project and what we do and what has happened. ‘We have been on a field trip with this group and we have been swimming’ […]. That kind of documentation is very good, but to note: ‘You got an offer from the Swedish Public Employment Service that you did not accept.’ Who will I tell that to? [City Official, Interviewee 7]

As they could not agree on ways to share information about the residents with each other, the working group members decided instead to visit the residents in their homes in smaller groups, as a shared activity. Hence, they could get to know them together without documenting and sharing information about them more systematically. Such visits were a completely new experience for some, as one city manager recalled:

I was present when we did this knocking-on-the-door activity. And that was really outside the box. Knocking on people’s doors, that was …. that was new. [City Official, Interviewee 6]

Concurrently, it became clear that while some municipal organizations, such as the social security services, engage in outreach activities as part of their core activities, other organizations, including the SPES, are barred from doing so. Over time, collecting and sharing information became a problem for the collaborators and required their increasing attention. They eventually realized that it was not feasible for the project to establish and maintain a system of information in a meaningful way and dropped these activities altogether.

Because of these emergent challenges and the growing difficulties of engaging in meaningful activities as part of the project, the project leader became increasingly concerned about the results they would be able to achieve and how they would be able to account for their achievements to the steering group and the wider public. How would they be able to capture how well the refugees at Askimsviken had become integrated as a result of the project? The project leader frequently raised this question at working group meetings, where much time was devoted to finding ways of meaningfully measuring results in terms of key performance indicators and other numbers. The collaborators found it frustrating that even if the numbers could be produced, they would mean little unless they were compared to the situation for other refugees in the city, and such numbers would be hard to get hold of. Furthermore, the collaborating partners were used to measuring their results in different ways, and producing measurements relevant for all partners became a challenge.

Thus, as the project proceeded, there was a growing feeling among the collaborators that it would be impossible to capture how well they had succeeded in integrating the refugees into society before the project ended. This did not, however, deter them from viewing the effects of their project in a positive light:

We may or may not have succeeded … but I believe that we have created a ripple effect – and that it includes a lot of things we’ll never know about. […]. Direct and indirect [effects], that we will never be able to measure. [Project Leader, Interviewee 1]

In the absence of measurable results, other indicators emerged regarding the project’s results, first and foremost in terms of the key learnings gained:

The whole project is a learning [effort]. We can’t fail with this project because something will come out of it, even if we fail. [Project Leader, Interviewee 1]

The project leader here alluded to the idea that the experience gained through the project, notwithstanding its outcome, could be useful in future collaborative work. In particular, the collaborators increasingly made sense of their project as a means to find and remove ‘bugs in the system’ – organizational barriers inhibiting collaboration – which could then be avoided in the future. This, however, shifted the project’s focus even further away from producing demonstrable results in terms of ‘successfully’ integrating the refugees living at Askimsviken. In light of these ambiguities and the absence of any meaningful measures of results achieved, the steering group terminated the project in December 2019, six months ahead of time.

Discussion: boundary work in integration support efforts

Leaning on Quick and Feldman’s framework of boundary work practices (2014), we have drawn attention to boundaries as a common feature of organizing and to the choices made about how to manage such boundaries in collaborative domains. We have shown that as part of such boundary work, boundaries may become enacted as enablers allowing collaborations to work well in the face of difficult circumstances. At the same time, we have also shown the fragility of such connections over time when public managers are not attentive to ongoing boundary work at multiple sites of difference. We have illustrated these challenges by describing how the public officials initially enacted boundaries as junctures, thereby enabling new possibilities for action that nonetheless soon succumbed to adverse conditions in the form of legal and financial constraints. More specifically, by describing collaborative work practices as ongoing, collective and dispersed, we have illustrated how the micro-dynamics of such practices evoke challenges that are to be managed, affecting what the collaborative work can accomplish over time.

Collaborative work is ongoing

What was evident in our case was the temporary, processual dimension of collaborative work (Ulibarri et al. 2020; Glimmerveen, Ybema and Nies 2020). This means that the efforts undertaken at one stage affected actions at other times. When the senior district officials went along with the demands of the city officials to broaden the scope and purpose of the collaboration, distinctions among actors’ interests were recognized and attempts were made to find ways of enhancing connections across them, forming junctures (Quick and Feldman 2014). However, the efforts at aligning differences, while enabling the project through the enrolment (Callon 1986) of a number of relevant actors, opened up a challenge later on: the broad and multiple goals agreed on initially – the ‘three pillars’ and developing a new model – while interesting many actors with differing interests at an early stage and prompting them to get involved, were not easily translated into concrete practice. The challenges posed by such translation processes have been illustrated in the past (e.g. Czarniawska and Sevón 1996, 2005) as they are collective and consist of ongoing negotiations and mediations during which a match is found between the perceived problem at hand (in our case integration) and the perceived attributes of the solution(s) (here ‘the three pillars’ and the new model). As our case suggests, a broader framing of the goals on a managerial level can thus be expected to lead to more unintended consequences as the goals are negotiated in efforts to materialize them in practice later in time (e.g. Bryson, Ackermann, and Eden 2016). Empirically, the Askimsviken project shows how collaborative junctures are more meaningfully seen as temporary constructs that require further and reflexive boundary work for their upkeep. This furthermore illustrates important micro-dynamics of boundary work: how boundary work practices undertaken at one point to successfully enable collaboration paradoxically might influence successive boundary work practices to inhibit collaboration. Thus, when boundaries become connected to form junctures these are temporary and fleeting results of organizing. As we have seen, continuous boundary work is needed to retain the junctures as sites of opportunities to do things differently.

Collaborative work is dispersed

Boundary work is not only ongoing, but also dispersed, meaning that it unfolds simultaneously in different places. In our case, the working group was allocated the role of translating the agreement into practice – translating across differences (Quick and Feldman 2014). Here it became evident that the project not only allowed some collaborators to attend to their normal work, but that it even assisted them in doing so. This moreover, illustrates how barriers of collaboration (e.g. Rigg and O’Mahony 2013; Rodríguez et al. 2007; Vangen 2017a, 2017b) may differ between collaborators. The activities of the SPES caseworker, for instance, mirrored her daily work activities outside the project. For the Real Estate Office’s representative, on the other hand, the activities in the project were very different to their ‘normal’ work. Furthermore, translating the aims of collaborative work into this practice questions the very premise of working collaboratively, where the idea is usually to find new ways of solving shared problems (e.g. Huxham 2003; Doberstein 2016). Nevertheless, it becomes evident here that the project was only considered to be working well when the collaborators engaged in activities that closely resembled what they already did. In hindsight, contributions to one or more of the collaborators’ core activities could be deemed a good result for the project, even when it resembled less collaborative boundary work, and more configurational, or even downright competitive, boundary work (e.g. Langley et al. 2019; Zietzma and Lawrence 2010) disguised as collaboration. However, over time, if the collaborative work bears strong resemblance to everyday work activities of the collaborating organizations, the necessity of the project might be questioned at managerial levels. This implies that even though the project facilitates the work for some collaborators, and with good results, it is questioned for not being ‘novel’ enough. Our material also shows that boundary work undertaken is characterized by multiple failures to decentre and align differences, resulting in boundaries becoming enacted as barriers (again). This paradoxically implies that efforts to do something novel evoke actions to do the same.

Collaborative work is collective

The starting point of working collaboratively is usually to incorporate different views and skills to address complex issues (e.g. Huxham and Vangen 2010) and thereby facilitate learning across boundaries (Lindqvist 2019). Bringing together different organizations is thus often described in terms of designing collaborations effectively (Bitteman and Koliba 2020). Yet the practices of collaborative work, and how to manage the challenges arising as a consequence of the collaborating partners’ differences, have previously received little attention (Glimmerveen, Ybema and Nies 2020). Our study elucidates some responses to these challenges and suggests that the dispersed nature of collaborative work evokes actions to manifest any accomplishments as collective accomplishments. In our case, this became evident in the efforts to measure results in numbers to show accountability to the steering group. However, this then meant that the collaborators were shifting their efforts away from the initially-agreed aims of the collaboration and towards finding adequate methods of measurement. This signals a paradox in that even though successful collaborative work is assumed to be done collectively, the ambitions to account for a collective result might take over, taking the collaborative setup far from the reasons to collaborate in the first place; is that, then, ‘successful’ collaborative work?

To sum up, we have here shown how boundary work unfolds in practice and the efforts evoked to manage such processes as part of collaborative work. Our findings contribute to the literature on collaborations in the public sector in several ways. First, by tracing how collaborative work unfolds in practice, we corroborate previous studies outlining the challenges and provide an example of the micro-dynamics of how this unfolds in the inter-organizational domain in a context of high currency of integration of refugees into host societies.

Second, while Quick and Feldman’s (2014) focus was primarily on boundary work practices that enable collaborations to unfold smoothly, our study shows how boundary work at once supports and inhibits collaboration: a) how specific boundary work practices unfolding at one stage and enabling collaboration influence boundary work practices at another to inhibit collaboration; b) how collaborative work provides space for action for some actors but not for others; and c) how collaborative work must be collective, although visualizing collective outcomes can easily shift efforts onto activities that are too decoupled from the initial aims and where the requirements of the collaborative domain become the ends (see also Diedrich and Styhre 2013), instead of what the collaborative domain initially wanted to achieve.

Thirdly, while the literature has amply recognized the role of paradoxes in preventing many collaborations from delivering tangible results (Vangen 2017b; Waardenburg et al. 2019), there are few studies on how collaborative work addresses the challenges emerging as a result of the paradoxical nature of collaboration (Ospina and Saz-Carranza 2010). However, while Ospina and Saz-Carranza (2010) argued that leaders deliberately adopt practices to address challenges, we show how paradoxes were enacted in practice and challenges arose due to efforts to manage collaborative work. Hence, in our case, challenges arose due to previous actions, and were not consciously addressed by the involved actors.

Fourthly, to meaningfully understand the workings of interrelated boundary work practices in inter-organizational collaboration in the public sector, we agree with Glimmerveen, Ybema and Nies (2020) that researchers should follow processes of organizing such activities over time, following the actors to varying sites at which boundaries are enacted and re-enacted through their connections and disconnections. Only then does it become possible to outline boundary work as an ongoing, collective endeavour that takes place across sites.

Finally, while the existing scholarly work has approached integration support for refugees, and migrants in general, from a variety of angles, exploring such issues as the appropriateness and efficiency of particular ideologies, policies, conceptual frameworks or managerial approaches (e.g. Ager and Strang 2008; Dekker et al. 2015; Emilsson 2015; Qvist 2016, 2017), with few exceptions (e.g. Diedrich 2013, 2017) it has tended to neglect the everyday practices within which integration support efforts are enacted. Our study fills this lacuna by illustrating some of the challenges that emerge as ideas of ‘effective’ integration support are translated into practice.

In addition to these theoretical contributions, we can point to a number of practical implications for public managers and other officials and policy makers who pursue the integration of refugees into host societies.

Firstly, advocates of integration efforts should refrain from understanding their work in terms of the development and implementation of a model of ‘best practice’. Our study suggests that the real work starts once agreements to collaborate on improving integration support are in place. Public managers should be attentive to the ongoing boundary work practices and prepared to invest repeated efforts into managing the ongoing negotiations and mediations between often-competing interests. In collaborative work aimed at tackling a wicked problem such as the integration of recent refugees, substantial efforts may be required to engage with actors who may not subscribe to any definition advocated by the collaborators, or with senior managers located in the home organizations. Without their support, however, local boundary work practices that enable collaborations to work well will remain unrecognized or be deemed insignificant beyond the immediate context of the collaboration.

Secondly, collaboration is often framed as a response to complex societal problems such as the integration of refugees (Chen 2020; Geuijen et al. 2017; Qvist 2017) and faced with such wicked problems, policy makers, public managers and officials often arrive at all too ambitious goals as part of their collaborative work. Our study points to the risk that the work will shift from the issue to be solved – the end – to the methods or models used to solve the issue – the means. In other words, the means can easily become the end in collaborative work to solve wicked problems. Avoiding this requires continuous reflection on the part of the collaborators as to what constitutes the basis for the collaborative setup. This does not mean that collaborators should get stuck in endless discussions on what integration or any other wicked problem means in the first place, but should discuss what actions are reasonable to pursue given the emerging conditions for the collaborative work. Reflecting on and analysing what integration means should not stand in the way of action. If a collaborative setup’s goals seem unattainable, as we have seen in our case, there is a risk that these goals will instead become demotivating, leading to inaction.

Thirdly, public officials working in collaborative projects frequently find it hard to capture tangible results before the end of a project (Vangen 2017b; Waardenburg et al. 2019). Our study shows that they might subsequently be inclined to state (key) learnings as important results of their efforts and ‘ripple effects’ that might become apparent in the longer term. While these results may or may not materialize, it is important to remember that any experiences gained may need to be reflected upon in a structured, cognizant way in order to become internalized as (key) learnings and have a meaningful impact on future collaborative work.

Finally, in contrast to its image as a panaceum for all sorts of organizational challenges, collaborative work may in fact complicate things unnecessarily (Rigg and O’Mahony 2013). Our study shows that when these challenges emerge, the collaborators’ focus may revert to their own work activities because everything else seems too difficult or meaningless. When the outcome of collaboration resembles activities which unfolded before its establishment, and which it sought to overcome, its value should be questioned. Collaboration for its own sake, after all, can easily turn into a massive white elephant.

Concluding remarks

We concede that enacting boundaries as facilitators of collaboration may not always be better for public value. At the same time, we also acknowledge that enacting boundaries as barriers need not be problematic. Viewing boundary work as an ongoing, dispersed and collective process, our aim here has instead been to alert public managers to the challenges that may arise over time through boundary work practices (aligning, translating and decentring differences) as well as to the potential of such practices to facilitate collaborations that work well to address wicked problems, such as the integration of recent refugees, in a meaningful and pragmatic way.

Finally, we would like to remind our readers of an important limitation of this paper: it offers little more than a glimpse of the efforts to ‘support’ the integration of refugees into society. Our focus here has been the organizers of such activities and the challenges and tensions they encounter in their collaborative work, not the targets of the activities – the refugees. Their voices are all but absent here. Nevertheless, the challenges we have addressed are bound to have consequences for the target groups – consequences that they may or may not be able to influence. As these consequences have not been the focus of this paper, we see the opportunity for future studies to explore them in greater detail through the boundary work lens by investigating collaboration surrounding integration support as a continuous process of negotiations and mediations involving refugees and other groups, public sector organizations, private companies and community organizations. This would be a worthwhile endeavour, as contemporary refugee migration across the globe is one of the most profound humanitarian crises of our times, and the integration of thousands, if not millions, of refugees into host societies in Europe and elsewhere should capture the attention of the fields of public administration and management to a larger degree than has been the case until now (McGahan 2020).

Acknowledgement

The authors are grateful for the valuable comments by the reviewers and the editor of this journal.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Swedish Research Council for Health, Working Life and Welfare [2016-077205]; The city of Gothenburg.

Notes on contributors

Sara Brorström

Sara Brorström is an associate professor in Business Administration at the Department for Business Administration, School of Business Economics and Law, Gothenburg University. Her research is on public sector strategic management, collaborative organizations, city planning, and sustainability.

Andreas Diedrich

Andreas Diedrich is an associate professor in Business Administration at the Department for Business Administration, School of Business Economics and Law, Gothenburg University. His research is within the field of management and organization studies , especially focusing on organizational learning and change, and labour market integration of refugees and other immigrants.