https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2616-1200
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ABSTRACT
The article examines the introduction of quantitative perspectives from the sociology of immigration into administrative departments for immigrant integration in Germany. Using Andrew Abbott’s concept of professional jurisdictions within competitive ecologies, the article shows how statistical indicators enabled administrators to consolidate a lasting responsibility for the problem of immigrant integration within public administrations. In investigating administrative departments on the municipal and state level in Germany, the article highlights five crucial functions of integration statistics: They stylise integration as a problem amenable to bureaucratic intervention; they construct integration as an enduring problem that warrants the attention of a permanent agency; they offer persuasive force in securing a departmental budget; they durably redraw jurisdictional boundaries by creating a new client out of problems previously processed elsewhere; and they help monopolise a definition of integration realities among competing understandings of integration problems. The article thus extends recent research on the science-policy nexus in the field of immigration by highlighting the as yet neglected role social-scientific indicators play in securing a lasting jurisdiction for bureaucratic work in a competitive political environment.
Acknowledgements
I thank Gil Eyal, the editor in charge of the manuscript, and two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments and suggestions.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 Abbott uses the terms ‘settlements’ and ‘bundles’ for the analogs of jurisdictions within academia and politics, respectively. To keep the technical terms to a minimum, I will generally speak of ‘jurisdictions’ in this article.
2 On the obvious affinities with Bourdieu’s field theory see Fourcade and Khurana (Citation2013); Liu and Emirbayer (Citation2016); De Souza Leão and Eyal (Citation2019); and Abbott’s own remarks at http://home.uchicago.edu/~aabbott/Papers/BOURD.pdf; last accessed October 30, 2021.
3 For a recent approach to knowledge utilisation in international bureaucracies that shares many assumptions with Abbott’s ecological approach, see, however, Littoz-Monnet (Citation2021).