This thesis builds on six months of multi-site fieldwork conducted in a division of the Norwegian Directorate of Integration and Diversity (IMDi), the integration office and adult education centre of a small municipality, a text analysis of integration policy documents, and interviews of policy makers. Utilising Bourdieu’s “bureaucratic field” and Foucault’s reflections on neoliberalism, governmentality, and bio-politics as theoretic lens, the thesis examines the social imaginaries and bio-political goals which informed the creation of Norwegian integration policies and the ways in which street-level bureaucrats implement these policies in dayto-day practices on the ground. The analysis illustrates how governmental policies conceptualise integration as business model and commodify refugees into trading objects which generate income for municipalities and to fill the gaps in Norway’s vocational labour market. The thesis argues that integration policies in Norway are a neoliberal project designed to maintain the welfare for the majority population of Norwegian citizens at the expense of those who are subjected to the integration regime. Norwegian policymakers utilise the notion of integration to legitimise anatomo-political technologies of discipline and control which aim to shape refugees into “ideal citizen workers”. The technologies create an elaborate bio-political apparatus in form of the introduction program, which transforms refugees into partial citizens that have adapted Norwegian values, norms, and ways of (work) life and maintain the Norwegian welfare state by working in specific sectors of the labour market. The thesis explores how street-level bureaucrats implement these bio-policies based on their discretion, their role understandings as enforcers of state bio-policies, and their social imaginaries on integration. Rooted in empirical data from a small municipality, the thesis presents the fictitious city of Låsen as case study to illustrate how the daily integration practice of street-level bureaucrats is shaped by local power struggles and neoliberal reforms, bringing the local integration infrastructure to the verge of collapse.
Full info
ARENA Report 1/23 (pdf) (143 pages)
From Imagination to Reality: An anthropological study of the Norwegian Bio-politics of integration
Mona Marie Frank
April 2023