Conference Agenda

Crises pose unanticipated challenges and bring about the need for novel policy solutions. Public sector experiments offer an opportunity to test out solutions before they are applied on a wider scale. In that light, experimental policymaking could be viewed as a useful approach in crisis governance. However, conducting policy experiments during a crisis can encounter various challenges. In the theoretical part of the paper, we outline the key paradoxes that experimental policy making faces during crises. In the empirical part of the paper we probe – drawing on interviews conducted with 66 public officials in Estonia and Finland – how these paradoxes have been perceived to influence experimentation during crises and what the implications of these paradoxes are.

We find that, overall, although crises create a pressure to innovate, the timeframes and uncertainty experiments entail can make it challenging to use experimentation as part of crisis governance. We also find that if experiments are undertaken during a crisis, they tend to be short, limited in scope, and follow the logic of design thinking rather than randomized controlled trials.

It is often argued that addressing intractable societal problems require the cooperation of several types of actors, across different sectors of society. This paper analyses attempts to manage one such issue, the integration of migrants into the labor market, at the local level. What we call “local integration fields” involve actors from the public sector, private sector, and the third sector.

Utilizing an institutional logics perspective (Thornton et al. 2012; Ocasio et al. 2017), the paper investigates the complexities involved in these efforts, not only in terms of the variety of actors involved but also the complex institutional characteristics of these fields. Empirically, the paper is based on qualitative analysis of documents and interview data, from several large municipalities in Norway. While the complexity of these fields might be theoretically defined, this complexity is also clearly experienced and expressed by field practitioners. Many report difficulties and challenges in the field stemming from both the diverse set of actors involved, and the divergent logics characterizing immigrant integration efforts.

While different societal level logics (i.e., the market, state and community) are important, the paper emphasizes different field-level logics are in the paper. This includes a logic of assimilation, a logic of integration and a logic of placement. It is argued that tensions arising from the multitude of logics are managed at a practical level by mechanisms of (de)coupling and selective coupling (Mysangyi 2016; Pache & Santos 2013).

By grounding the analysis in this theoretical framework, the paper contributes to the “local turn” in migration research by critically examine the complexities of local integration governance (Zapata-Barrero et al. 2017). Moreover, the paper contributes to the research on new public governance models, such as co-creation and co-production (Ansell & Torfing 2021), by exploring the structural characteristics of local integration fields in which actors are embedded, and which enable and constrain their efforts. It is argued that these features must be considered to assess the viability of these governance models.

References

Ansell, C., & Torfing, J. (2021). Public Governance As Co-Creation: A Strategy for Revitalizing the Public Sector and Rejuvenating Democracy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108765381

Misangyi, V. F. (2016). Institutional complexity and the meaning of loose coupling: Connecting institutional sayings and (not) doings. Strategic organization, 14(4), 407-440. https://doi.org/10.1177/1476127016635481

Ocasio, W., Thornton, P. H., & Lounsbury, M. (2017). Advances to the Institutional Logics Perspective. In R. Greenwood, C. Oliver, T. B. Lawrence, & R. E. Meyer (Eds.), The SAGE Handbook of Organizational Institutionalism (pp. 509-531). SAGE. https://doi.org/10.4135/9781446280669.n20

Pache, A.-C., & Santos, F. (2013). Inside The Hybrid Organization: Selective Coupling As A Response To Competing Institutional Logics. Academy of Management journal, 56(4), 972-1001. https://doi.org/10.5465/amj.2011.0405

Thornton, P. H., Ocasio, W., & Lounsbury, M. (2012). The institutional logics perspective : a new approach to culture, structure, and process. Oxford University Press.

Zapata-Barrero, R., Caponio, T., & Scholten, P. (2017). Theorizing the ‘local turn’ in a multi-level governance framework of analysis: a case study in immigrant policies. International review of administrative sciences, 83(2), 241-246. https://doi.org/10.1177/0020852316688426