Remaining neutral while conveying ‘the right picture’ of Sweden: governing agents navigating a neoliberally influenced social contract

Abstract

This article studies how governing agents at a civic orientation course site, through collaborative boundary work, manage tensions that arise from simultaneously representing the governing state and the governed subjects taking part in the courses. The findings illustrate how individual agency—in policy and practice—is expected of immigrants enrolled in civic orientation courses, but not necessarily facilitated by the governing system providing the context for this agency. Through three types of collaborative boundary work, the governing agents produce and enact an understanding of professionalism as continuous shifting between different positions related to their two reference points—the governing state and the governed subjects. By engaging in collaborative boundary work, the governing agents manage perceived ambiguities and tensions between rhetoric and ‘reality’ and between policies they are set to represent and practices related to these policies that they do not personally believe in and/or challenge.