This research aims to contribute to a better understanding of strategic collaborations between work-integration social enterprises (WISEs) and for-profit enterprises (FPEs) with the joint objective to improve labour market opportunities for vulnerable groups. We find that most collaborations strive towards integration or transformation in order to make more social impact.
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With a lack of a clear definition, though a normalized use, the discursive weight of the concept of integration is felt throughout policy and civic integration programmes. In wider societal discourse the term integration is used in a taken-for-granted way, with an assumed understanding of its meaning and the actions which one takes to display its attainment. Studies which aim to explore or measure integration, further reproduce these taken-for-granted realities, a fact which has contributed to the recent debates on the discursive power of ‘integration’ in migration studies. While the debate on integration unfolds within the academic sphere, it’s implementation and discursive power continue in practices which take place in everyday life. Practices which construct the ‘doing’ of integration and which shape the lived experiences of those who encounter them. Practices which contribute to the reproduction of Othering and racialized categories which accompany the concept of integration and its current discursive frame. This paper will thus explore how integration as a concept is shaped and promoted in practices, practices such as texts which migrants encounter in civic integration programmes as well as activities which are promoted during the integration pathway. This analysis allows us for an understanding of integration as it lives and is operationalized at the level of practice and enacted through daily activities one undertakes. This critical discourse analysis will shine light on how these practices contribute to strengthening of hierarchical divisions based on colonialist categories of modernity and Eurocentric depictions of a ‘successful’ everyday life.
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Whilst until the late 1980s most migration issues developed in a parallel manner but with national specifics, important differences showed up during the 1990s and at the beginning of this decade. Since the middle of the 1990s, there has been an obvious change in policy towards migrants and foreigners in the Netherlands, and those changes have been more or less “exported” to our neighbouring countries and even to the level of the EU. Integration into society with the maintenance of the immigrant’s own culture has been replaced by integration into the Dutch society after passing an integration examination. The focus of this article is to investigate those changes and to compare the implementation of those policies in the Netherlands/Limburg and Germany/NRW, where the official understanding of not being an immigration country was dominant until the end of the 1990s, and where integration has only recently become an important political issue. Both countries are now facing similar challenges for better integration into the society, especially into the educational system. Firstly, the autors describe migration definitions, types, the numbers of migrants and the backgrounds of migrant policies in Germany and the Netherlands up until the middle of the 1990s. Secondly they discuss the integration policies thereafter: the pathway to a new policy and the Action Plan Integration in Germany, and the central ideas of the Civic Integration of Newcomers Act (WIN) in the Netherlands. Integration policy in the Netherlands is highly centralised with little differentiation on the local governmental level when compared to South Limburg. Thirdly, the autors investigate the cross-border cooperation between professional organisations and educational institutions in the Euregio Meuse-Rhine, and the involvement of social work institutions and social workers in their process of integration into the local society and the exchange of each others’ experiences (the ECSW and RECES projects).
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The COVID-19 pandemic has forced higher education (HE) to shift to emergency remote teaching (ERT), subsequently influencing academic belonging and social integration, as well as challenging students' engagement with their studies. This study investigated influences on student engagement during ERT, based on student resilience. Serial mediation analyses were used to test the predictive effects between resilience, academic belonging, social integration, and engagement.
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European civic integration programmes claim to provide newcomers with necessary tools for successful participation. Simultaneously, these programmes have been criticised for being restrictive, market-driven and for working towards an implicit goal of limiting migration. Authors have questioned how these programmes discursively construct an offensive image of the Other and how colonial histories are reproduced in the constructions seen today. The Dutch civic integration programme is considered a leading example of a restrictive programme within Europe. Research has critically questioned the discourses within its policies, yet limited research has moved beyond policy to focus on discourse in texts in practice. This study presents a critical discourse analysis of texts used in the civic integration programme and demonstrates that they participate in multiple discursive constructions: the construction of the Dutch nation-state and its citizens as inherently modern, the construction of the Other as Unmodern and thus a threat, and the construction of the hierarchical relationship between the two. The civic integration programme has been left out of discussions on decolonisation to date, contributing to it remaining a core practice of othering. This study applies post-colonial theories to understand the impacts of current discourse, and forwards possibilities for consideration of decolonised alternatives.
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In the following paper I investigate several factors of integration and their influence on students’ success in higher education derived from leading pedagogical theories. Furthermore the use of Facebook by first year students, in the Department of Media, Communication and Information at the Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences is discussed as a possible new influential factor of student success in contemporary society. The differences in the purpose of Facebook use by students are measured and compared with factors of integration, which were proven in previous studies, to be of influence to the success of students in higher education. Because this study is part of a broader (PhD) research wherein I investigate the influence of media literacy and its possible effect on students’ success, I will embed the results in a more theoretical discussion into integration in higher education and compare the results with previous studies conducted among the same population as part of previous mentioned research. All variables are measured using digital surveys and analysed with the help of statistical tests. This paper will ultimately investigate the relation between the variables derived from Tinto’s integration theory in contemporary society, Facebook use by students and its possible influence on students’ success.
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The number of social enterprises in the Netherlands has increased rapidly. Social enterprises are looking for new, innovative and economically sustainable ways to tackle structural societal challenges that generally fall outside the direct focus and objectives of the public and private sector. Social enterprises are primarily mission-driven, where profit is not a goal in itself but a means of creating societal impact with regard to a specific social problem. Many social enterprises aim to increase their societal impact by growing their organization. However, despite their ambition, scaling up and expanding their impact remains challenging in practice. This research aimed to identify the main constraining factors in scaling up social enterprises and to develop effective methods to tackle these barriers in order to achieve more societal impact. The research was conducted among twenty social enterprises in the Netherlands, all of which aim to stimulate the labor market participation of people who are at a distance from the labor market, generally referred to as work-integration social enterprises. The results show that the majority of the participating social enterprises succeeded in achieving growth in the past two years with regard to specific indicators, but generally not in the way they had originally planned.
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In January 2022 the new Dutch Civic Integration programme was launched together with promises of improvements it would bring in facilitating the ‘integration’ of newcomers to the Netherlands. This study presents a critical discourse analysis of texts intended for municipalities to take on their new coordinating role in this programme. The analysis aims to understand the discourse in the texts, which actors are mobilized by them, and the role these texts and these actors play in processes of governmental racialization. The analysis demonstrates shifting complex assemblages are brought into cascades of governance in which all actors are disciplined to accept the problem of integration as a problem of cultural difference and distance, and then furthermore disciplined to adopt new practices deemed necessary to identify and even ‘objectively’ measure the inherent traits contributing to this problematic. Lastly, the analysis displays that all actors are disciplined to accept the solution of ‘spontaneous compliance’; a series of practices and knowledges, which move the civic integration programme beyond an aim of responsibilization, into a programme of internalization, wherein newcomers are expected to own and address their problematic ‘nature’, making ‘modern’ values their own.
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Research on the success of students in higher education in the Netherlands is highly influenced by Tinto’s integration theory. This paper is part of a broader PhD research, in which I propose adjusting this theory to achieve a better fit with the present generation of students in the developed world. The paper focuses on a limited amount of factors from Tinto’s theory and measures these variables at an ordinal level for a better fit with the evaluation forms used in Dutch Institutes of Higher education. In line with the above-mentioned pedagogical theory and using insights from recent studies on students’ social media use, I also test the influence of the use of social media (Facebook) on student success.The amount of effort a student makes, the subjected level of the courses and the expected progress are measured as well as use of Facebook by students. All are statistically analyzed and compared with the progress of the students; by grade points and the amount of time they need to pass all exams.This paper provides insight into the potential use of a simplified version of the integration theory and the role of social media in education – especially by students outside of the classroom.
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Research on student success has been highly influenced by Tinto’s integration theory in Europe and America. As part of my PhD research, I investigate the possible influence of the use of social media by first year students in higher education. Based on Tinto’s theory, the amount of variables is diminished by including only the best predictive variables. Hereby, avoiding the capitalization of chance and to establish a more easy to use model for teachers and management. In previous studies the latent variables ‘satisfaction’ was built by using a fraction of the original manifest variables and tested using principal component analysis to proof how the model could be simplified. In this paper I focus on the role of the use of social media, in particular Facebook, and enrich the model of Tinto for a better suit to the students’ contemporary society in the developed world. The principal analysis, on the use of Facebook, measured by purpose (information, education, social and leisure) and by the use of different pages amongst students, is also conducted in a previous study. However, the result of this study provided the different integration or engagement components, which now will be included in Tinto’s simplified model. For the principal component-analysis, internal consistency and the reliability will be shown by Cronbach’s alpha and Guttman’s lambda-2. For testing the fit of the model, SPSS AMOS is used and the normed fit index (NFI), the comparative fit index (CFI), the Tucker-Lewis Index (TLI) and the root mean square error of approximation (RMSEA) are calculated. Ultimately this paper will provide a better insight into what kind of influence social media can have upon student success.
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