Scientific research from within and beyond academia continues to provide the justification and the knowledge for policy developments directed toward migration and integration governance. A proliferation of scholarship aims to study, pilot, and investigate the ‘best practices’ for facilitating integration, which is then taken up in advice to policy makers. Many authors have written about this science-policy nexus (Boswell 2009; Penninx, Garcés-Mascareñas, and Scholten 2005; Scholten et al. 2015; Verbeek, Entzinger, and Scholten 2015) These works have also engaged in critical reflection, problematizing this nexus and demonstrating how funding structures draw researchers not only into addressing short-term policy goals, but also into reproducing some of the essentialist worldviews that come with methodological nationalism (Wimmer and Glick Schiller 2002) and the ‘national order of things’ (Malkki 1995). Yet, the colonial legacies and dis/continuities of these logics in integrationism have not received much attention so far.The paper takes a critical lens on the implications of the science-policy complicity in reproducing colonial logics of ‘cultural distance’, based on perspectives and empirical research from different national (Netherlands and Switzerland) and supra-national (EU) contexts. We analyse texts which shape the civic integration programme in the Netherlands, the genealogy of the integration requirement to respect the values of the constitution in Switzerland, and the EU framework on migrant integration. This combined analysis brings forth the role scientists and knowledge producers play in (re)producing the colonial logics within integrationism, and their contributions to the regime of truth within which integration discourse operates. Throughout this article, we draw on examples from these different contexts to display that integration and its migranticized (Dahinden 2016) subjects are constructed through practices deemed as scientific or objective expertise, building on important work by Schinkel (2018) on integration research as “neocolonial knowledge production” and Favell’s (2022) critical reflections on integration indicator frameworks. As we demonstrate, the “idea of integration as an issue of cultural distance is rendered imaginable in and through colonial legacies and scientific practices from which policy draws legitimacy. We show how cultural distance is produced in the scientification of migrants’ assimilability in a ‘Western work ethic’, in measurement of migrants’ adherence to liberal values, and through constructions of integration drawing on social imaginaries of national and European identity. Importantly, we argue that by presenting this cultural distance as a product of objective, scientific processes of empirical observation, the notion of cultural distance is normalised and depoliticized, which ultimately legitimizes integrationism as a mode of governance.The present study builds on important contributions (by Schinkel 2017; Favell 2022; Korteweg 2017; Bonjour and Duyvendak 2017, and others) in attempting to destabilize the normalization of integrationism as the widely accepted mode of governance of ‘immigrant’ or ‘ethnic’ populations and their inherent and problematic ‘distance’. The content and structure of this summer school in post-colonial Amsterdam would allow us to continue our critical reflexive discussions to better understand the colonial logics at play and how they operate in multiple contexts and at multiple levels of governance, in and beyond integration
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This paper proposes an innovative method for factor analyzing data that potentially contains individual response bias. Past methods include the use of “ipsative” data, or, related to that, “ipsatized” data. Unfortunately, factor analysis as the main method used for analyzing the dimensionality of data, cannot be applied to ipsative data. In contrast, normalization of data as an alternative method to filter out response bias, is not hampered by the technical statistical issues inherent to applying multivariate techniques to ipsative data. Using high-quality data from a survey in Nepal that makes use of – among others – the High-Performance Organizations (HPO) framework, this paper shows that the traditional approach of directly applying Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA) starting from an existing model or theory, is inferior to our approach. Even applying Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA) to the raw (non-normalized) data before using CFA, is unable to detect the optimal dimensionality, or structure, in the data. A better structure can be obtained by performing EFA on normalized data that corrects for response bias in the raw data. This paper convincingly shows that the newly identified structure is superior to the original structure suggested by the HPO framework. Applying a CFA using the newly detected structure on the raw data, gives excellent goodness-of-fit statistics, with more items retained, and no need of forced methods to improve the model fit. The findings suggest that existing models and questionnaires based on these models, are not necessarily as valid and reliable as empirical studies that make use of traditional analyses seem to suggest. When adopting existing instruments, researchers are advised to critically check the validity and reliability of these instruments – especially those vulnerable to response bias - and to apply the procedures laid out in this paper, in order to enhance the quality of their research, and to inform future researchers who consider using the same instruments or to warn them about the potential shortcomings of these instruments.
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Families in the Netherlands consisting of individuals falling into a variety of racialized migrant categories, are often the focus of governmental scrutiny and scientific curiosity. These ‘migrant families’ are constructed in a variety of ways, all which make it possible to center them as the object of interventions aiming to address their assumed cultural distance and their ‘traditional’ way of life, often within the discourse of ‘integration’ and within government mandated civic integration programmes. The paradox arises when these migrant families, problematized in their traditionality, their ‘unmodernity’, are seen as a threat to the Dutch ‘modern’ families and what are seen as their own national Dutch ‘traditions’. Embracing ‘tradition’ is therefore simultaneously seen as a sign of a lack of progress when attributed to migrant families, while also seen as something which must be protected, as an inherent characteristic of national identity of the modern Dutch nation state. This paper aims to explore this paradox and the constructions of the modern and unmodern family by focusing on the everyday doing of these families, and how they are studied and described in a variety of knowledge production reports. The everyday, and the description and governance of it, is a site which contributes to the (re)production of the logics of modernity, yet it is often ignored or left unseen, perhaps because of its assumed mundanity. What hierarchical descriptions exist in these reports between migrant and Dutch families on how daily family life is organized, enacted in parent child interactions, in gender roles, in community involvement, in celebratory traditions, and in work/leisure activities? How do these everyday activities, act as signifiers of the extent to which the doing of modern values (such as equality, solidarity, participation, and freedom) are enacted in everyday life in migrant vs Dutch families. Understanding these constructions, and the role that scientific research publications play in (re)producing them, will be explored to better understand how the normalization of these logics set the stage for the further scrutiny and discipline of these migranticized families.
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Achtergrond Steeds meer technologie is beschikbaar om zelfmanagement en kwaliteit van leven van ouderen te bevorderen. Zorgorganisatie Livio maakt gefragmenteerd gebruik van die technologie en zoekt naar een manier om technologie duurzaam te implementeren en in te bedden in reguliere werkprocessen, steeds in samenwerking met de cliënt. De Normalization Process Theory (NPT) biedt concrete aanwijzingen om inbedding van innovaties in werkprocessen te ondersteunen. Daarbij is de focus op het concrete wat en hoe het werk gedaan wordt. De NPT onderscheidt daarbij vier mechanismen: samenhang, betrokkenheid, samen doen en reflectie. Met het op NPT gebaseerde NoMAD-instrument kan innovatiebereidheid en implementatievoortgang op die vier mechanismen gemonitord worden. Doelstelling Met deze aanvraag wordt een breed implementatieproject voorbereid gericht op inbedden van technologie in verpleeghuis, thuiszorg en woonzorgcentra (VVT) in Oost-Nederland, met (inter)nationale opschalingsmogelijkheden. In dit project werken hogeschool Saxion, zorgorganisatie Livio en Roessingh Research & Development samen om dit te realiseren. De doelen van deze voorbereidende aanvraag zijn: a) Het aanpassen van het NoMAD instrument voor de implementatie van technologie, voor de context van verpleeghuis, thuiszorg en woonzorgcentra, b) het uitwerken van een werkwijze om cliënten te betrekken in de implementatie van technologie. Daarnaast is het doel van deze aanvraag om een consortium te vormen van zorgorganisaties, netwerk-, onderwijs-, MKB- en kennisinstellingen ten behoeve van het brede implementatieproject om daarmee een subsidieaanvraag voor RAAK Publiek te schrijven, gericht op implementatie van technologie in Oost-Nederland. Resultaten - Aangepaste versie van NoMAD geschikt voor het monitoren van de implementatie van technologie in de VVT; - Een werkwijze voor cliëntparticipatie tijdens het implementatieproject; - Consortium met partners van zorgorganisaties, netwerkorganisaties, MKB, onderwijs, kennisinstellingen en cliëntenorganisaties, ten behoeve van - RAAK Publiek subsidieaanvraag gericht op implementatie van technologie in VVT in regio Oost-Nederland.
