‘Malmö does not work, without our work’: A study of migrant women’s labour market participation
On both a national and Malmö level unemployment rates among foreign-born individuals, especially foreign-born women is increasing at the same time that unemployment is decreasing for Swedish-born. The project has the following aims: 1) to analyse the diversity and shared experiences of the labour market for women with a migrant background, and identifying the actors who are central to creating bridges into the labour market; 2) to identify a series of best practices in relation to labour market entrance through collaborative research strategies with migrant women, and key actors among non-governmental organisations and public service employees engaged in the topic.
The project is based on a mix-method approach, combining interviewers with migrant women of various labour market position as well as interviews with 20 key actors in the municipality, analysis of municipal documents exploring the topic migrant women and work. Finally the empirical sample will be completed by a series of work-shops on best practices with migrant women, civil servants and members of NGOs. The originality of the project lies in the documentation and analysis of the obstacles and possibilities that migrant women encounter when entering the labour market, from the perspective of the migrant women with a strong focus on gender equality and on an exploration of best practices through a bottom-up approach underlining the knowledge of the skills of central actors within the municipality and the city.
The project is based on a mix-method approach, combining interviewers with migrant women of various labour market position as well as interviews with 20 key actors in the municipality, analysis of municipal documents exploring the topic migrant women and work. Finally the empirical sample will be completed by a series of work-shops on best practices with migrant women, civil servants and members of NGOs. The originality of the project lies in the documentation and analysis of the obstacles and possibilities that migrant women encounter when entering the labour market, from the perspective of the migrant women with a strong focus on gender equality and on an exploration of best practices through a bottom-up approach underlining the knowledge of the skills of central actors within the municipality and the city.
Final report
English scientific summary
‘Malmö does not work without our work’: A study of migrant women’s labour market participation
The present study aimed to analyse the shared and diversified experiences of labour market participation among women with migrant backgrounds and their interaction with municipal labour market secretaries and policies. It also aimed to identify a series of success factors in the transition from unemployment to sustainable paid employment by engaging in critical, collaborative dialogue with women with migrant backgrounds, municipal employees and actors from civil society organisations. Theoretically, the project took its point of departure from the concept of conviviality and gender scholars’ focus on multiple gendered inequalities in terms of intersectionality.
The empirical data consisted of interviews with both unemployed and employed migrant woman. In addition, interviews were conducted with municipal administration employees and key civil society actors working on issues related to the labour market integration of unemployed migrant women. Observation of participants in a number of labour and integration programmes, during 2018–2020, was also conducted. Finally, selected national- and the municipal-level documents addressing female migrant employment and unemployment in some way were reviewed. In this summery, I present the main conclusions from the research project.
Practices of conviviality and success factors
A central conclusion from the project is that those migrant woman who were unemployed and those who had paid work both experienced the municipal labour market as a place for conviviality and community building. Communities were created among participants and between participants and municipal employees. The activities at the municipality provided a collective space in which participants could exchange experiences and share relevant networks, which could play a crucial role in their future labour market careers.
Most participants emphasised that the municipal integration and labour projects, programmes and activities played an important role in creating space for support and community in the difficult journey towards stable formal employment. According to the study findings, these communities of migrant women are fundamental to their search for long-term employment, for instance many of the unemployed study participants got jobs through the social networks created within these spaces. In the next section, I identify five success factors.
Success factors in obtaining long-term and sustainable labour market work
One of the aims of the present project was to document and analyse possible best practices and distinguish strategies that migrant women identified as strengthening their opportunities for a long-term and socially sustainable livelihood.
The first success factor identified by migrant women and labour market secretaries was that the best programmes and activates where the ones which provided a clear labour market path towards a profession (Mulinari 2021b). Those projects can lead to a sustainable, long-term employment, unlike projects that reinforce already precarious life situations, for instance the ones with no clear ending point (Mulinari 2018). My findings confirmed previous research and showed that the labour market projects that often lead to paid work are the ones that are most similar in form and content to regular work (Mulinari 2020).
The second success factor identified by unemployed and employed migrant women and labour market secretaries was offering different types of package solutions in the labour and integration projects. Specifically, these solutions combine educational paths in a specific profession with internships and education in the Swedish language.
A third important success factor was paying people for their project work, since taking loans, such as student loans, was often perceived as too risky and did not guarantee paid employment. This argument was especially present among elderly migrant women, while younger women were more open to investing in student loans (Mulinari 2021b).
The fourth success factor, which was strongly voiced by the migrant women, was the need to develop projects and programmes geared towards labour market integration in which participants are treated with respect and understanding of their life situation. According to the research subjects, this means acknowledging the life puzzles with which migrant women are confronted to and which they need to solve in order to participate. It also means that the municipal employees in charge of the courses and programmes must understand (and recognise) the challenges that migrant women face in the form of ethnic discrimination in Swedish working life. By taking the woman’s lives as its point of departure, the organisation can create support systems and networks to decrease the diverse burdens on the women involved in the projects.
The fifth success factor was developing structures and patterns within labour and integration programmes that do not create opposing logics or requirements. There were many situations in which the different authorities made demands that where contradictory (such as Swedish social Insurance agency, schools, the Swedish migration agency) which created unhealthy stress among the participants. To create a more successful path towards sustainable employment, the demands placed on the unemployed must be coordinated. A number of activities and projects coordinated the requirements and goals of various organisations, hence decreasing the stress of the participants, making it easier for them to focus on their studies and work and increasing their feelings of wellbeing and security. There where however also practices that in different ways challenged those spaces of conviviality.
The municipality unemployed complex revisited: Boundary making, policing joy and regulating time
Previous research on unemployment politics and practices towards migrants has often focused on disciplinary practices within the labour market complex. My findings show similar tendencies (Mulinari 2021b). The culturalization, pathologisation and victimisation practices identified by a number of scholars were also present in my study (Mulinari 2018).
Various organisational practices create hierarchical boundaries and thus counteract and hinder the development of conviviality. I conceptualised one form of boundary making as the policing of joy. My empirical findings (especially from the participant observations) show how municipal employees created practices that reduced the participants’ opportunities for joy, happiness and pride in various ways. This was expressed and regulated, among other ways, in a demand that migrant women in the municipality unemployment regime should not take up too much space; should never speak their own languages; and, most of all, should not laugh, joke and enjoy themselves too much.
Another hierarchical boundary that challenged forms of conviviality was the unwillingness of municipal employees to identify any similarities in the everyday life of themselves and the unemployed. Although my interviews showed clear-cut, shared gendered experiences between the unemployed woman and the labour market secretaries, such as both groups taking greater responsibility for unpaid work at home and a desire to work fewer hours, which were topics they often discussed during coffee breaks, those shared experiences were never used to create spaces of conviviality between them. On the contrary, during formal encounters with the unemployed migrant woman, the municipal employees stressed that Sweden has a gender equality culture in which women and men share work and family responsibility in equal terms, meaning that Swedish women work eight hours as men do. These and similar statements were often expressed only minutes after the employees had coffee break discussions with colleagues on their desire to work half time and their impossible work load at home. There was also a reluctance within the municipality to take participants’ criticism of activities seriously (Mulinari 2021c).
Another form of inequality was the temporal inequality within the unemployment complex. While there is extensive feminist research on the relationship between time and gender inequality, there is very limited research on how the intersection of gender and ethnic discrimination affects time inequality. The employed and unemployed interviewees both emphasised that their previous education was seldom valued and that their previous work experiences were not perceived as adaptable to the Swedish context. The participants experienced that the municipality through its unemployment complex ‘stoled’ their time partly by forcing them into practices without clear goals and results and partly by not taking their time and the time they have invested in studying and working before they came to Sweden seriously (Mulinari 2021c). The long waiting journey that the unemployed must go through forces many of them to ‘choose’ to participate in projects and programmes aimed at jobs for which they had not originally planned. An important study conclusion is the need for more research on the relationship between ethnic discrimination and time.
Paradoxes in the unemployed municipality complex between the politicians and the municipal employees
One of the central findings of the study was the identification of the paradoxical logic through which unemployed migrant women and municipal secretaries are forced to manoeuvre. Many of the political and organisational demands evolving from politicians have the opposite logic to that of the key success factors that municipal employees believe support unemployed migrant women in their search for employment. Below, I discuss three of those opposing logics.
Politicians’ rhetoric about evidence vs lack of support for evaluation strategies
The municipal employees often asserted that, despite rhetoric on the relevance of evidence and evaluation at the national and leadership level and within the political realm, there are seldom attempts to document and analyse what works and what does not when it comes to labour and integration issues. While the organisation increasingly emphasises the need for evidence, in the employees’ experience, there are few strategies for identifying which success factors exist and how knowledge from the municipal employees and the unemployed could be used to improve unemployment polices. The employees further perceived that there are few evaluations of activities that could identify which success factors exist and what needs to be developed. The lack of knowledge around those questions leads to a lack of organisational
credibility among both the unemployed and the professionals, as they do thing that nightery of them believes stenches the transitions from unemployment to employment (Mulinari 2021c),
Public discourse on ‘foreign-born women’ vs the knowledge and skills of unemployed migrant women
My findings show that public discourse explains migrant women’s unemployment due to their being born abroad (Mulinari 2018), while unemployed women, employed women and labour market secretaries stressed other factors, including gender and ethnic discrimination in the labour market. Among the people I meet and interview there is also a greater focus on how migrant women’s life puzzles affect the likelihood that they can balance their often large responsibilities with eight hours of study and work. All participants expressed a willingness to challenge dominant notions of the group as ‘weak and far from the labour market’.
Instead of focusing on the group’s various shortcomings, many of the professionals I encountered emphasised that the focus should be on identifying which prevalent shortcomings in the labour market seem to make the transition from unemployment to employment longer for migrant women. While all actors involved underlined structural factors, the discourse mediated by politicians increasingly places the responsibility for unemployment on individuals (Mulinari, Tahvilzadeh, & Kings 2021a).
Politicians’ demand for quick solutions vs labour integration sustainability
The third paradox was about time demands. On the political level, the need to very quickly transition from unemployment to employment is increasingly being emphasised. However, the unemployed women and labour market secretaries both asserted that the focus should be on preparing migrant women for working life. The focus on the rapid flow from unemployment to employment entails an increased risk of strengthening the welfare/workfare circulation, whereby people move between short periods of paid work and periods of unemployment and the need for financial assistance. According to the unemployed migrant women and the municipal employees in charge, programmes and projects that equip the unemployed for sustainable labour market participation are needed. Many study participants noted that the increased demand for speed from the political level might ultimately has the opposite effect, prolonging people’s participation in the unemployment complex. Municipal employees and unemployed migrant women alike considered the increasing demand for a quick entry into working life to be a practice that basically weakens the participants’ opportunities for long term sustainable labour market positions and only satisfies politicians’ need for good numbers.
Politicians’ new public management agendas vs professionals’ need for diversified strategies
The studied municipal employees identified forms of intervention from politicians and from the leadership towards a streamlined organisation; however, they also underlined the need for organisational elasticity in order to be able to meet the needs of different individuals. Strongly influenced by new public management, the focus is shifting, according to the municipal employees, from the participants and their needs to the politicians’ need for success. The lack of elasticity means reduced room for manoeuvring for the employees, which they identified as central in order to be able to meet the participants where they find themselves.
The impossible task of the municipal labour and integration employees
Today, there is relatively limited research on municipal labour and integration market secretaries. At the same time, their role is becoming increasingly central, as there has been a shift from welfare to workfare and the municipal labour market secretaries are often on the border between them. Although they perform a very complex job and work with vulnerable groups every day, municipal labour market secretaries do not have the official responsibilities that social secretaries have. This means that they often lack the tools to assist participants with key issues, such as addressing housing needs or contacting health care departments, that need to be resolved before integration into the labour market.
Since many participants need welfare assistance that the municipal labour market secretaries cannot provide, these employees have to engage in difficult translation work between organisational logics and different fields of knowledge in order to support the women. In other words, these professionals engage in extensive forms of social work.
Above all, many of these professionals feel ambivalence about their work when, according to one research subject, they are ‘forcing’ people who might need a social worker rather than a labour market secretary into paid work. Meeting the requirement to get participants into the labour market as quickly as possible despite the fact that they often have complex economic and social problems and amid expanding municipal responsibility for these groups means constant stress for the employees.
Concluding remarks
At the theoretical level, the concept of conviviality functioned as a productive tool for achieving a multifaceted analysis of unemployed migrant women and labour market and integration secretaries. The study identified a number of similarities with scholarship in the field regarding forms of governmentality and further developed their analysis through the concepts of policing joy and the political economy of waiting (Mulinari 2021b) as well as through identification of the gender equality paradox (Mulinari 2018). Contrary to previous research, the present study shows the relevance of the unemployment complex (despite its shortcomings) for the well-being of unemployed migrant women, offering clear and concrete best practices from the perspective of this vulnerable group (Mulinari 2019). The study also identifies tensions between municipal employees and politicians’ agendas. Perhaps the most important result is the need to develop more stable and original forms of communication and knowledge transmission between the academy and society. Finally, a central lesson from the research project is the vital need to develop knowledge that is both scientifically stringent and of societal relevance.
Selection of Collaboration and projects formed during the period
• Granted grants from the Gender Equality Authority to, in collaboration with the International Women's Association, run and evaluate the Equal 2.0 project, which aims to develop methods for intersectional gender equality work.
• Research study circle with employees at the analysis unit. Ongoing during the autumn of 2019.
• Evaluation of gender equality work on two labor market projects.
• Part of project group on digitization and citizen influence 2018-2019. Malmö Municipality Labor Market Department and RISE.
• Participating in the reference group for project VI (a project owned by Folkhögskoleförvaltningen Göteborg co-financed by the ESF, whose goal is to improve the health and future om young adult without employment or education.
• Collaboration between Malmö University and “Hela Malmö” on building a university branch in Nydala (Malmö)
Selection of presentations of the project and its results
• 20200912 “The labor market complex paradoxes” Presentation for Malmö Kraften.
• 20200119. "The paradoxes of politics" Steering group for the delegation for Young and New Arrivals (DUA)
• 20191202 "The way in - an evaluation" The steering group for the ESF project "The way in" (Arbetsförmedlingen, City of Malmö, ESF, Kommunal) •
The management group for the Labor Market and Social Administration, City of Malmö. • 20191119 “It take a lot of time to be unemployed” Rörelsernas Museum, City of Malmö.
• 20190215 “Working in the middle of a paradox” Inspiration day for the City of Malmö's labor market secretary.
• 20180215 ”here in Sweden we are all equal… or” Yalla Sofielund (labor market project City of Malmö)
‘Malmö does not work without our work’: A study of migrant women’s labour market participation
The present study aimed to analyse the shared and diversified experiences of labour market participation among women with migrant backgrounds and their interaction with municipal labour market secretaries and policies. It also aimed to identify a series of success factors in the transition from unemployment to sustainable paid employment by engaging in critical, collaborative dialogue with women with migrant backgrounds, municipal employees and actors from civil society organisations. Theoretically, the project took its point of departure from the concept of conviviality and gender scholars’ focus on multiple gendered inequalities in terms of intersectionality.
The empirical data consisted of interviews with both unemployed and employed migrant woman. In addition, interviews were conducted with municipal administration employees and key civil society actors working on issues related to the labour market integration of unemployed migrant women. Observation of participants in a number of labour and integration programmes, during 2018–2020, was also conducted. Finally, selected national- and the municipal-level documents addressing female migrant employment and unemployment in some way were reviewed. In this summery, I present the main conclusions from the research project.
Practices of conviviality and success factors
A central conclusion from the project is that those migrant woman who were unemployed and those who had paid work both experienced the municipal labour market as a place for conviviality and community building. Communities were created among participants and between participants and municipal employees. The activities at the municipality provided a collective space in which participants could exchange experiences and share relevant networks, which could play a crucial role in their future labour market careers.
Most participants emphasised that the municipal integration and labour projects, programmes and activities played an important role in creating space for support and community in the difficult journey towards stable formal employment. According to the study findings, these communities of migrant women are fundamental to their search for long-term employment, for instance many of the unemployed study participants got jobs through the social networks created within these spaces. In the next section, I identify five success factors.
Success factors in obtaining long-term and sustainable labour market work
One of the aims of the present project was to document and analyse possible best practices and distinguish strategies that migrant women identified as strengthening their opportunities for a long-term and socially sustainable livelihood.
The first success factor identified by migrant women and labour market secretaries was that the best programmes and activates where the ones which provided a clear labour market path towards a profession (Mulinari 2021b). Those projects can lead to a sustainable, long-term employment, unlike projects that reinforce already precarious life situations, for instance the ones with no clear ending point (Mulinari 2018). My findings confirmed previous research and showed that the labour market projects that often lead to paid work are the ones that are most similar in form and content to regular work (Mulinari 2020).
The second success factor identified by unemployed and employed migrant women and labour market secretaries was offering different types of package solutions in the labour and integration projects. Specifically, these solutions combine educational paths in a specific profession with internships and education in the Swedish language.
A third important success factor was paying people for their project work, since taking loans, such as student loans, was often perceived as too risky and did not guarantee paid employment. This argument was especially present among elderly migrant women, while younger women were more open to investing in student loans (Mulinari 2021b).
The fourth success factor, which was strongly voiced by the migrant women, was the need to develop projects and programmes geared towards labour market integration in which participants are treated with respect and understanding of their life situation. According to the research subjects, this means acknowledging the life puzzles with which migrant women are confronted to and which they need to solve in order to participate. It also means that the municipal employees in charge of the courses and programmes must understand (and recognise) the challenges that migrant women face in the form of ethnic discrimination in Swedish working life. By taking the woman’s lives as its point of departure, the organisation can create support systems and networks to decrease the diverse burdens on the women involved in the projects.
The fifth success factor was developing structures and patterns within labour and integration programmes that do not create opposing logics or requirements. There were many situations in which the different authorities made demands that where contradictory (such as Swedish social Insurance agency, schools, the Swedish migration agency) which created unhealthy stress among the participants. To create a more successful path towards sustainable employment, the demands placed on the unemployed must be coordinated. A number of activities and projects coordinated the requirements and goals of various organisations, hence decreasing the stress of the participants, making it easier for them to focus on their studies and work and increasing their feelings of wellbeing and security. There where however also practices that in different ways challenged those spaces of conviviality.
The municipality unemployed complex revisited: Boundary making, policing joy and regulating time
Previous research on unemployment politics and practices towards migrants has often focused on disciplinary practices within the labour market complex. My findings show similar tendencies (Mulinari 2021b). The culturalization, pathologisation and victimisation practices identified by a number of scholars were also present in my study (Mulinari 2018).
Various organisational practices create hierarchical boundaries and thus counteract and hinder the development of conviviality. I conceptualised one form of boundary making as the policing of joy. My empirical findings (especially from the participant observations) show how municipal employees created practices that reduced the participants’ opportunities for joy, happiness and pride in various ways. This was expressed and regulated, among other ways, in a demand that migrant women in the municipality unemployment regime should not take up too much space; should never speak their own languages; and, most of all, should not laugh, joke and enjoy themselves too much.
Another hierarchical boundary that challenged forms of conviviality was the unwillingness of municipal employees to identify any similarities in the everyday life of themselves and the unemployed. Although my interviews showed clear-cut, shared gendered experiences between the unemployed woman and the labour market secretaries, such as both groups taking greater responsibility for unpaid work at home and a desire to work fewer hours, which were topics they often discussed during coffee breaks, those shared experiences were never used to create spaces of conviviality between them. On the contrary, during formal encounters with the unemployed migrant woman, the municipal employees stressed that Sweden has a gender equality culture in which women and men share work and family responsibility in equal terms, meaning that Swedish women work eight hours as men do. These and similar statements were often expressed only minutes after the employees had coffee break discussions with colleagues on their desire to work half time and their impossible work load at home. There was also a reluctance within the municipality to take participants’ criticism of activities seriously (Mulinari 2021c).
Another form of inequality was the temporal inequality within the unemployment complex. While there is extensive feminist research on the relationship between time and gender inequality, there is very limited research on how the intersection of gender and ethnic discrimination affects time inequality. The employed and unemployed interviewees both emphasised that their previous education was seldom valued and that their previous work experiences were not perceived as adaptable to the Swedish context. The participants experienced that the municipality through its unemployment complex ‘stoled’ their time partly by forcing them into practices without clear goals and results and partly by not taking their time and the time they have invested in studying and working before they came to Sweden seriously (Mulinari 2021c). The long waiting journey that the unemployed must go through forces many of them to ‘choose’ to participate in projects and programmes aimed at jobs for which they had not originally planned. An important study conclusion is the need for more research on the relationship between ethnic discrimination and time.
Paradoxes in the unemployed municipality complex between the politicians and the municipal employees
One of the central findings of the study was the identification of the paradoxical logic through which unemployed migrant women and municipal secretaries are forced to manoeuvre. Many of the political and organisational demands evolving from politicians have the opposite logic to that of the key success factors that municipal employees believe support unemployed migrant women in their search for employment. Below, I discuss three of those opposing logics.
Politicians’ rhetoric about evidence vs lack of support for evaluation strategies
The municipal employees often asserted that, despite rhetoric on the relevance of evidence and evaluation at the national and leadership level and within the political realm, there are seldom attempts to document and analyse what works and what does not when it comes to labour and integration issues. While the organisation increasingly emphasises the need for evidence, in the employees’ experience, there are few strategies for identifying which success factors exist and how knowledge from the municipal employees and the unemployed could be used to improve unemployment polices. The employees further perceived that there are few evaluations of activities that could identify which success factors exist and what needs to be developed. The lack of knowledge around those questions leads to a lack of organisational
credibility among both the unemployed and the professionals, as they do thing that nightery of them believes stenches the transitions from unemployment to employment (Mulinari 2021c),
Public discourse on ‘foreign-born women’ vs the knowledge and skills of unemployed migrant women
My findings show that public discourse explains migrant women’s unemployment due to their being born abroad (Mulinari 2018), while unemployed women, employed women and labour market secretaries stressed other factors, including gender and ethnic discrimination in the labour market. Among the people I meet and interview there is also a greater focus on how migrant women’s life puzzles affect the likelihood that they can balance their often large responsibilities with eight hours of study and work. All participants expressed a willingness to challenge dominant notions of the group as ‘weak and far from the labour market’.
Instead of focusing on the group’s various shortcomings, many of the professionals I encountered emphasised that the focus should be on identifying which prevalent shortcomings in the labour market seem to make the transition from unemployment to employment longer for migrant women. While all actors involved underlined structural factors, the discourse mediated by politicians increasingly places the responsibility for unemployment on individuals (Mulinari, Tahvilzadeh, & Kings 2021a).
Politicians’ demand for quick solutions vs labour integration sustainability
The third paradox was about time demands. On the political level, the need to very quickly transition from unemployment to employment is increasingly being emphasised. However, the unemployed women and labour market secretaries both asserted that the focus should be on preparing migrant women for working life. The focus on the rapid flow from unemployment to employment entails an increased risk of strengthening the welfare/workfare circulation, whereby people move between short periods of paid work and periods of unemployment and the need for financial assistance. According to the unemployed migrant women and the municipal employees in charge, programmes and projects that equip the unemployed for sustainable labour market participation are needed. Many study participants noted that the increased demand for speed from the political level might ultimately has the opposite effect, prolonging people’s participation in the unemployment complex. Municipal employees and unemployed migrant women alike considered the increasing demand for a quick entry into working life to be a practice that basically weakens the participants’ opportunities for long term sustainable labour market positions and only satisfies politicians’ need for good numbers.
Politicians’ new public management agendas vs professionals’ need for diversified strategies
The studied municipal employees identified forms of intervention from politicians and from the leadership towards a streamlined organisation; however, they also underlined the need for organisational elasticity in order to be able to meet the needs of different individuals. Strongly influenced by new public management, the focus is shifting, according to the municipal employees, from the participants and their needs to the politicians’ need for success. The lack of elasticity means reduced room for manoeuvring for the employees, which they identified as central in order to be able to meet the participants where they find themselves.
The impossible task of the municipal labour and integration employees
Today, there is relatively limited research on municipal labour and integration market secretaries. At the same time, their role is becoming increasingly central, as there has been a shift from welfare to workfare and the municipal labour market secretaries are often on the border between them. Although they perform a very complex job and work with vulnerable groups every day, municipal labour market secretaries do not have the official responsibilities that social secretaries have. This means that they often lack the tools to assist participants with key issues, such as addressing housing needs or contacting health care departments, that need to be resolved before integration into the labour market.
Since many participants need welfare assistance that the municipal labour market secretaries cannot provide, these employees have to engage in difficult translation work between organisational logics and different fields of knowledge in order to support the women. In other words, these professionals engage in extensive forms of social work.
Above all, many of these professionals feel ambivalence about their work when, according to one research subject, they are ‘forcing’ people who might need a social worker rather than a labour market secretary into paid work. Meeting the requirement to get participants into the labour market as quickly as possible despite the fact that they often have complex economic and social problems and amid expanding municipal responsibility for these groups means constant stress for the employees.
Concluding remarks
At the theoretical level, the concept of conviviality functioned as a productive tool for achieving a multifaceted analysis of unemployed migrant women and labour market and integration secretaries. The study identified a number of similarities with scholarship in the field regarding forms of governmentality and further developed their analysis through the concepts of policing joy and the political economy of waiting (Mulinari 2021b) as well as through identification of the gender equality paradox (Mulinari 2018). Contrary to previous research, the present study shows the relevance of the unemployment complex (despite its shortcomings) for the well-being of unemployed migrant women, offering clear and concrete best practices from the perspective of this vulnerable group (Mulinari 2019). The study also identifies tensions between municipal employees and politicians’ agendas. Perhaps the most important result is the need to develop more stable and original forms of communication and knowledge transmission between the academy and society. Finally, a central lesson from the research project is the vital need to develop knowledge that is both scientifically stringent and of societal relevance.
Selection of Collaboration and projects formed during the period
• Granted grants from the Gender Equality Authority to, in collaboration with the International Women's Association, run and evaluate the Equal 2.0 project, which aims to develop methods for intersectional gender equality work.
• Research study circle with employees at the analysis unit. Ongoing during the autumn of 2019.
• Evaluation of gender equality work on two labor market projects.
• Part of project group on digitization and citizen influence 2018-2019. Malmö Municipality Labor Market Department and RISE.
• Participating in the reference group for project VI (a project owned by Folkhögskoleförvaltningen Göteborg co-financed by the ESF, whose goal is to improve the health and future om young adult without employment or education.
• Collaboration between Malmö University and “Hela Malmö” on building a university branch in Nydala (Malmö)
Selection of presentations of the project and its results
• 20200912 “The labor market complex paradoxes” Presentation for Malmö Kraften.
• 20200119. "The paradoxes of politics" Steering group for the delegation for Young and New Arrivals (DUA)
• 20191202 "The way in - an evaluation" The steering group for the ESF project "The way in" (Arbetsförmedlingen, City of Malmö, ESF, Kommunal) •
The management group for the Labor Market and Social Administration, City of Malmö. • 20191119 “It take a lot of time to be unemployed” Rörelsernas Museum, City of Malmö.
• 20190215 “Working in the middle of a paradox” Inspiration day for the City of Malmö's labor market secretary.
• 20180215 ”here in Sweden we are all equal… or” Yalla Sofielund (labor market project City of Malmö)