This article contributes to theoretical discussions on how immigrant integration is produced as a part of redefining national policy to local everyday practice, and what this tells us about the society in which the policy is formed. Integration is from this perspective a way to understand imagined social communities, how they are produced, who is considered to belong, and who is not. Document analysis and interviews with immigrants, local politicians, and officials in small-and medium-sized Swedish towns give insights into both what taken-for-granted assumptions the integration policy builds on and reproduces, and what consequences the integration policy have for the persons the policy is intended for. It is shown that the Swedish integration policy is itself a part of the production of a Swedish space as a container with closed doors, where immigrants are not given equal access and possibilities. This is created by putting sameness and difference at the core of the integration policy and by describing integration as an act of entering the Swedish space.

PurposeThis paper aims to understand how immigrant entrepreneurs use digital opportunities to overcome the liability of newness and foreignness and how an immigrant's ethnicity can be digitally performed as an asset in business.Design/methodology/approachThe study adopts an inductive multiple case study approach using social media content. The data consist of over 3,500 posts, images and screenshots from Facebook, Instagram and the webpages of seven successful Vietnamese restaurants in Sweden. Grounded content analysis was conducted using NVivo.FindingsThe findings suggest that digitalising ethnic artifacts can mediate and facilitate three digital performances that together can turn ethnicity from a liability to an asset: (i) preserving performance through digital ethnicising, (ii) embracing performance through digital generativitising and (iii) appropriating performance through digital fusionising. The results support the introduction of a conceptual framework depicting the interwoven duality of horizontal and vertical boundary blurring, in which the former takes place between the offline and online spaces of immigrant businesses, and the latter occurs between the home and host country attachment of the immigrant businesses.Originality/valueThis study responds to calls for understanding how immigrant entrepreneurs can overcome the liability of foreignness. It offers a fresh look at ethnicity, which has been seen in a negative light in the field of immigrant entrepreneurship. This study illuminates that ethnicity can be used as a resource in immigrant entrepreneurship, specifically through the use of digital artifacts and digital platforms.

The woman as problem and solution: analysis of a gender equality initiative within the Swedish Rescue Services.

This article discusses gender mainstreaming (GMS) as a strategy to implement gender equality in public work organizations by analysing discourse in terms of the theoretical notions of translation and circulation in organizations to shed light on how gender equality and the mainstreaming strategy are formulated in the documents which govern the Swedish fire and rescue services. More specifically, it looks at how the goals regarding gender equality are circulated and translated. The results show that gender equality as a practice is created in the translation of national goals in terms of the local context and its specific gender equality challenges. Furthermore, the article discusses how vague formulations in the documents are stabilized through circulation between the government and the public agency in question. The results indicate the central role played by maintaining stable translations over time and the presence of a double logic of change in the processes, as well as the importance of legitimizing gender equality initiatives.

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