Workplace Challenges in a Shifting World

Working with migrants can challenge the usual expectations and routines of the workforce in welfare institutions. Bureaucrats respond differently depending on their own background and they can resort to different coping strategies, such as, ‘othering’ their migrant clients. Organizational pressures such as integrating new public management processes add to these challenges and can result in existential insecurity amongst bureaucrats; their ontological security is challenged which can have a knock-on effect on their work, that of the institutions they work for and outcomes for their migrant clients.