This thesis investigates contemporary practices focused on facilitating the integration of those who, for various reasons, are perceived as standing“outside” society. The practices represent a societal response to a perceived need for integration. It aims to explore how integration as a social process of change is professionally facilitated, as well as how its facilitators –analytically referred to as “integrators” – reason. Such an investigation aims to help us understand the ideas that shape our contemporary understanding of society and its members. Through a “dialectical dialogue method”, conversations were conducted with integrators from eight workplaces in Sweden and Hungary, examining their knowledge, reasoning, and underlying assumptions about their practice and its role in society. Sweden and Hungary constitute two national contexts that, in this thesis, are understood as employing a shared manner of integration facilitation practice.
The analysis reveals that integrators operate within a set of inherently contradictory demands: (1) to meet their clients without prejudice while relying on cultural generalisations; (2) to respect their clients’ differences while guiding them toward established societal norms; and (3) to motivate voluntary compliance from their clients within a context where expectations have already been defined for them. These contradictory demands challenge both integration policies and established research paradigms, revealing a more complex interplay of values, ideals, and epistemologies than is typically acknowledged.
The thesis interprets these contradictions through Chantal Mouffe’s theory of the democratic paradox as a non-reconcilable negotiation between liberal ideals and democratic practices, suggesting that integrators enact a paradoxical role: upholding ideals of unconditional inclusion while realising conditional belonging. Integrators must, in effect, persuade individuals to desire becoming what they are expected to be, navigating between coercive adaptation and idealised mutual recognition. In this way, they take on a political function, mediating not just between people and institutions butalso between conflicting visions of society itself. However, the thesis contends that their work simultaneously reflects the conformist and depoliticised nature of the social sphere, as discussed by Hannah Arendt. Within this sphere, the conformist assumptions underlying integration discourses often remain hidden. Integrators thus become both enforcers and negotiators of societal boundaries.
Finally, the thesis explores how integrators must maintain a double perspective: a critical distance from society and an intimate familiarity with it – what Alfred Schütz described through the positions of “the stranger” and “the homecomer”. Concurrently, the thesis explores the limits of the integrators’ critical distance through Sara Ahmed’s concept of the stranger. It argues that the integrators’ encounters with clients, who are positioned as strangers, are shaped by visible markers of difference produced through histories of exclusion. As such, clients appear not as unfamiliar others but as familiarly strange, which enables the ongoing reproduction of the integrators’ imagined conception of an integrated society. By analysing the integrators’ role, position, and practice, the thesis deepens our understanding of how integration is enacted – not just as policy or discourse but as a lived, negotiated, and contradictory practice.