Between Institutional and Domestic Logics: Symbolic Capital in Community Development in a Disadvantaged Neighbourhood in Berlin,Germany

The Stadtteilmütter

We draw on empirical data of a study in a subsidized housing estate from the 1960s, built around a courtyard in Berlin, Germany. On the ground floor, The Hub offered state-funded community development activities. Since its founding in 2017, social worker Eileen, ³ a woman in her 40s whose parents had immigrated from Turkey, managed it and hosted the Stadtteilmütter project. The Stadtteilmütter and the Hub were complemented by other projects under the ‘Social City’ umbrella. With statistics on, among others, unemployment (11.3%), migrants (73.7%) and recipients of income support (62.1%), the city classified the neighbourhood as ‘area with particular need of support’, eligible for this neighbourhood programme (IHEK, 2019: 3). We were told that a substantial number of families have a temporary residency status. This forbids employment, limits access to higher education and property-ownership and requires regular renewal of immigration status. Social exclusion, especially of youth, followed from low formal education, language barriers and racism (Blokland and Šerbedžija, 2018). The local administration described the neighbourhood as an ‘area of concern’ and its youth crime as ‘worrisome’. Youth workers, social workers, police, the elementary school and the local government held various round-tables in the last years dedicated entirely to the ‘problems of the neighbourhood’. The area appeared regularly in local news on crime. This external reputation (Permentier et al., 2008) or territorial stigma (Wacquant et al., 2014) framed all citizen–state relations.

Funded by the city as a charity in this and other districts, Stadtteilmütter should ‘support orientation’ of migrant women and act as ‘examples’ (Haarbach, 2022). In our neighbourhood, the women were employees of a charity. Initially it had a year’s training and then a payment for each family that was successfully visited 10 times. Over time, women got regular job-contracts and 200-hours-training. The project aims to incorporate migrant families ‘as quickly as possible’ in their district’s ‘educational, pedagogical and health system’ (Gesemann et al., 2020; Koch, 2009). ‘[Stadtteilmütter] are examples (. . .) for how a self-defined life is possible, and meanwhile support thousands of families’, praised a district mayor (Schilp, 2022). A newspaper reported: ‘The women should hinder (. . .) that families retract, lock themselves in a parallel society (. . .) become unreachable for society’ (Bernewasser, 2016). Women reported to the newspaper that they had become Stadtteilmütter as they sought work but lacked required qualifications, enjoyed giving support as they had already been doing in other ways and liked working with other women. Researchers attested that the women ‘blossom[ed] immediately’ because of new social ties and hope to be ‘better mothers themselves’ through the qualification (Macher, 2022) especially when they had not worked before (KUKON, 2022).

A nation-state’s work to produce ‘good migrant mothers’ is a topic widely discussed by other scholars (for example for women in circular migration by Lutz, 2016 or for Polish women in the UK by Erel, 2011). This production was organized around themes to be addressed with every family, including health, language training and schooling but also addiction prevention and sexual development (Kast, 2006). The programme defined ‘good mothers’ as open to public institutions instead of inwardly family-oriented (Bernewasser, 2016) and taking ‘advantage of further counseling and educational offers’ (Kast, 2006:17) by the state. It follows guidelines of bilingual education and mutual respect: ‘The mothers should understand that education starts already at home’: children should learn two languages at home, always be spoken to ‘softly and quietly’, and be treated ‘on eye-level’ (Plahl, 2018).

An evaluative study showed that the Stadtteilmütter increased the network strengths and sizes and diminished conflicts. Going with clients through ‘tunnels of administration’, Stadtteilmütter ‘help reduce the hurdles of the clients’ to formulate concerns to state agents, and, the study claims, help ‘open’ local institutions by creating ‘understanding for the life-worlds and needs of migrant women’ (Sülzle et al., 2019:3). Berg et al. (2015) found self-reported positive effects among clients, but low numbers of reached families. Koch (2020) worried that a ‘new category of social workers’ grew: cheaper than workers with social work degrees, but less professional. Sülzle et al. (2019) suggested that mixing of private and formal ties made the work burdensome. Our findings relate to this.

Building Symbolic Capital by Emotion Work

As the Hub’s manager, Eileen had built many relations around the centre. Her body piercings, black makeup, tattoos and work biography as former pub owner defied stereotypes of ‘the Turkish woman’. We read her lifestyle markers as visualizations of her bridging role: clearly not an observing traditional Muslim, or an ‘Alman’ (e.g. white German) but visibly ‘literate’ in Berlin’s activist community work. Eileen saw her work in terms of responsibility to ‘take care’ of the residents: ‘there are 3800 people living here. And it is my task to focus on everyone and all issues.’ Initially, she thought she ‘would do this with [her] left hand only’. After seven years, she reflected:

I’m exhausted [. . .] because of my personality, I’m giving much more than I should [. . .] so it takes the upper hand quite quickly. [. . .] I am a very warm Mensch and very strongly build on relationships. Like, I need relationships to do my work.

For Eileen, the qualification necessary to do so was a personal, moral quality, which residents had to recognize and attribute value to, not professionally acquired skills. She used her warmth to build relations but drained her personal resources: ‘as I have a relationship to the people here, they don’t always see me as a social worker, but rather as a family member or friend. And then naturally themes and expectations emerge, that sometimes are very, very burdensome.’ Eileen illustrated this with a mediation of a tenants’ conflict, which turned out to be a family feud where she was ‘stuck with the two families’:

Really also the emotionality behind it, the tears that I have dried. Ehh. . . the suffering of the children who suffered so much from this entire family war. Like, I really get to know too many details. Let me put it like that. Had I been sitting in an office somewhere as a social worker, I would only get the facts on my desk. Here, however, I don’t just get the facts, I get the entire. . . the entire gulf that’s in the back of it all.

Eileen explained: would a parent enter a Jugendamt [child protective service] office with a child with school problems and respond to ‘what is the problem’ with ‘math’, one would ‘lie a little’, but the case worker would take care of the math problem – and only work with ‘facts’: ‘That doesn’t mean that I think this is right, because I definitely think that this gulf behind the curtains plays the major role to resolve the [factual problems].’ Eileen differentiated facts and issues such as the lived experiences of domestic violence, poverty and exclusions through legal status restrictions. Facts as constructed in report cards, degrees, apprenticeship certificates, psychological and remedial test outcomes and the like are signifiers of accrued value of compliance or instead deviance in society. The institutional logics required case workers to only define such facts to then take care of registered deficits. Their logic did not assume trust, only confidence in the adequacy and competences of professionals. In contrast, in the Hub, values accrued in relationships included sympathy, empathy and care – the values that make us feel that a social space transmits trustfulness. Eileen had noted that her personality brought her to engage deeply, but as sociologists, we also see a different logic of meaning making – and symbolic value.

Doing things ‘depends not so much on intrinsic capacity, or even upon dispositions or habits, but on the ways in which the world is available as a space of action, a space where things “have a certain place” or are “in place”’ (Ahmed, 2007: 153). The space of the Hub mediated between the institutionally administrated facts-as-problems, categorized according to the state’s paragraphs and regulations, and Eileen’s work through improvisations, partial story-telling, reputation making, shame, secrecy and casual banter and joking. Such work drew on meanings attributed to emotional practices and bodily presence. Eileen brought warmth, the habit of keeping secrets and balanced asking with not-asking. She worked in the contact zone of bodies as she dried tears and embraced people. This brought her ‘behind the curtains’.

After the Hub’s COVID-19 closure, Eileen shared her telephone number with residents, who contacted her day and night. Long phone-calls of people in isolation blurred the boundaries (even more) between ‘working with facts’, and emotion work. Eileen accrued value through practices that carried warmth, a symbol of friendship or family. The symbolic meaning of heartfulness as an emotion allowed the emulation of other learnt experiences: as we learn to see such warmth as a symbol that people care about our welfare, the inference follows that we can trust. But the families increasingly dissolved the boundary between Eileen’s personality and her professional identity. She separated the ‘behind the curtain’ from the formal categorizations of ‘facts’, but her holistic approach came with a continuously felt experience of boundaries being crossed. This depleted her emotionally, even though the trust that she was entrusted with was what she had invested symbolic capital for in the first place.

Navigating Trust between Domestic and Institutional Logics

As an institution, the Stadtteilmütter programme assumed that in certain neighbourhoods, migrant women needed help to enhance parental skills, an assumption also common in other places (e.g. Bauer, 2017; Erel, 2011) and for lower social class (Cooper, 2021) although sometimes seeing a push-back, as Kerrane et al. (2024) show for British-born Southeast Asian mothers. At the time of our fieldwork, the COVID-19 restrictions allowed meetings outside with more than two persons, and the Stadtteilmütter workers gathered outside of the Hub at fixed times to offer advice. One of them, Sheila, explained that ‘building trust’ to help women ‘open up’ was a necessary ‘first step’ in her work. Many women with whom she worked were reluctant to share problems because they feared state interventions. The Stadtteilmütter programme premised that the clients were deficient in their uptake of state programmes for children and youth (and did not expect them to challenge such devaluations, as Erel (2011) found in her study). However, eligibility required them to share more than a problem being ‘math’. Among each other, in domestic logics, women thought trusting state agents was impossible. They experienced primarily a punitive state. For example, families on social security income (Bürgergeld), especially when refugees (Etzel, 2021), lived under continuous surveillance and threat of payment-cuts when filling out the wrong form, not giving the full and correct information at the proper moment, not reporting a change in the household in time and so on. Schools worked with threats of suspension and other exclusions when children did not behave according to established norms. Parents not attending parent–teacher meetings did not receive their children’s report cards. Women were supposed to know infant vaccination schedules and initiate regular dentist visits on their own initiative and faced judgemental comments from health care staff when they delayed appointments or had wrong information. The German symbolic practices of mothering properly in relations with the state draws on extraordinary implicit knowledge (Blokland, 2024).

The Stadtteilmütter worked in a domestic logic, which framed state presence as threat and truth-telling to state institutions as risk. They had to engage with mothers on eye-level, as migrants and as mothers. But they could not be ‘friends’. The social support network of mothers around the Hub and the courtyard-oriented built structure also meant that reputation making and breaking through gossip always had to be taken into account, as in any network with high density and a local base. So, the workers had to create a social space where things could be told without fear for reputational damage in the domestic logics and without consequences of interventions – for example by the Jugendamt. Sheila therefore saw value in being welcoming and open:

I was in the family centre one day, and a mommy came down [. . .] I didn’t know her [. . .] she was so ready and done somehow, in my view, that I said: ‘would you like to wait a little here? You are welcome to come in, have something to drink.’ [. . .] and then she suddenly hugged me and cried, which was new to me, too. Maybe because I had been close with her and welcomed her nicely.

Sheila used her professional position to suggest trustworthiness through secrecy (e.g. the ability or habit of keeping secrets, Simmel, 1906) in relation to possible reputational damage:

I told her ‘when you like, you are welcome to talk to me. And that will stay between us here. We work here. Or you can simply sit here and calm down’ and then ‘if something is the matter, then just say so. When you’d like to talk about it.’ You are not supposed to put pressure. They have to arrive first, don’t they (. . .) I talked with her, and she was much calmer.

While Sheila stressed distance from domestic logics by pointing out that she was there to work, it remained emotional work of care:

It ought to be this way (. . .) it is what one needs. I mean (. . .) not simply saying something like: ‘well, what’s the matter with you then?’ But that you communicate the feeling that one will be listened to, even when you don’t need to know immediately what’s going on. But that she just simply feels well.

Sheila attempted to create a trust relation by stressing that it was her work, so that she could be expected to keep secret whatever the woman confided in her. In other settings, Stadtteilmütter maintained a distance from institutional logics. They then acted as mothers, downplaying institutional links to not be seen as professionals in direct communication. They sometimes hid the ‘name badge’ that they had to wear to not stand out. Professional ‘help’ would immediately suggest hierarchy and distance, so they preferred to talk about their work as ‘support’. Shirin explained: ‘aid is too much referring to problems, support sounds better, because it means you can still make the future good. There is more promise in it, the promise of improvement.’ But they also talked about avoiding to produce friendship through help, shielding themselves against assumptions of reciprocity (Gouldner, 1960). As long as they were not offering help, no debt was created in social capital’s give-and-take. As long as practices of the Stadtteilmütter were enabling rather than caring, and encouraging rather than giving, they involved emotions without the symbolic economy of indebtedness in favour banks that is characteristic for social capital ties: one peer supported another, but the first one did so as a job. The Stadtteilmütter’s institutional affiliation helped to accrue value in interactions with other mothers. People recognized and greeted them. And while they sought not to be seen as aid providers, ‘one knew what they have done to help’ without expectations of returns. Shirin felt that people knowing who she was because of her work gave her status: working for others in the neighbourhood, supporting and caring, helped her achieve a situational respectability (Skeggs, 2004). This demonstrates the working of symbolic capital: Shirin and Sheila had their cultural capital – their professional positions – recognized in the neighbourhood and used it as an affective power in building relations (Threadgold, 2020: 94).

The women, however, found it not easy to ‘move easily through’ (Threadgold, 2020: 94) between the social spaces with domestic and institutional logics. Sabina developed stomach problems, which she ascribed to stress: caring for her household, children and her ‘clients’, she had little time ‘for herself’, as she always put ‘a lot of heart’ into her work. The use of Whatsapp and people calling her at night, uncommon before the pandemic, brought ‘stress in her head’. It was ‘emotional’ that so many people wanted something from her. Her boss always told her not to answer phone-calls or read messages after 5 p.m., but that was ‘simply not possible’. Sabina noted that she knew that it was ‘her own responsibility’ to ignore the calls and messages, but she would lose ‘people’s trust’ if she would do so. Besides, most ‘really urgent and important’ situations needed immediate support. Shirin, with a Kurdish background, shared a story of support she had offered to a (another Kurdish) client who had recently moved to Germany and had not known anyone to illustrate that for her, too, responding after working hours was not feasible, but unavoidable. Setting limits as the institutional logics required was difficult. Shirin applied the cultivating of an aspect of an ethnically based identity that Erel (2011: 698) identified as culture work or Inowlocki and Lutz (2000: 307) described as a trace of ‘self-referential truth represented by numerous phantom constructs in all kinds of communication of culturalized ethnic difference’. In her ‘culture’, Shirin said, it was ‘more open’ and people spoke ‘with their heart’. She had to explain to the Kurdish newcomer that she could not be with her in all situations as ‘here, regulations and laws are like this’ and that everyone had their jurisdiction. She could not always support in every field. This implied negotiating respect while upholding a professional attitude: ‘Otherwise, [the Kurdish newcomer] would say that the only Kurdish woman she had met in Berlin did not help her.’ A formal restriction – do not reply after 5 p.m. – might thus have worked seen from the logics of the employer, but not from the domestic logics through which the Stadtteilmütter created symbolic capital by being present, available, listening and caring. Paid only for specific hours, they could not restrict work to these hours without damaging symbolic capital – reputation – on which they must draw to build social capital, or bring traffic over bridges. Trust resulted from endurance to make themselves, as persons, available and from engagement beyond ‘facts’. Denying support could jeopardize the relational maintenance of trust.

Symbolic Capital in Context

The acts of gaining reputation and respect are contextualized by the disadvantaged neighbourhood with its stigmatized external reputation and the lack of value ascribed to the women’s positions on other scales as part of broader ‘minoritization’, in which all institutions that participate ‘encapsulate migrants and their lived practices in an ethnic semantic’ (Gutiérrez Rodríguez, 1999: 161–162, our transl.). Ula shared that working as a Stadtteilmütter made her ‘stronger’. So did Sabina, who had worked for 12 years as a teacher in Iran. She had not converted her degree, as she would not be able to teach with her headscarf (outlawed in Berlin public schools). As Stadtteilmütter, she had become ‘someone’ again. As her colleagues knew she was a teacher, she received much respect.

Things worked differently where Stadtteilmütter went with clients to access state services, which do not ‘expect a foreigner as their discussion-partner’, as Gutiérrez Rodríguez (1999: 193, our transl.) already observed in 1999 and Helma Lutz described in her study on migrant social workers as early as 1991. In such institutions, the Stadtteilmütter downplayed personal connections to clients and reduced emotional engagement. Sheila was Muslim and wore a veil, ‘that [is considered as] the metaphor for the cultural and religious strangeness of Muslim immigrants’ (Lutz, 2001: 225). She told us about a visit to the ‘Job Centre’, which administers social benefits, known to be hard to access. Sheila had learnt to always mention her professional role and the name of the Charity: as a person she would not be read in her right place. She needed to explain herself to the street-level workers to negotiate access to this institution, which tries hard not to open its doors to persons, but attempts to stick to facts of cases with case numbers: ‘When I say I am Stadtteilmütter, maybe that works differently, when I say I am Stadtteilmütter from [name of Charity] it works differently again, because [the Charity] is well-known.’ Once, the Job Centre’s case worker had wondered about her competences:

I was there a few times and [the case worker] had recognized [me] right away. I do not know, maybe I come across as so neutral. Finally, [the case worker] looked at me and said ‘what is your profession?’ because I did not have a name tag. We are always obliged to carry an ID, so we can identify ourselves. Then the case worker said ‘I knew right away that you had something, because you made direct eye contact [. . .] your attitude was so confident, when you talked you were so sure of yourself somehow, you came across as very confident in your attitude.’

A female, migrant body (the embodiment of culturalized and ethicized difference, see Gutiérrez Rodríguez, 1999: 166), was read as ‘confident’, which required explanation, while the white body was in place. The inhabiting of street-level bureaucracies in Berlin remains predominantly white, ingrained in specific categories of what is normalization as organizational principle (Lutz and Wenning, 2001: 17). The case worker reasoned from the habits of this world. The symbolic value that Sheila acquired in this situation reinforced the institutional understanding of migrant women as not outspoken or well-informed. The case worker’s question ‘what is your profession?’ suggested that Sheila’s self-confidence required an explanation. Sheila felt recognized in her professionality. Yet, this moment also showed that the institutional logic framing the interaction assumed whiteness as standard and implied what was ‘in place’ and what ‘out of place’ (Ahmed, 2007: 153) and appeared in this case to have not changed much since scholars like Gutiérrez Rodríguez (1999) and Lutz (1991) embarked on discussing this.