Exploring sensemaking of trust through the lens of time: Finnish welfare professionals’ perspectives on institutional encounters with forced migrants in the neoliberal welfare state

Abstract

While attention has recently been given to the time sensitivity of trust, current research seems to fall short of examining welfare professionals’ experiences of the relation between trust and time. Therefore, this article employs an analytical lens of time and temporality to explore how welfare professionals make sense of trust and distrust in encounters with forced migrant service users in a changing neoliberal welfare state. Empirically, the analysis draws on semi-structured individual interviews with welfare professionals in employment and social service institutions in Finland. Theoretically, I apply a dual framework that leans on the interplay between trust and time. Recognising trust as relational yet fragile, contextual and dynamic, and viewing time as increasingly commodified and accelerated, I show how time impacts and shapes trust in institutional encounters. My analyses uncover four ways in which welfare professionals’ sensemaking of trust was linked to time. First, I show how the welfare professionals perceived the foundations of the trusting relationship in relation to time. Second, time and trust were interconnected in the efficient institutional tempo of encounters. Third, when the welfare professionals were replaced, trust was shaped negatively through disruptions to service user relationships in the series of institutional encounters. Fourth, I show how flows of institutional encounters shaped trust both positively and negatively. Thus, this article contributes to the literature on the intersections of trust, time and migration research, particularly in the transformation of the neoliberal Nordic welfare state context.

Keywords

trust time institutional encounters forced migrants welfare professionals Nordic welfare state

Introduction

This article contributes to understanding welfare professionals’ sensemaking of trust and distrust when encountering service users with a forced migration background. By highlighting temporalities of trust, I analyse the sensemaking of trust in institutional encounters while deepening time analyses of trust research. Empirically, this article contributes to the existing research by deploying a time lens to analyse top-down experiences of trust shaping from the perspective of welfare professionals. Trust is vital for societies and especially institutional systems to function well (Bachmann and Impken, 2011; Luhmann, 1979) and for providing and receiving appropriate services in the welfare state (Jessen, 2010; Pinkney, 2013). Trust has been argued as a significant element of welfare professionals’ work, influencing everyday decisions and encounters with service users in complex ways (Davidovitz and Cohen, 2022a, 2022b; Jessen, 2010; Pinkney, 2013; Smith, 2001). In the migration context of the Nordics, trust dynamics have been recognised as essential for providing appropriate guidance (Sundbäck, 2023a; Tanttu, 2017; Turtiainen, 2012), centring individual welfare professionals when building institutional trust (Fersch, 2016; Turtiainen, 2012) while also highlighting welfare professionals’ discretion in trust shaping (Sundbäck, 2023b).

While recent research has brought valuable attention to the temporalities of trust, emphasising dynamic features (Möllering, 2013, 2014), trust trajectories over time (Korsgaard et al., 2018) and disruptive change (Bachmann et al., 2015), the sensemaking of trust from a time perspective has been less explored among welfare professionals. Previous research has shown temporal conflicts in welfare professionals’ work (Hirvonen and Husso, 2012; Yuill and Mueller-Hirth, 2019) and how the work of welfare professionals’ is ‘performed at the intersection of different time rhythms’ according to Hjärpe (2022: 292), making it especially interesting to investigate from a trust perspective. By foregrounding welfare professionals’ sensemaking of trust from a time perspective, this article responds to the need to deepen our understanding of trust dynamics in institutional encounters with forced migrants. For the purpose of this article, I will lean on the notion of trust as institutional-based relational trust. The relational aspects of trust have been shown to be central in research on forced migration: ‘trust was primarily relational and dynamic, that is, shaped by current and past relationships and shifting throughout the resettlement journey’ (Essex et al., 2022: 559). This perspective is relevant as the welfare professionals’ sensemaking of trust strongly evolves around the service users’ understanding of trust, as I show in my analyses.

In the Finnish welfare state, institutional encounters have become more culturally and linguistically diverse due to a growing number of persons with a foreign background (Statistics Finland, 2023), many of whom are forced migrants. Institutional encounters are essential for forced migrants’ future aspirations (Nordberg, 2015; Sundbäck, 2023a; Turtiainen, 2012), as accessing welfare services and benefits is tied to interactions with public institutions. Hence, institutional encounters with forced migrants require a recognition of different forms of structural vulnerability that follow from forced migration and resettlement. In such a context, professionals need to build trust with the service user, not only in relation to themselves as professionals but also towards the institution and more broadly the new country of settlement. Consequently, trusting (or distrusting) institutional relations affect the way migration policy is delivered to service users. While Finland is part of the Nordic welfare states, traditionally entailing universal, broad social benefits and services funded by taxation, service delivery is increasingly featured by neoliberal, efficiency-driven New Public Management policies (Kokkonen et al. 2018; Nordberg, 2018). As part of this transformation, the political discourses on integration centre strongly on the notion of speed, setting the key aim to ‘speed up integration and employment of immigrants’ (Ministry of Economic Affairs and Employment, 2022). Consequently, in Finland and beyond, the neoliberal turn has created a political consensus on the need to integrate migrants more efficiently (Kamali and Jönsson, 2018; Nordberg, 2015). As policy often is made through street-level bureaucracy where bureaucrats possess discretion (Lipsky, 2010), the institutional encounters with welfare professionals are crucial for gatekeeping as the welfare professionals serve as the face of the welfare state.

Against this backdrop, as welfare professionals become mediators between the institution and the service user, their sensemaking of trust through the lens of time and temporality offers an interesting research site, especially in the wake of the ‘long summer of migration’ (Kasparek and Speer, 2015), with more restrictive migration policy regimes in the Nordics. Therefore, in this article, I ask how do welfare professionals’ make sense of trust in institutional encounters through the lens of time? Sensemaking is here understood as capturing various realities of agency, flow, unfolding and emerging, while ‘turning circumstances into a situation that is comprehended explicitly in words and that serves as a springboard into action’ (Weick et al., 2005: 409). Empirically, I draw on 15 qualitative interviews with welfare professionals in two institutional settings in Finland; employment and economic development offices including the local government pilots on employment (hereafter referred to as employment services) and the local social services for immigrants (hereafter referred to as immigrant services). These institutions are among the first institutions encountered by forced migrants settling in Finland and constituted crucial gates for further navigating towards a more stable position in the new society.

In what follows, I start by discussing theoretical aspects of time and trust, emphasising the relational aspects of trust in institutional settings and time as controlled, institutional clock time but also as temporal disruptions and flows. I refer to the notion of shaping trust, emphasising the fragile and changing dynamics of trust and embracing various positive or negative antecedents shaping trust. While the notion of building trust has a positive connotation on making trust stronger, shaping trust also includes trust dilemmas and trust disruptions. In the subsequent sections, I present the methods and data, followed by an empirical analysis of welfare professionals’ sensemaking of how temporality and time shape trust and distrust. Here, I expound on four themes for the sensemaking of trust, evolving around the establishment of a trusting relation, the institutional tempo, negative disruptions and time flows. I conclude with a discussion and thoughts on future research.

Theoretical approaches to trust, time and temporality

The theoretical framework of this article rests on dual pillars, combining theoretical approaches to trust and time. In the well-researched area of trust, definitional debates continuously shape the concept of trust; for the purpose of this article, I lean on the notion of trust as relational. This approach is useful for revealing the relational nature of trust between the trustor and trustee (Möllering, 2014) and for unfolding how this relationship is sensitive to time. As noted by Frederiksen (2014: 169), a relational approach challenges us to make sense of trust ‘as a characteristic of relations and not only of individuals’ and therefore ‘not solely an individual phenomenon based on individual perception but also develops from and within social relations’. Bachmann et al. (2015) highlighted the relational aspect in research on trust repair and showed how symbolic acts such as apologising can rebuild a trusting relationship. Further, relational trust has been shown to be crucial in previous work for understanding welfare professionals’ sensemaking of trust (Cranston, 2011; Davidovitz and Cohen, 2022a; Pinkney, 2013). Smith (2001) foregrounded trust in social work by arguing that if effectiveness is measures not only by outcomes and targets but also by effectiveness in a sense of qualitative and moral features of interpersonal relations (such as sensitivity, encouragement, communication), trust is needed. Hence, trust is needed to make ‘social work to work’ (Smith, 2001: 298 emphasis in original text), and to my understanding, this indicates that trust is needed to deliver the service or benefit in a humane and emotional way, leaving the service user with a positive experience based on interpersonal relations. Trust in institutional settings has been contextualised as ‘constitutively embedded in the institutional environment in which a relationship is placed, building on favourable assumptions about the trustee's future behaviour vis-à-vis such conditions’ (Bachmann and Inpken, 2011: 284). Hence, for the purpose of this article, I subscribe to Backmann and Impken's notion of trust, as their approach captures the future notion of assumptions and coming behaviour while recognising the relational nature of trust and its embeddedness. When taking a relational approach, we also need to grasp the ‘diversity and variability of human relationships in order to understand how they shape trust and are shaped by trust in return’ (Möllering, 2014: 17). Hence, trust is not a dyadic phenomenon between two isolated actors creating a relationship, but the relationship is created within a context (Möllering, 2006). In this article, the relationship, as described by the informants, is based on and embedded in the institutional settings of employment and social services. Without the institutional settings, there would be no relationship between the welfare professional and the service user. Therefore, trust, as understood in this article, is a form of institution-based relational trust.

The temporal aspects of trust and distrust are often considered important when examining trust building and loss or the nature of trust (Möllering, 2013; Lyytinen, 2017). For instance, Frederiksen and Heinskou (2016: 382) argued that ‘trusting the other is embedded in the process of becoming that ties past, present and future together’. Similarly, Möllering (2013) pointed out that any trustful state of mind is preliminary and should be seen in relation to prior and likely future states of mind. Thus, embedded in the notion of trust is the sensitivity to both past and future time. Further, much trust research has explored changes in trust from a time perspective by presenting stage models on trust where calculus-based trust turns, with time, into knowledge-based trust and then identification-based trust (Lewicki and Bunker, 1996) or a growth model of trust highlighting trusting trajectories in longitudinal designs (Korsgaard et al., 2018). Other research has focused on how trusting (or distrusting) relationships emerge over time as a process (Möllering, 2014). Similarly, research has highlighted changing levels of trust, such as Ilmarinen et al.'s (2019) survey, which showed that migrants’ trust in social services declined with time. However, these studies often frame time as time passing by. Thus, scarce is trust research exploring various understandings of time and temporalities, such as commodified, institutional time, disruptions or flows of times and how they impact and shape the trusting relationship, as I intend to do in this article.

Therefore, in seeking to understand various nuances and aspects of time and temporality, I am inspired by Adam's (2004) notion of time control and clock time. Adam maintained that we can regulate and rationalise the pace of beings, social activities and institutions and that the notion of clock time is strongly connected to industrial time, where time is seen as a commodity, controllable and fixed, and where tempo is increased and maximised (Adam, 2004). Likewise, in relation to time and welfare capitalism, Fitzpatrick (2004: 202) argued that as the measurement of time has become more precise, ‘we have become less the agents who embody time and more the subject that commodified time embodies’. Therefore, time has become a commodity that needs to be used productively for it not to be wasted (Fitzpatrick, 2004: 202). In the Finnish context, researchers have argued that neoliberal reforms to the welfare state and the lack of public resources have challenged welfare service work by increasingly compressing it to be ‘measured by the units of clock time’ (Hirvonen and Husso, 2012: 352). Previous research in Sweden has highlighted aspects of time as crucial in institutional encounters where migration policy is made by welfare professionals and where administrative matters prevent time from being spent on supporting clients in the best way (Larsson, 2015). Regarding various notions of time, particularly those in a migration context, Griffiths (2017) showed how bureaucratic institutional time might operate with a linear and progressive view of time, where migrants move linearly from points A to B, while migrants’ lived time as part of everyday institutional encounters is far from linear. In their scoping review, Griffiths et al. (2013) identified five modes of thinking about time in a migration context when combining research on temporalities and migration: flows and moments, rhythms and cycles, tempos, synchronicity and disjuncture, and the future. While these modes are developed for understanding migrants’ time perceptions, I find them useful for understanding welfare professionals’ sensemaking of trust, as it evolves strongly around the service users’ sensemaking of trust and structural challenges set by the institutional system in the neoliberal welfare state. For that reason, my analyses focus on two of Griffiths et al.'s (2013) modes of time, namely tempos and flows, to untangle how welfare professionals make sense of trust (or distrust). In addition, I lean on the notion of negative disruption (Griffiths et al., 2013) to capture the sensemaking of trust and distrust in relation to discontinuities.

On data and methods

In order to understand how welfare professionals in migration services make sense of trust, I carried out semi-structured individual interviews. The data collection is part of a larger project on forced migrants and welfare professionals sense making of trust and distrust in institutional encounters. The data for this article consists of interviews with welfare professionals in Finland. All the informants worked at institutions offering services to forced migrants granted a residence permit on international protection grounds. Altogether, 15 welfare professionals working in Finnish welfare state institutions were interviewed for this article. The data were collected in two institutional settings during 2021–2022. Research approvals were granted by the municipalities/cities. First, I interviewed welfare professionals at the national public employment and business services as well as at the local government pilots on employment (n = 9). Second, I interviewed welfare professionals at the immigrant services at the municipal level (n = 6). Of the 15 informants, three were male, however, in order to protect the identity of the informants, I have refrained from revealing their gender. The work experience of the informants varied from a few months to over 30 years, and the age range varied from 20 to 60 years. Two of the welfare professionals mentioned their own migration background. While it would have been useful to contextualise the welfare professionals to a greater extent in the analyses, I refrained from doing so to protect their anonymity. Some of the semi-structured interviews were carried out face to face at the informants’ workplace while others took place online due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The informants were asked about institutional encounters with service users from a forced migrant background, preferably relatively newly arrived. The interview questions evolved mostly around understandings and experiences of trust and distrust and ways of building trust. The informants were asked about what trust in institutional encounters means to them, how they strive to strengthen trust (both towards themselves and the institution, as well as in the direction of the service user), if they have had positive or negative experiences of trust in institutional encounters. Due to my previous readings on temporal aspects of trust, the interview guide also included a question on whether and how the informants perceived trust changing over time. The data were analysed using qualitative content analysis and coded thematically using NVivo. Citations were translated from Finnish and Swedish to English by the author.

In order to further specify the institutional context of the research, I briefly present the policies guiding the informants’ work in the institutional settings. According to the legislative Act on the Promotion of Immigrant Integration (2010), the employment and economic development offices supports migrants’ employability and their navigation towards a more secure position in society (language courses, studies and employment measures). At the municipal level, immigrant services (usually placed administratively under the social sector of the city/municipality) focus on counselling and guidance related to housing and social benefits for forced migrants with residence permits. Here, welfare professionals such as social workers and social councillors give complementary and more holistic social counselling to service users compared to the welfare professionals at the employment office, where the focus is on employability and language learning. Regarding the nature and span of the informants’ relationships with service users, the institutional intention was to assign one main worker responsible for the service user during their clienthood in both institutional settings. According to the information provided by the informants, their case loads varied, with 35–40 persons for immigrant services, 70–80 for the local government pilots on employment and up to 150 for employment services. At immigrant services, the welfare professionals decided case by case on the duration of the encounter (max. 2 hours) based on the needs of the service user. At employment services, the encounter usually lasted for a maximum of 1 hour. The number of encounters was not predefined at immigrant services, and service users typically requested encounters from once a week to once a month. If the welfare professional had not heard from the service user in a while, they could also reach out. The duration of the welfare professional–service user relationship varied. For some at immigrant services working with aftercare (social services for migrants having arrived as unaccompanied minor asylum seekers once they turn 18), the duration of the relationship could last from when the service user turned 18 until they turned 25 (or earlier if the service user got Finnish citizenship). At employment services, the relationship with service users varied from a few months to several years, depending on the employment situation.

Centralising time and temporalities in sensemaking of trust

In tracing patterns and understandings of trust and distrust in my data, a common feature of the welfare professionals was the sensemaking of trust as dynamic, temporal and shapeable. Throughout the data, various aspects of time(s) emerged in relation to how trust or distrust was made sense of by the informants, especially related to structural institutional obstacles connected to service users’ trust or distrust trajectories. Hence, the perspective of service users was strongly emphasised by the welfare professionals in their reflections on the meaning of trust. Following this line of thought, I identified patterns of how time and trust were interrelated and combined these into four themes. First, time and trust were interconnected when establishing a trusting relation. Second, trust was shaped by the efficient institutional tempo of the encounters and thirdly through negative disruptions in service user relations. Fourthly, flows of institutional encounters shaped trust, embracing the impact of both past and future events.

Establishing a trusting relation

When discussing the sensemaking of trust, my informants highlighted how trusting (or distrusting) strongly evolved around the relationship between the welfare professional and the service user. Therefore, I start by discussing how informants centred the trusting relationship and how this connects to time and temporality. As noted by one informant when asked what trust means in the institutional encounter: ‘For me it means that trust starts with building the relation, we do need to build a trusting relation with many of the service users’ (Welfare Professional, Immigrant Services). Here, emphasising the need to build a trusting relationship indicates the awareness of a possible lack of trust or direct distrust among some of their service users due to different forms of structural vulnerability following forced migration and resettlement. This informant indicated that because of flight, war or trauma, service users with a forced migration background might be hesitant to trust. Another informant recognised that building trust takes time, as showed in the following extract: ‘As a professional, I am used to trust building taking time and demands perseverance, so for me it is not a new thing’ (Welfare Professional, Immigrant Services). Here, the informant made sense of trust as something needed to work on and invest time in. Putting time into trust building made sense, as the informants articulated trust as a crucial working tool in order to give service users appropriate services and benefits, in line with previous research findings (Davidovitz and Cohen, 2022a; Smith, 2001). Emphasising trusting and building also resonates with Möllering's (2013) argument that trust is never finished and needs to be continuously worked on.

Interestingly, some welfare professionals perceived the need for separate, informal, trust building time, besides the discourse on administrative matters, while others perceived that trust should be built during the administrative discourse. In the first case, the empirical data showed that using humour, talking about music, sharing personal things from the welfare professionals’ lives, discussing everyday things or clothing appeared as trust building time in the encounters. This informal chatting was deliberately a strategy to build trust, despite the fact that it took time away from administrative matters. Hence, in a context of institutional clock time where tempo is increased and maximised (Adam, 2004) and where time is a commodity (Fitzpatrick, 2004) the welfare professionals stole valuable commodified clock time turning it into trust building time. Others strove to create trust within the administrative discourse by letting the service users choose what to discuss or asking when the service user would like to meet and seeking to diminish the asymmetrical power relation in the encounters. While Griffiths (2017) and Hjärpe (2022) pointed to time control as a means of power, in this case, the welfare professionals strove to relinquish some of their time control in order to create space for the service user to have an impact on the order of the meeting. This also echoes Smith (2001) on changing epistemological stances in the encounters of welfare professionals. However, while there was an inherent power asymmetry between the service user and the welfare professional in the institutional setting, the welfare professional was also an intermediator, often unable to steer the time frames set by the institution. This exemplifies Hjärpe's (2022) view that welfare professionals are at the intersection of various time rhythms.

Conversely, while the welfare professionals emphasised trust building time, they were also aware of the fragility of trust: ‘A part of trust is very sensitive and, in some way, emotional, and the experience matters, some experiences, some matter or some small nuance can impact trust. In a way, as in any relationship, trust changes’ (Welfare professional, Employment Services). Here, the welfare professional emphasised the temporality of trust, resonating with previous research on the fragility of trust in forced migration contexts (Essex et al., 2022; Lyytinen, 2017). One welfare professional at immigrant services also emphasised the role of trauma in hindering or slowing down trust building, pointing out that:

It depends much on their mental wellbeing. At times, I need to remind myself that if things do not proceed as we have agreed or that the reciprocity does not change in the relationship with the service user then…well, it is also reciprocal [referring to the relationship] and the service user also has some responsibility. (Welfare Professional, Immigrant Services)

This informant also pointed out how their knowledge of trauma theories helped them to understand challenges in trust building, and mentioned that ‘if the service user starts out thinking ‘Will that person do harm to me?’, it will be a long way to building a trusting relationship’. Further, several informants mentioned how keeping promises but also not promising too much (in relation to services or benefits) was a way of building and sustaining a trusting relationship. This way of carefully avoiding future disappointments from the service users’ side also indicates the professionals’ sensitivity to future trust disruptions, giving the trusting relationship a future direction.

Further, according to the informants, longer service user relations over time created space for deeper trust, entailed service users opening up about difficult things and showing emotions, such as laughter or crying. Longer relations with service users enabled a deeper trusting relation where the service user shared difficult things:

After half a year, the clients start to open up about something that affects their functional capacity, for example, health. They have not had the courage to tell this before, and this is for me a signal that now they feel safe […]. (Welfare Professional, Immigrant Services)

Here, a trustful relation indicated a space where sensitive factors impacting the functional capacity of the service user, such as mental illness or domestic violence, could be discussed. Longer service user relations also engendered a trust stability so strong that even small disappointments would not break trust, as noted by one informant: ‘Once the ground is stable and the client relationship is longer and trust has been built strong, trust will not be lost, even if there was some sort of distortion’ (Welfare Professionals, Immigrant Services). Hence, a strong trusting relation between the service user and the welfare professional protected the relation from trust breakage, even if there were small disagreements or disappointments. According to this informant, who works with young service users, disagreements could relate to practical solutions such as not being able to provide additional financial support for a particular hobby or not being able to find suitable housing solutions.

In my data, foregrounding the establishment of a trusting relationship indicated that the service user started trusting the professional, enabling open communication. However, while pointing out the relational aspect of trust, the informants did not highlight how they themselves needed time to start trusting the service user, but underscored the time needed for the service users to trust them. In contrast to previous research on trust and public service delivery showing how professionals assess their clients’ trustworthiness (Davidovitz and Cohen, 2022b), the current sample of welfare professionals mainly indicated immediate and stable trust in the service users. Even after sometimes realising that service users had been lying, the informants tried to understand the reason and did not question the service users’ reliability. Instead, they showed empathy and recognised the epistemological stances of their service users when it came to various factors hindering trusting relationships. This could partly be explained by what Smith (2001) referred to as evolving changing perceptions of epistemologies in welfare professional–service user relations. Smith (2001) noted the importance of service users’ accounts as ‘true, real and meaningful for them’, and hence, service users are to a larger extent invited to engage with social workers as ‘fellow travelers on the road to discovery’ (Smith, 2001: 298).

The efficient institutional tempo hindered trust

I now move on to show how the efficient institutional tempo hindered the establishment of a trusting relationship. One informant explained how working time was scarce and how this affected the trusting relationship:

I wish there was more time for the clients; then we could work on trust – that in one meeting, there would be more time to go deeper into things. If things are bad already and there is a crisis going on, then there is less time for free conversation. (Welfare Professional, Immigrant Services)

Here, the welfare professionals need to prioritise solving crises (e.g., providing financial support, housing or mental health services), but there is not enough time to work on trust. The informants also emphasised the need for time to explain the system and services in order to create or maintain a trusting relation to themselves and the institution. Here, the amount of meeting time appeared crucial, especially in the first meetings to go through the institutional vocabulary and inform about the administrative system. The first meeting was also the place when welfare professionals shared information about possibilities to file a complaint it the service user was not satisfied with the service and to tell that all information given was confidential, all in order to build trust. Some welfare professionals emphasised that service users with a forced migration background require more time due to their unfamiliarity with the ‘bureaucratic jungle’ and digital systems. Without a strong common language, extra time is needed for the explanation stage or for working with an interpreter. Similarly, the informants emphasised the need for time to explain decisions. When there was enough time to explain a decision and explain other options how to proceed in the system, the professional perceived that trust was not broken. What is interesting here is the way welfare professionals discussed how time for explaining both systems and decisions could turn distrust into trust or prevent distrust. Consequently, time was needed to create an understanding of the system, making the system more familiar and, thus, creating space for institutional trust. This echoes Davidovitz and Coheńs (2022a) argument that trust increases with the degree of exposure.

Further, as shown by Yuill and Mueller-Hirth (2019), ‘paperwork time’ reduces the time available for ‘compassionate temporality’ in social work. According to Yuill and Mueller-Hirth (2019), compassionate temporality can be seen as time devoted to helping people and using various skills the professionals learned during their university studies and spending time working intensively with service users. However, this was not possible due to the high number of service users assigned to each welfare professional:

The system is too efficient and gnaws away time from the actual meeting with the client as we always have to search for better results and make efficient use of time. Thus, we assume that the clients are like robots who grasp everything immediately and trust us immediately; however, this is not the case. (Welfare Professional, Employment Service)

This informant argued that when working with 70–80 clients, the institutional structure did not provide an opportunity to create trust or to do counselling of good quality. Here, we can relate to Smith's (2001) argument that trust is needed in order to deliver the service in a good way, emphasising the qualitative and moral features of interpersonal relations. In line with Larsson's (2015) findings, the neoliberal impact on migration policies has taken time away from actual interaction and institutional discourse. In order to control time (Adam, 2004), welfare professionals need to steer the meeting and push the tempo. This echoes Pinkney's (2013: 101) argument that how time is spent with the service user ‘is curtailed and squeezed with the demands of other competing priorities’. In a similar vein, Hirvonen and Husso (2012: 360) showed that the ‘execution of overlapping tasks on a knife's edge, managing emotions and creating a trustful and caring atmosphere all at the same time, are heavy exigencies for any worker’. This also resonates well with Fitzpatrick's (2004) argument regarding how welfare professionals have become subjects that embody commodified time. As I show above, this commodification of time, according to the welfare professional, is an antecedent of distrust.

Likewise, insufficient time and the efficient institutional tempo were understood to create distrust as service users still had to manage on their own:

In an effective system, the service user easily sense that we don’t have much time and do not tell us everything. They only tell what is very necessary and realize that it is not worth using time for this as, in the end, they will have to manage on their own anyway – that they cannot trust the system […]. (Welfare Professional, Employment Service)

As the public institutional system has, through the neoliberal turn (Hirvonen and Husso, 2012), become callously effective, service users create distrust and a feeling of having to navigate the maze on their own. This informant, who had extensive work experience, questioned the frames for the encounter and sometimes, using their discretion (Lipsky, 2010) stretched encounters over longer durations than the ordinary 1 hour in order to work on the trusting relation. Hence, as I have showed elsewhere (Sundbäck, 2023b), via these trust-shaping strategies, such as stretching or breaking institutional guidelines in order to build a trusting relation, the welfare professionals also positioned themselves critical to the institutional framework by opposing the efficient institutional tempo.

Negative disruptions in trusting relations

As discussed above, time within the encounters affected trust and in addition to this, deriving from time spent with the client, longer client relations strengthen trust over time, echoing previous research on professionals understanding of trust (Pinkney, 2013). However, the institutional system presented challenges relating to longer relations with service users, creating what Griffiths et al. (2013) called temporal discontinuity and negative disruptions. The encounters exemplified ruptured time when the service user and, in many cases, the welfare professionals would have wanted longer relations instead of ruptured encounters that enhanced liminality instead of progress.

However, the informants maintained that over time, long service user's relations were rarely possible; instead, one crucial reason for distrust among service users were welfare professional’ s replacements, as noted by one informant: ‘Clients always have to explain to the new worker the same painful things. They ask why workers change all the time as, for them, it is like “my own” worker’ (Welfare Professional, Immigrant Services). Thus, a new welfare professional, an unfamiliar face of the institution, resulted in having to repeatedly retell life stories, which usually included painful and traumatic experiences. From a time dynamics perspective, this can be referred to as what Griffiths et al. (2013) called halting or Griffiths’ (2014) sticky time, where things do not proceed. Consequently, changing welfare professionals created distrust or what one of the informants referred to as ‘mental distance’ between them and the service user. Another informant stated in relation to changing case workers:

Clients have said that the worker always changes, that they need to tell their story over and over again and that they still have not gotten help. If you have heard the same mantra that with trust you tell your story, there might be some cynicism that, again, I will tell my story, and it raises distrust about whether this will be yet another person who still cannot help me. (Welfare Professional, Immigrant Services)

From the perspective of professionals, replacing case workers and disrupting the trust creation process resulted in service users engaging with distrust and cynicism. Not only did service users have to repeatedly share their traumatic experiences, they were also cynical about actually getting help due to case worker turnover. This reflection is in line with previous research on children and welfare professional trust building understandings (Pinkney, 2013). In my data, there appeared to be no single reason for case work turnover, and the institutional intention was to assign one contact person to a service user. However, for various reasons such as changing jobs, internal circulation due to new institutional amendments or parental leave, or the service user moving further in the institutional system (e.g., due to age), the welfare professionals changed. Negative disruptions in the trusting relationship also emerged when processes outside the direct institutional encounter, such as family reunification, were prolonged. Due to the disappointment related to the obstacles in the process, service users could blame the welfare professional for this and, as a consequence, lose trust in the professional. In other cases, when service users received misinformation about services or benefits from their own community, this could lead to losing temporal trust in the professional. In these cases, the welfare professionals strived to take time to show the service user that they were on the same side in order to restore the trusting relationship. Apologising was also presented as central if mistakes had been made on the welfare professional's part, indicating how symbolic acts can restore trust (Bachmann et al., 2015).

Flows of institutional encounters shaping trust and distrust

Further, the analyses highlighted time and temporality from a broader perspective entailing the past, present and future showing how flows of institutional encounters shape trusting relations. By flows, I refer to a series of events happening over time, in line with Griffiths et al. (2013). The informants emphasised how previous institutional encounters in both Finland and abroad influenced service users’ trusting relations both positively and negatively. This resonates with the findings of Griffiths et al. (2013) highlighting the presence of the past, present and future in migrants’ lives and those of Essex et al. (2022), Lyytinen (2017) and Ni Raghallaigh (2014) on previous negative experiences challenging trust building processes in countries of resettlement. However, what is interesting in my data is that when referring to previous negative experiences shaping trust, the informants often referred to service useŕs experiences of Finnish institutions, not institutions abroad. Below, a welfare professional shares their narratives on how service users’ negative experiences of previous encounters with Finnish institutions shaped trust;

Of course, if you have had to encounter several institutions and explain your story over again and convince things – I recall one client who arrived in Finland as a minor and waited 4–5 years for asylum. By that point, there were already some severe negative feelings as you have had to complain and fight. (Welfare Professional, Immigrant Services)

In the above extract, the informant shares how the series of institutional encounters entailing negative experiences impacted service users’ trust in institutions in general. This resonates with Ilmarinen et al. (2019) showing how levels of trust in health services decreased among migrants with time spent in Finland. One explanation for decreasing trust given by the informants was that service users’ expectations were not met (see also Sundbäck, 2023a). If the system does not provide services and benefits in alignment with expectations, distrust can ensue. The informants perceived the service users’ initial trust sometimes turning into distrust over time due to what the informants referred to as ‘chains of small disappointments’ or a ‘culmination of bitter experiences’ in Finland:

If we think about those young clients who have been part of the asylum reception system and have encountered authorities, there might be a feeling of resentment, for example, waiting for the residence permit. This might culminate in bitter experiences, with the client immediately accusing the new worker. (Welfare Professional, Immigrant Services)

Hence, without having met the new welfare professional, the service user automatically accuses the new worker due to negative previous experiences, which created a frustration among the professional. However, the informants were also understanding towards the service user struggling with previous bad experiences, highlighting Smith's (2001) research on changing epistemologies. This also resonates with Pinkney (2013), who emphasised listening and taking seriously the service users’ views and opinions when building trust. Hence, sensemaking of trust evolved around the welfare professionals’ understanding of service users’ trust (or distrust) legacy. Here, we can relate to what Möllering (2013) referred to as a preliminary and unfinished trustful state of mind being contextualised in between prior and future states of mind. In addition, the welfare professionals sensemaking of trust highlighted trust as a characteristic of relations and not only of individuals, echoing Frederiksen (2014). In relation to previous encounters, the informants also emphasised the need for what they called ‘fixing encounters’:

Trust building towards various institutions – the institutional network, the police, the emergency services, the social service, the Migri [Finnish Immigration Service] – requires a lot of time and fixing encounters, including several encounters. (Welfare Professionals, Employment Services)

In line with this, according to the welfare professionals, previous experiences with institutions in Finland can also have a healing function.

Further, one informant at employment services mentioned some service users were rather trusting towards employment services, as they had heard positive things about the services from their social worker or at immigrant services:

If the service users has been in contact with a social worker or social councellor previously, then perhaps we are bunched into that same group and if the experiences there have been good then there is no resistance or distrust. (Welfare Professional, Employment Services)

Hence, the social worker/social councellor functioned as a mediator for institutional trust towards employment services, without yet having formed a relationship with the welfare professionals there. In a similar vein, one informant at immigrant services mentioned how they functioned as intermediators for the restoration of trust towards other institutions, such as accompanying the service user to the police or defending services users’ rights in discussions with a bank or health services. Hence, the welfare professionals also put extra time into trust building outside their own institution, functioning as trust intermediators by fixing encounters.

While various forms and directions of trust were not the main analytical focus of this article, a time-centred analysis untangled certain nuances regarding directions of the trusting relations. When asked about the direction of trust in terms of whether the welfare professionals perceived that service users trusted them or the institution, they pointed to the importance of the trusting relation between themselves and the service users, the person to person trusting relation. This indicates social trust (towards the person) instead of institutional trust (towards the abstract system/institution). As the professional is the one spending time with the service user and delivering the services, trust was placed in this relation. Another reason for social as opposed to institutional trust, according to the welfare professionals, was the confusion generated by the complicated administrative system, which, according to the informants, hindered trust among service users. As the institution does not explain nor open the decision, while the welfare professional is the one putting time on explaining the content and reasons for the decision and thus making sense of the decision, trust is placed in the welfare professional. Others perceived trust as transformative, starting with the professional, but in time, when the system became more familiar, trust was also variously placed in the institution. One informant explained: ‘People get attached to other people first, not the institution, as the people and that face create the visible part of the system’ (Welfare Professional, Employment Service). Therefore, I would argue that the line between institutional and social trust seems to be shifting and somewhat blurry in the series of institutional encounters revealed in the data. While, according to the informants, migrants might have high expectations entailing high levels of institutional trust, this might turn into institutional distrust alongside chains of small disappointments or a culmination of bitter experiences. However, due to fixing encounters, trust restoration does take place, and this form of trust is merely social, not institutional, as it is based on experiences with the professionals. With time, the direction of the trusting relation can also evolve from a social trust relation to a trusting relation towards the institution. Consequently, as argued throughout this article, trust is a complex and dynamic phenomenon that changes over time, including the directions it takes.

Concluding discussion

In this article, I add to the understanding of trust dynamics in institutional encounters between welfare professionals and service users with a forced migrant background in Finland by examining welfare professionals’ sensemaking of trust from a time perspective. I argue that when understanding sensemaking as turning circumstances into a situation that is comprehensible through words (Weick et al., 2005), the informants’ sensemaking of trust centred around the relational aspects of trust. Further, all welfare professionals located trust relationships in the wider contexts of forced migration and structural institutional settings.

A time-sensitive analysis of trust offered insight into how the rhythms of institutional encounters are deeply embedded in neoliberal welfare policies. While the informants perceived trust as dynamic and shapeable yet fragile and tense, this research pointed to the scarcity of time for trust building within the neoliberal institutional context of commodifying time. This was particularly prevalent in regards to the complex institutional system, as distrust might emerge when service users remain unfamiliar with the administrative system due to time constraints. Further, I argued that the replacement of welfare professionals engendered negative disruptions to service users’ relationships. Consequently, service users were trapped in liminality and needed to repeatedly retell sensitive personal life stories, which led to distrust. Engaging with the temporal aspects of trust and distrust, I showed how flows of institutional encounters and, thus, past events were identified by the welfare professionals as fundamental for the trusting relationship. Previous negative and positive encounters with authorities abroad and in Finland, resulting in chains of small disappointments or fixing encounters, impacted the level of pre-trust in subsequent institutional meetings. Thus, this time-sensitive analysis highlighted the fragility and temporal aspects of trust, further demonstrating the importance of institutional encounters as a trust-shaping momentum.

In previous research on migration and time, the notion of time has usually been discussed quite dichotomously, with the institutional system stealing, stopping and ordering time, while migrants have differing perceptions of time. My contribution to this field of research is a more nuanced understanding of time and trust from the perspective of welfare professionals, who are situated as intermediators between the service user and the institutional system. As I show, welfare professionals also position themselves critically alongside neoliberal policies, as temporal dissonances appear between them and the institutional system they represent. Understanding the relationship between structural obstacles in integration policies and service users’ trust is important for grasping sensemaking for professionals. Hence, the informants’ sensemaking of trust centred around trusting relationships being shaped at intersections of time and temporality, the structural vulnerabilities of forced migrants and the structural restrictions of the neoliberal welfare state for professionals.

Finally, looking beyond micro-institutional trust and time dynamics, I would argue that from a critical perspective, a trusting relationship can facilitate the exploration of service users’ vulnerability and dependency on welfare professionals’ actions. Hence, trust can also be a means to making service users malleable or, according to Masoud et al. (2021), integrateable. Particularly in institutional encounters with forced migrants, where power asymmetries are evident, a trusting relationship could also create further dependency and vulnerability. In order to reach the goal of Finnish policy to speed up the integration of migrants, gaining service users’ trust seems to be a coping strategy for welfare professionals to deal with their job. However, when service users with a forced migration background trust, they become more governable through the actions of the welfare professionals. As institutional encounters are sites where nation states try to manage, control and order migrants into the imaginary homogenous nation state, attention needs to also be paid to the outcomes of these encounters. Therefore, a more critical gaze on trust would be beneficial for future migration research. In addition to how trust is built, broken or restored in institutional encounters with time, it remains crucial to enquire about the means to which trust is being used: to support the best interests of the service user or those of the neoliberal welfare state.

Footnotes

Acknowledgments

The author expresses gratitude to the interlocutors for their time and willingness to participate, to the anonymous peer-reviewers for comments and improvements to the article and to the supervisor Camilla Nordberg and co-supervisor Eveliina Lyytinen for their valuable and insightful comments.

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship and/or publication of this article: The research has been funded by Åbo Akademi University Foundation.

ORCID iD

Liselott Sundbäck

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