Exploring operational Issues in refugees' care and integration process: the case of "SPRAR" project organisations

Abstract

Several crises in many countries of the world are causing large migratory fluxes towards the most developed countries. The importance of migrants’ reception, acceptance and integration is increasing. The last phase of migration process concerns migrants’ integration, i.e. the process that start with migrants being accepted in the hosting country and end with migrants being completely integrated, i.e. autonomous both from an economic and a social point of view. Since this integration process is being slow and difficult, this research has two main objectives. The first one is to explore all the operations conducted by the organisations involved in the migrants’ integration process; the second one is to investigate about all the organisational factors that may have an impact on the integration process, with the purpose of improving it. Improving the integration process means being able to deliver services that are adequate to satisfy the migrants’ needs and expectations. With this exploratory purpose, two case studies have been conducted, in which two organisations involved in delivering services for migrants’ integration were analysed. At the end of the case studies analysis, a final framework was developed. It was found that the most important factors affecting the migrants’ integration are related to organisational capabilities, practices related to services co-design and co-creation, cooperative networks with other organisations and contextual factors like the social context in which they operate. The theoretical background about cooperative networks and operational improvement programs was crucial in order to identify these organisational factors that affect migrants’ integration.