Abstract
Research on administrative burdens has demonstrated that families experience significant costs in navigating different institutions. Yet studies have often focused more on the nature of the burdens that result from administrative rules than on the types of obstacles that produce these burdens. Less attention has also been paid to how families navigate multiple institutions simultaneously. Drawing on qualitative research with Congolese refugees resettled in the United States, we conceptualize how errors and mishaps in organizations tangled procedures into institutional knots, or complex blockages. We also show how some knots had a ripple effect as problems in one institution reverberated, leading to new, unrelated problems in different institutions. These institutional knots and subsequent reverberations were costly to resolve and a hindrance to upward mobility.
- © 2023 Russell Sage Foundation. Sackett, Blair, and Annette Lareau. 2023. “Institutional Entanglements: How Institutional Knots and Reverberating Consequences Burden Refugee Families.” RSF: The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences 9(4): 114–32. DOI: 10.7758/RSF.2023.9.4.05. We thank the refugee families, aid workers, and volunteers who shared their experiences. Maria Odongo, Mirriam Chemutai, and Frida Aloo were exceptionally talented research assistants who helped carry out interviews with refugee families. We also gratefully acknowledge the financial support of the School of Arts and Sciences of the University of Pennsylvania. An earlier version of this article was presented at the 2022 Russell Sage Foundation conference “Administrative Burdens as a Mechanism of Inequality in Policy Implementation.” We are grateful to the feedback of conference participants, especially from the editors. We are also thankful for the input from the doctoral student writing group at the University of Pennsylvania: Minseo Baek, Ashleigh Cartwright, Sherelle Ferguson, Peter Harvey, Katharina Hecht, and Doron Shiffer-Sebba. Maia Cucchiara, Judith Levine, Julia Wrigley, Danni Falk, Shaquilla Harrigan, and Frida Aloo provided invaluable comments. We benefited enormously from the feedback given to us from Cecilia Menjivar, Leslie Paik, Van Tran, Emilio Parrado, Chenoa Flippen, Naomi Schneider, and Elliot Weininger. Andy Jimenez, Lee Ang, Edward Stevens, and Isabelle Alaniz did valuable work as research assistants as we were completing the manuscript. Of course, all errors are the responsibility of the authors and not of the sponsoring agencies. Direct correspondence to: Blair Sackett, at blair_sackett{at}brown.edu, Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs, 280 Brook St., Providence, RI 02906, United States.
Open Access Policy: RSF: The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences is an open access journal. This article is published under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.