“I always try to behave professionally” – Emotional Labour of Finnish Career Counsellors as Street-Level Integrators

This study investigates career counsellors working in the Finnish integration training programme, and as street-level integrators. In this study, their work is considered as emotional labour (Hochschild, 2012), requiring the street-level workers to manage their feelings for the sake of their duties. The study is based on two datasets, collected in 2019–2020. The first dataset includes video-recorded career counselling discussions between the career counsellors and migrants, and the second includes semi-structured interviews with the same counsellors and applying stimulated recall interview method. The counsellors verbalise very little emotional labour in the first dataset. In the second, they volunteer to describe various emotions involved in their work, which in this study are interpreted as cues for emotional labour. The descriptions by the counsellors involve either issues related to their counselling relationship with the migrants or directly to the migrants themselves. The results suggest there are various emotions involved in the counsellors’ work, but they manage and regulate them when meeting the migrants. However, when presented with a situation to deal with this side of their work, they use it willingly. This indicates that there is an emotional gap present in their work: the emotions are not discussed in their daily duties, but the counsellors would benefit from receiving structured support to address them. The emotional gap burdens these street-level workers and indirectly informs the way they do integration policy. Additionally, due to this situation, the integration policy outcomes are neither optimal nor adequate.