Dilemmatic discourses on newcomers in social and healthcare organisations during workplace development programme to solve labour shortages

The ageing population is contributing to labour shortages, which in turn are exacerbating high turnover among social and healthcare professionals in post-industrial societies. At the policy level, this crisis is being addressed through migration and through attempts to make the sector more attractive to recent graduates. However, for social and healthcare organisations, the integration of young and non-native newcomers into the workforce presents significant challenges. Thirteen group discussions involving social and healthcare professionals participating in an organisational development programme in Finland were examined to address these challenges. Drawing on critical discursive psychology, the study explored how participants, who were regular employees, spoke about newcomers and the agentic positions assigned both to themselves and to the newcomers, as these discursive practices revealed the ideological dilemmas of workplace integration. Four interpretative repertoires were identified through which newcomers’ and regulars’ agencies were constructed in workplace integration. These repertoires gave rise to ideological dilemmas that were formed in the tensions between them: newcomers were alternately positioned as too passive or too autonomously active; regulars were portrayed as both needing to adapt to shifting workplace conditions and needing to manage newcomers’ integration challenges; and, at the community level, responsibility for workplace integration was negotiated in relation to participation, with integration treated as contingent on newcomers’ engagement while often being addressed in their absence. Together, these dilemmas demonstrate in a nuanced way how competing expectations regarding agency, responsibility and professional boundaries shape the negotiation of newcomers’ workplace integration.