Controversy and conventions : Mmking sense of local resistance to sheltering asylum seekers

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Controversy and Conventions

Making sense of local resistance to sheltering

asylum seekers

Master Thesis Political Science | Conflict Resolution and Governance

Piet Vriend | 10195130

First Supervisor: Dhr. Dr. D.W. Laws | Second Reader: Mw. Dr. A.M.C. Loeber

June, 2016

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Acknowledgements

I wish to express my sincere gratitude to my supervisor David Laws for his enthusiasm, patience and close involvement in this project from start to finish. At several instances in the process writing this thesis, the original insights and helpful theories that you came up with have steered this research in the right direction. It was nice to know that, when needed, your door was always open.

I sincerely want to thank my girlfriend Annemiek for all her love and support in the last few intense months, and more specifically for all these moments when we have studied together, sitting on opposite sides of the table, struggling our way through our theses.

I also thank all others who have contributed to this project in multiple different ways, and have made this research to what it is now.

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1. Introduction

1.1 Setting the stage

Oranje is a Dutch hamlet with approximately 115 inhabitants. Not much more than an intersection of a channel located in the heart of the Dutch province Drenthe. Formerly only known to the people in the direct surroundings, the town gained national fame after public resistance had resulted in disturbances around a closed town meeting that was held on October 6, 2015. State Secretary for Security and Justice Klaas Dijkhoff, was personally present that night to communicate the decision, unilaterally taken by the government, to host another 700 asylum seekers in Oranje. This implied a doubling of the number accommodated earlier in the holiday park ‘Pipodorp,’ located central in the tiny village. The incident resulted in fierce local and national commotion, due to which the local resistance in Oranje came to symbolize the recently experienced problems and dilemmas in policy implementation on refugee related issues.

Dissatisfied with the explanation of the State Secretary, popular anger arose directly after the town meeting had broken down. Widely reported in the national media the next morning was an episode in which angry citizens had blocked the entrance roads to the village. This act of resistance had temporarily prevented both the buses with refugees, that were already waiting nearby, from entering, and the State Secretary’s car, from leaving Oranje. The image imprinted on everyone’s retina the next morning was the moment when a female resident, filled with rage, had stepped in front of the State Secretary’s car, was pulled away by a policeman in civilian clothes, and shouted the words ‘with your fat BMW’ to the departing car. Initially the broadcasting about the event was the umpteenth time that the response of local communities was treated as irresponsible and irrational (De Voogt, 2015).

Fairly soon thereafter, when more facts came to be known, the coverage about the events started to change. Besides yet another case of public discontent, the ‘Nacht van Oranje’ was increasingly perceived as an instance where the government had made some serious mistakes. Dijkhoff had single-handedly overruled local authorities and taken a decision that contravened agreements made earlier with the municipality and the village. The realization began to penetrate that in this particular case the emotional opposition of local citizens was less about the idea of hosting refugees, as they had already done so for the past year, than caused by bitter sentiment about the undemocratic course of events.

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This perception of the incident comes back in the statements that inhabitants of Oranje presented in the national media around this time. For example, Hilda van der Heide, who became the face of the demonstration due to the incident around the State Secretary’s car, explained how she had experienced the meeting: “The wind blew only from one angle; you were not allowed to say anything, you just had to listen. Dijkhoff simply announced that we had to take 700 more and that they were on their way, we had no say in anything (Pauw, 2015a).” Evita Pagie, president of the local interest group Commission for the Viability of

Oranje and its surroundings (Dutch: ‘Commissie Leefbaarheid Oranje en omstreken’),

expressed a similar viewpoint:

Dijkhoff and the Central Organ for the reception of Asylum seekers (Dutch: ‘Centraal Orgaan opvang asielzoekers’, hereafter: COA) have simply wiped our village off the map. Everything can apparently be overruled. It was not the outcome of a

deliberation, but a notification stating that 700 more were arriving with the buses already waiting around the corner. (Pauw, 2015b)

In their statements, these inhabitants of Oranje argued that the mayor problem, next to the ratio between the large number of refugees and the size of the village, was the lack of consultation and dialogue in the decision-making process (De Jonge, 2015).

When we take a closer look at the immediate run-up to this incident, we see an interesting example of the dynamic interplay among the different policy domains in local cases, which will be a principal topic of inquiry in this study. The meeting in Oranje was the result of the coming together of a complex system of factors that played in the interaction between Dijkhoff and Ton Baas (the mayor of the municipality Midden-Drenthe to which Oranje belongs). In these conversations, the Mayor had told the State Secretary that the municipality “did not agree with him (‘Burgemeester Baas van…’, 2015).” Baas indicated that he had “told him that three or four times earlier as well (ibid.).” He wanted to honor the agreements that they had signed earlier that year. The terms of this agreement about the number of asylum seekers and the duration of the reception center were reached with the consent of local residents. At the same time the State Secretary and COA saw themselves faced with high working pressures and number of arrivals. Dijkhoff argued that these circumstances had caused the situation in Oranje, which was an “unique action outside the rules because the need was great (‘JBZ-Raad; Verslag van…’, 2015).” The exceptional situation had forced him to make this decision despite the local opposition, which had eventually resulted in the escalated meeting in Oranje.

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Shortly after the incident, Dijkhoff had to account for his actions in the second chamber of the Parliament. The State Secretary particularly emphasized that he had ‘no other alternative left’ and understands the emotional reaction that his conduct had resulted in (‘Dijkhoff: snel naar…’, 2015). Dijkhoff showed remorse and promised to reverse his decision as soon as he had another option, bringing the number of asylum seekers in Oranje back to 700 (‘JBZ-Raad; Verslag van…’, 2015). The State Secretary argued that “there is a system in the Netherlands that is beautiful on paper, but breaks down in practice (ibid.).” In his view, the incident in Oranje was an exception to the rule. I argue that although the case certainly has unique features, it does point attention to more general difficulties in the decision-making process and communication in local cases. Therefore, this study treats Oranje as an instructive case, in which tensions and problems that are present in local cases everywhere, play out somewhat more extremely.

1.2 Research questions

How does a quickly escalated situation like this arise in a normally quiet municipality? The intuition is developed – grounded in preliminary research and overtly visible in the discussions after the incidents in Oranje and other localities – that the simplistic way in which the public response is framed does not do justice to the more complex reality that plays out in individual cases. This study minutely explores what it would mean to resist in an individual local case, dismissing the nature of these strong public responses, as in the irrational or self-interested way implied by a Not-In-My-Back-Yard (NIMBY) characterization. Rather it regards emotions as a form of information processing that help humans negotiate the world around them. This approach recognizes emotions in various forms and settings, and suggests that different emotions correspond to different things we care about, different goals we may have (Jasper, 1997:289-290). Obviously this does not imply that the legitimacy is evaluated of the actions on either side. It solely interprets actions in a context of interaction and communication, and the difficult task to display a valued judgement about any of the stakeholders or organizations involved is left to the reader.

In the negative responses alone there is an enormous range of coloring. These vary from a strongly outspoken and violent to a silent ‘no’. Certainly there is a strong emotional component as people feel threatened, afraid, disempowered, frustrated and angry about the imposition of a policy decision. Notwithstanding the fact that shared emotions enhance group cohesion and stimulate patterns of escalation, it is important to keep in mind, however, that

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these emotions are embedded in a social and political context. Although NIMBY or something related may be going on in some of the cases comparable with Oranje, this research does not start from that presumption. The kind of public response often portrayed as common and almost as commonly discredited, are hence treated as merely the current outcome and the most visible part of a larger system of interactions and relationships.

The main hypothesis of this study is that the problems and discontent around the allocation of reception centers are the democratic consequences of the building of a consensus that is intolerant of disagreement, disruption and interference. It often seems that the way in which proposals are framed, to a certain extent, trigger the sequence of action that follows, motivating people to actively oppose policy impositions that they sense are forced upon them. The suggested approach to investigate the hypothesis is to turn attention away from only focusing on the result of an interaction. With this aim in mind, the study is composed of an institutional and communicational analysis in the local, administrative and national domains, that will map the observable manifestations of relationship among the parts of the policy system to grasp the complexities and make sense of the interactions as they unfold (Watzlawick et. al., 1967).

This thesis investigates three explanations for the controversy and escalation in Oranje. First, attention will be pointed to framing, and the differences in the framing of experiences in each of the domains. Second, the distinct ways in which the spheres punctuate the sequence of events and the significance of when they come together will be examined. Third, the dynamics of the interactions are analyzed describing the ‘felicity’ or ‘infelicity’ of interactions at critical moments in the case. These are the explanations that will be researched in the remainder of this study to better understand the considerable misunderstanding, confusion and escalation that we can observe around reception centers for asylum seekers.

The explanations will be conceptualized in the theory chapter that follows the introduction. After that, the methods chapter will explicate and rationalize the ways in which these have been investigated. The results of this investigation, based on the three explanations and the way these have been theorized, are presented in two empirical chapters. Punctuation has been added to the first chapter on framing, since it builds on the descriptions of the individual frames. The second empirical chapter will focus on interactions. In the end, the chapters will be related to one another in a concluding chapter. Besides the conclusion and the discussion, this chapter will be composed of a vignette that discusses recent changes in law which can be seen as one response to the experiences in Oranje. This research is an depth case study of experience that revolves around several moments of communication

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in-and around the village of Oranje. The timeframe of the case study stretches from the end of September 2014, when the issue was first raised, until the beginning of October 2015, shortly after the incident that was introduced in the previous section.

This thesis tries to understand how the different spheres are organized, and how they ‘think and talk’ about a particular case. The case study is followed through these three regimes to understand their internal discourse, framing and patterns of organization. How do these frames come together in the concrete setting of Oranje, and how do they impact the actions and behavior of the parties involved? As a consequence of this approach, the public ‘no’ is not regarded as an isolated irrational response, but as a part of a larger interaction. On a similar note, local behavior, such as the public opposition in Oranje, can only be explained in part of a system of behavior that includes the regional and the national. It may be a lack of coordination among the spheres which causes them to be out of sync with one another. Making it seem to some degree that the domains pursue different goals and speak different languages, contributing in a substantial way to the observed patterns of behavior. The research question drafted to investigate the hypotheses is the following:

How was the case of Oranje framed and pursued in the local, administrative and national spheres and how did this affect behavior?

This central research question leads to the following sub-questions that will be dealt with in the chapters that follow:

How was the case of Oranje framed and pursued I: in the different local interactions?

II: in the ways the administrative domain prepares and discusses a local case? III: in the national media and parliamentary discussions?

IV: How did these differences among the domains problematize coordination and communication in the dynamics of interactions among them?

1.3 Social and scientific relevance

Although some points concerning the social and scientific relevance of this thesis have already been described in the introduction, this short paragraph will more explicitly discuss my motivation to study this topic and describe where the results of this study situate themselves compared to similar studies that have been performed in the past. One of the main

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motivations to write this piece was to shed an alternative, more elaborated and nuanced light on how to interpret fierce and emotional responses on a controversial topic. Initially this study dismisses the NIMBY characterization, regularly provided by other investigations, that prominently focuses on the ‘small group of brawlers’ which in their eyes determines the strongly emotional outlook of discussions on this topic (“Vluchtelingencrisis: het blijft…”, 2016). It is interesting to see whether this argumentation holds up when the image is made more complex and the communications are regarded from multiple different angles.

In addition, government agencies appear to be still struggling to find an adequate and fixed approach to deal with local cases. When retrospectively observing the altercation described in the introduction, many public officials would wonder whether they could have valued the seriousness of the tensions more accurately to change the pattern of the interaction before the situation reached its point of escalation. My hope is therefore that this study will be of benefit for all stakeholders in these conversations, and especially for public officials dealing with similar cases, to better grasp the complexities of the interactions, and provide them with the opportunities to reflect on it.

Even though the frequently examined concept of framing will play a prominent role in this research, it will not be similar to other studies on this topic. This is mostly due to the way in which framing is practically applied in this study to better understand the particularities of contemporary deliberations and interactions among multiple actors in conflictual and ambiguous settings. The scientific relevance of this study lies mostly in its layered approach to account for the controversy.

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2. Theoretical Considerations

2.1 Introduction

In this chapter, I present the ‘palette’ of concepts that I draw on in subsequent chapters. This palette is composed of the theories and concepts that will be used in framing the research, and in presenting the findings. Although written more in conceptual terms, this chapter will attempt to retell the concrete and detailed story about Oranje that was presented in the introduction in terms that make its resonance with other cases clear. In the course of this story, different features of the practical settings of cases will be related to the pieces of theory that they evoke. The story told here will also link the research questions to the methods that will be discussed in the following chapter. To jump ahead and spoil the plot, the main story line is about framing linked to understanding the influence of speech acts and the contingencies of interactions among the policy spheres. Framing will be used in several ways throughout the chapter, like the blending color on the palette, to make sense of the situation and see what lies behind the anger seen so often in several localities throughout the country.

2.2 Broad outline of the chapter

This chapter will describe conceptually how the escalated situation surrounding the town meeting in Oranje was the particular outcome of an interaction between mismatched expectations and actions. Designed like a communicative and institutional analysis, insights are acquired into how dramatic cases of miscommunication like this one, distinct from the distress and despair evident in the actions of Dijkhoff, might be the result of the considerably different ways in which the participants in the interaction frame and pursue action in the same case. How can we account for the differences that are apparent in the statements people made in Oranje? Repeating the claim that the interactions among the policy domains are arranged in such a way resulting in intolerance for disagreement, contestation and interference, this chapter will outline in detail the ways to investigate three possible explanations for the controversy and escalation around reception centers seen in places like Oranje. For the sake of clarity, these explanations will be formulated here and conceptually developed in the subsequent sections of this chapter.

The first explanation takes as its starting point the insight that individuals and groups from the different domains might, to a certain extent, speak their own languages and so be acting on different, largely independent, bases sometimes without realizing it. This tentative claim consists of two parts; the second links to explanations on punctuation and interaction

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also addressed in this chapter. The first part explains how those who work in these different how the working spheres may come to see themselves as confronting different issues or problems because of the way they frame what they confront. Framing provides a way to how these differences in perspective can develop even when people share an experience and have access to many of the same facts. The role frames play in an undertaking can provide individuals with distinctive retrospective characterizations of the event that can lead to, for example, opposing rooters to experience the same game of football as if they were watching an entirely different match (Goffman, 1974:9). Understanding how these different definitions of a situation relate to features of the context and the pattern of interaction, can help us to make sense of how framing can diverge among groups of actors within a case.

The second part of the explanation articulates the idea that individuals and groups from the different regimes may be working on different schedules and under different logics of what appropriate questions, feelings and behavior are in a given situation. Frames display the results of this organization of experience in light of the conventions, rules of conduct and patterns of communication of the three spheres, where different actors come to entirely different conclusions facing this question of appropriateness influencing the interaction that goes on among them. Moving on to the second explanation, I draw on Cohen, March and Olsen’s ‘garbage can’ model of organizational choice, which will help us appreciate the differences in punctuation and the consequences of this for the moments of interaction along the sequence that makes up the timeline. As the frames are relatively independent they must first be analyzed in this way. Understanding how the streams or domains differ from one another, the analysis will focus on the significance when and where they come together and how this influences the broader interactions. As it is questionable whether there is ever an interaction among all actors with a stake in the interaction, this is one of the factors resulting in problems in communication and coordination in Oranje. I argue that in practice the working spheres only come together episodically, partially and clumsily.

The third explanation expects that there is something in the dynamics of interactions among the spheres responsible for the controversy in Oranje. This explanation draws on the theories of J.L. Austin (1975) and starts from the idea that ‘speaking and acting’ are closely related efforts in interactional settings, which leads to the view that language can be seen as action, as doing as well as reporting. Utterances with this quality fall under Austin’s category of ‘performatives’ of which the ‘felicitous’ use can be judged based on six conditions that are required for the smooth functioning of an ‘accepted conventional procedure (ibid.).’ As will be elaborated on later, his scheme can be used as a practical to help diagnose how things went

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wrong in a communication and to distinguish deliberations and other forms of interaction that are ‘felicitous’ from those that ‘misfire’ (Austin, 1975).

Taken together, this approach suggests that the way to understand the controversies in Oranje is to look at how individuals narrate both in action and when they reflect on what has happened at critical moments in the case. Hannah Arendt’s use and understanding of narratives, that will be dealt with later on in this chapter, can provide us with access to explain the relevance of this approach. The theories underlying these explanations will be clarified in the remainder of this chapter. Austin’s theories will be presented in an earlier section than what would be logical, when following the natural order of the explanations. This has to do with the relevance of his ideas for the broader approach of how to understand and apply ‘speech acts’ in this research. The Austinian perspective applies most prominently to the third explanation, but is consequently introduced earlier.

2.3The notion and application of speech acts

What can we learn about how conversations work and do not work, taking into account the institutional setting and local circumstances, by looking at men and women ‘acting and speaking’ in a concrete context? Before speech acts can be employed as a framework for empirical research, the notion of speech or symbolically mediated interaction in social settings needs to be clarified. In The Human Condition, Hannah Arendt developed a broad theory of the notion of speech. She described that “in acting and speaking, men show who they are, reveal actively their unique personal identities and thus make their appearance in the human world.” This disclosure of ‘who’ demarcated from ‘what’ is implicit in everything somebody says or does (Arendt, 1998:179). Arendt conceives stories, produced through human action, to be at the heart of human nature determining the relationship between men. Stories, which are the result of action and speech, reveal an agent and tell us more about their subjects. Although they allow us to make sense of the world, we are not the author of our own life stories, but are instead lived by the story as both the actor and the sufferer of the experienced events (ibid:184). Since action and speech are aspects inherent to every human interaction, they reveal the position of an agent in the already existing web of human relationships.

This is significant to my study, since Arendt’s account suggests that stories and speech provide access to who people are as they ‘make their appearance in the world’ and gives insights in how they experience events. An analysis of these sources informs us about

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the perspective and position of different speakers in the interaction. What does speech do in social interactions? Language and the way in which language is used, are important organizing frameworks to understand society (Hajer & Laws, 2006:256). Framing draws on these categories of language as participants, in the terms that they use in the interaction, give meaning to uncertain and controversial situations. The ‘speech acts’ expressed by participants in the interactions in Oranje can be analyzed in this way through interviews with a narrative focus and a discourse analysis that takes into account the explicit content and implicit meaning of what has been said, and, on top of that, links these to the realm of pragmatics. This conceptualization complies with the line of inquiry followed in this study, which combines how individuals narrate both in the moments of actual communication and when they reflect on it. The syntactics and semantics of communication can be studied through uncovering the internal discourse of the different spheres, acquiring insights in the aspects they emphasize and imply in their speech or writing.

Analyzing ‘the pragmatic aspect of human communication’, which formulated quite plainly is the idea that communication influences the behavior of participants in the interaction, is more tricky and open to interpretation than the other two linguistic realms. Further extending my theoretical palette for the study of this aspect of communication, I focus on Watzlawick, Beavin-Bavelas and Jackson’s communication theory as drafted in their eloquently written book Pragmatics of Human Communication. Drawing on the thinking of Gregory Bateson, they argue that all behavior is communication and “all communication affects behavior. […] For the data of pragmatics are not only words, their configurations and meanings, which are the data of syntactics and semantics, but their nonverbal concomitants and body language as well. […] [E]ven the communicational clues inherent in the context in which communication occurs (Watzlawick et. al., 1967:22). They argue that all behavior in interactional situations, ‘whether being activity or inactivity, words or silence, have message value and imply commitment (ibid: 49).’ The ‘impossibility of non-communicating’ is one of their ‘tentative axioms for metacommunication’ with pragmatic importance in interpersonal situations. These are useful to understand the behavior of participants and how they perceive the relationships among them at different moments in the conflict. The axioms demonstrate how, to a certain extent, all communication is conditional to its context.

Another closely related axiom combines the ‘report’ and ‘command’ aspects known to any communication saying that messages “not only convey information, but at the same time impose behavior (ibid:51)” and define the sender’s view of relationship with the receiver

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influencing the pattern of interaction. The authors argue that ‘sick’ relationships in moments of conflict “are characterized by a constant struggle about the nature of the relationship (ibid.)”. In ‘healthy’ relationships this aspect recedes more into the background. It is interesting to see when and how discussions and disagreements arise throughout the conflict in Oranje about the nature of relationships that are normally taken for granted. It is likely, for example, that only after Dijkhoff had single-handedly overruled local authorities and the relationship between them turned sour, the people in Oranje started to wonder whether the State Secretary was capable to execute such an action and how far the powers of national authorities in the local arena stretched. These axioms are a background presence in the empirical chapters to analyze instances when people were activated to think about how they related to others. Another axiom regards punctuation within and across the domains, and will be dealt with in a later section of this chapter.

The most important point to remember so far is that ‘speaking and acting’ are closely related efforts in interactional settings. Extending this view leads to the idea that language can be seen as action, as doing as well as reporting. This idea is drawn from J.L. Austin’s description of the performative character of utterances as written down in the first of his Harvard lectures collected under the title How to do things with words. In the lectures Austin came up with a separate category for “many utterances which look like statements [but] are either not intended at all, or only intended in part, to record or impart straightforward information about the facts (1975:2).” With these utterances, as for example in speaking the words ‘I marry you’, by saying something we do something and “the uttering of the sentence is in itself, or is a part of, the doing of an action (ibid: 5).” Through their speech people that work in organizations can, for example, initiate deliberations and bring events and structures into existence that were not there before they took the action (Weick, 1988:306). This opens a window on institutional practice through which we can see how this doing is accomplished and reflects on the ethics and democratic character of the actions. As witnessed in Oranje, “speech can consequently be seen as a form of action in which politics is expressed as speech itself (Laws, 2011:7).” Linking performance and language, this category of performatives, in contrast with statements, cannot be judged on being true or false. When something goes wrong and the performative utterance is to some extent a failure, Austin prefers ‘unhappy’, or ‘infelicitous’ rather than false (Austin, 1975).

What grounds the ideas of Austin and makes them practically applicable for this research is the way he linked this idea of the performative to the notion of a ‘conventional procedure’. He argued that for the smooth or ‘happy’ functioning of an ‘accepted

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conventional procedure’ six necessary conditions have to be met. Using Austin’s scheme titled ‘the doctrine of the infelicities’, creates the possibility for a micro-analysis of practice in institutional settings – this also applies to less formal settings – in which a breach against any of these six rules provides a way to describe and make sense of how things can go wrong in communication. In unsettled and conflictual situations, like the case under study here, even the question “What is the appropriate convention?” can turn into a negotiation. In these instances all statements can turn back into questions through proposals based on behavior. Consequently the answer to a question like this “cannot always be found in the register of political practices known to [participants in the interactions]. More precisely, actors lack a shared register, and different actors most likely will understand the practice in terms of their own register (Hajer, 2009:58).”

Conventional procedures in distorted situations often are not fixed which results in a need to quickly reframe and make sense of the changed scenery. To figure out just what it is that we are involved in, we might ask ourselves questions like “What are people trying to do by saying something?” Asking these kind of questions participants will make “a normative assessment based on their beliefs about what an appropriate procedure would be (Laws, 2011:12).” Before an interaction under these circumstances can be effective and successful, “people first need to agree on a provisional sense of what conventions are to prevail (Hajer, 2009:58).” As a consequence felicity depends on your view of the situation and the way in which different actors frame what is happening in it. In this environment, Austin’s scheme is an additional tool to judge between deliberations and other forms of interactions that are ‘felicitous’ and those that ‘misfire’. In his original formulation, besides the uttering of the words, these are the other things that have “as a general rule to be right and to go right if we are to be said to have happily brought off our actions (Austin, 1975:14):”

[A. 1] There must exist an accepted conventional procedure having a certain conventional effect, that procedure to include the uttering of certain words by certain persons in certain circumstances, and further,

[A. 2] the particular persons and circumstances in a given case must be appropriate for the invocation of the particular procedure invoked.

[B. 1] The procedure must be executed by all participants both correctly and [B. 2] completely.

[Γ. 1] Where, as often, the procedure is designed for use by person having certain thoughts or feelings or for the inauguration of certain consequential conduct on the part of any participant,

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then a person participating in and so invoking the procedure must in fact have those thoughts or feelings, and the participants must intend so to conduct themselves, and further

[Γ. 2] must actually so conduct themselves subsequently (1975:14-15).

Applying these conditions to contemporary deliberations, David Laws described in his article Enacting Deliberation that the performative conditions of Austin ‘tie the analysis of ‘what people do with words’ to the settings in which they act and the conduct of the participants (2011:8).’ In this article, Laws explained that the notion of a conventional procedure is central to making all these judgements about what the appropriate circumstances, participants, and their feelings and behavior are. The scheme of Austin opens up the relationship between the character of talk and the institutional conditions. When we apologize ‘something changes because of what we say and how this relates to the setting in which we say it (ibid:9).’ In line with the two tentative axioms theorized earlier, Austinian thinking dedicates attention to what Maarten Hajer has called the dramaturgical point of view. This perspective dedicates attention to an analysis of how people say things, where they say it and to whom they say it. Hajer linked this perspective with the notion of ‘performative habitus’, that will in addition to the thinking of Austin be employed “to understand the behavior of administrators in the initial phases of crises (Hajer, 2009:71).” As will be developed in the second empirical chapter, this notion describes how “political actors develop certain discourses and dispositions over the course of many years that help or hinder them to respond tactically when they need to act in highly contingent and stressful situations (Hajer and Uitermark, 2008:7).”

Especially in conflictual situations, how do you make sure that someone understands and believes you when you apologize? Austin makes the first big distinction between sins against one of the first four rules and sins against the latter two. When we offend against any of the former rules ‘the act in question, in this case apologizing, is unsuccessfully performed and thus not achieved at all (Austin, 1975:16).’ A breach of this category is called a ‘misfire,’ which implies that the procedure that we intend to invoke is “disallowed or is botched” making the act “void and without effect (ibid:16).” With the final two rules the case is achieved, but it is achieved under such circumstances that the act becomes insincere. These kind of sins are seen as an ‘abuse’ against procedure. Even though the act is performed and completed in line with the first four rules, the act in question does not have the intended effect or outcome. Rather than as void or without effect, ‘the act can be seen as not implemented or not consummated (ibid:16).’ This division between a misfire and an abuse

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matters because a breach against the latter two rules indicates that ‘one of the participants did not have or conduct himself with the appropriate thoughts and feelings or behavior (Laws, 2011:10).’

Framing plays an important role, since participants make a normative assessment based on their belief about what in their judgement is the appropriate procedure in the given setting. The last two rules exhibit that also on the tacit level these frames ‘must be reconciled quickly with one another in order to be successful (Austin, 1975:13).’ Each sin against an individual rule has a specific name, but it is important to remark that the cases of infelicity are not mutually exclusive. “[T]he ways of going wrong ‘shade into one another’ and ‘overlap’ [making the] decision between them arbitrary in various ways (ibid:23).” It is also important to realize that an apology could have worked better in one of the other domains. Differences across the domains can cause a ‘misfit’ where the same speech act is felicitous in one and misfires in another domain. The theories of Austin will be the main method used in the second empirical chapter to explain what was ‘infelicitous’ about the performance of participants in the interaction in Oranje. Hope is that such an analysis can contribute to an understanding of how to bring deliberation and democracy together in practice on a controversial topic like the one discussed in this thesis, and to better understand the ways in which communication has failed and how this resulted in controversy and escalation.

2.4The facets of framing

To understand the pattern of interaction that developed in Oranje, we need to understand how in the course of speaking and acting the different actors that were involved arrived at such different and opposed views about what was going on and what was at stake. What can we learn from the different statements of men and women ‘acting and speaking’ in this concrete setting and the frames they base their utterances upon? Framing fits under the forms of analysis that draw on categories of language. Related to what has been analyzed earlier, “frames are ‘sense-making devices’ that help to render events or occurrences meaningful and thereby function to organize and guide action (Goffman, 1974).” This thesis treats acting as the way in which the framing of uncertain situations is completed. In order to successfully complete framing it is not necessary to only talk, but also to act on what has been discussed earlier. Frames are only worth considering when they have entered into behavior, since they can now be distinguished from other potential frames that have never played a role in the actual conflict. Further extending the theoretical palette, this section will discuss several

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aspects that are involved in every act of framing and analyze how these influence the behavior of participants as they actively make sense of what it is that is going on. Answering this question, framing underlies storytelling as it links ‘facts derived from experience, observations and a rich array of accepted sources with values and other commitments in a way that guides action (Hajer & Laws, 2006:257).’

The name for such a set of expectations was first coined by Gregory Bateson to describe the layered quality of communication. He used the analogy of the physical frame foregrounding a painting from the wall on which it is hung. This invites the viewer to another form of interpretation telling him that the inside is ‘art’ instead of ‘background’ (Jorgensen & Steier, 2013:392). In any social situation our perception of the frame determines how we interpret what happens within it (Lipman, 2001). This links back to Austin’s description of the ‘infelicities,’ as people have different perceptions based on their frames about what is appropriate. The interactive view on framing, the one that is followed here, considers frames to be ‘socially generated ‘definitions of the situation’ that arise in and structure face-to-face encounters (Jorgenson & Steier, 2013:391).’ This perspective on framing stresses the active and processual character of the phenomenon, “that implies agency and contention at the level of reality construction. It is active in the sense that something is being done (Snow & Benford, 2000:614).” Since framing is an inherent and inescapable aspect of every interactional act, this does obviously not imply that framing requires something extra. The phenomenon is processual in the sense that framing is a dynamic process that develops incrementally through an ongoing negotiation among contending meanings, in which participants ‘reflexively examine and make sense of their interactions as they unfold (Snow & Benford, 2000:614; Jorgenson & Steier, 2013:391).’ This last point will be elaborated on in the next section that deals with interactions.

Through the processes involved in framing, diffuse worries are described in normative-prescriptive stories that develop into actionable beliefs (Hajer & Laws, 2006:257). Following this definition, frame and belief are closely aligned. Charles S. Peirce analyzed in

The Fixation of Belief how the persistent irritation of doubt is the only immediate motive for

the struggle to attain a state of belief. Although Peirce described several ways to settle doubt, he favored the one he called ‘inquiry,’ of which the sole objective is the settlement of opinion and thereby ‘to free ourselves from the uneasy and dissatisfied state of doubt (1877:15).’ Frames mediate the relationship between ‘doubt and belief’ as they provide external certainty and are a way to grasp and understand the kind of disruption that controversy triggers.

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As we will see in Chapter 4, the ‘irritation of doubt’ is clearly visible in the behavior of local citizens after the initial decision was taken to host large numbers of refugees. Many of them experienced this decision as a ‘governmental raid’. The lack of information and uncertainty about the consequences of this imposition, caused a state of doubt from which residents tried to free themselves. The ‘inquiry’ that residents embarked in to depart the annoying state of doubt “guides our actions so as to satisfy our desires […] and make us reject every belief which does not seem to have been so formed as to insure this result (ibid: 18).” Peirce argued that this inquiry stops as soon as a firm belief is reached. After arriving at this ‘calm and satisfactory state,’ the individual is entirely satisfied, whether the belief is true or false, and ‘clings tenaciously to believe just what he does believe (ibid: 15-16).’ After an opinion is settled and someone has taken up his or her position on the issue, it is extremely difficult to bring this person back to doubt for “nothing out of the sphere of our knowledge can be our object (ibid:18).”

Framing isolates and helps us appreciate these moments when individuals actively make sense of the ‘disruptions of everyday life (Lipsky, 1980),’ and the way in which their answers guide action and shape what follows. The focus of this section rests on three features that every act of framing essentially involves, which are ‘selection’, ‘salience’ and ‘indexing’. Taken together these three processes help us grasp how stories about the same experiences, based on similar facts, develop and diverge. How might each factor come into play in making sense of the controversy in Oranje? Selection and salience concern the promotion of a particular problem definition, causal interpretation, moral evaluation or treatment recommendation, in which prominence or salience is given to certain data and events while obscuring or downplaying the importance of others (Entman, 1993:55). Calling attention to and focusing on certain aspects that become key events, “[frames] are accounts of ordering and ‘schemata of interpretation’ that signify and condense the ‘world out there’ by selectively punctuating and encoding objects, situations, events, experiences, and sequences of actions within one’s present or past environment (Snow & Benford, 1992:137).” When doubt was triggered in Oranje, what aspects did stakeholders select and give salience to resolve this doubt and make sense of an unconventional situation? The suggested way to investigate what participants prioritized at critical moments in the case, is to look at how individuals and groups from the working spheres narrated in action and when they were later asked to reflect on it.

Indexing refers to the way in which people reason by relating current events to prior experiences and so to the way in which history is included in the construction of reality. The

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debate in national media and parliamentary discussions often seems to portray the current situation as both a ‘crisis without precedent,’ and approaches individual cases as ‘events without history’. In this thesis, I argue that history plays an important role, especially in the local domain, when people are faced with important and ambiguous decisions. The current issue is never isolated in prolonged relationships, and the question is to which prior experiences the people in Oranje index the events that are unfolding. Other factors to consider in understanding the local response are the geographical location and the outlook of the locality. Since we are dealing with a small village in the rural province of Drenthe, the historical patterns of cooperation both locally and nationally are important variables to consider as well. Is there a sense of remoteness to national government institutions and does this play part in the current controversy?

Accordingly, “frames are not just collections of events, but sequences that have a plot related to the story’s meaning. […] [T]he actions that develop the plot reveal what the story is about (Verloo, 2011:43).” Framing helps us understand the way in which participants fill in the stories that develop in the context of action. Close examination of the sequences of behavior and the utterances of stakeholders in the context of action, will help us grasp the characters’ intentions and the meaning of the story (ibid:43-44). Keeping this in mind, it is interesting to comprehend how stable stories get shaped and narrative ordering proceeds in our three observational spheres. What do the different domains collect if they frame a case like Oranje, and how do they link the current question to normative prescriptive stories and organizational norms? This section will be concluded with some additional thoughts on how to understand the different accounts of framing.

For this we will return and analyze the tug-of-war between Baas and Dijkhoff before the incident in Oranje. This analysis points attention to the fact that every frame has an existential, a strategic, and a pragmatic aspect to it, but that it is often difficult to keep these apart in practice. Therefore, it is difficult to argue with confidence in terms of received notions of ‘intention’, ‘strategy’ and ‘planning’ in the conversation between both public officials.1 In my view, this process of reasoning from behavior to intention in the effort to

1_{While there currently is almost no controversy anymore about the fact that the immediate sequential context}

matters when analyzing stretches of talk, from the nineties onwards a dispute has emerged concerning the possible relevance of the wider situational context for an analytic interpretation of discourse data (Gruber, 2001). There is an ongoing debate about which issues to consider when attributing procedural and cultural knowledge to the participants in an interactional exchange (Heritage, 1991). The one group arguing for a more or less direct relation between the verbal and non-verbal behavior of actors in combination with their ‘internal states’, thereby proposing that interactional moves are the result of more or less conscious anticipatory planning

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grasp the meaningful character of an action involves a range of non-logical heuristics, which invoke and trade-off contextual, cultural and procedural knowledge (Heritage, 1991:313).2 Before we can make claims about the intention that provides the actions with meaning, behavior and context first have to be brought into ‘a mutually elaborative alignment with one another (Levinson, 1979).’3

The main point is that without knowledge of the context – in the widest sense of the word – it is impossible, for example, to make the claim that Baas strategically lured Dijkhoff to Oranje that night knowing the agitation this would cause. It might have been merely a pragmatic solution stating that ‘no is no’, ‘the agreements are made for a reason’ and ‘if you want this so badly then you should come and explain it yourself’. Whatever their intentions may have been, Dijkhoff did come and the events unfolded in a way that might have only been partially anticipated and intended by anyone of them. Strong claims about intention and strategic behavior are therefore difficult to prove. Partly because of the position in which Dijkhoff found himself as the asking party, he had to give in and ended up in an awkward position confronting an unwilling audience.

Selecting and giving salience to certain data and events in their ‘emotional’ responses, the attendants at the meeting probably related back both to personal experiences and to experiences and sentiments that had been shared in the local community. For example, an instance the year before, in which a reception center was opened without local involvement and against the will of residents came into play as people made sense of events and acted in the case that is analyzed here. Framing, and more specifically indexing, gives us a way to describe how this history could have influenced the way people in Oranje responded to the proposal they faced. The same points apply to the other domains, as the COA and Dijkhoff might also have linked their expectations of this town meeting to earlier moments when they were confronted with public resistance. In addition, the national sphere comes in both as a

(see for example Goody, 1995; Drew, 1995). The other group claiming that it is questionable if every ‘strategy’ is always realized by the same sequence of talk. Someone might realize the same strategy with different verbal sequences or the same verbal sequence may be used to realize different strategies depending on the situational context.

2_{Heritage (1991:313) specifies the knowledge involved in these non-logical heuristics. He states that contextual}

knowledge involves knowledge of real world knowledge of objects and its properties, culturally specific knowledge includes knowledge of possibly relevant social statuses and roles, and procedural knowledge concerns the normative organization of action and action sequences.

3_{Gruber called this viewpoint on strategic behavior the principle of structural indeterminacy, which entails that}

it remains unclear how an analyst could decide in which situation which sequence of talk or action should be associated with which strategy (Gruber, 2001).

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political stream discussing the obligations and as a national media discourse influencing the frames of all the individuals and groups with a stake in the interaction.

2.5 Features of interactions and punctuation

This final section will further extend the theoretical palette to help grasp the dynamics of interactions among the different working spheres in a concrete and local case like Oranje. Many of the ideas presented here build on the earlier introduced theories of Austin. The following paragraphs will try to deliver insights in how to conceptualize what goes wrong in the character and dynamics of interactional sequences. The description provided earlier on the qualities of stories, revealing the agents and providing the situation with meaning, will be utilized here to understand how to interpret communication among the domains at critical moments in Oranje.

Once again falling back on the words of Arendt, action and speech are surrounded by and in constant contact with the web of the acts and words of other men (Arendt, 1998:188). Every action establishes relationships, making an actor never merely a ‘doer’ but always at the same time a ‘sufferer’. An interaction can consequently be seen as a process in which “every action becomes a chain reaction and where every process is the cause of new processes (ibid:190).” The communication in the decision-making process and after the reception center was opened in Oranje, will be regarded as a web of interactions among the different policy domains. Here we see what happens when people are confronted with the prospect of hosting refugees. We also see what happens when a centralized political decision affects a local environment. Trying to get hold of how national policy proposals have generated political voice in municipalities, that is often actively opposed to national and regional policy decisions that triggered it, we need to look at the dynamics of interactions in a case like Oranje.

The working assumption here is that the policy domains to a certain extent speak their own languages and work under specific, often distinct, logics of appropriateness. How is this visible in the interactions that develop among them? Initially each of the spheres will be treated as a separate stream that interprets and makes sense of the situation. The streams will be linked with one another in the empirical chapters, looking into punctuation and the dynamics of interactions, only after the contingencies of the individual streams have been described in the sections on framing. These two explanations will analyze the difficulties and

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tensions in the coordination and the communication among the working spheres, to grasp what goes wrong in the character and the dynamics of interactions.

The word ‘interactions’ is intentionally written in plural to disregard the assumption that all actors are involved in the same interactional sequences. In practice this is hardly ever the case, and the different groups in the interactions only come together episodically, partially and clumsily. This opens up the possibility to investigate whether the domains are in sync when the local sphere of ‘everyday life’, the administrative domain, and the sphere of national media and politics interact. Taking a situation in which one group has to decide before others make a decision – or perhaps even know – can help to explain what goes wrong in the coordination among them. This situation links well with Cohen, March and Olsen’s description of ‘garbage can’ decisions, which are the outcome of the specific ways in which relatively independent streams have interpreted the situation. Similar to the domains in this research, the organizational streams that Cohen et. al. described “although not completely independent, each of the streams [could] be viewed as independent and exogenous from the others (Cohen et. al., 1972:3).” In this study their model is used primarily to grasp this relative independence, the consequences of this independence, and to understand where and how the streams or domains come together at critical moments in the case. Analyzing differences in how the domains punctuate the chain of events, can help to explain some of the anger and local citizens’ sense of being unheard and uninvolved in decisions affecting their immediate surroundings. Let me first introduce applicable parts of their theory, and subsequently explain their relevance in relation to the concept of punctuation.

The garbage can model of organizational choice describes decision-making processes within ‘organized anarchy’ and explains the impact that organizational structure has on processes of choice. Organized anarchy, although in my view not entirely accurate for the situation in Oranje, implies decision-making under goal ambiguity and in the absence of consensus (ibid: 2). The authors argue that under these circumstances “one can view a choice opportunity as a garbage can into which various kinds of problems and solutions are dumped by participants as they are generated (ibid.).” In addition, the model calls attention to two elements that structure the individual streams and influence the outcome of a garbage can decision process.4 These structuring elements are ‘time patterns’ and ‘rhythms in the

4_{These are the two elements that are in my view relevant for this research. Cohen, March, and Olsen have also}

described other elements that structure the individual streams in ‘garbage can’ choice events. These have either been included in these two elements or disregarded for reasons of applicability.

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allocation of energy’. Small changes have been made in their names and nature in order to make them more useful for this study.

The first element – time patterns – ‘calls attention to the strategic effect of timing when introducing problems and choices to other stakeholders. How do stakeholders become active, and is attention directed towards, or away from, a decision (ibid.)?’ There can be large differences in when groups from different domains enter a case. The process is normally advanced in the administrative sphere at the moment in which local residents get involved, complicating the coordination across the domains. The different moments in which problems, choices, solutions or decision makers arrive in each domain, may account for some of the ‘miscommunication’ in Oranje (ibid:4). This signifies not only differences in timeframe at the first encounter with the issue, but also differences at the start of each new episode or turn.

The second element – rhythms in the allocation of energy – can somehow be seen as an extension of the first element, due to its focus on the time patterns of available energy (ibid:2). This structuring element analyzes the flow of energy throughout the case and roughly has to do with differences in the moments of active and passive participation. Participants from each domain are limited in the attention they can dedicate to the events in Oranje, both in general and around critical moments. Each sphere has to estimate the complexity and the importance of the problems, to determine the amount of energy and attention they dedicate to each choice event in Oranje. Especially in periods characterized by high working pressure and influx of asylum seekers, the COA is constrained by time and capacity as it has to open many new and large locations in a relatively short period of time. “Since every entrance is an exit somewhere else (ibid:3),” this results in a need to be selective in the amount of time and energy that is dedicated to each local decision-making process and reception center. Meanwhile, local residents and laymen are limited in the allocation of energy as well, since they have to combine working on the case with other daily tasks. Besides these elements that structure the individual streams, there are also the context specific and existential factors in the frames that play part in the controversy in Oranje.

The garbage can model provides insights into how the streams distinctly punctuate the chain of events and how this influences the communication and the coordination among them. Punctuation is the second explanation that this study investigates. My interpretation of the concept is based on the way Watzlawick et. al. described this ‘tentative axiom’ for metacommunication in the Pragmatics of Human Communication. They explain how an outside observer can view a series of communications as an uninterrupted sequence of interchanges. This is different in the minds of participants who always introduce punctuation

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to the sequence of events (Watzlawick et. al., 1967:54). It is important to remember that the issue is not whether punctuation is in general terms good or bad, but the insights it gives into the relative importance of events in the sequence and the way it “helps to organize behavioral events which would otherwise simply be endless chains of actions and reactions (ibid: 56).”

Interpreting an example of Whorf, Bateson and Jackson shows how the sequence of experience in laboratory experiments can be punctuated in such a way that it is always the experimenter who ‘stimulates’ and ‘reinforces,’ and the rat, that ‘responds’. A role definition like this ‘only holds up as long as the organisms are willing to accept the system of punctuation’. It would fall apart if the rat in the Skinner box experiment would say: “I have got my experimenter trained. Each time I press the lever he gives me food”. When the rat “declines to accept the punctuation of the sequence which the experimenter was seeking to impose (ibid: 55),” this could result in an unsettled and conflictual situation. The point is that the dominant view, except for the obvious fact that it is hard to communicate with a rat, is not more or less accurate than the other view of the same event. Punctuation shows what is important for the different actors and serves to organize interactional sequences (ibid: 56). It focuses on what they prioritized and emphasized in their punctuation of the sequence, through which we can learn about the relative importance of several events and the differences in punctuation among the spheres.

Overall, the second and third explanation for the controversy in Oranje describe that there is something in the more general pattern of communication that limits the possibilities to sustain a working conversation among the domains, and that is unable to properly include the concerns and interests of all parties in the decision. It is interesting to see how this general understanding plays out in the detailed descriptions that will be provided in the empirical chapters. However, before the results in light of these theoretical considerations will be analyzed, the methods chapter will discuss the reasoning behind the design of this study and the way it has been operationalized.

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3. Methodological Considerations

3.1 Introduction

The previous chapter suggests that to understand the ways in which experiences are framed and the dynamics of the interactions that develop both within and among the local, administrative and national domains, we need to look at how people interact and make sense of the interactions in which they are involved. To get access to this we can look how they talk and act with each other in concrete settings in the case and how they reflect on their experiences at a later time. This research examines how individuals and groups from each sphere ‘think and talk’ differently in their accounts about Oranje. To a certain extent groups each speak their own languages and, at least at times, seem to act on different, largely independent, bases sometimes without realizing it complicating coordination among them. Following this train of thought, the claim is that many of the problems around reception centers for asylum seekers are the democratic consequences of the building of a consensus that is intolerant of disagreement, disruption and interference. This chapter will discuss the research design and the methods used to address the research questions that have been conceptually outlined in the previous chapter based upon the three possible explanations for the controversy and escalation in Oranje. The section in this chapter discussing the practical implementation or operationalization will enable readers to measure the validity of the choices made in performing this study and in processing the data.

3.2 Case study research

The main body of the thesis consists of a qualitative single-case study of experience that closely follows the progression in Oranje and investigates how action was framed and pursued in three policy domains. The research questions and objectives suggest that the approach to understand the conflict and escalation is to look at how individuals narrate both in the moments of actual communication and when they reflect on their experiences in the case. This results in two discourses which will be referred to as ‘stories-in-action’ and ‘reflective stories’. These have been researched using different methods as will be described in the section on operationalization. Before that I will explain the reasons to select the single-case study as the appropriate design for this research. Independent of my belief in this approach, the single-case study was also a sensible choice evoked by the design of this study, since one case already consists of three relatively independent stories and the goal is to

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compare these stories. The approach could be extended to multiple cases. Because of time constraints and concerns for quality, the decision was made to focus on a single case.

Qualitative methods are suitable to capture the differences in the stories and speech of individuals and groups from the different domains. Bent Flyvbjerg’s summary of common misunderstandings regarding case study research suggests how objections to this approach can be refuted. Flyvbjerg is a proponent of the single-case study, and has proposed to reorient the perception of scientific development from a positivist to a more artisanal approach based on standards of craftsmanship and practical wisdom. Drawing Aristotel’s categorization of types of knowledge, he named this phronesis, which involves ‘the art of judgement’ that “emerge[s] from having an intimate familiarity of what would work in particular settings and circumstances (Schram et. al., 2013:369).” Such contextually specific knowledge “goes beyond analytical, scientific knowledge (episteme) and technical knowledge or know-how (techne) and involves decisions made in the manner of a virtuoso5 social and political actor (Flyvbjerg, 2001:2).” Studies of human behavior like this one are not rule-governed, making practical wisdom “more valuable than the vain search for predictive theories and universals (ibid:73).” Case study research enables the “proximity to real-life situations and its multiple wealth of details (Flyvbjerg, 2004:422)” that is important for the development of a nuanced view of reality that understands the local perceptions of national policy in their actuality. From this perspective, it is not in generalizing findings to a larger population where most interesting phenomena can be found, but “in the most minute and concrete of details that, when closely examined, reveal itself to be pregnant with paradigms, metaphors and general significance (ibid:430).” This wealth of details is also required in Oranje, where the findings will be most interesting when phronesis is attained of how things go wrong in communication.

3.3 Limitations and biases

In-depth case study research is an adequate design to achieve the goals outlined so far, but – like all methods – it has several limitations and biases that have to be dealt with in this section. The most common critique is that case study research is unable to provide verifiable 5_{Instead of using Dreyfus’s term ‘expert’ to describe “performers at the highest level of skill acquisition”,}

Bourdieu prefers ‘virtuoso’. He prefers this since expert is usually linked to the type of analytical-rational decision making which can be signaled as one of the lower and rule-governed stages in the learning process (Flyvbjerg, 2001:171). Virtuosity defines ‘excellence’ or “perfect practical mastery of the ‘art of living’ which is neither the result of free choice or of mute submission to structural rule or law, but is the art of necessary improvisation” (Lane, 2000:105).

Controversy and conventions : Mmking sense of local resistance to sheltering asylum seekers