In this paper the main objective is to develop and discuss the theoretical-analytical framework of a collective research project which is guided by the following research question: How do professional interventions addressing “the immigrant” appear and how are they legitimised and transformed after WWII? 

Theoretically, we want to develop original knowledge about professional interventions, contributing to the research area of the sociology of professions, linking it to conceptualisations from research areas of political sociology, sociology of pedagogy and immigration studies. This development of theory as regards professional interventions is based on theoretical-analytical tools of classical and modern sociology. First of all, we extend the use of the political sociological concept of the state as a bureaucratic field (Bourdieu, 1996; Wacquant, 2008, 2009) into the research area of sociology of professions. The state as a bureaucratic field refers to the state as a dynamic structure, i.e., a space of institutions and agents struggling to define and distribute “the public good” or “the collective” using codified symbolic power. In this paper, we will operationalise this overall concept into levels of the bureaucratic field, such as a level of policy, and a level of practical interventions and institutionalisations. Thus, we suggest how to use and further develop the Bourdieuian and Wacquantian political sociology approach where relations between social dynamics and structures, including professional interventions and institutions on the one hand, and policies on the other hand, are the focus of attention. This approach enables us to analyse policy documents, professional interventions, classifications and institutionalisations as tied to symbolic and socio-economic relational forces (Lamont and Molnar 2002, van Zanten 2005).

Furthermore, we want to extend the themes of Loïc Wacquants Punishing the poor into the domain of educational sociology and sociology of professions (Bourdieu, 1996; Durkheim, 1975, 1992), e.g., professional interventions addressing “the immigrant”, and into new contexts (Denmark, France and England). As pointed out by Wacquant, not only “the market” and “workfare” are stressed as logics of neo-liberal policy. “Security”, a drift to punitive regulation and a disciplinary logic as the answer to the threat of crime and disorder seems to be constitutive of neo-liberal policy as well (Wacquant, 2009). In other words, we want to investigate into understandings of professional educational interventions as differentiating activities which targets “problem populations” such as “immigrants” with special pedagogical action design to discipline, supervise and sanction proper behavior. And finally, we want to develop our understandings of these processes through a concept of state crafting processes. This concept put focus on the way in which the state crafts itself, especially when addressing “the immigrant”, continuously remaking and rethinking itself through material forces and symbolic powers addressing “the immigrant”’.

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