Institutional Entanglements: How Institutional Knots and Reverberating Consequences Burden Refugee Families

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.