27 Nordic journal of working life studies Volume 8 ❚ Number S4 ❚ November 2018 1 You can fnd this text and its DOI at https://tidsskrift.dk/njwls/index. 2 Corresponding author: buch@learning.aau.dk. Perfect Match? The Practice Ecology of a Labor Market Initiative for Refugees 1 ❚ ❚ Sara Kristine Gløjmar Berthou Ph.D., Project Manager, The Danish Society of Engineers, Denmark. ❚ ❚ Anders Buch 2 Professor, Aalborg University Copenhagen, Denmark. ABSTRACT The article investigates the case of a Danish labor market initiative for refugees with a professional engineering background. The ambition is to identify the causes and contextual elements that are active in shaping labor market initiatives directed at groups of refugees. Contemporary theories of practice are used to investigate the structures that enable, constrain, and channel the activities related to the initiative. The discussion focuses on the practice of the initiative in order to analyze ways in which activities are organized in the site. Furthermore, it sets out to investigate how the practices exist and are interconnected in ecological arrangements where practice architectures hold one another in place.The theoretical conceptualization in terms of practice, practices, practice architectures, and practice ecologies helps to explain how a seemingly ideal initiative turned out to have a little impact in bringing the refugee engineers closer to employment on the Danish labor market. KEYWORDS Case study / engineers / labor market initiative / practice architectures / practice ecologies / practice theory / refugees Introduction I n early September 2015, images of approximately 200–300 refugees walking on the motorway in southern Denmark circulated the media widely. The images spurred a nation-wide debate about fnances, cultural cohesion under pressure, and the sustain- ability of amounts. Generally, there was consensus that the situation was one of crisis, the crisis being the refugees arriving in Denmark, and an oft-used narrative about the arrivals were one of ‘streams of refugees’ fowing uncontrollably into the country 1 . Employment is seen as the perhaps most important factor in integrating new groups of people into society. A recent report by a Danish think tank shows that 19,100 refu- gees holding residency permits are receiving integration benefts, since they are currently not in employment (Axcelfuture 2017). Introducing refugees and immigrants into the labor market is thus highly prioritized.