Scholarship on refugee labour market participation regularly alludes to the temporal dimension of the process, yet explicit engagement with it remains limited. I argue that researching the temporalities of refugee employment re-entry is valuable as it discerns the recursive interrelation between social structure and individual agency that advances or curbs the labour market trajectories of refugees. Namely, refugees’ perceptions of time inform their integration pathways. In this article, I interrogate how highly educated refugees perceive the temporalities imposed upon them by the integration framework, their efforts of temporal re-appropriation and the ways in which institutional factors inform these re-appropriation efforts and, thus, individuals’ sense of integration. To this end, I discuss and compare 11 refugee healthcare professionals’ perceptions of licensure procedures in Oslo and Malmö based on material from semi-structured interviews. The refugee professionals reported that the licensure appropriated their time through, for instance, prolonged suspension from work and abundance of pointless waiting time. Seeing time as a precious commodity, they deemed the imposed temporalities as problematic, employing different attempts of temporal agency to speed up the licensure process. When comparing the attempts of temporal re-appropriation between the licensure procedures in Oslo and Malmö, I find that the perceived clarity of the licensure requirements and process, accessibility of support structures and existence of tailored qualification programmes lend licensure a quality of institutional plasticity. This fosters individuals’ attempts to accelerate their licensure endeavours, thereby promoting their re-entry into the labour market. However, rather than disrupting the underlying power relations determining the relative value of foreign healthcare qualifications, temporal re-appropriation maintained the established institutional rationale.

关于难民劳动力市场参与的学术研究经常提到这一过程的时间维度，但对其的明确参与仍然有限。我认为，研究难民重新就业的时间性是有价值的，因为它可以识别社会结构和个人机构之间的递归相互关系，从而推动或遏制难民的劳动力市场轨迹。也就是说，难民对时间的看法决定了他们的融入途径。在本文中，我询问受过高等教育的难民如何看待融合框架强加给他们的时间性、他们在时间上重新占用的努力以及制度因素如何影响这些重新占用的努力，从而影响个人的融合感. 为此，我根据半结构化访谈的材料讨论并比较了 11 名难民医疗保健专业人员对奥斯陆和马尔默的执照程序的看法。难民专业人士报告说，执照占用了他们的时间，例如，长时间停工和大量无意义的等待时间。将时间视为宝贵的商品，他们认为强加的时间性是有问题的，采用不同的时间代理尝试来加快许可过程。在比较奥斯陆和马尔默许可程序之间的时间再拨款尝试时，我发现许可要求和流程的明确性、支持结构的可访问性以及量身定制的资格计划的存在为许可提供了制度可塑性的质量。这促进了个人加速获得执照的努力，从而促进他们重新进入劳动力市场。然而，暂时的再拨款并没有破坏决定外国医疗资格相对价值的潜在权力关系，而是保持了既定的制度原理。