scholarly journals Taking Time Seriously: Biographical Circumstance and Immigrant Labor Integration Experience

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Erika Gubrium ◽  
Mariann Stærkebye Leirvik
Keyword(s):  
Labor Market ◽  
Market Integration ◽  
Meaning Making ◽  
Qualitative Interviews ◽  
Immigrant Labor ◽  
Case Scenario ◽  
Socially Constructed ◽  
Integration Of Immigrants ◽  
Personal Histories ◽  
Personalized Approach

AbstractThe article offers a re-conceptualization of the labor integration process which takes temporality into account as a relevant feature that, rather than following patterned frames of reference, is actively referenced through narratively and socially constructed formations of understanding. The European policy strategy regarding immigrants has shifted in the past decades from a focus on social integration to a predominant focus on labor market integration, due in part to the relatively high unemployment rates of immigrants entering and migrating within Europe. A personalized approach used throughout Europe to “empower” and move immigrants into the labor market has not been realized in practice. Norway, a “best case scenario” for a more personalized approach through comprehensive labor integration and activation measures, has also had limited success with the sustained labor integration of immigrants. We suggest that a source of the problem lies in the conceptualization of labor integration, which, in contrast to true personalization, follows a patterned notion of the process. We argue that such a conceptualization does not provide the means to explore and untangle potentially significant processes and mechanisms relevant to the labor integration experience. We introduce the concept of biographical circumstance to demonstrate how immigrant participants in a Norwegian labor activation program draw on different references from their personal histories as they make meaning of their labor integration—and how meaning-making is dialectically shaped and delimited by the structural effects of changing policy opportunities, rules, and regulations. We conducted 14 qualitative interviews with immigrants involved in the Norwegian Qualification Program, a national labor activation program. We select four participants to present as illustrative cases of biographical circumstance and meaning making. The four differently make meaning of and respond to their labor integration experiences through active reference to specific personal histories and changing policy encounters over time. The data demonstrate that accounting for biographical circumstance enables us to better understand the actions, rationalizations, and motivations of immigrants participating in labor integration and activation measures.

scholarly journals An Evaluation of the Effectiveness of Labor Market Integration Policies in EU Member States Using PROMETHEE

2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 73-84
Author(s):  
Anastasia Blouchoutzi ◽  
Panagiota Digkolou ◽  
Jason Papathanasiou ◽  
Christos Nikas
Keyword(s):  
Labor Market ◽  
Market Integration ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
The European Union ◽  
Member States ◽  
Economic Point ◽  
Labor Market Integration ◽  
Eu Member States ◽  
Integration Policies ◽  
Integration Of Immigrants

From an economic point of view, the rational response towards migration is the labor market integration of immigrants. Within the above framework, several actions have been developed by the European Union member states over the last few years, in an effort to integrate migrants to local communities. This paper evaluates the performance of the European Member States as regards to their labor market integration policies using the Zaragoza indicators for employment. Combining those indicators, the data will be processed with the well-known multi-criteria analysis method PROMETHEE. The model will be constituted by the selected years from 2008 to 2017 as 10 successive scenarios, the 28 EU countries as alternatives, and eight criteria. The paper will end up with ten final rankings of the countries, which will be analyzed in detail.

scholarly journals Social Representations of Diagnosis in the Consultation

Sociology ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 52 (6) ◽  
pp. 1185-1199 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tom Sanders ◽  
Diane Roberts
Keyword(s):  
Social Order ◽  
Meaning Making ◽  
Social Representations ◽  
Qualitative Interviews ◽  
Negotiated Order ◽  
Socially Constructed ◽  
Sciatic Pain ◽  
The Social ◽  
The World ◽  
Pain Symptoms

Observations of physiotherapy consultations and qualitative interviews with patients were conducted to explore the clinical explanation for sciatic pain. We report three themes which illustrate the contested and negotiated order of the clinical explanation: anchoring; resistance; and normalisation. We show using the theory of social representations how the social order in the physiotherapy consultation is maintained, contested and rearticulated. We highlight the importance of agency in patients’ ability to resist the clinical explanation and in turn shape the clinical discourse within the consultation. Social representations offer insights into how the world is viewed by different individuals, in our case physiotherapists and patients with sciatic pain symptoms. The negotiation about the diagnosis reveals the malleable and socially constructed nature of pain and the meaning-making process underpinning it. The study has implications for understanding inequalities in the consultation and the key ingredients of consensus.

The meanings of racist and sexist trash talk for men of color: A cultural sociological approach to studying gaming culture

2018 ◽  
Vol 21 (4) ◽  
pp. 879-894 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephanie M Ortiz
Keyword(s):  
Meaning Making ◽  
Qualitative Interviews ◽  
People Of Color ◽  
Social Actors ◽  
Color Experience ◽  
Sociological Approach ◽  
Socially Constructed ◽  
Men Of Color ◽  
Gaming Culture ◽  
Boundary Making

Scholars have documented how people of color experience gaming culture as violent, yet it is unclear how this violence shapes conceptualizations of gaming culture. Undertaking a cultural sociological approach that foregrounds meaning-making, I demonstrate that trash talk is a useful site to explore how social actors construct and negotiate gaming culture. Analyzing data from 12 qualitative interviews with men of color, I argue that trash talk is a practice of boundary-making that reproduces racism and sexism. Respondent narratives about gaming culture vis-à-vis trash talk thus show how gaming culture is socially constructed in everyday interactions, and bound to cultural repertoires and structural conditions that exist outside of gaming. This study provides a potential avenue to explore the socially constructed and dynamic nature of gaming culture and gamer identity.

scholarly journals Employment and Education–Occupation Mismatches of Immigrants and their Children in the Netherlands: Comparisons with the Native Majority Group

2018 ◽  
Vol 6 (3) ◽  
pp. 119-141
Author(s):  
Yassine Khoudja
Keyword(s):  
Labor Market ◽  
The Netherlands ◽  
Market Integration ◽  
First Generation ◽  
Market Outcomes ◽  
Post Secondary ◽  
The Public ◽  
Integration Of Immigrants ◽  
Employment Probabilities ◽  
Using Data

This study examines the labor market integration of immigrants and their children in the Netherlands focusing on employment and over- and underqualification. Using data from the first wave of the Netherlands Longitudinal Life-Course Study (NELLS), the analysis shows disadvantages in employment probabilities for men and women from different foreign origin groups compared to the Dutch majority even after accounting for differences in human capital. Ethnic differences in employment probabilities are lower, but still visible, when comparing only respondents who obtained post-secondary education in the Netherlands. Further, first-generation immigrant men from Turkey and Morocco are at higher risk of being overeducated than Dutch majority men whereas this is not the case for second generation men and first- and secondgeneration minority women. Substantial ethnic difference in the likelihood of being undereducated are not prevalent. Having a foreign compared to a Dutch degree is related to lower labor market outcomes, but this negative relation is more pronounced for women than for men. Finally, there is some indication that overeducation is somewhat less common in the public sector than in the private sector, but minorities do not benefit more from this than the Dutch majority.

The Employment Status of Immigrant Women: The Case of Sweden

2005 ◽  
Vol 39 (1) ◽  
pp. 173-202 ◽  
Author(s):  
Pieter Bevelander
Keyword(s):  
Labor Market ◽  
Employment Status ◽  
Market Integration ◽  
Immigrant Women ◽  
Labor Market Integration ◽  
Integration Of Immigrants ◽  
Female Immigrants ◽  
Immigrant Men

This article presents an exploration of the employment status of various groups of immigrant women in the Swedish labor market in the period 1970–1995. Since employment is one of the key components for the integration of immigrants, it is interesting to study what factors determine whether or not immigrants become employed after entering Sweden. Numerous studies have analyzed the labor market integration of immigrant men, whereas the integration of women still has received less attention (Ekberg, 1983, 1991; Hammarstedt, 2001; Scott, 1999). This study can be seen as a contribution to an increase in the knowledge of the labor market integration of female immigrants in Sweden.

scholarly journals Skill structure and labor market integration of immigrants in Europe

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Johan Westerman ◽  
Ryszard Szulkin ◽  
Michael Tåhlin
Keyword(s):  
Labor Market ◽  
Market Integration ◽  
Labour Force ◽  
The European Union ◽  
Foreign Born ◽  
Demand And Supply ◽  
Advanced Economies ◽  
Integration Of Immigrants ◽  
Skill Supply ◽  
Labor Market Attainment

Across European countries, immigrants are disadvantaged in labor market attainment relative to natives: foreign-born individuals are less likely to be employed and more likely to be unemployed. Previous research indicates that immigrants’ employment chances are better when the share of low-skill jobs in the labor market is large. Upgrading of the job structure, which has taken place in many countries over recent decades, might therefore have hurt immigrants’ employment prospects. However, an exclusive focus on skill demand neglects another important development in the skill structure of advanced economies: educational expansion. The rapid rise in skill supply has tended to outpace the decline in the low-skill job share with increasing over-education as a consequence, potentially leading to crowding-out of immigrant workers from employment. Based on data from the European Union Labour Force Surveys (EU-LFS) 2004-2016, we perform analyses that jointly consider the demand and supply sides of labor markets. Our results indicate that the size of the low-skill job sector is positively related to immigrants’ employment if and only if those employed in the low-skill sector have low qualifications. In economies with high rates of over-education, where many well-educated natives occupy low-skill jobs, the labor market prospects of immigrants deteriorate.

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