Organising labour market integration of immigrants: theory and practice

Abstract:

This multidisciplinary research programme aims at investigating labour market integration initiatives directed at immigrants, from the perspective of contemporary organisation theory. The project has its roots in practice-based approaches to labour market integration. Thus, its aim is to study how initiatives intended to support labour market integration of refugees and other immigrants work in everyday practice: how they are made sense of by integrators and by the immigrants, and how they are organised with the help of a variety of ideas, people, objects and activities. We shall use a multi-method approach to reveal as many as possible different aspects of the integration phenomenon in the context of migration. A combination of ethnographic, quantitative and historical methods will be applied to study the labour market integration of immigrants in five work packages, covering: 1) historical and contemporary sites of integration; 2) the role of the private sector in integration; 3) the role of community embedded initiatives and active citizenship, 4) the role of the public sector in integration, and 5) the complications and opportunities of connecting integration activities across sites.