Ethnicizing Employability Governing the Unemployed in Labour Market Projects in Sweden (original) (raw)
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Learning to be Swedish. Governing migrants in labour-market projects
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This article focuses on adult learning in labour-market projects targeting unemployed migrants in Sweden. Drawing on a Foucauldian analysis of governmentality, the results of the study problematize the ways that such projects produce individualizing discourses – targeting individuals, constructing them as responsible for their position as unemployed. The project’s target groups are generally defined not on the basis of ethnicity as such, but rather using terms such as non-Nordic background, foreign born and immigrants. However, two groups considered especially problematic are constructed through ethnicity: Somali and Roma people. The notion of social competency is analysed here as a way of constructing the unemployed migrants as not yet employable. Another significant result concerns the notion of gender equality, which makes migrants governable because it constructs boundaries between Swedishness and Otherness. In line with this rationality, the targeted migrants are governed towards Swedishness through learning gender equality. These results raise a number of issues of great concern for the inclusion of migrants in the labour market, as they highlight a paradoxical relationship between the inclusive ambitions of interventions targeting unemployed migrants and the ethnicized discourses of ‘Othering’ that imbue these learning practices. Keywords: integration; migrants; learning; employability; governing
Citizens in the making – the inclusion of racialized subjects in labour market projects in Sweden
This article analyzes the formation of citizenship in today's multi-ethnic Sweden in the light of the inclusion of 'people with foreign background'. Particular focus is put on how ethnicity and migration renders visible existing citizenship ideals, defined in terms of similarity and difference on the basis of ethno-cultural background. The formation of citizenship is analysed in the case of labour-market projects targeting racialized migrants. The point of departure is an understanding of citizenship as an ongoing process of citizen formation, highlighting the formation of citizens as rights-bearing subjects, belonging to the societal community – in contrast to those not bearing these rights and not belonging to the societal community. The analysis illustrates how norms of Swedish-ness condition the membership in the Swedish societal community, forming a particular kind of racialized citizenship, including certain subjects, under certain conditions, while excluding others. One conclusion is that in addition to the formal dimensions of citizenship, the ability and willingness to adapt to norms of Swedish-ness is essential for accessing and using social rights – i.e. for becoming employable and included on the labour market. In the projects analysed, racialized migrants have the duty of becoming employable by embracing certain values – the good, working citizen, the free, independent individual, able to make choices – all constituted as being part of the ideal Swedish citizenship.
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In the flexible Swedish labour market, the concept of employability has grown important. Within a neoliberal framework, accountability for one’s possibility to successfully obtain or keep employment rests with the individual. In contrast, within a social welfare discourse the individual is offered care and support in order to gain employment. The present study combined intersectional and discourse analytical approaches with the understanding that individual employability is subjectively constructed in the exploration of labour market induction, employability constructions and categorizations in the discourse used by government agencies directly involved in the labour market integration of newly arrived migrants. Public documents comprising information on labour market entrance, employability and associated concepts such as competence building and career development were analysed. The employability constructions were often contradictory—placed at the crossroads of neoliberal and soci...
Constructing the employable immigrant: The uses of validation practices in Sweden
This paper examines the Validation/Integration (V/I) project, a labour market initiative aimed at developing methods of validating the prior learning of recent immigrants to Sweden as part of their settlement support aimed at promoting their 'employability'. This study places the V/I project within its social and economic context and uses a constructivist perspective on organizing in order to problematize how ideas regarding employability are translated into practice within the project. The study proposes that the V/I project, notwithstanding its laudable intentions, by focusing on the bureaucratic requirements of employers and public organizations, promotes specific forms of employability and may thus formalize and reinforce the ethnic division of Sweden's labour market.
Discourses of Employment and Inclusion: Governing Citizens and Suburban Peripheries in Sweden
Righard, Erica, Johansson, Magnus & Salonen, Tapio (eds) Transformation of Scandinavian Cities: Nordic Perspectives on Urban Marginalization and Social Sustainability, Lund: Nordic Academic Press [forthcoming]
The notion of active citizenship has become more and more a mainstream policy narrative in a number of different arenas – not least in the arenas of labour and urban policy, where there is a strong focus on activating citizens and making citizens take responsibility including themselves in society. Taking as a theoretical starting point, the work of Michel Foucault and his concept of governmentality, the aim of this chapter is to analyse the main developments in Swedish labour and urban policy, with a particular focus on the formation of an ideal active citizenship and corresponding active citizens. In Swedish urban policy in the new Millennium, multi-ethnic “areas of exclusion” have been represented as opposites towards which the ideal active citizenship is given meaning. The analysis indicates that these areas, together with their inhabitants, increasingly have become identified as a serious political problem that needs to be “dealt with”. The issue that has repeatedly been raised in Swedish urban policy is how to get the suburban population to transform its morality of impotence, dependence and passivity into the diligence, confidence, employability and enterprise of the surrounding Swedish society. In urban policy discourse, exclusion is first and foremost to be resolved from inside of the “areas of exclusion”. On the basis of this type of argument, a large number of activating measures or efforts (intended to motivate, provide opportunities, remove obstacles, stimulate self-sufficiency) are directed specifically at multi-ethnic suburbs.
The Will to Activate: Employability, Social Exclusion and Labour Market Policies in Sweden
This article analyses central ideas and arguments found in labour market policy documents in Sweden, from the 1990s and later. In particular, the focus is directed at ideas and conceptualisations of work and of the ideal, actively working citizen which have come to dominate Swedish labour market policy during the period. The analysis directs a particular focus at two themes that occupy a central position in the context of the shift described above, namely employability, i.e. the endeavour to produce employable subjects, and exclusion (in Swedish utanförskap) and the problem of the multi-ethnic suburbs, which are both strongly linked, albeit in different ways, to the shift in labour market policy. Stated briefly, this shift may be described as follows: A policy focused on passive ‘benefit dependency’ is replaced by an ‘activating’ policy focused on getting people to support themselves. As in many other countries, welfare is gradually replaced by an obligation to work, termed workfare. Over time, work becomes more a duty than a right. As we will see below, the shift has had a particularly powerful effect in multi-ethnic suburbs. These areas, together with their inhabitants, have increasingly become identified as constituting a serious political problem that needs to be ‘dealt with’. Several of the measures and ‘activation requirements’ that have been in place since the 1990s were developed specifically in order to be implemented in a suburban context. In other cases, a more indirect link is drawn between unemployment and ‘benefit dependency’ on the one hand and ‘problem suburbs’ on the other.
Ethnicized un/employability: Problematized Others and the Shaping of Advanced Liberal Subjects
Ephemera. Theory & politics in organization, 2013
This paper suggests some analytical tools for theoretically informed qualitative research of the nexus of employability and ethnicity. A governmentality perspective, inspired by Michel Foucault and others who have elaborated on his thoughts, constitutes the analytical approach of the paper. This approach directs the analytical focus towards problematizations and how the conduct of the governed subjects is guided. The analytical tools and approach are then employed using an empirical example. The analysis shows how a certain disadvantaged group – unemployed Somalis in Sweden – is problematized in the context of a labour market project co-funded by the European Social Fund (ESF). The paper discusses how different techniques, such as resume-writing, personal action plan, guidance and job interview training are deployed in order to reshape these problematized and ethnicized Others into advanced liberal subjects, or ‘employable’ individuals.