The article connects the fields of work/non-work research with the research on social integration of migrants. It is based on in-depth interviews with foreign physicians in the south of Sweden which explored their work/non-work experiences and their subjective perceptions of managing work, family, social and private domains of life. Based on individual reflections of social life as experienced in the workplace, in the locations of everyday life and transnationally, the analysis does not pursue the existence and composition of social networks but focuses on non-instrumental aspects of social life and explores their significance for high-skilled migrants' own sense of integration. The findings suggest that migrants who are privileged in terms of education and employment still face extensive challenges in the social domain of life, especially with regard to close friendships. The findings furthermore suggest that social integration is a process that is influenced by place, time and individual life trajectories and therefore cannot be truthfully accounted for by looking at the numbers and ethnic composition of a migrant's social relations. It is the quality of relationsnotably friendshipsthat matters most. RÉSUMÉ Cet article associe les champs de la recherche sur le travail/nontravail avec la recherche sur ĺintégration sociale des migrants. Il est basé sur des entretiens approfondis avec des médecins étrangers basés dans le sud de la Suède, explorant leurs expériences professionnelles/non-professionnelles ainsi que leurs perceptions subjectives de la gestion de la vie professionnelle, familiale, sociale et privée. Fondée sur des réflexions individuelles sur la vie sociale vécue sur le lieu de travail, dans les lieux de la vie quotidienne et au niveau transnational, cette analyse ne cherche pas á étudier ĺexistence et la composition des réseaux sociaux, mais se concentre sur les aspects non-instrumentaux de la vie sociale et explore leur signification pour le sentiment d intégration des migrants hautement qualifiés. Les résultats suggèrent que, malgré des privilèges en termes d´éducation et d emploi, les migrants doivent encore faire face à des défis ARTICLE HISTORY
This article analyses the relationship between human capital and career outcomes using the case of highly skilled young Latvians and Romanians in Sweden. As a non-English-speaking country with regulated labour markets, the Swedish case provides a contrast to previous studies on EU10 to EU15 mobility that usually focus on English-speaking receiving countries with less regulated labour markets. Thirty-eight semi-structured interviews are analysed from a life-course perspective to map the education and career trajectories before and after their mobility. Three career trajectories are found: match, re-skilling, and de-skilling. Most young migrants tend to prioritize general, rather than country specific, human capital investments, which negatively affects their career outcomes. The results highlight the importance of individual human capital investment choices as well as structural opportunities in receiving countries for understanding the relationship between human capital and career outcomes for young EU-migrants.
The article engages with occupational aspirations of highly educated refugees with the aim to explore how their social positions of being highly educated and a refugee inform their aspirations. It does so by drawing on semi-structured interviews with 30 highly educated refugees living in Malm€ o and Munich. Findings show how highly educated refugees' occupational aspirations are informed by their educational and occupational resources, identity struggles and an interpretation of the local opportunity structures that is offered by public employment service (PES) case officers. The article thus argues that, rather than reflecting personal traits, occupational aspirations have socially grounded character. In doing so, the article contributes to the empirical knowledge about labour market integration of highly educated refugees, to our conceptualisation of refugee integration and to our understanding of the role that state integration programmes for refugees, particularly the PES case officers, play within it.
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.
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