Practices of organizing migrants' integration into the European labour market

Open Access

Abstract

Organizational practices of migrants' labour market integration have by and large been overlooked in favour of research on societal-level/macrolevel factors, policies, rules and regulations and their impacts on migrants' positions and perspectives on the labour market in the host country. Organizations are conceptualized as key sites that can open doors for meaningful employment and career progression or close them by way of producing inequalities. This change of focus, which we advocate, has a potential to not only increase our understanding of how migrants' labour market integration is organized and practiced at the organizational level, but also shed light on migrants' own mobilizations and agency in these processes. Research on organizational practices of workplace integration of migrants is also relevant as economic and political migration is still high on the agenda in many European countries, particularly since the so-called 'refugee crisis' in 2015, when hundreds of thousands of refugees made their way to Europe. Unfortunately, the war in Ukraine in 2022 reminds us of the heightened importance of this issue. In this article, we start by outlining what has motivated this Special Section. Next, we briefly review the relevant literature that directly or indirectly focuses on practices of organizing migrants' labour market integration in European host countries. We then introduce the two contributions to this Special Section, presenting and discussing their main lines of reasoning and how each of them answer our call for papers. We conclude by elaborating what is, from our point of view, still missing and suggest possible avenues for future research.