Understanding discrimination in hiring apprentices

how training companies use ethnicity to avoid organisational trouble

authored by

Christian Imdorf

Abstract

Children of immigrants from non-EU countries face particular problems to access apprenticeship training in German-speaking countries. In this context this article asks how recruiters in small and medium sized companies (SME) make sense of national and ethnic origin when hiring new apprentices. The author proposes Boltanski and Thévenot’s theory of justification in order to conceptualise ethnic discrimination in hiring. Accordingly, the social body of a company consists of multiple interweaved (industrial, domestic, market) ‘worlds’ of social coordination and justification. In order to avoid organisational trouble and to guarantee the further existence of the company, these worlds claim different principle of personnel assessment, some of them penalising applicants of specific ethnic origin. Empirically, the article refers to apprentice recruitment in Switzerland and Germany. It illustrates that employers in SME expect trouble in the domestic and in the market world of the company when hiring school leavers they perceive as foreigners. Hence, discriminatory categories such as ethnicity are used as symbolic and organisational resources for trouble avoidance in hiring apprentices.

External Organisation(s)

University of Bern

Type

Article

Journal

Journal of Vocational Education and Training

Volume

69

Pages

405-423

No. of pages

19

ISSN

1363-6820

Publication date

03.07.2017

Publication status

Published

Peer reviewed

Yes

ASJC Scopus subject areas

Education

Sustainable Development Goals

SDG 4 - Quality Education

Electronic version(s)

https://doi.org/10.1080/13636820.2016.1278397 (Access: Open)