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ABSTRACT
In this article, we discuss labour market entries as experienced by Austrian university graduates with a migrant background. On the basis of 21 problem-centred interviews, we investigated (a) what kind of discrimination and marginalisation the respondents had experienced in the labour market post-graduation, and (b) how they had dealt with their situation. To analyse the interviews, we used a combination of thematic charting and coding methods. The empirical results indicate that migrant backgrounds often lead to both a disavowal of those graduates’ abilities and a rise of conflicts along religious, ethnical or stereotypical ascriptions. The coping strategies employed by migrant background graduates ranged from preventive strategies – such as an emphasis on performance and the avoidance of problematic situations – to responsive strategies, through active resistance or various kinds of resignation.
Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes
1. Hirschman’s (Citation1970) third pattern of reaction is loyalty, discussed particularly in connection with crises in organizations and companies.
2. Stevens, Hussein, and Manthorpe (Citation2012, 260) argue that ‘language and skin colour may be used as markers to classify, and negatively evaluate, others cultures, leading to discrimination and racism’.
3. Additional barriers due to age and gender were referred to in several interviews. In particular, young women such as Mrs. Popescu complained about the entanglement of different disadvantages during the first phase of their careers: ‘That I’m young, that I’m a woman, and that I come from abroad’ (I 9: 1885f.). Mrs. Celik put it in a nutshell quite concisely, ‘There were barriers ( … ) because I simply wasn’t 100-percent Austrian. And then there were situations because I’m a woman. And you can’t really play that down’ (I 20: 1503ff.). Byng (Citation1998) and Makkonen (Citation2002) have recently referred to comparable patterns of multiple marginalization and discrimination experiences.
4. The FPÖ is a right-wing party in Austria.
5. Such persistent non-reference to one’s name can be precarious for those concerned, as Bourdieu (Citation1990, 55) argues, because names function as ‘visible confirmation of identity’, that is, they create identificatory security in social space.
6. The abbreviation ‘-ic’ refers to the last syllable of common names in Bosnia, Serbia and Croatia. In Austria, it is used as a stereotypical expression, in this case implying low educational and occupational status for individuals with such an ethnic background.