ERIC Number: EJ1143512
Record Type: Journal
Publication Date: 2017
Pages: 19
Abstractor: As Provided
ISBN: N/A
ISSN: ISSN-1363-6820
EISSN: N/A
Understanding Discrimination in Hiring Apprentices: How Training Companies Use Ethnicity to Avoid Organisational Trouble
Journal of Vocational Education and Training, v69 n3 p405-423 2017
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.
Descriptors: Foreign Countries, Equal Opportunities (Jobs), Personnel Selection, Apprenticeships, Immigrants, Ethnicity, Small Businesses, Recruitment, Social Discrimination, Organizational Climate, Training Objectives
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Publication Type: Journal Articles; Reports - Research
Education Level: N/A
Audience: N/A
Language: English
Sponsor: N/A
Authoring Institution: N/A
Identifiers - Location: Switzerland; Germany
Grant or Contract Numbers: N/A