Refugee economic self-reliance practices: How institutional intermediations negotiate opportunities for refugee employment and entrepreneurship

Abstract

This research explores how institutional intermediations negotiate local institutional frameworks that constrain refugee (self-)employment. Drawing on the case of a Finnish non-profit organization, the findings show the construction of a labor market scaffolding, which is an analytical space wherein refugees’ institutional disadvantages are negotiated through three intermediation mechanisms: mobilizing network support, bridging the employability gap, and buffering regulatory constraints. This research contributes to scholarship on refugee workforce integration by elaborating on a comprehensive process that targets the individual, networks, and regulations to address the systemic and multilevel challenges of refugee employment. The paper also contributes to refugee governance mechanisms by suggesting that labor market scaffoldings can be productive tools for devising refugees’ self-reliance practices that are relational, temporally sensitive, and contextually relevant.