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.
Highlights
Similar to Germany, Switzerland has become a major immigration country during the second half of the last century
The main problem when companies appoint new apprentices consists of matching wellknown, experience-based internal categories of a company’s requirements with mostly unknown candidates who are mainly identifiable on the ground of distinctions offered by the company-external environment
An important assumption of the theory of justification is that the provision of a public good through workplace action necessitates a specific form of social coordination of humans to mutually adjust their behaviour
Summary
Similar to Germany, Switzerland has become a major immigration country during the second half of the last century. In the context of ‘foreign youth’ exclusion from apprenticeship in the last decade, this article asks how recruiters in SMEs make sense of ethnicity when hiring new apprentices It aims at developing a theoretical model of personnel selection and (ethnic) discrimination that goes beyond the prevalent assumptions of individualised productivity (inherent in concepts such as statistical discrimination or implicit prejudice) when recruiters assess the quality of job applicants.
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a call
