Abstract
A cohort of young French adults of Maghrebi origin, aged 20 to 29, who grew up in the same banlieue neighbourhood was constructed and used to observe their labour market integration. The biographical survey reviewed the pathways of these young men and women through the prism of social mobility. On the one hand, their parents’ migration (from one of three Maghreb countries), low skills level and occupations are not conducive to upward social mobility; on the other hand, the expectation of integration, the aspiration to a better life and education in French society are potentially positive factors. After describing the fieldwork conditions, the article presents the results as a typology comprising five types of occupational integration. These are compared with the parents’ occupational status in order to define the form of social mobility. While some young adults have clearly experienced upward social mobility, others have not managed to find stable employment in the blue-collar category. This outcome can be attributed partly to the diversity of educational pathways. However, the analysis would not be complete without a discussion of the changes in the labour market, growing job insecurity and downclassing. These new trends, which affect the whole population, have a special resonance in a situation of urban segregation, generating new inequalities. The occupational statuses of these young adults highlight the deindustrialization that has taken place between their parents’ generation and their own, constraining opportunities for social mobility.
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Notes
Recent publications include: Crul (2000), Journal of International Migration and Integration (2001), Santelli (2001), Meurs et al. (2005), Platt (2006), Silberman and Fournier (2006), Simon (2007), Papademetriou et al. (2008), Zhou et al. (2008), The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science (2008).
In addition to the seminal work by Bourdieu and Passeron (1970) on the mechanisms of reproduction of social hierarchies, other works on social mobility provide figures to support this, both at the bottom and at the top of the social hierarchy. On the French case, see Merllié and Prévot (1991) and http://www.inegalites.fr/spip.php?page=article&id_article=904.
In demography, a cohort is a group of individuals who have experienced a similar event during the same period of time: here, growing up in the same neighbourhood.
These young adults are the children of migrants who came to France from one of three Maghreb countries (Algeria, Tunisia or Morocco) between the 1950s and the 1980s. The fathers, classed as migrant workers, held manual jobs in various industrial sectors (in construction, chemicals, car manufacturing, etc.). Most of these jobs were unskilled and their working conditions were hard. The mothers joined the fathers under family reunification schemes. Depending on their social and personal characteristics, the families’ experiences of exile varied.
Located on the former industrial periphery south-east of Lyon, the neighbourhood consists of social housing in mid-rise and high-rise blocks. The neighbourhood has been targeted by the city’s policies for around 10 years owing to the high concentration of social problems (high unemployment, wage insecurity, low incomes and over-representation of welfare recipients). It is a zone urbaine sensible (ZUS) or “sensitive urban area” in the official terminology. See Methodology inset on the field survey.
Applied to the questionnaires, the statistical analysis confirmed the existence of the five main types of socio-occupational integration.
Three-quarters of the young people no longer living in the neighbourhood left when their parents moved to another area. Leaving the neighbourhood represents an improvement in living conditions, even if the new residential environment may differ little in objective term from the neighbourhood they moved out of. For the families, however, it may represent an opportunity to move into non-social housing and/or a more sought-after residential environment and/or to buy their own home. The young people who left the neighbourhood when they moved out of their parents’ home, the move is also always perceived positively: occurring upon marriage or, less frequently, for a job or education.
For a more detailed description, see Santelli (2007a). It should be noted that the typology is an analysis of the situation at a given point in time. In no way does it describe a static condition: the pathways of these young people can change to another type due to age or to an improvement in their social position attributable to personal strategies or resources or to structural conditions (decrease in unemployment, policies that target youth, etc.). The analysis was performed on three quarters of the young people who were no longer in education at the time of the survey.
Only a minority of the mothers worked (see the last section of the article).
In both senses of rejecting the labour market and being rejected by it.
This type comprises the largest number of young people with no qualification; more than half of all the young adults with no qualification belong to this type. Fully 25% of all the respondents have no qualification. The figure is 34% of those who were no longer in education at the time of the survey. That figure is in line with the results from other ZUS (see Observatoire des ZUS), but is much higher than the national average. The unemployment rate of people with no qualification is almost three times that of higher education graduates (INSEE employment surveys 1982–2008).
These are 2-year vocational courses, with the CAP covering a narrower range of subjects than the BEP. In the French school system, students are usually channelled into these vocational streams at the end of junior secondary school, so the students in the streams are aged between 15 and 17. In France, it is compulsory to attend school until the age of 16.
They enforce a certain moral order, a key effect of which is to limit the presence of young women in the outside areas (see Santelli 2010a).
Men who live in a ZUS are more than twice as likely to be unemployed as men who do not; the gap is smaller for women (INSEE, employment survey, 2008).
This can be compared to A. Honneth’s “recognition through love” (2007).
We are obviously reaching the limits of our discipline here. Some scholars nevertheless address these aspects, such as V. de Gauléjac and I. Taboada-Léonetti, who reveal the close links between identity and dignity: “The positivity attached to the self is an important human characteristic and a vital need” (1994, p. 96). During meetings with these young people, micro actions reveal how damaged their self-esteem is, which has a huge impact on their lives as a whole. The testimonial of Amrani and Beaud (2004) offers another illustration: his difficulty relating to others outside the neighbourhood stems from a lack of self-esteem even within his family. That distress, combined with a socially stigmatising status, produces and aggravates the processes of social exclusion, exacerbating their suffering and making it very hard for them to make progress: access to other social territories seems difficult or even impossible.
The baccalauréat is the senior secondary leaving qualification, usually obtained at age 18. Different streams lead to different types of baccalaureate: academic, technology or vocational.
After a BEP, school students can enter a senior stream (entry is based on their school results) that leads to a vocational or technology baccalaureate and then go on to higher education. Since technology institutes have stricter entry requirements, these students opt for academic university courses (such as law or economic and social administration), which are seen as less selective (at least at entry).
These are mostly unskilled jobs that are physically demanding and have odd hours (very early in the morning, before classes or in the evening). Some of these young people have also experienced difficult personal events (death of a parent, family breakdown), which are an explanatory factor in their chaotic educational pathways (taking 4 or 5 years to qualify for a 2-year university degree, lack of financial resources, etc.).
Deskilling is an occupational situation where young people hold jobs below their educational qualifications and/or work experience. Deskilling can be a subjective perception or an experience based on objective criteria.
The number of these service-sector jobs has increased substantially in recent years, mainly benefiting women. See INSEE’s website for the nomenclature of socio-occupational categories used in France: http://www.insee.fr/fr/methodes/default.asp?page=nomenclatures/pcs2003/pcs2003.htm
These results, obtained in my survey, have been confirmed by other surveys conducted in ZUS: women seem to do better, which is not verified when there is no distinction by place of residence.
Parental control of girls enhanced their performance at school; it has also proved decisive for boys.
It is worth noting that the percentage of respondents with higher education is only 14% among those who were no longer in education at the time of the survey, compared with 83% among those still in education at the time of the survey. All the young people who went on to higher education stress the family support they received throughout their education.
For example as youth workers, corporate administrative staff, store managers or technicians in industry or services.
The concepts of “reference group” and “membership group” are useful for capturing this, particularly in relation to their urban mobility; see Santelli (2010b).
This diversity can be seen in the different types of investment in their children’s education, which the study by Zeroulou (1985) showed as early as the 1980s, and which has since been validated by other research. See the following studies that focus on family socialisation processes: Zehraoui (1999), Boubeker (1999), Vatz Laaroussi (2001), Delcroix (2001) and Santelli (2001). More generally, the exploration of family environments offers insights into atypical success pathways in the working class (Lahire 1995; Laurens 1992).
Although not developed here, this includes the type of school attended (academic or vocational, in the neighbourhood or outside it), streaming and dealings with the school administration, especially disappointment with practices perceived as unfair (Santelli 2010b).
Some 53% of fathers and 36% of mothers have lived in France for more than 40 years. The number of non-responses to these questions is relatively high, with one respondent in ten not answering the question about the number of years his/her father has been in France. Either they do not wish to give out information about their families, or they do not have that information. It is also noteworthy that not knowing the year of immigration of the father varies strongly with the social status of the respondent at the time of the survey, with a very high non-response rate among the insecure: half of them could not say when their father arrived in France, whereas all the stable employed answered. In the families of the insecure types, probably for various reasons, that information was not passed on (or was withheld), which can be interpreted as a sign of “gaps” in inter-generational transmission in the most distressed families. That “family void” can be an indicator of problems within the family, which also have social repercussions.
The labour force participation rate of women aged 15–64 in the total French population was 63.4% in 2003 (working or seeking work; INSEE). In a narrower age range (25–49), it was 80.7%.
Galland (2000, p. 25) shows that “boys who do not have the baccalaureate but whose mothers work are clearly protected from prolonged dependency, as if the incentive to work and achieving independence are transmitted more effectively when the mother participates in the labour force”. Dependency is defined as not having a stable job, an independent home and a relationship.
Other research in the field of family sociology, which takes a biographical approach, attests to this. See Legros and Kellerhals (1991).
This should be distinguished from net mobility, which measures the changing trend in the probability of accessing a given occupation.
As Castel (2001) writes, the new generation faces bigger hurdles, not because they are young but because they are new entrants on the labour market. Because while a majority of people are still employed on permanent contracts, the numbers of those entering the labour market on insecure contracts are constantly increasing.
This expression refers to an increase in jobs at the lowest and highest ends of the skills range, hollowing out the middle. Accessing the middle class represents upward social mobility. For an analysis of the phenomenon in relation to second-generation migrants, see Perlman and Waldinger (1997).
This recalls the concept of “subjective social mobility” proposed by Attias-Donfut and Wolff (2001, p. 955): a sense of having succeeded or failed socially is an analytical tool for understanding the process of social stratification.
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Acknowledgements
I would like to thank the journal reviewers for their highly constructive criticism, as well as my colleague Corinne Rostaing at the Centre Max Weber for her invaluable assistance during the drafting of this article, and Madeleine Grieve, for her faithful translation.
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Santelli, E. Young Adults of Maghrebi Origin from the French Banlieues: Social Mobility in Action?. Int. Migration & Integration 13, 541–563 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12134-011-0232-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12134-011-0232-2