2.1 Introduction

Between 2007 and 2008 the TIES project conducted a survey of almost 10,000 native-born children of immigrants from Turkey, Morocco and former Yugoslavia in 15 cities in eight European countries; it was the first comparative data collection to focus explicitly on the ‘second generation’ in Europe. The TIES Survey was carried out with young adults aged between 18 and 35, and provided broad insights into educational outcomes, their transition to the labour market and current labour market situation, feelings of belonging, social and family relations, and a number of other relevant issues (see Crul et al., 2012a for details of this project). The results also generated a special interest in processes of intergenerational upward mobility between the second generation and their immigrant parents in educational and socio-economic terms. Since labour migrants from Turkey and Morocco had particularly low levels of formal education when they were recruited as ‘guest workers’ between the early 1960s and mid-1970s, successfully completing secondary education and attaining a secondary education certificate – which is true for the vast majority of the native-born children of these labour migrants in Europe – already represented a clear step beyond their parents’ level of formal education. But the TIES data also revealed a small minority that achieved even steeper upward mobility as they had entered higher education, obtained a degree and/or were working as highly qualified and well-paid professionals. Taking into account the age range of the respondents and the fact that, at the time of the TIES data collection, in most survey countries the ‘second generation’ was still mostly in the younger age cohorts, the statistical presence of this group was quite remarkable. However, its size varied greatly per survey country: it amounted to between a quarter and almost half of the total sample of ‘second generation’ Turkish and Moroccan respondents in Sweden, France and the Netherlands (including those who were still in higher education), while numbers did not exceed 15% in the German-speaking countries − Germany, Austria and Switzerland – countries where vocational training and company-based labour market careers tend to be more central (Crul et al., 2012b: 127).

The statistical presences of this steeply mobile group were also remarkable if we note that in all survey countries, access to higher education and high-prestige professions was basically not foreseen for children from working-class immigrant families in the institutional arrangements concerning education and the transition to work; there were hardly any targeted support measures, and there were even mechanisms of active hindrance at work (cf. Crul, 2013).

For this reason, some of the researchers in the international consortium that had carried out the TIES Survey decided to design a follow-up research project on this particularly successful group, but this time working with qualitative in-depth interviews, at least in part also among the former TIES respondents. The project consortium comprised the leading partners of the TIES project from the Netherlands, Switzerland, Spain and Germany, found new partners in France, Sweden and Belgium (only Austria was no longer represented), and expanded to include Italy and Norway.Footnote 1 Each of these national projects secured its own funding and some pursued additional research interests, while remaining under the common umbrella of regular exchange and shared critical reflection called Pathways to Success. In addition to this cooperation, the Dutch team obtained EU-funding for ELITES, a comparative qualitative project across four countries and three professional sectors. The empirical basis of this book is formed by these two research clusters: the several national Pathways to Success projects and the multinational ELITES project.Footnote 2

The decision to follow up specifically on this particularly successful group of respondents was also motivated by a rather surprising lack of research and literature on ‘success’ and upward social mobility in this generation of labour migrants’ children (cf. Schneider & Lang, 2015; Crul et al., 2017; Schnell et al., 2013). The TIES data allowed us to determine a number of specific contextual and correlational factors behind these trajectories. But, they also show the important statistical effect of educational level and professional qualification on a number of other socially relevant issues, such as feelings of belonging; social relations and the composition of circles of friends; the role of religion; values of democracy and gender equality; perspectives on multicultural and multi-religious living together; the importance of transnational relations; and the role of female labour market participation on middle-class formation. However, while the analyses showed the strength of these correlations and – once again – huge differences between national contexts, neither TIES nor other available quantitative data on social mobility processes in immigrant working-class families allowed us to assess the specific and concrete ‘interaction effects’ between individual human capital and family background factors, on the one hand, and different context factors, such as institutional arrangements in education and professional fields which structure the pathways of young people into high-prestige professions, on the other.

In this chapter, we start with an international comparative look into the TIES data, descriptively analysing the differences in degrees and types of social mobility which need to be explained. This quantitative comparison serves as a broader contextual reference for the qualitative analyses in the chapters that follow. After that, we explain how the various projects within the ELITES/Pathways to Success consortium recruited their respondents and their sampling criteria. This is followed by a description of the topics covered by the respective interview guides and the data collected for contextualizing the individual trajectories and narratives at the national and local level. Here, we also elaborate on the specific challenges of international comparisons on the basis of qualitative data and how these were tackled in the following empirical chapters.

2.2 Educational and Occupational Trajectories of the Turkish ‘Second-Generation’ – Insights from the TIES Survey

In this section, we present some analyses of data collected in the TIES Survey specifically on the ‘second generation’ of families that migrated from Turkey. The aim is to assess (a) the frequency and ‘typicality’ of the successful trajectories described in the qualitative analyses in the following chapters, and (b) their connectedness to a wider picture of ‘institutional arrangements’ and context factors, especially within the educational systems, in the transition to the labour market, and in the course of professional careers. The central focus of comparison in this section are country-related data, which in the following chapters are further differentiated according to occupational sectors – an analytical differentiation that is not possible in this quantitative part because the numbers are too small. The statistical analyses compare four countries – Sweden, France, the Netherlands, and Germany – which show the most diverging, but also ‘ideal-typical’ country differences, thus best exemplifying the effects of institutional arrangements and context factors on trajectories of (relative) individual success (see Chap. 1 for a discussion of problems around the conceptualization and definition of ‘success’).

To obtain a differentiated picture of how the ‘Turkish second generation’ achieves upward social mobility in different countries, we pay special attention in this section to the notion of educational and occupational trajectories and differentiate various avenues to gaining socioeconomic advancement. This design, stemming from life course research, gives a portrait of educational and occupational trajectories from the beginning of school tracking in lower secondary education until the stage in the labour market at the time of the interview when all education-to-work transitions were complete (Hao & Pong, 2008, Groh-Samberg et al., 2012; Laganà et al., 2014). This ‘trajectory perspective’ provides insights into the process-like character of the socioeconomic careers of children of immigrants, as shown in a similar study on Switzerland (Schnell & Fibbi, 2016). It gives a different perspective to that obtained by looking at either educational achievement or occupational achievement separately. It highlights not only the interplay between individual factors and institutional arrangements of national systems but also transforms the generalized understanding of thresholds between ‘success’ and ‘failure’ at the end point into more detailed sequences of failures and successes. The questions guiding this section are: do second-generation immigrants of Turkish descent experience upward mobility in the four countries compared, and if so, in what respect? To what extent does the degree of upward mobility differ between these four countries?

In the field of sociology of education, and especially in studies focusing on educational upward mobility, two different types of mobility pathways are frequently observed (e.g. Laganà et al., 2014; Spiegler, 2018). These types differ not only in the barriers students are confronted with and the resources available to them, but above all by the structure of their educational and occupational upward mobility paths. Most of these studies observe a trajectory in which young adults successfully move through more prestigious educational tracks leading to professional and high-income positions. In contrast to these “thrivers”, numerous publications describe at least a second group of upward mobile youths: those starting low in the education system but climbing successfully step-by-step to higher streams that eventually lead to more prestigious labour market positions (often labelled as “climbers”, Schnell & Fibbi, 2016). Both upward mobility paths are described schematically in Fig. 2.1 (compare categories A and B). At the same time, the figure shows at least two potentially less successful trajectories: ‘Downward trajectories’ (category C) frequently start high in the education system but either lose ground within the course of their educational career or in the labour market after completing education, while a fourth category describes trajectories characterized by a lack of upward mobility (category D). In order to empirically analyse these socioeconomic trajectories we used retrospective autobiographical statements on individual life courses collected in the TIES survey in order to explore various trajectories towards socioeconomic advancement.

Fig. 2.1
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Families of trajectories (schematic illustration)

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We focussed on three relevant transition points (t) in the life course in order to define and measure socioeconomic trajectories (for similar approaches see Laganà et al., 2014 or Schnell & Fibbi, 2016): (t1) (Lower) secondary education represents the starting point in secondary education (after the transition from primary school) and is divided into school types with (a) elementary requirements (basic-level performance) and (b) extended requirements (advanced-level performance).Footnote 3 (t2) Final education attainment (educational certificate acquired) is the end point of education and is categorized on the basis of the EduCodes scheme (Crul et al., 2012b) into (a) post-upper secondary and tertiary (university or applied scientific/technical institute) and (b) below tertiary education, especially vocational training after the end of compulsory schooling. (t3) Occupational status captures the current labour market position by using information from the Erikson-Goldthorpe-Portocarero (EGP) classification scheme (Erikson et al., 1979). Respondents with a high labour market status are either ‘executives and professionals’ (EGP I and II) or have an income above the average national disposable income. This is the ‘default category’ in the following analysis; the other category thus includes low to average occupational status, ranging from economic inactivity or unemployment to skilled and routine manual jobs.

Figures in TIES indicate that the percentage of ‘thrivers’ (category A), who successfully move through more prestigious educational tracks and go on to professional and high-income positions in the respective national samples of ‘Turkish second generation’ varies substantially between countries. This group is smallest in Germany (2%), followed by the Netherlands (6%) and France (8%), while it amounts to almost 11% in Sweden (compare Figs. 2.2, 2.3, 2.4, and 2.5). The group of ‘upward trajectories’ (category B) summarizes avenues of upward mobility following (lower) secondary education. This upward mobility may happen in the course of secondary education, on the labour market, or through a combination of both – whichever is the case, these persons are classed together as ‘climbers’. There is a substantial group of Turkish ‘second-generation’ youth within each country travelling along upward mobility trajectories: 10% in Germany, 11% in France and the Netherlands, and 17% in Sweden.

Fig. 2.2
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Four types of trajectories in France, Turkish second-generation (%; N = 303). (Source: TIES 2007–2008)

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Fig. 2.3
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Four types of trajectories in Germany, Turkish second-generation (%; N = 466). (Source: TIES 2007–2008)

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Fig. 2.4
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Four types of trajectories in the Netherlands, Turkish second-generation (%; N = 371). (Source: TIES 2007–2008)

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Fig. 2.5
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Four types of trajectories in Sweden, Turkish second-generation (%; N = 201). (Source: TIES 2007–2008)

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In contrast, the ‘downward trajectories’ (category C) start high in the education system but either lose ground within the course of their educational career or in the labour market after completing education. Compared to their initial starting position in the education system (high, academic-orientated track), their current employment status is lower than originally expected. These ‘declining achievers’ are frequent among the Turkish ‘second generation’ in Sweden (37%), followed by France (29%), while they are only half as frequent in the Netherlands and Germany (18% and 16%, respectively). Finally, ‘low to average-level trajectories’ (category D) start in the lower tracks of secondary education and end up in routine to manual work with low to average formal requirements, or even in unemployment or economic inactivity (e.g. unpaid housework). These ‘average-level achievers’ are a substantial group among second-generation Turks in all the four countries compared, but there are significant cross-national differences (compare Figs. 2.2, 2.3, 2.4, and 2.5): they are, for example, twice as frequent in Germany (71%) as in Sweden (36%). It is worth emphasizing that being an ‘average-level achiever’ is not the same as being part of the group of young people ‘at-risk’: respondents who left school early and are currently unemployed account for only around 12% in Germany, 9% in the Netherlands, 7% in France and 4% in Sweden. But since this chapter focuses on those who end up in a high position, i.e. above the average in education and professional status even in relation to the total population of similar age groups, categories C and D comprise all statuses below this.

The following figures show the distribution of the four types of trajectories in the four countries studied, highlighting the two trajectories that lead to upward mobility and educational and/or economic success.

2.2.1 A Closer Look at ‘Climbers’ and ‘Thrivers’

Because the Turkish second generation in the four countries usually come from less-advantaged social backgrounds, they often did not manage to enter and keep their place in ‘constant high-level trajectories’ (in particular in comparison to non-immigrant-origin students, see Fig. 2.6). But here, we can see clear effects of the differences between the respective education systems. On average, the proportion of ‘thrivers’ embarked upon ‘constant high-level trajectories’ is significantly lower in countries with an education system that selects pupils at an early age (Germany and the Netherlands) as compared to the two countries with a tracking system that only comes into effect at the end of compulsory education (France and Sweden).Footnote 4 The early tracking in the first two countries streams children into pathways that are very difficult to leave or overcome. Yet, in contrast to Germany, students in the Netherlands are encouraged to stay in the education system as long as possible, which frequently means completing higher vocational education. Although this ‘stapling possibility’ also exists in Germany, it is chosen by far fewer students, mainly because the main focus is on bringing them into the apprenticeship system rather than into higher forms of vocational education (Crul & Schneider, 2009).

Fig. 2.6
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Thrivers and climbers, by country and group (percentages). CG Comparison Group (non-immigrant descent, same age cohorts), 2GT Turkish second-generation. (Source: TIES 2007–2008)

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Although children from Turkish working-class families have fewer opportunities to take the successful path from the beginning (in particular in Germany), some constantly move upwards and get ahead through other trajectories. While the proportion of these ‘climbers’ is almost identical among our respondents of Turkish descent in France, Germany and the Netherlands, the channels through which they climb differ substantially. In Germany and France, almost all climbers gain their upward mobility via the labour market (see Fig. 2.7). For the group of Turkish descendants who achieved upward mobility in the labour market in these two countries, self-employment plays a larger role (9% in Germany; 13% in France) – especially in direct comparison to Sweden and the Netherlands. In addition, the private employment sector plays a significant role in both countries, since the majority of climbers works in the private sector, e.g. in sales and marketing. There are also differences regarding the way in which upward mobility through the labour market manifests itself in both countries. In Germany, vocational training, which combines vocational schooling with training-on-the-job in companies and offices, is important for gaining relevant work experience and network contacts with future employers. This role of vocational training in Germany has been repeatedly emphasized in comparison to the more school-based system in France (see Chap. 4 for details and examples).

Fig. 2.7
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Channels of upward mobility among ‘climbers’, second-generation Turks (%). (Source: TIES 2007–2008)

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Upward mobility in the education system, on the other hand, is rather low among ‘climbers’ in Germany and France. In Germany, students who have been streamed into vocationally-oriented schools at the age of 10 (Hauptschule or Realschule) are theoretically able to switch and move up to the academically-orientated track at the end of lower secondary education (generally around the age of 16). But only a small proportion of pupils make use of this possibility: it is difficult to obtain the marks needed to switch to the academic track, especially if this is not explicitly encouraged and facilitated by teachers. In France, the majority of students of Turkish descent are streamed into the vocational track after lower-secondary education at the age of 15 and leave at the end of secondary education to take up jobs even though the French system also offers them a ‘second chance’ to make the transition from the vocational track to post-secondary/tertiary education. Several studies have shown that in order to successfully navigate their way to the top of the educational ladder, access to resources provided by non-immigrant peer networks, as well as support from teachers, are crucial for children of Turkish immigrants in both countries, but only a small share has access to these forms of support (see e.g. Schnell, 2014).

By contrast, in the Netherlands almost half of the climbers enter the upward mobility path during their education. Previous analyses of the TIES survey data have shown that many children of immigrants in the Netherlands have moved up the educational ladder by starting at the bottom rung in lower vocational education and climbing step-by-step via middle vocational education to the highest stream of vocational education, ‘stapling’ diplomas as they go (Crul & Schneider, 2009; Schnell et al., 2013). Compared to the direct route towards higher education via the academic track, this ‘long route’ in the Dutch ‘stapling system’ takes between 1 and 3 years longer.

The Swedish educational system does not really provide ‘second chances’ because the permeability between tracks at the end of each type is always a given. Students in lower and upper secondary education can choose tracks without restrictions, and all upper secondary tracks provide certificates that permit students to continue on to post-secondary or tertiary education. This high degree of permeability means that individual factors are less relevant to the educational upward mobility of second-generation Turks in Sweden (Schnell, 2014: 217). Yet, about two-thirds of the climbers in Sweden experience upward mobility through the labour market, almost half of them being employed in the public sector, e.g. in public administration or public health organizations.

These data from the TIES survey show that there are important differences regarding the possibilities that institutional arrangements in education and the labour market produce for native-born children of migrants in different systems. The differences described among children of Turkish labour migrants with similar levels of resources at the family level indicate the importance of looking in more detail at the conditions and specific barriers and opportunities that different institutional contexts – both country and occupation-specific – present to children of immigrants upon entering the labour market. Related to this is the question of how some of the children of immigrants manage to successfully ‘navigate’ these contexts, while many do not. This is thus the starting point from which ELITES/Pathways to Success proceeded.

While it was generally felt that the open questions could be better investigated through qualitative techniques and exploratory research, the TIES database still served as a departure point for a general assessment of relevant context variables (including local contexts, i.e. cities). It was also used to contact former TIES respondents as potential interviewees in those countries where addresses were still available.

2.3 ELITES/Pathways to Success: Sampling and Recruiting

The exploratory nature of the ELITES and Pathways to Success research projects allowed the researchers from the various countries considerable freedom to choose additional foci, while still remaining firmly within the same set of theoretical problems (as presented in the previous chapter). So, for example, we allowed for a certain variety in national origins of interviewees’ parents, in accordance with those origins which were most numerous in a particular national (and urban) context, or which seemed particularly interesting for theoretical reasons.Footnote 5 Other aspects were the availability of data and the existing knowledge on particular migration flows in the countries where the projects asked for financing. The only central requirement was that the focus had to be on labour migration, a selection of high-prestige occupations to which access was obtained, and the dynamics of considerable upward social, educational and occupational mobility compared with their families of origin. So, even though there are a number of important problems in identifying the social class, educational level, and occupational status of first-generation immigrants (a high school diploma in rural Morocco in the 1950s is not the same level of education as a high school diploma in the Netherlands in the twenty-first century), it was clear that our starting point would be children whose parents had low status regarding the criteria of occupational position and education conventionally used in European immigration countries.

According to the conceptual approach of Integration Context Theory (Crul & Schneider, 2010), individual pathways and career trajectories are always the result of individual agency and human capital in interaction with institutional arrangements in relevant contexts. While the original comparative focus of this conceptual approach was nation-states and secondarily cities, it became clear that analysing the trajectories of young people who seemed to be establishing a middle-class position also required a focus on occupations. Becoming a lawyer, a teacher or a business executive requires specific qualifications and sometimes involves quite different career paths. It could thus be assumed that the obstacles in the pathways of children of migrants who attain success might also vary, as might the resources which children of migrants could mobilize. Hence, occupational contexts became an additional central focus of attention, resulting in specific sampling strategies targeting ‘second generation’ individuals in particular occupations.

2.3.1 Sampling Criteria

Following the above specified research interests, the following sampling criteria were applied:

  • Country of origin: following-up on the TIES Survey, most sub-projects focused on respondents with parents who had immigrated from Turkey – in ELITES and in the German Pathways to Success project, this was the only immigrant-origin group. In Switzerland and Norway, the projects also looked at other origins. The focus on a Turkish background was mainly due to the fact that it is present in large numbers in many European countries, making it suitable for international comparisons. However, Turkish immigration has played a very marginal role in Spain, so the Spanish project opted for the most important immigrant groups from Latin America, China and Morocco (the latter group it shares with Norway).

  • ‘Second generation’: as in TIES, the focus is on children of immigrants who were either born in Europe or arrived as young children, because, unlike adult or adolescent immigrants, it can be presumed that following their entire educational career in the immigration country ought to have offered them basically the same opportunities for professional careers as their peers of non-immigrant background. The fact that this is mostly not the case serves as the point of departure for looking at the structural mechanisms which make parental background so important, albeit differently in the various countries and educational systems. The framework was thus not that of an ‘ethnic minority’ (although many, perhaps most, of the young people interviewed probably defined themselves as such), but, more specifically, children of labour migrants. We were interested not only in the ways in which social status as a ‘minority’ affected the trajectories of our interviewees, but also in the ways in which the ‘migration process’ had impacted on young people’s lives, from their own experience and their families’ citizenship rights to the neighbourhood they grew up in and the schools they attended.

  • Working-class family background: closely related to the question of how one’s family’s ‘ethnic’ or immigrant background becomes relevant for educational and professional careers, is the question of how this applies to social class. Therefore, the projects recruited respondents from families with low parental education or low socio-economic status. Moreover, the projects in Germany and Switzerland as well as the ELITES project also compared the ‘second-generation’ respondents with age peers from a non-immigrant working-class background. This dimension is explicitly not included in the analyses in this book, since it would have added yet another dimension to an already quite complex comparative task. Nonetheless, on the level of the specific country projects, it very much informed the analysis and understanding of the specificities of the elements of ‘class’ and ‘ethnicity’ or ‘migration background’ in the careers of the ‘second-generation’ respondents.

  • The age range in most projects fulfils three main criteria: (a) it follows up on the TIES Survey in the sense that TIES respondents were almost 10 years older when re-approached for the projects presented here than at the time of the interview for the original survey; (b) it corresponds at the lower end of the age range to the likely minimum ages at which ‘success’ has been accomplished or is, at least, imminent in a professional career. In fact, apart from the business sector, all the occupations investigated were professional fields (see below) requiring completed university studies plus the transition phase to work, which frequently implies additional years of traineeships or similar. So respondents could hardly be younger than in their late-twenties. (c) The upper threshold for our age range turned out to be less clearly definable, although the projects originally intended to set a maximum age of 45. However, the actual demographic size of the ‘second generation’ differs greatly across countries, as does the distribution across age cohorts. Germany signed its labour recruitment agreement with Turkey in 1961, and was followed by other European countries at later dates. Turkish labour migrants in Germany came earlier and also started to have families earlier; consequently, we can find native-born children from Turkish immigrant families in Germany who are in their early to mid-fifties. Accordingly, the German and the Swiss projects lifted the upper age limit, and this had some positive effects. Careers are built over time, and even though simple age does not tell us how many years an individual has been working in a particular occupation, older respondents simply have more to say about career development and, for example, ‘glass ceiling’ effects – also in comparison to colleagues of non-immigrant background. By contrast, Spain only became a sizeable immigration country in the 1980s which means that the ‘second generation’ in this country is almost 20 years younger than in Germany and Switzerland. Accordingly, it has the lowest age range of all participating countries, and finding respondents in the upper age cohorts turned out to be quite a challenge.Footnote 6

  • Gender: all of the projects initially stated that ideally there would be equal shares of women and men among the respondents, but this aim was impossible to fulfil completely, in particular due to the respective focus on different professional fields. As women are glaringly overrepresented in the teaching profession, the Swiss project, which focused only on education, has three times as many women as men in its sample. By contrast, since law and business are fields with a traditionally higher representation of men, this is reflected in overrepresentation of men, especially in the Norwegian sample, and also, albeit to a lesser degree, in Germany and in the ELITES project.

  • Local contexts: in the TIES Survey, the local focus was considered to be of central relevance for many issues around ‘integration’ and thus included a two-city comparison in all countries except Sweden. Most projects of the Pathways to Success/ELITES consortium took this local focus as a departure point for their sampling too, so that, especially, the local contextualization derived from TIES could be used again: the ELITES project selected cities that had been part of the TIES Survey, albeit extended from Rotterdam and Amsterdam to the entire metropolitan region Randstad in the case of the Netherlands.Footnote 7 But, some national projects also added completely new local contexts in order to introduce other relevant aspects: Switzerland introduced the comparison between German- and French-speaking cities (whereas TIES had only covered Basel and Zurich), and Germany added the traditional mining and steel production area Rhein-Ruhr, because it had been the main destination of Turkish labour immigration to Germany and the project could connect to previous qualitative research that had been conducted there by the German research institute IMIS.Footnote 8

  • Occupational sectors: a shared interest of the consortium was looking at access to occupations with high social prestige that are clearly associated with middle-class status and which are also known for their high level of social reproduction – in the sense that coming from a family with active members in the field has consistently been proven to be an important source for upcoming junior staff (cf. Hartmann & Kopp, 2001). The professional sectors that are most associated with high social prestige are certainly medicine and law, closely followed by corporate business. Medicine and law generally require high levels of cultural capital in the sense of formal educational credentials. They are also interesting from the point of view of international comparisons because states are heavily involved in regulating education for both lawyers and doctors, and in organizing large parts of the labour market, e.g. through state-run hospitals and public judicial systems. In contrast, the business sector is more diverse and ambiguous in almost all regards. Yet, although access to the field offers fewer barriers in terms of formal educational qualifications, and it draws its prestige primarily from monetary success, it also shares the characteristic of high social reproduction. This is especially true with regard to access to top ranks and managerial positions in leading corporations. Another interesting sector for comparison is education. In many European and emigration countries, becoming a teacher used to be one of the prime avenues of social mobility for gifted children from low-educated families, especially in the countryside. The social prestige of the teaching profession varies across countries and across levels of education, but it generally offers high job security and social respectability. However, the required formal levels of education and also the level of competitiveness are generally lower than for law and medicine, which tends to make education – as a professional sector – more open to a broader range of prospective professionals, and accessible for career changers. All projects except Switzerland decided to compare at least three professional sectors. Education and business are regarded in four projects, law in three projects; medicine was only included in Norway, as was public administration in Germany.

Table 2.1 gives an overview of the more than 400 qualitative interviews in total in the various projects which were used for the analyses in this book:Footnote 9

Table 2.1 Interview samples in Pathways to success and ELITES
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2.3.2 Recruitment Strategies

Generally, it can be said that the respondents whom the projects in the ELITES/Pathways to Success consortium wished to interview were relatively exceptional. They were exceptional due to their steep upward mobility trajectories within their families and among age peers with a similar immigrant and/or social background; but also with regard to the organizations and fields they made their way into. There was no sampling frame and no direct or ‘natural’ way to easily find respondents, and all projects reported that obtaining the samples required considerable effort. Consequently, in all of the projects the strategies for finding respondents had to be quite varied and adapted to the conditions in the respective cities and – above all – in the different occupational sectors:

  • Networks and organizations: these included professional organizations in the fields studied – e.g. teacher unions, a network of teachers of immigrant origin, associations of lawyers and judges, medical associations, chambers of commerce – and organizations for specific ‘ethnic’ or religious backgrounds, such as Turkish business federations, Muslim or ‘ethnic minority’ oriented student associations, and networks for academics of Muslim, Turkish or working-class background. Another important resource consisted of virtual social networks for academics and professionals, such as LinkedIn or the mainly German-speaking Xing. In some cases, online advertisements were published in these networks.

  • Web and local press research: search engines and the homepages or archives of local press and broadcasting companies were used with specific combinations of keywords to find websites and media reports on e.g. entrepreneurs, professionals, or public personalities.

  • Websites of companies, law firms, schools etc.: law firms generally present themselves extensively on their websites, including portrait pages of all partners and employed lawyers. The German team, for example, scanned the homepages of the top 50 corporate law firms in Germany (among the several thousand lawyers who work in these firms, it found only 17 lawyers with a Turkish name; see Lang et al., 2016: 38). Similar strategies were sometimes successfully applied in major companies with headquarters in the specific local or regional contexts we investigated. Sometimes, this would also work for schools: in some areas, the teaching staff was presented on school homepages that listed their names and positions. All in all, in most of the projects this was greatly facilitated by the fact that Turkish and formerly Yugoslavian names are quite specific and easy to recognize – which is less the case with Arab names, and virtually impossible to use as a criterion when looking for persons of Latin American origin in Spain.

  • Snowballing turned out to be the most effective recruitment strategy for potential interviewees. In order to avoid biases or too homogeneous samples, it was essential to develop a broad range of starting points to set off a high number of ‘snowballs’. But this was also necessary in order to find enough respondents and obtain broad access to the different local and professional fields. In those projects which also interviewed respondents of non-immigrant working-class background, snowballing was almost the only way to find potential interviewees, since this information is hardly available on webpages; many of them were colleagues of the interviewees of immigrant background. In Germany, additional important resources were a network of higher education students of working-class background, and the inside knowledge of the editors of a professional journal for corporate law firms.

Whatever channel was used to obtain names and contact details, all the potential interviewees had to be asked not only about their willingness to participate in the research, but also whether they fulfilled the basic criteria mentioned above – especially with regard to the educational/socioeconomic background of their parents and their birthplace or age at immigration. Other screening questions might also include their specific position in the company or connectedness to the respective local urban contexts (i.e. originating from there or currently working and/or living there).

In general, reactions to being contacted for interviews were very positive and welcoming. Only a very small fraction of all persons contacted refused to be interviewed. But some reactions of potential interviewees revealed that this was related also to the wording and channels of contact. For persons from Kurdish families, for example, it could make a difference whether they were approached as having a “Turkish background” or a “family background in Turkey”. Potential respondents were more productively approached as professionals (and via professional networks and contacts) than as the offspring of immigrant families or as having a particular ‘ethnic’ background. It tended to be helpful to emphasize the relevance of social class, and – in projects where this was the case – to mention that persons from a non-immigrant working-class background were also part of the target group.

All researchers of the consortium were aware of the possible dangers of selectivity introduced by the recruitment methods used, and they therefore adopted strategies to limit bias. However, the primary objective is not to provide information about ‘typical’ trajectories, although we believe many of the accounts will be paralleled by accounts elsewhere. As qualitative research, the main aim is to identify social mechanisms in operation in order to shed light on the factors which either facilitate or obstruct social mobility. However, specific factors identified as helping or hindering one interviewee’s career may not be applicable in other contexts, because different dynamics are at play in different contexts. For example, the degree to which a lawyer may wish to pro-actively ‘network’ with co-ethnics by attending ‘community’ events, or by using the language of his or her ‘country of origin’ depends on the numbers of potential clients this will bring in. Our purpose in understanding and describing this kind of use of ‘ethnic resource’ in contacting potential clients – a pattern described in several chapters – is not to suggest that this strategy is always used, but rather to describe how it can be appropriate in a specific context – for example, it could be used by a young independent lawyer who needs to build up a client base – and also how it may change over time as the lawyer’s career progresses. Aspects such as being self-employed or working for a large firm, being in the public sector or in the private sector, are likely to be relevant aspects of the ‘integration context’, especially in contexts where they represent a rational business strategy. Yet, our focus is not on frequency, but on possible social mechanisms at work – and on ‘modelling’ contextual relationships between institutional arrangements in specific professional sectors and how individual biographies and resources ‘respond’ to them (and vice versa).

2.3.3 Topics and Comparative Analysis

2.3.3.1 Interview Guides

The main method of data collection in all projects were interviews with members of the respective target groups. Information on the interview guides is presented in the single chapters. The following list shows the topics generally covered:

  • family background:

    • parents: migration history, occupations and support attitudes

    • role of siblings

  • school careers and experiences:

    • types of school, school changes

    • experiences as regards teacher attitudes, peers, support, discrimination

    • key persons

  • higher education:

    • choice of and transition to higher education

    • experiences with teaching staff and peer students (including encounters with other students of immigrant, working class or similar ‘ethnic’ background)

  • transition to work:

    • access to first jobs/traineeships, relation to studies, role of networks

    • next steps/jobs and career development

  • current job:

    • access and current position

    • career steps within the current institution (if applicable)

    • characteristics of the institution and the working environment

  • places and social relations:

    • place of work, place of living, choice of residence/neighbourhood

    • partnership and family, role of parents and siblings

    • circles of friends, relations with colleagues

    • transnational relations

  • identity issues:

    • feelings of belonging, role of ethnicity and of parental place of origin

    • professional identity

    • othering experiences

Since the interviews had to cover a wide range of topics, most project teams worked with interview guides that structured the course of the interviews and helped to limit the total duration of an interview. At the same time, interviews were also intended to evoke narrations and allow for aspects brought up or particularly emphasized by the interviewees. As in similar qualitative interviews, interviewees’ accounts provide information which they think the interviewer will see as appropriate and interesting and which fit in with their more general ideas of how people’s careers are structured (Plummer, 1995; Mason, 2004). This is an aspect of comparative qualitative research which should be borne in mind, since ideas of what is an interesting social phenomenon worthy of attention, as well as more general ideas of social reality, vary between countries and historical epochs. To give an example: common sense discourse regarding how people get on at work, and regarding e.g. the importance of personal ‘connections’ probably varies from one country to another as well as between different occupational and institutional environments. Likewise, with regard to discrimination, the awareness of feeling discriminated against or disadvantaged may be greater in some national contexts than others, simply because the issue is discussed more widely in the respective national debates transmitted by media and then filter into private conversations and thus individuals’ conceptions of social reality.

2.3.3.2 Contextualization

In addition to the interviews as the core empirical data, different kinds of empirical material were collected in order to contextualize the interviewees’ narrations about their pathways into their current positions and to complement them with information on the respective local, regional and national structural situations. In particular, these include information about labour markets and demographic data, but also about important actors, be they organizations or personalities. It was particularly important to learn as much as possible about institutional arrangements in the investigated occupational sectors in their specific local, regional and national expressions. This made it possible to better assess the role of specific aspects and mechanisms at work in the still exceptional career paths of our respondents.

Contextualization thus worked in two directions: on the one hand, the respondents’ statements and information about their careers were highly relevant for understanding the role of institutional contexts; on the other hand, this personalized information needed to be ‘classified’, in the sense of adding a wider perspective and information from other sources and other types of knowledge about each specific field. This greatly ‘enriches’ the analyses in the following empirical chapters: they assess in detail how individual careers and pathways corresponded and interacted with the institutional arrangements concerning school education, higher education, and work in labour market sectors with high social prestige and rather restricted access possibilities.

2.3.4 Comparisons

The interviews were recorded and then prepared for analysis via detailed transcriptions and coding with the help of qualitative data analysis programmes. Codes were derived from theory at first hand, nevertheless allowing for open coding during analysis. The units of analysis were meaningful statements that were analysed according to qualitative content analysis, as described, for example, by Mayring (2008).

Comparative approaches are quite rare in qualitative research in migration studies. Yet, we believe that it is crucial to move beyond the simple dichotomy between large-scale surveys that do not hesitate to undertake cross-country comparisons (with sometimes quite adventurous theoretical presumptions and data bases) and qualitative case studies on single migrant groups in single countries. In this we follow David FitzGerald and his ‘comparativist manifesto’:

Undertheorized works simply portraying immigrant lives do not explain the causes of migration or its consequences (…). Large-scale censuses and surveys promise to yield more generalizable propositions, yet even if researchers are able to resolve the formidable challenges of the comparability and validity of data collected across different cases (…), large-N studies alone cannot explain the mechanisms of causality or provide an interpretive appreciation of how migrants engage multiple contexts of origin, transit, and destination. This paper argues for building migration theory through fieldwork in multiple sites chosen for their theoretical variation. Studies of both assimilation and ‘transnationalism’ can be improved by case selection strategies that strip away self-imposed national blinders. The logic of multi-sited fieldwork has been challenged for making the false assumption that the various sites are isolated units, and that variation in outcomes observed in each site are derived from different causes. (FitzGerald, 2012: 1725f.)

While we follow FitzGerald’s plea for doing fieldwork – or qualitative data collection – in various ‘sites’, comparative data analysis remains a challenge. Multi-sited research is mostly rooted in anthropology (Marcus, 1995; cf. Boccagni, 2020). It has had an immense influence, especially on the developments of transnational research. However, it has been mostly conceived as ethnography in various research sites undertaken by single researchers on single ethnic minorities or migrant groups (see Vathi, 2015 for a good example in migration studies). The comparative analyses in this book are taking a different path. They use qualitative interviews backed by quantitative data, also because our objective is partially a different one: Our main analytical focus is on the structural mechanisms of social mobility. We expect the trajectories and careers of children from working-class immigrant families to shed light on these issues. Through this we hope to develop relevant knowledge about the particular role and position of these new social climbers in current and future societal changes. So we hope that this research has broadened the scope of what are considered aspects of reality which influence the educational and occupational careers of children of migrants, and by identifying the social mechanisms in play, has throw light on social mobility more generally. Whereas much research – and much policy – is centred on features of a social context which are of obvious relevance for members of an ‘ethnic minority’ (from policies on migration to media presentations), the empirical results emerging from our research focuses attention on many other aspects of institutional organization not normally considered to be relevant to the lives of migrants and their descendants, (from the age of transition in an educational system to the rules of access to a profession). In the same way as work in gender studies has long broadened the focus on features of social organization which limit or promote the careers of women well beyond the measures that explicitly exclude or empower them, so work done in the context of integration context theory broadens the field of features which ‘matter’ to the lives of migrants and their descendants.

As Charles Ragin (2014) said, ‘variable-centred research’ tends to pluck social phenomena out of context in order to compare them. In this book, on the contrary, the central task and challenge is to compare not only individual experiences and narratives, but also their connections to and dependency on sector-specific institutional contexts. The analytical endeavour of this book comprises four levels of comparisons: comparing national contexts, comparing institutional contexts, comparing individual trajectories, and comparing narratives of belonging in their relation to underlying social mobility processes. These aspects stand in a relationship of ‘mutual mirroring’, in the sense that we learn about the structural mechanisms of access and career development, of inclusion and exclusion in specific professional fields from the individual trajectories and narratives of belonging; but we can also only understand individual trajectories and narratives by taking into account the structural mechanisms of the respective professions in a cross-country comparative perspective. Even though the entire sample comprises more than 400 biographical accounts in seven countries, we still have to look for the underlying structural aspects in individual trajectories and ‘uncover’ them.

The analytical task set out above is quite a complex one, both with regard to practicability – considering the width of the sample – as to thematic focus and adequate forms of presentation. The empirical chapters of this book deal with this in different ways, but with the same objective: to translate the detected differences and commonalities into a ‘thick description’ (Geertz, 2017 [1973]) which allows a deeper understanding of the underlying processes. In this regard, all chapters apply a mix of individual biographical accounts and different forms of modelling or generalizations, making use of individual examples as ‘prototypes’ (cf. Borneman, 1992: 47ff.) for what was found in the broader sample. The approaches represent different ways of ‘analytical modelling’ on the basis of an extremely rich corpus of qualitative research data from several countries.

Chapter 3 sets the stage by looking in more detail at individual trajectories as producers of senses of belonging and participation, and what makes the ‘second-generation experience’ specific. In line with the occupational sector approach in this book, it focuses particularly on those parts of the biographies and their corresponding narratives that make connections between self-definitions and the structural and institutional contexts in which respondents have been developing their professional and social lives. The chapter presents four exemplary cases from four countries – Sweden, the Netherlands, Belgium, and Germany – and with careers in four different professional fields: a banker, a teacher, a journalist, and an independent lawyer. In this regard, they also represent the width and options of constructions of belonging in the professional sectors which are the centre of focus in the chapters that follow.

Chapter 4 undertakes a detailed description of the pathways enabled or facilitated by the institutional arrangements in two sectors in two countries: business and law in France and Germany. Thus, this chapter also compares in three dimensions: across countries, across occupational sectors, and across the trajectories of individuals in these contextual settings. In contrast to the previous chapter, the main ‘characters’ in this chapter are not individuals, but institutional contexts.

Chapter 5 follows a similar strategy for school teachers. Here the focus is on just one sector, while comparing across five countries: France, Germany, the Netherlands, Spain and Switzerland. Consequently, the cross-country comparison is the main centre of focus in this chapter, and it relates the qualitative empirical findings to what is observed as the state of knowledge in the literature. These analytical comparisons of empirical evidence taken from our research projects and the literature focus on three main topics: motivation and choices for becoming a teacher, access to teaching positions in schools, and the experiences and agency of teachers against the backdrop of mainstream images of the role of teachers in the respective educational systems.

Chapter 6 adopts an inverted approach: it looks at two occupational sectors in just one country: medicine and law in Norway. There are two reasons for this: (a) the Norwegian Pathways to Success project started and was completed much later than the other projects of the consortium which made it difficult to include the Norwegian case in the comparative analyses in Chaps. 3, 4, and 5; (b) the Norwegian project is the only one that focused on medicine as an occupational sector which once again makes it difficult to directly compare it to any of the other country projects in this regard. However, it is also attractive to include this project in this book, since medical professions rank among the most prestigious and highly-desired occupations for families with upward social mobility ambitions. Chapter 6 not only adds another country and another professional field, but it also confirms the remarkable similarities across countries and occupations. The analytical comparative findings are summarized in Chap. 7.