Laurence Romani

This ethnographic study inquires why unequal opportunities persist in a Swedish international organization despite its commitment to diversity and employing highly skilled migrant workers. By observing evaluation decisions in a recruitment process in ‘real time and space’, we uncover how ethnic minorities (refugees, nonEuropean migrants, etc.) are constructed and reproduced as deficient and lacking essential traits, skills and experiences taking majority Swedes’ competences as the tacit norm. The findings show that despite the organization’s efforts to recruit and act ‘color-blind’ (racially non-biased), the decision makers’ apparent prejudices inflict on how ethnic minorities are perceived and evaluated and hence the job possibilities they are offered in the organization. The novelty of the study is twofold. First, it builds on observation of recruitment processes (interview, assessment meeting), which is very difficult to access. Second, while well-documented in gender studies, practices of tacit reproduction of an implicit norm in evaluation and recruitment are less frequent in studies of diversity and race. The contributions from this study touch upon recruitment practices and how ethnicity has been surprisingly absent from the (European) critical recruitment literature. Implications for practitioners recommend to avoid a color-blind approach, but rather, to accept and address the existing prejudice by embracing a norm critical approach.

Organizations engage today in CSR agendas supporting social sustainability, and in the recent context of large migration flux, many have become actors in the integration of migrants. Among the various programs they engaged into, providing mentorship to a newly arrived migrant has gained much popularity. Broadly, these mentorship programs pair an organizational member, the mentor, with an immigrant mentees. This mentorship program is perceived as a resource for the mentees to guide them into their new society and for them to find a job.

Despite a context of challenging working conditions, ethnocentrism, post-colonial tensions and no valorization of local Greenlandic professional knowledge, the Danish Police Officers sent to Greenland report knowledge development. And not intercultural knowledge or interaction skills, but rather important professional learning, which leads them to become better officers once back in Denmark. This contribution, based on a qualitative case study, intends to elicit this unexpected finding and to contribute to further theory development in expatriate adjustment literature. In the present case, no cross-cultural learning (which is the most common reported learning) is reported, but rather professional expertise development. The specificity of the present case and the extraordinary conditions in which the collaboration takes place provides an opportunity to shed a new light on expatriate learning. It seems that from all previously identified variables, only self-efficacy and autonomy are potentially decisive factors for learning. In addition, when expatriates saw Greenland as a place of poor professionalism and obsolete practices, it is precisely this difference that contributed to expatriate development. This case provides an example of how an environment perceived as foreign and undesirable turns out to be beneficial for individual learning.