KON_F_05 Practical Integration at the Workplace?

Objective/Research Question

Alongside knowledge of the German language, professional activity or gainful employment plays a significant role in debates on the integration of refugees with a right to stay and migrants in Germany because this is regarded as a source of social cohesion. The project aims to study empirically the micro-dynamics in the creation of social cohesion and focuses above all on the nexus of cultural orientations, social practices, and situative interpretative processes. The starting point is the observation that “regular gainful employment” stands not only for economic self-sufficiency but also for numerous dimensions of our everyday perceptions of cohesion and expectations of integration, for example the structuring of life routines, cooperativity, relevancy, assuming responsibility, community spirit, and self-discipline.

As a case study, the project investigates, firstly, the practical forms of cooperation and coordination often personified and difficult to verbalize, through which integration in everyday working life takes place and, secondly, the social added value of integration in the employment market in relation to the moral expectations embedded therein and the further cultural and social implications associated with gainful employment as a motor for integration in an overarching social context. The goal of the project, which is located at the intersection of ethnology and qualitative sociology, is to map out the interrelationship of these dimensions of integration with the aid of the ethnographic analysis (e.g. in the context of video-based participatory observations) of socialization processes through the gainful employment of refugees with a right to stay and of migrants in small and medium-sized German companies whose workforce is socioculturally diverse. On the basis of a video-based participatory observation of work practices and interactions between migrant entrants to the labour market and supervisors in the companies, the research interest focuses on the question of how work is performed in practice and which cultural and normative orientations connected with this are communicated in socialization processes in this context. Overall, the project identifies by way of example how concepts of cohesion valid on a macro-structural level come together and negotiate with practical resources and processes in social micro-dynamics.