Barbara Herzog-Punzenberger

Integration Trajectories: A Mixed Method Approach

In contrast to the Austrian discourse on integration in the 1970s and 1980s, when socially marginalised strata of the domestic population were at the centre of attention, in the 1990s the focus of political and media debates around the concept of integration shifted to a problematisation of ‘cultural differences’ of foreign workers. In academic research, too, theoretical approaches to immigration and integration diversified, but many of them still approach the topic from the perspective of the nation-state and majority society. Although some attempts of discussing migration and integration processes from a life course perspective exist (primarily in the US-American context, e.g. Portes and Rumbaut 2001), much of the existing literature pays hardly any attention to the complex interplay between individual action, prior life history and structural embedding.