Viktor Vesterberg

Learning to be Swedish: governing migrants in labour-market projects

This article focuses on adult learning in labour-market projects targeting unemployed migrants in Sweden. Drawing on a Foucauldian analysis of governmentality, the results of the study problematize the ways that such projects produce individualizing discourses – targeting individuals, constructing them as responsible for their position as unemployed. The project’s target groups are generally defined not on the basis of ethnicity as such, but rather using terms such as non-Nordic background, foreign born and immigrants. However, two groups considered especially problematic are constructed through ethnicity: Somali and Roma people. The notion of social competency is analysed here as a way of constructing the unemployed migrants as not yet employable. Another significant result concerns the notion of gender equality, which makes migrants governable because it constructs boundaries between Swedishness and Otherness. In line with this rationality, the targeted migrants are governed towards Swedishness through learning gender equality. These results raise a number of issues of great concern for the inclusion of migrants in the labour market, as they highlight a paradoxical relationship between the inclusive ambitions of interventions targeting unemployed migrants and the ethnicized discourses of ‘Othering’ that imbue these learning practices.

Citizens in the Making: The Inclusion of Racialized Subjects in Labour Market Projects in Sweden

This article analyzes the formation of citizenship in todays multi-ethnic Sweden in light of the inclusion of ‘people with foreign background’. Particular focus is put on how ethnicity and migration renders visible existing citizenship ideals, defined in terms of similarity and difference on the basis of ethno-cultural background. The formation of citizenship is analyzed in the case of labour market projects targeting racialized migrants. The point of departure is an understanding of citizenship as an ongoing process of citizen formation, highlighting the formation of citizens as rights-bearing subjects, belonging to the societal community – in contrast to those not bearing these rights and not belonging to the societal community. The analysis illustrates how norms of Swedish-ness condition the membership in the Swedish societal community, forming a particular kind of racialized citizenship, including certain subjects, under certain conditions, while excluding others. One conclusion is that in addition to the formal dimensions of citizenship, the ability and willingness to adapt to norms of Swedish-ness is essential for accessing and using social rights – that is, for becoming employable and included on the labour market. In the projects analyzed, racialized migrants have the duty of becoming employable by embracing certain values – the good, working citizen, the free, independent individual, able to make choices – all constituted as being part of an ideal Swedish citizenship.

Portrait of authority : a critical interrogation of the ideology of job and career coaching

Abstract This article focuses on job and career coaching provided by a multinational company, as a means of learning how to become employable. On the basis of a critical discourse analysis informed by Fairclough, we interrogate tips and advice in blog posts written by job and career coaches on the company’s website. The aim of the article is to examine the power relationships between the coaches, the coachees and the employers in these tips and advice. The analytical focus is directed at descriptions of three subject positions – the coach, the coachee, and the employer. We explore the ways in which their relationships to each other are legitimised. The tips and advice shape a particular understanding of the contemporary conditions and challenges on the labour market producing an ideology of job and career coaching, where existing power relationships in working life are legitimised by portraying coaches as neutral authorities and coachees as commodities.