Hence Ali was still actively building social capital in order to advance his career. His family could never be instrumental in his pathway, but he initiated a networking drink among highly-educated descendants of migrants from Turkey in Paris every two months. Even though his contacts with the Turkish community have not helped his career so far, he likes to keep a large circle. In contrast to Ali's trajectory, Sukran's case typifes the pathways of young people who did not acquire a *Grande École* diploma and who try to accumulate different forms of capital through internships, part-time jobs and foreign study programmes to compete in the job market. Sukran was working in a middle management position at a large French Bank. She was born and raised in a suburb of Paris. Her parents also did not have any formal education beyond primary school in Turkey. Her father was employed in the construction sector, while her mother worked as a housewife. Sukran decided to study business administration, banking and fnance at two different public universities in Paris. She said she couldn't attend an "École" because her family couldn't afford it. Therefore, she put even more effort into getting interesting internship positions during the summer holidays.

After high school I did not go on any holidays with my family. Yeah, I think that was the last time I had a long holiday. I didn't have any connections so I was making open applications to all companies, maybe I was lucky to fnd something but these experiences are important. I learned about my different options but also got to know a lot of people.

Thus, similar to Ali, Sukran realized that due to her family background she lacked contacts in and knowledge about the feld. However, unlike him, she could not access *Grande École* credentials as a form of symbolic capital but had to rely on individual strategies to accumulate professionally-relevant social capital and work experience to advance in her career. Through recommendations and her selfdeveloped professional network, she managed to attain a middle management position in an internationally operating French bank. Like Ali, she highlighted the importance of interpersonal relationships when advancing in the feld. However, she was also aware that, in general, top-level managers in French frms have *Grande École* degrees and that it would be diffcult to become part of the leadership positions without one. Since access to these private institutions is highly selective and very limited among descendants of migrants or working-class families, the selection to top management positions even precedes the labour market and begins much earlier in differential educational opportunities. At the time of the interview, Sukran was seriously considering moving into her company's international department in the expectation that this would give her more opportunities to climb the corporate ladder. But this would require English language skills rather than her Turkish language capital as the connection with the Turkish migrant community or Turkey could not be used as a resource in her current position. The comparison of these pathways in the business sectors in Germany and France shows similarities and differences in the forms of resources that became valuable and were accumulated by respondents in the course of their careers.

First, social capital and professional experience accrued by doing internships during one's educational trajectory proved crucial in both countries for the transition into the labour market and the later career. Educational programmes combining theory and practice through mandatory internships, such as vocational training or programmes at universities of applied sciences in Germany, could support this, especially for young people who could not rely on the transmission of professionallyrelevant resources from their families (Keskiner, 2017, 2019). In France, where such institutionalized opportunities were less common, our respondents had to develop individual strategies to fnd relevant internships and accumulate the social and cultural capital crucial for their entry into the labour market. This also included acquiring knowledge about the rules of the game, which enabled them to adjust their career strategies accordingly (Keskiner & Crul, 2017). Contacts among future employers and networks in the company also played an important role for our respondents.

Second, educational resources were of varying relevance when we compare the two countries. While attaining a profession-related degree was a necessary but largely unspecifed condition for accessing positions in companies in Germany, the pathways of respondents in France were overshadowed by the signifcance of attending a *Grande École* in order to build the required network and reach a leadership position. For our respondents, this constituted an important barrier. To begin with, most of our respondents or their immigrant parents had not even been informed of the existence of such institutions, and even if they knew they were unable to afford courses to prepare them for the entrance exams for a *Grandes École.* If they somehow managed to surmount these obstacles, their families were not in a position to afford the high tuition fees for these institutions. Only a few of our respondents who were able to secure scholarships as high-achievers managed to enter these institutions, a move that paid off as they later attained top management positions.

Third, resources related to one's Turkish background were less relevant in all the profles. Building contacts in the migrant community or transnational connections to Turkey were not particular assets, at least not for the types of careers we were looking at in large companies, despite their international orientation. In this context, resources related to one's migration background could become relevant for temporary assignments to Turkey but it is questionable whether this is helpful to a career in the long run.

#### **4.5 Conclusion**

In this chapter we conducted a comparative analysis of the successful pathways of descendants of migrants to enter and work in the business and law sectors in France and Germany. The sectoral approach unravelled how these pathways are shaped by institutional contexts which required or enabled our respondents to accumulate different forms of resources at different moments in their career. These resources consisted of institutionalized cultural capital in the form of educational degrees and grades, professional skills and knowledge as forms of 'embodied' cultural capital, social capital, and language skills and cultural competences related to their Turkish background. This implies differential opportunities for children of immigrants who were largely unable to draw on career-relevant cultural and social capital in their families to achieve higher positions in these sectors.

We have seen that sectors in which the transition into the labour market is regulated by more rigid institutional structures primarily require institutionalized cultural capital. Acquiring the 'right' educational diploma (and grade) is thus crucial in order to access higher positions. This does not come as a surprise, yet the degree of credentialism in these sectors was also refected in our respondents' experiences and infuenced their educational strategies. This was clearly the case in the law sector in both countries, where entry into the profession is regulated by state-organized exams, which create high barriers. The accounts of our respondents in the law sector underline that passing the examinations or grade threshold that open up secure professional opportunities, is far from merely being a matter of individual effort as promulgated by the 'meritocratic' narrative. Instead, it depends on the available cultural and economic capital – the latter being used to pay for private preparation courses. This is capital that children of immigrant and working-class background are unlikely to 'inherit' from their families. While attaining these credentials is not an equal battle for everyone, once acquired they can open doors to prestigious areas in the law sector. The business sector seemed less rigid in terms of such credentials, yet in France we see that a *Grande École* degree is more highly valued than a degree from a public university. Acquiring a degree from such a prestigious institution, which is still unlikely for children of immigrants (Brinbaum & Guégnard, 2011), functioned as symbolic capital and eased our respondents' pathways into leadership positions in both law and business. A similar condition was not observed in the business sector in Germany. Nevertheless, for all of our respondents in both sectors, educational credentials were not suffcient on their own, and they therefore had to accumulate other resources in order to succeed in the labour market.

Social capital was another crucial resource for all of our respondents. There is a long tradition of research into the signifcance of networks for access to the labour market (Granovetter, 1974; Keskiner et al., 2022). As the individuals we studied entered employment sectors and positions distinct from those of their parents, they could not inherit relevant social capital and had to accumulate it themselves by using different strategies such as doing internships or combining work and study. Especially in the German business sector, social capital seemed more relevant for entering the labour market than the type of educational credentials. Social capital worked in different ways. Connections to future employers smoothened access to the labour market. Having connections was also emphasized as being key to accessing leadership positions. Despite their considerably high educational achievements, many of our respondents reported situations in which they perceived disadvantages and discrimination, like Osman who tried to enter the business sector in Paris:

It is more diffcult to get into a job interview, that's what I discovered, with this background. I see this with other colleagues who fnished training and actually fulfl all the requirements but then receive a one-liner like "the position is already flled" (laughs) whereas you know that this is not true because the position is still being advertised.

Experiences of discrimination in recruitment processes were particularly reported by respondents in the business sector in both countries. Gathering social capital in the feld before entering the labour market, e.g. via internships, thus became even more important because it allows one to 'prove' one's professional skills to potential employers and avoid having to go through recruitment processes as an 'unknown candidate'. Further, the trajectories show how the accumulation of social capital and institutionalized cultural capital are closely entangled: respondents converted educational resources that helped them to enter prestigious subsectors ─ such as a *Grande École* diploma in the French business sector or degrees with 'distinction' in the German law sector ─ into important social capital that further supported their careers. However, this also shows how in some felds, building relevant networks may require specifc educational resources (e.g. attending a *Grande École)*, which are more diffcult to attain for children of immigrants. While for most respondents, useful contacts were professionals without a migration background, who still dominate the higher positions in the sectors investigated, in the law sector, contacts in the population of migrant background or transnational connections to Turkey also emerged as important social capital.

Most of our respondents possessed language skills and cultural competences related to their parents' Turkish migration background, yet these only became a

resource in some of the felds they entered. Primarily among independent lawyers in France and Germany, converting these resources into social capital was a key strategy. The respondents invested in their relations with the Turkish migrant population to build up a clientele. However, this was also a reaction to their experience of an 'ethnic bias', or simply discrimination, in the choice of a lawyer among clients both with and without a migration background. In that sense, the active, partly strategic use of their language skills and cultural competences to build up social capital proved an important ingredient for success.

Lawyers working in corporate law frms in both settings mentioned building up connections with Turkey as a lucrative career strategy, a specialization that could be fexibly deployed. In contrast, for those working in the business sector in large companies, Turkish language skills and cultural knowledge was hardly a resource. Our fndings thus illustrate that labour market contexts defne the value of the resources at an individual's disposal and that this includes contextual factors beyond institutional structures: notably the booming economy in and business relations with Turkey at the time of the research and the existence of a sizeable population of Turkish background in the cities where our respondents worked proved crucial.

The chapter pursued a relational approach, which made it possible to understand how the professional pathways and strategies of children of migrants from Turkey are shaped by the interplay between structural conditions and different forms of resources, or capital that individuals have at their disposal or are able to accumulate in the course of their careers. It is important to underline that this also has a temporal dimension, with different forms of capital becoming relevant at different stages of a career. This points to the importance of studying careers with a longitudinal perspective as the institutional structures and the resources they value or enable to be developed vary over time. The temporal dimension also relates to the convertibility between different forms of capital (Bourdieu, 1986), which was visible in different respects. On the one hand, it could be supportive for certain trajectories, when, for example, attending a prestigious university or achieving a degree with 'distinction' not only means accumulating institutionalized cultural capital and symbolic capital, but also makes it possible to convert this into social capital in the form of important contacts in the professional feld. On the other hand, however, this convertibility is a mechanism that perpetuates the disadvantages of children of immigrants in accessing higher positions as they have fewer opportunities to obtain such required or valued educational credentials in the frst place.

All in all, our research underlined the importance of looking at institutional structures and conditions not only in educational systems (see Crul et al., 2012) but also in different labour market sectors when investigating the pathways of descendants of migrants. Focusing on the resources that descendants of migrants rely on and are able to accumulate within these contexts and over time helps us to understand their professional strategies and opportunities.

#### **References**

Granovetter, M. S. (1974). *Getting a job: A study of contacts and careers*. Harvard University Press.

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## **Chapter 5 Teachers of Immigrant Origin: Contextual Factors and Resource Mobilization in Professional Life**

**Rosita Fibbi and Rosa Aparicio Gómez**

#### **5.1 Introduction**

Migration scholars have often thematized the integration problems of immigrants and their children. Yet virtually all studies on children of immigrants born in the receiving country (the so-called second generation) show that a remarkably high share of them experience educational and social mobility in comparison to their parents' generation. This is especially true for children of labour migrants (Crul, Schneider, & Lelie, 2012a; Stutz et al., 2010; Wippermann & Flaig, 2009; Santelli, 2001). Despite this, the public debate continues to treat the second generation with deep scepticism. Current, often politicized, debates neglect the accomplishments of immigrants' offspring (Ettinger & Imhof, 2011). Concentrating attention on the problematic aspects (which are a reality that needs to be addressed) minimizes the potential of these often-ambitious children of modest immigrant origin. The homogeneity assumption within immigrant fows overshadows their internal differentiation. The emergence of a new, successful category of people of immigrant descent, the high-achieving second generation, risks being overlooked, and its potentials neglected.

In many countries, immigration conformed to the existing segmentation of the labour market, as guest-workers were recruited to cover the lower occupational levels. Moving out of "dirty, dangerous and demanding" immigrant jobs (Castles, 2002) proved to be beyond the reach of most frst- generation immigrants, as changing social stratum mainly occurs at the generational turn (intergenerational mobility), if at all. In migration studies, social mobility is largely framed as 'the' avenue

R. Fibbi (\*)

R. Aparicio Gómez Instituto Universitario de Investigación Ortega y Gasset, Madrid, Spain e-mail<EMAIL_ADDRESS>
Université de Neuchâtel, Neuchâtel, Switzerland e-mail<EMAIL_ADDRESS>
for migrant-origin populations to integrate into their new society. Many studies on the children of immigrants focus on the conditions required for advancement in the educational system as this gives them the qualifcations they need to advance beyond their parents' low-status, precarious occupations. The present study shifts its focus from the acquisition of educational assets – largely studied in Europe (Crul et al. 2012a, b; Fibbi et al., 2011; Heath et al., 2008; Stanat & Christensen, 2006) – to the conditions of their valorisation at a later stage in the labour market. Achievement in the competitive setting of the labour market is subject to other challenges than those of the restricted, less competitive, and rather meritocratic school environment.

Building on the international 'Pathways to Success' study, this chapter concentrates on educationally successful children of immigrants who decided to become teachers. Many arguments support our choice of this particular professional feld. The *mobility argument* is based on the evidence showing that this profession – at least some segments of it – is especially open to socially underprivileged strata. Becoming a teacher has long been a typical avenue of mobility for youth with a working-class background and thus, possibly, also for children of immigrants. The *process argument* rests upon the highly formalized trajectory giving access to this profession. The meritocratic principle mostly shapes the avenue to this largely publicly ruled and sponsored profession, enabling social mobility through education, whatever one's social or ethnic origins.

The *institutional argument* refers to the fact that teaching very often entails entering public employment. In many European countries, by far the most teachers work in the public sector.1 This is especially relevant for children whose parents occupy marginal labour market positions: becoming a teacher secures them a stable job and gives access to the primary labour market of public employment. Given the relative size of the public employment sector, which ranged between 10% and 22% of the labour force in 2008,2 "reduced opportunities for public sector employment for ethnic minorities may be a more important constraint than its numerical importance may suggest" (Heath & Cheung, 2007, 14).

The *symbolic argument* refers to the fact that teachers are entrusted with the task of contributing to the social reproduction of a society, while fostering empowerment, equality and social mobility for individual students. Such a position might be particularly satisfying for children of immigrants, outsiders whose conformity to the rules of their country of residence has often been questioned. The profession is a powerful marker of legitimate belonging.

The *policy argument* refers to the growing interest of academics and policy makers in a diversifed teaching force as one possible way of responding to the

<sup>1</sup>Three of the countries under study, namely Germany, Switzerland, and France, present a share of students in private schools below the 18% OECD average, while Spain (34%) and the Netherlands (66%) largely exceed this level. Sources: (OECD, 2012). Indeed, almost all teachers in the Pathways study work in public schools.

<sup>2</sup>Employment in general government (i.e., public services excluding market production by public corporations) as a percentage of the labour force in 2015: FR 21.4%; ES 14.8%; NL 13.6%; DE 11.3%; CH 9.9%. Source: (OECD, 2017).

diversifed student body (Rotter, 2014; Ogay & Edelmann, 2012; Schmidt & Schneider, 2016). Teachers of immigrant origin (TIO) are the living proof that an immigration society is an open society. Furthermore, they can function as role models for immigrant-origin youth. The fact that TIOs have a migratory experience and working-class background is likely to ensure a cultural and class proximity with minority students.

#### **5.2 Theoretical Background, Research Questions and Methodology**

Our study of the career paths of second-generation adults is framed by two main theoretical references. The frst frame, 'frst-generation students', analyses factors infuencing the educational success of upwardly mobile youth with a micro and meso focus. The second frame concentrates on the specifc situation of socially mobile children of immigrants: the 'integration context theory' develops a macrosocial approach by considering the impact of country-specifc social opportunity structures on the trajectories of children of immigrants.

The analysis of educational trajectories identifes factors determinant for upward mobility, accounting for how the gravitational law of social reproduction can be overridden. Studies on 'frst-generation students', i.e. students whose parents have not followed tertiary education, provide valuable insights into factors that shape upward trajectories (Mountford-Zimdars & Harrison, 2017; Spiegler, 2015). Spiegler synthesizes the factor clusters affecting educational mobility as pertaining to the individual learner, characteristics of their family context and the role of school at both the micro and meso level (Spiegler, 2018). He introduces an acute distinction between resources, mobilized by achieving students to overcome obstacles, on the one hand, and requirements, conditions necessary for successful upward mobility, on the other hand. The three requirements are ability, motivation, and opportunity. While no single resource is needed to attain high educational qualifcations, each single requirement is necessary for educational intergenerational mobility.

Findings concerning 'frst-generation students' are of course also pertinent to educationally mobile children of immigrants, the subject of many studies conducted in Europe in the last decade (Stamm, 2009; El-Mafaalani, 2012; Tepecik, 2011; Ravecca, 2009; Schnell et al., 2015; Crul et al. 2012a, b). If educational trajectories are at the core of those pathways, recent research projects like 'Pathways to Success' and 'Elites' focused on another institutional context, namely the labour market. They extended their interest to the way in which educational credentials provide access to workplaces and professional careers and to factors that either enable or hinder career promotion (Lang et al., 2018; Waldring et al., 2015; Rezai, 2017; Konyali & Crul, 2017). Synthetizing their results, Crul et al. (2017) offer an overall overview and discussion of the resources that can be mobilized to reach the social mobility goal in working life, namely individual agency, resilience, parental agency, social support, social skills and ethnic capital.

Grounded in these theoretical frames and based on qualitative feldwork carried out in fve European countries on teachers of immigrant origin (TIOs), i.e. born or raised from an early age in the country to which their parents migrated, this paper addresses three crucial aspects of the respondents' professional trajectories: career choice, access to the professional feld and present workplace experience, and sets them in a broad comparative perspective. Each theme with its specifc research questions is treated in a different section, while the comparative purpose of the study runs across the three aspects.

Section 5.3 sets the background scene for our schoolteachers by presenting their *professional choice*: the analysis looks at the motives and constraints underlying their decision to become a schoolteacher. It fnally addresses the transversal comparative issue by seeking to identify whether there are common patterns across the countries under study for TIOs' educational trajectories and professional choices.

Section 5.4 retraces the process of TIOs' *access to the professional feld* and their frst employment. The questions here are: which institutional features channel qualifed students into the workplace in the various countries and how do the resulting institutional opportunity structures defne which resources help TIOs to attain a stable position? This section thus shifts the focus to macro dimensions representing the constraints under which individual agency might develop.

Section 5.5 fnally concentrates on the *professional experiences* of TIOs. The central questions are: how do our TIO respondents interpret their role as a teacher? In what ways do institutional factors infuence the way in which they interpret their TIO role?

Each section is organized according to a similar schema: it frst presents the analytical tools from the relevant literature and the research questions guiding the analysis, it then introduces elements from the feldwork (exemplary cases) to illustrate the variety of situations encountered in the countries/contexts under scrutiny and fnally it discusses the relationship between theories and the empirical evidence, delivering the interpretation of the fndings. Understandably, not all 46 TIOs interviewed are presented in the paper. We selected 13 cases to account for the scope of the dimension pertinent to each section, e.g. choosing the profession, contextual settings, and agency. Hence the portrayed cases qualitatively refect the types of situations found in the feldwork.

The overarching comparative research question pertains to contextual factors: it addresses the relative importance of migrant-specifc policies in relation to allencompassing institutional arrangements in drawing the opportunity structure for the mobility of children of immigrants. It further analyses how those contextual factors infuence which resources are relevant and can be effectively mobilized by children of immigrants accessing the teaching profession according to the specifc opportunity structure they are confronted with.

The comparative part of the article refers theoretically to the "integration context theory" (Crul & Schneider, 2010) which argues that participation and belonging of children of immigrants depend on the integration context. The context is shaped by the social and political situation as well as by the institutional arrangements in key social areas, such as education, labour market, housing, religion, and legislation. This focus on the context is not new in migration sociology. For instance, Portes and Böröcz (1989) theorize reception conditions for immigrants in the receiving country as the contextual aspects relevant for integration. They refer concretely to the regulatory frame for admission and integration, which can dramatically change according to the historical period and/or the immigrant group in question. In their segmented assimilation theory, Portes and Zhou further explain various assimilation issues as the product of interactions between characteristics of migrants and the receptivity of the host society, referring to government policies on migration, civil society and public opinion as well as resources and structures in ethnic communities (Zhou, 1997). In other words, the contextual dimensions deemed relevant for the incorporation process are essentially migration-related.

Studying the integration dynamics of children of immigrants in Europe, Crul and Schneider expand the notion of context to include all-encompassing institutional arrangements specifc to each country in social areas such as education, labour market. They are the product of a country's long-term history and the result of the way in which cleavages within the country have been managed and settled: therefore, such arrangements design an institutional opportunity structure not tied to migration-specifc issues and peculiar to the different countries. Moreover, this theoretical frame includes "the agency of individuals and groups, actively developing options and making choices, challenging given opportunities and structural confgurations" (Schneider & Crul, 2012: 31). The TIES research project was designed to test this theoretical frame (see Chap. 2 for details) and indeed confrmed, notably for the educational system, the relevance of country specifc features.

In this paper, however, contextual comparisons will not be based on the national unit of the country of residence, as was the case in the TIES project. The present analysis focuses on the main institutional features structuring the teaching profession. Single countries are subsumed into a typology of such features (see following section) based on the general structure of the respective civil service (*job vs. career system)* and on policies in the educational feld precisely targeting teachers of immigrant origin. The residence country of the interviewed teacher is not prominently featured as it is subordinated to the typology categories, although it is systematically reported in the vignettes for the reader's comfort.

#### **5.3 Methods, Sample, and Informants' Characteristics**

The study is based on extensive qualitative feldwork conducted by research teams in France, Germany, the Netherlands, Spain, and Switzerland as part of the 'Pathways to Success' and 'Elites' projects. Complying with the general design of these two projects, respondents were selected on the dependent variable of educational success and professional activity. Immigrant origin was of course considered for identifying possible interviewees, while family educational background was controlled for by selecting respondents whose parents had not followed tertiary education.

This paper exploits the subsample of 46 in-depth interviews conducted with in-service teachers, offspring of immigrants from the main non-EU infows of the last 20-40 years in the countries and cities under study (Table 5.1). The respondents are teachers, active in both primary and secondary schools who have acquired their qualifcations in the country in which they are currently working, while their parents emigrated from non-EU countries and did not follow tertiary education. A shared interview outline largely comparable across countries allows for the pooling of the data. The paper focuses on the common general feature of the respondents' immigrant origin and does not thematize differences in ethnic origins.

Among our informants, 14 are currently working as primary school teachers, 12 are teaching at lower secondary level and 20 at upper secondary level. Nowadays, teaching is a profession that appeals mostly to women: on average two-thirds of the teachers in OECD countries are female (OECD, 2014); a feature which also applies to our TIOs interviewees, as 32 out of our 46 informants are women. Our informants are aged 30 on average.

The interviews were recorded and transcribed. Each team then submitted these texts to a content analysis supported either by an analytical grid or by software programs like MAXQDA, ATLAS.TI or Kwalitan. The present article used the coded documents developed by the Pathways teams.

**Table 5.1** Interviewed teachers by country of residence, parental country of origin and gender

#### **5.4 Becoming a TIO: From Education to Professional Choice**

This section looks at intergenerationally upward mobile pathways by retracing how children of immigrants converted their educational achievements into labour market positions and by analysing their motives for choosing teaching as a career.

#### *5.4.1 Analytical Tools*

There is extensive research into the motivation for becoming a teacher (for an overview see Heinz, 2015). The literature generally distinguishes three types of motives: (1) intrinsic reasons, pertaining to the actual nature of the job, such as teaching children, and a desire to use one's knowledge and expertise in a particular subject; (2) altruistic reasons, pertaining to viewing teaching as a socially worthwhile and important job, accompanied by a desire to help children succeed and to contribute to society at large; and (3) extrinsic reasons, which cover aspects of the job that are not inherent to the actual work, such as long holidays, level of pay, and status (Brookhart & Freeman, 1992; Kyriacou & Coulthard, 2000).

Enlarging the scope beyond the traditional analysis of values, a new, more elaborate model of motives behind teacher career choice, the Factors Infuencing Teaching Choice Scale (FIT-Choice Scale (Watt & Richardson, 2007) considers fve constructs: socialization infuences, perceptions of the task, perceptions of the self, values related to teaching and teaching as a 'fall-back' career (Richardson & Watt, 2016). The FIT scale, frst developed in Australia, has been used in several studies internationally (Heinz, 2015): it shows consistent fndings in studies on pre-service teachers' motivations across higher-income countries, including the Netherlands (Fokkens-Bruinsma & Canrinus, 2012), Germany (König et al., 2016) and Switzerland (Berger & D'Ascoli, 2012).

Findings on prospective teachers point out that: "for most students the decision to choose to become a teacher is (…) because the expected occupation-specifc activities are in the foreground" (Affolter et al., 2015: 86). Similarly, a US study indicates that "most candidates chose to enter the education profession for noble causes such as the opportunity to share their love for learning or to make a difference in society or students' lives. More pragmatic motivators were also noted such as a need for a career change or the perceived benefts of the teaching career" (Bunn & Wake, 2015, 47). Richardson and Watt (2016), 288) in their recent state of the art on this topic conclude that "the main motivations for entering teaching are intrinsic enjoyment and the desire to make a social contribution and work with youth", while choosing teaching for negative reasons, such as a 'fall-back' career appears as the lowest rated motivation in countries where job opportunities are scarce (2016).

On the other hand, the teaching profession has traditionally been a steppingstone for socially mobile young people from the working and lower middle classes (Charles & Cibois, 2010; Lortie, 1975). Today, as in the past, students in teaching programs are generally characterized by lower socio-economic and cultural resources than their fellow students in other degree programs (Enzelberger, 2001). Furthermore, teachers' social origins differ according to the level they teach at. Primary school teachers are more likely to have a working-class background while upper secondary teachers tend to have a middle-class background (Charles, 2006). Such differentiation used to be attributed to the prerequisites to access training and hence to the length of training. In most countries, primary school teachers could access teacher training directly after compulsory education, while teachers at upper secondary school level were required to undergo a full university curriculum before a short pedagogical training.

In many European countries teacher training has undergone deep reforms, repositioning all teacher training at the level of tertiary education. Altogether the number of training years after compulsory school has increased for all types of teacher training, although the study programmes for primary school teachers are still shorter than those for upper secondary school teachers (except in France). The impact of these teacher training reforms on the recruitment of teachers is perceived differently in some of the countries under study. Studies in Germany support the hypothesis of a progressive closing of the gap in social recruitment of teachers between lower (compulsory school) and higher (Gymnasium) school levels (Kühne, 2006). In Switzerland, however, fndings show that teacher training institutions still recruit "from lower, less-educated social classes" more often than other university programs (Denzler-Schircks et al., 2005). Finally, in France the question of whether this reform has changed the social background of primary school teachers is a matter of hot debate (Charles & Cibois, 2010).

#### *5.4.2 Case Studies*

Four cases exemplify the variety of educational trajectories and reasons for entering the teaching profession.

#### **<IP_ADDRESS> Safa: Model Student and a Teacher Through and Through**

Safa grew up in the Paris region as the child of Algerian parents. She always wanted to become a teacher. As a child, she played at teaching her brothers and sisters.  As her parents valued school success, she responded by being a very good pupil. She was teased in class because of her good grades but at home, she was a role model for her siblings. Studying was a way to escape the many constraints of the family home, where she felt bored to death. The distance with her parents grew as she moved up the educational ladder. After her baccalaureate, she studied Spanish at university and spent a year in Spain to learn the language. While in Cadiz, she was surprised that she was perceived as a Frenchwoman, as in France she is an 'Arab'. Today she teaches Spanish at an upper secondary level school.

#### **<IP_ADDRESS> Saladin: Following in the Footsteps of a Few Emancipating Teachers**

Born in Geneva to a Syrian family, Saladin moved as a child to the Arab Emirates and Syria before settling back in Geneva as a teenager. Although he was a good pupil in general, he struggled with math and was therefore tracked into a prevocational career by a teacher who could not conceive that an immigrant child would be capable of following general education. He overcame this humiliating experience by attending the general education track in nearby France. In this new positive environment, a couple of teachers reassured him: his school results were extremely good and he passed his baccalaureate in 5 languages. He studied French at university and became a teacher in a Gymnasium. Nowadays, he tells his pupils that "nothing is decided once and for all, everything is still possible if we manage to have the right knowledge and the right means, each of us can change the world. We can choose to let it be or to act".

#### **<IP_ADDRESS> Kerim: Teaching as a Fall-Back Solution**

Teaching was not Kerim's frst choice. Instead, this young man who was born in the Netherlands to Turkish parents wanted to study medicine but failed the admission exams. He embarked upon a public administration curriculum but felt uneasy in this milieu. He therefore took the entrance exam for dentistry, but once enrolled on the course, he did not like the atmosphere. As he had previously worked as a mentor in homework classes, he opted for pedagogy. He started out as a social worker, but was frustrated by the feeling that he was unable to do enough for the children he had been employed to help. He therefore took a newly created position combining teaching with social work at a secondary school in Amsterdam, helping pupils with problematic behaviour both as their daily classroom teacher and as a social worker. Despite this trial-and-error orientation process, Kerim took a very well-considered professional decision and derives satisfaction from the fact that his work corresponds to his values.

#### **<IP_ADDRESS> Bülent: Seeking Refuge from Discrimination and Economic Hardship**

Bülent went to a comprehensive school, achieved his Abitur and studied construction engineering. He is now a teacher in Math, Engineering, Social Science, and Islamic Religion in the Ruhr area, as well as a guidance counsellor at a comprehensive school (secondary level school). After his studies, he found it diffcult to get a job in construction engineering. Fearing a diffcult professional future (due to the fact that many construction companies were in crisis, in addition to feelings of discrimination), this young Turkish-origin professional was persuaded by his wife to take the available 'lateral career /cross entry' into the teaching profession, made easier by a shortage of teachers at that time in the Ruhr area. He applied for a teaching internship and was assigned to a school near his home. Two years later, after following extra courses in pedagogy, he was offered a contract at the same school. He soon obtained a position as guidance counsellor and later as provisional head of department, extending his competence subjects by taking additional training to teach Islamic Religion.

#### *5.4.3 Trajectories: Ability, Motivation, and Resource Mobilization*

The primary and secondary school teachers in our sample have a similar social background, in contrast with the literature on teachers in general. The interviewed teachers of immigrant origin have a working-class background. The parental level of education is unsurprisingly low, once more exemplifying the literature fnding that the teaching profession is an open avenue of social mobility for children from underprivileged milieus.

Yet the educational trajectories of teachers at primary and secondary level are somewhat different: non-linear paths are more frequent among primary school teachers than among secondary school staff. Being assigned to lower educational tracks such as pre-vocational schools or dropping out are setbacks that are also found among upper secondary school teachers like Saladin, albeit to a much lesser extent. Youth of immigrant origin often mention diffculties during their time at school, ranging from teasing and mocking to bullying and discrimination.

The story our informants tell in order to account for their educational trajectories is the result of interactions between factors pertaining to the individual learner and characteristics of their direct social context. Motivation and ability are the two individual-level 'requirements' for upward mobility for "frst-generation students" (Spiegler, 2018), like our informants.

Teachers' narratives are imbued with intrinsic motivations pertaining to the actual work involved in their profession, while extrinsic reasons for choosing this profession are virtually absent. Yet the conversion of tertiary educational achievement into professional mobility takes forms which are not always clear from the beginning. Half of the informants said that they always wanted to become teachers: Safa is motivated by her love for this activity; Saladin acts as a role model, encouraging his pupils to take action and stay the course despite setbacks. For the other half of our informants, teaching was not their frst goal, but a fall-back option. Kerim reached out to the teaching profession he had been socialized to when working as a mentor after failing to achieve his professional goals; Bülent's decision to retrain as a teacher was prompted by a fear of unemployment and discrimination. For these people, teaching is not a 'vocation' but rather a mature decision, an alternative way to make use of their educational qualifcations and to attain middle-class status from the options available to them. Across the whole sample in the various countries, half of the teachers interviewed did not initially want to become a teacher (cf. Schneider & Lang, 2016 for a more detailed analysis of the German case).

Literature on motivations for the choice of the teaching profession extensively discusses the notion of teaching as a fall-back career among pre-service teachers. In studies that included a fall-back career as a possible reason for becoming a teacher, this was the option ranked lowest by respondents (Wong et al., 2014). Delving into this last motivational factor, Wong distinguishes two types: 'Teaching as an alternative', a career option selected by respondents who were experiencing diffculties fnding a job or who had had negative experiences in other jobs, and 'Teaching as a provisional option', suggesting that teaching is only a temporary solution. While the frst type is associated with positive attitudes toward teaching, the second type is negatively correlated with teaching-related commitments.

Naturally, fndings on ranked motivations of pre-service teachers are not proper terms of comparison for interpreting the frequency of fall-back options among our in-service TIOs. Yet, the gap between a least valued motive and the recurrent mention of this type of decision in our TIOs sample is a striking indication of the specifc situation of our committed minority teachers, matching the frst type identifed by Wong. They had hesitated several times before taking the decision to enter the teaching profession, after coming to terms with disillusionment and abandoned dreams, especially if they had encountered obstacles towards achieving their professional aspirations. Their career choice is mainly symptomatic of frustrations and hurdles rather than a lack of commitment to their current teaching profession. This second-best career choice is not a matter of individual motivational defcit but points towards painful individual readjustments and challenging labour market access even for successful children of immigrants, framed by larger societal conditions, such as minority status, social origin, opportunity structures and economic and labour market conditions.

Results concerning educational trajectories and professional choices show that TIOs travel along similar pathways across countries; this is not surprising as the analysis was mainly conducted at the micro and meso level. Moreover, the methodological set up of the study, selecting respondents on the dependent variable of educational success tends to black out relevant country differences observed in studies of educational careers (Crul et al. 2012b).

#### **5.5 Entering a Teacher's Position: Opportunities for TIOs**

The necessary 'requirement', complementary in Spiegler's terms (2018) to individual specifc ingredients for upward mobility, are opportunities: they relate to the wider context under which motivations and abilities may unfold. While these two latter requirements characterize successful children of immigrants across the board, the third requirement − opportunities − are country specifc. In this section we analyse if and how upward mobility pathways differ across a typology of countries. Our analysis of opportunities covers some institutional features characteristic of the public school system, since almost all informants in our sample teach in public schools. We focus on institutional regulations regarding entry conditions and career opportunities or barriers as well as educational public policies.

#### *5.5.1 Analytical Tools*

The recruitment and career development of teachers differ according to the general features characterizing each country's civil service. The literature distinguishes two different ways of organizing the civil service in Europe: the *job system* and the *career system* (Bekke & van der Meer, 2000).

In the *job system*, recruitment and selection are highly decentralized and functionoriented. Individuals are recruited for a specifc position, are subject to general employment legislation, and may not always beneft from job security. Such a system ensures great fexibility and enables the externalization of tasks. This system highly resembles what is practised in the private sector. This job system, typical for Anglo-Saxon and Scandinavian countries, is also practised to a certain extent in Switzerland and the Netherlands (Eurydice., 2012, 116).

In the *career system*, the initial recruitment of teachers is carried out through competitive examinations, based on the principles of merit and equality. As individuals are recruited not only for a position but for a career, they beneft from job security. Their advancement through the hierarchy of their corps is determined by specifc promotion rules based on length of service and merit or by internal exams. The *career system* is typical of the French and Spanish civil service. In those countries, teachers have "career civil servant status" as they are "appointed for life by the appropriate central or regional authority" (Eurydice., 2012, 116).3

The German civil service combines characteristics of both systems. On one hand, there is a comprehensive and uniform hierarchy of legal norms establishing a country-wide framework of career categories and insuring clear standardization and job security. On the other hand, decisions on recruitment, personnel deployment, in-service training and promotion are very much decentralized (Goetz, 2000). Differences are found not only between Länder, but also within Länder.

The civil service systems determine the mechanisms for allocating teachers to a school. Whereas in all countries under study, teacher training includes some form of traineeship, the effects of internships on gaining access to a stable workplace vary according to the type of civil service model. In *job system* countries, internships provide an arena where a prospective teacher can build up a professional network

<sup>3</sup> https://eric.ed.gov/?id=ED539386

that may be instrumental when looking for a job; therefore, this system opens up margins for individual action. In *career system* countries, internships have no bearing on the further allocation of teachers, as competitive examinations leave no leeway to infuence where they will practice their profession. These general institutional features impact teaching careers as they determine conditions and entry procedures into the workplace and defne the scope for individual action.

Yet entry procedures are not only determined by general institutional arrangements but also by educational policies aiming at improving the educational performance of migrant-origin pupils. Some measures directed at reaching this goal focus specifcally on teachers. To identify the main features of these policies and their variability across the countries under study, we rely on the Migrant Integration Policy Index. The MIPEX index is a comparative tool measuring policies promoting the integration of third-country nationals in some 38 countries (http://www.mipex. eu/) and education is one of the eight policy areas covered by the index.4

We singled out policy measures that specifcally target teachers from the questions the index is built upon. For our purpose of analysing entry conditions of children of immigrants into the teaching profession, a key policy action is one aimed at bringing migrants into the teaching workforce. This provision intends to promote school success among children of immigrants and create a diversity- friendly school environment (Schmidt & Schneider, 2016). While it could be questioned as a form of affrmative action, this measure ensures sheltered access to a middle-class position for people with an immigrant background.

Table 5.2 shows that this policy measure is often quite consistently accompanied by other teacher-centred measures in training, so that the three tools shape the professional environment and its degree of openness to the specifcity of migrant teachers. The overall picture emerging from Table 5.2 is of a great variety among the countries under scrutiny in this paper: the Netherlands and Germany adopted clear teacher-centred measures. In Germany, for instance, bringing migrants into the teacher workforce represents one explicit goal that has featured in the national integration plan since 2007 (Lang et al., 2018, 105). Such policies seem to be completely absent in Spain and France, while Switzerland takes an intermediate position between these two poles.

#### *5.5.2 Case Studies*

The selected cases illustrate the infuence of institutional opportunity structures on the ways in which teachers of immigrant origin manage to enter this career.

<sup>4</sup>Each policy area in the MIPEX index 2015 is divided into four sub-dimensions for a total of 167 items. Each item is a closed ordinal item, coded as 0, 50, or 100. The maximum score of 100 is awarded when policies meet the highest standards for equal treatment, often drawing on policy standards set by the European Union (Ruedin et al., 2015).

**Table 5.2** Evaluation of measures targeting teachers as tools to promote children of immigrants' integration in the countries under study

Source: MIPEX 2014, http://www.mipex.eu/methodology

Legend: Considering the diversifcation of the teaching force, MIPEX country experts report widespread measures in the Netherlands and a scattered pattern of similar provisions in Germany; this contrasts with the absence of such arrangements in the other three countries under scrutiny. Measured against European integration standards, the Netherlands scores 100, Germany 50 and the other countries 0

#### **<IP_ADDRESS> Mayra: In the Hands of a Bureaucratic System**

Mayra, born in Seville to Peruvian parents, had been working for some time as a mediator, when she decided to risk taking the competitive examination for teachers in the public sector. She passed the exam and, in the face of her previous experiences as a child of immigrants, was surprised to acknowledge that "the examiner had been fair". However, because of her grades, she was assigned to a school with many children of immigrants in a village far away from where she was living. Her placement in this school (be it a majority or a minority school) was neither the result of her personal choice nor that of the school but the outcome of an impersonal administrative decision.

#### **<IP_ADDRESS> Ceren: Fitting in the Ethnic Niche**

After achieving her Abitur in the German school system, Ceren wanted to study Turkish. It seemed like a natural choice to take advantage of the newly established opportunity to combine this with a teaching degree. She applied for a teacher internship and, because of her subject, it was easy to fnd a job at a Gymnasium in the Ruhr region, an urban area with many migrant children. Her professional profle fts in the ethnic niche.

#### **<IP_ADDRESS> Dilek: Relying On Her Professional Network**

Dilek, a teacher of Turkish origin, was having a diffcult time fnding a job as the supply of history teachers exceeds demand in Geneva. To secure a teaching position, she activated her professional network, built during her school days when she attended a school with many minority pupils as well as during internships and jobs as a supply teacher. Eventually, she found a job as the only teacher with 'exotic origins' at a predominantly majority school, where most pupils have a majority background.

#### *5.5.3 Institutional Channelling*

This paper's comparative design highlights the importance of contextual dimensions in shaping the job search process. The institutional structure of the feld may grant or inhibit individual leeway in the process and determine the relevance of the resources that individuals can mobilize to enter the professional feld.

The competitive examination system typical for *career system* countries, illustrated here by Mayra's vignette, frmly channels a competent workforce into vacancies defned on the basis of the subjects to be taught. In Ceren's vignette, a policy of 'preferential' recruitment for teachers of immigrant origin may make the ascribed attribute of ethnicity more relevant to securing a position, leaving it up to the individual teacher whether or not they want to highlight this attribute. Yet, Ceren is the only German case where the institutional channelling of migrants into the teaching workforce was mediated by the choice of the subjects taught. For most of the teachers interviewed in Germany, their immigrant origin was not important to their recruitment to the extent that the offcial teacher-centred policy to promote immigrant pupils' integration might suggest (Lang et al., 2018, 110). While the specifc profles and competences of TIOs are often sought after by schools in urban neighbourhoods with high shares of immigrant children, the allocation of positions based on a career system or the simple lack of open positions in some regions prevent it from becoming a primary resource for recruitment. Almost all informants had been recruited by a school where they had either worked during their training period or as a supply teacher, thereby proving their competences.

The *job system* of civil service, illustrated here by Dilek's vignette, gives a great deal of latitude to individual actors. Naturally, both teaching subjects and the supply and demand situation in the specifc labour market powerfully infuence job search, but informal job-search methods through mobilizing one's social networks also become very relevant in this context. This dimension recalls Granovetter's pathbreaking studies (1973, 1974) on job search; however, in our case, informal contacts take place within a largely institutionalized context such as internships and supply teaching in the framework of the *job system*.

As this context gives relevance to social capital, a discussion of this concept is appropriate (Behtoui, 2009). According to Bourdieu (2001), social capital, i.e. personal and professional relationships, procures competitive advantages by providing higher returns on [educational] investment. Emphasizing its inherited nature, Bourdieu's social capital theory primarily explains the reproduction of inequalities in society. The situation of upwardly mobile children of immigrants is quite different. First-generation students entering a 'new' professional area cannot 'inherit'

relevant social capital. The social capital they rely on in their job search is what they have accrued in their specifc professional environment; they are actors in accumulating human and social capital via 'hard work and commitment'.

The notion of social capital 'à la Coleman' (1988) differs sharply from the meaning attributed to it by Bourdieu. Similar to economic and cultural capital, social capital can be accrued by the same logic of 'rational choice theory' (Arneil, 2006). The institutional opportunity structure of the *job system* and of internships provides an arena for collecting a profession-specifc relevant network which can be exploited when looking for a job. Framed as the rational calculations of self-interested individuals, social capital provides individually-tailored tools to escape from social reproduction (Crul et al., 2017).

Ethnic-specifc social capital can also be a resource in upwardly mobile trajectories of children of immigrants (Crul et al., 2017). Echoing the 'Pathways to Success' studies, this type of capital can be understood as the mobilization of the ascribed attribute – the immigrant origin – in gaining a professional position. Yet the examples of the teachers cited above show that the relevance of this resource which 'turns disadvantage into advantage' (Konyali, 2014) is crucially dependent on the countryspecifc institutional channelling and opportunity structure.

In *career system* countries, individual attributes such as ethnic background are not formally recognized and therefore bear no formal relevance to gaining a position, even if school principals may express a preference for specifc candidates during the recruitment process. In *job system* countries, there is potentially more scope to mobilize one's ethnic background; however, this was not really exploited by most of the informants in our samples who relied mainly on their professional attributes to gain a position.

The critical contextual dimension required for ethnic reference to be effective is an explicit diversity policy on teaching staff or, to a much lesser extent, the inclusion of migrant-specifc teaching subjects. This is partially apparent in the German case. For these teachers, facilitated access to a job is counterbalanced by the risk of being caught in an 'ethnic mobility trap', whereby it is impossible to transfer acquired professional, cultural and social capital to any sort of mainstream organization (Crul et al., 2017).

Mobilization of one's minority background may function as a resource to gain a work position; alternatively, it may be totally irrelevant, depending on the institutional opportunity structure within the various contexts.

#### **5.6 Being a TIO: Interpreting the Teaching Role**

Having discussed the trajectories of informants to attain their ambitioned position in the labour market as teachers, in this section we turn to their present situation as professionals and address questions on the extent to which they perceive their immigrant origin as having a bearing on their professional activity. We especially analyse if and how the type of institutional opportunity structure infuences two central

dimensions of their activity: the way in which informants interpret their role as teachers of immigrant origin and to what extent they are accepted within their professional environment.

#### *5.6.1 Analytical Tools*

School sociology literature identifes three major dilemmas and challenges confronting teachers today: knowledge transmission vs educational function; separation between private and professional spheres vs fusion of the two spheres; institutional role vs relevance of personal project. In the exercise of their professional activity, teachers are called upon to position themselves in those various areas of tension. Democratization of upper secondary school has brought into the school system pupils quite different from the two traditional fgures of pupils, i.e. Bourdieu's heirs or deserving diligent learners. Democratization has opened up secondary school to young people from working-class backgrounds who are less familiar with the school culture than the traditional pupils. This means that teachers are being confronted with new social problems and personal tensions (Dubet, 2010; Dubet & Martuccelli, 2014).

The interpretation of the work and role of teachers has been affected by these fundamental transformations (Navarro, 2012; Duru-Bellat, 2015). Some teachers uphold the primacy of knowledge transmission, whereby they must prove their disciplinary expertise and pupils must show discipline and endurance, while others support a larger educational function for teachers who prioritize learners and adapt to their needs (Perrier, 2004). The former shares the traditional cultural ethos of teaching based on a strict divide between the private and the professional sphere; the latter abandons this position and uses their personality, background and relational capacities in their work. In such cases, the teachers' role is subject to a personal interpretation that reaches beyond institutional defnitions. The divide between upholders of knowledge transmission and supporters of the educational function of teaching is more prominent among secondary school teachers than primary school teachers (Duru-Bellat & van Zanten, 2012). Dubar (1996) identifes and names the two different historically positioned models from which teachers can develop their professional identities: the reference professional model is that of a 'magister', i.e. a teacher who focuses on transferring knowledge to the pupils; the alternative model is that of a 'pedagogue', who focuses on the learning process and pupils (Lang, 1999).

In countries where the notion of TIOs is made relevant by educational policies, teachers must meet two main expectations: to establish cultural links between school and home for pupils from a minority background (Villegas & Irvine, 2010; Schmidt & Schneider, 2016), on the one hand, and to function as role models for minority pupils in achieving (Sleeter & Richard Milner, 2011) and developing identities (Bayham, 2008), on the other hand. Such expectations are coherent with the 'pedagogue' model. This is usually not the case in countries where educational policies grant no institutional relevance to teachers' ethnic origin.

TIOs are minority professionals who pioneer access to a work feld that used to be largely precluded to immigrants (Elias & Scotson, 1994). As 'newcomers' in their professional milieu, like other minority professionals (Waldring et al., 2015; Van Laer & Janssens, 2011), they may be confronted with a lack of acceptance of their position. This can take the form of open contestation or of micro-aggressions, i.e. "everyday exchanges which send denigrating messages to certain individuals because of their group membership" (Sue, 2010, xvi). The comparative design of the paper allows us to analyse whether the type of institutional environment has an impact on the occurrence of legitimacy questions and on the ways in which such thorny situations are dealt with.

#### *5.6.2 Case Studies*

The following cases illustrate how TIOs interpret their role and deal with any legitimacy tensions they may encounter. These examples specifcally show how the institutional opportunity structure affects the way in which they fulfl their role.

#### **<IP_ADDRESS> Evren: Magister By Conviction**

Evren is a biology teacher of Turkish origin working in an upper secondary school of the Paris region. He grew up in Brittany where – as he says – his unusual name did not sound out of place. He thinks that a teacher's migrant background is a personal matter which has no place in his work: in the public sphere a schoolteacher has to be "deeply republican". He believes that a teacher's job is to portray "republican values" and transmit disciplinary knowledge.

#### **<IP_ADDRESS> Raquel: Magister By Necessity**

Raquel is a teacher of Moroccan descent, working in a public primary school in Madrid. Her headmaster has welcomed her, glad of her professional competences both as a teacher and a mediator. Despite this, from the very beginning, she has had to cope with unvoiced resentment from the rest of the school staff – from the cleaners to her colleagues – who consider that her appointment has overturned established ethnic hierarchies: "A Moroccan person as teacher?" Similarly, the pupils' parents question her professional competences. Raquel must therefore struggle to be recognized as a competent teacher. Leaving this school is not a solution open to her in a *career system*. Instead, she decided to downplay her migrant background at work by giving up her mediator role and focussing only on the teaching side of her job. She has chosen to reinforce her role as magister as she reckons this is the best way to keep on challenging the established ethnic hierarchies in her school.

#### **<IP_ADDRESS> Sultan: A Self-Appointed Mediator Who Enjoys Double Legitimacy**

Sultan, a young Dutch woman of Turkish descent, teaches Economics and Business classes at a secondary school attended by many minority pupils. The school not only offered her a job after her internship but also allowed her to implement a business class project that she had designed. She feels that she is not only teaching Economics and Business but also norms and values. She considers herself a role model to these youngsters: because she shares an ethnic and religious background with her students, she can contextualise students' questions and remarks and students are likely to place trust in her.

#### **<IP_ADDRESS> Azize Bahar: Role Model Challenged in Her Professional Identity**

Azize, now an established English teacher of Turkish descent in Rotterdam, realizes that her professional position as a teacher is valued by her pupils, especially Turkish and Moroccan girls, for whom she is a role model because of her immigrant background. Yet, her Turkish background also makes her vulnerable as she feels that her professional position is sometimes undermined because of her ethnicity. When she was working as a supply teacher in the school where she is currently employed, most pupils did not accept her because of her immigrant origin. After being continuously challenged by these pupils, she fnally notifed her direct supervisor. The school arranged talks with both the pupils and their parents, and eventually the class was assigned a different supply teacher. When relating this incident, Azize emphasized that she had received institutional backing from the school administration, legitimizing both her immigrant descent status and her professional competences as a TIO.

#### **<IP_ADDRESS> Aldin: Token Other, Contested as a TIO in a Majority School**

Aldin, a Bosnian Serb by origin, teaches Italian and French at a Gymnasium in Basel with very few minority students. In a city with a distinctive diversity-sensitive policy, quite unusual in Switzerland, the headmaster at his school feels obliged to comply with the general trend and therefore hired a TIO. After starting his new job, Aldin became aware of resentment on the part of his colleagues who are convinced that he is "fehl am Platz", out of place in that school and that he only got his position because of his origin. He suffers from being in an uncomfortable position in which his competences are ignored, while lacking the resources to overturn or manage the situation.

#### **<IP_ADDRESS> Harun: Appointed as Mediator Yet Contested as a TIO in a Minority School**

Harun is a teacher of Turkish origin working in Berlin. He was recruited as supply teacher to "ease" relationships between a 100% "German" teaching staff and an almost 100% "non-German" student body. Although shocked by the educational styles of the parents in many low-educated migrant families, he understands his pupils' frustrations and daily experiences of hostility. His pupils are glad to hear their names fnally properly pronounced and parents appreciate fnding an attentive counsellor when their children have problems at school. Yet as the only TIO at his school, he faces unfriendliness from his colleagues: some of them will not speak to him or even greet him. He is left alone to deal with this awkward situation.

#### *5.6.3 Constraints and Opportunities Framing Agency*

These vignettes document that the institutional setting affects the way in which TIOs can interpret their role. Strictly speaking, the extent of ethnic origin mobilization is not a constitutive feature of the models of magister and pedagogue, yet these two professional approaches represent frames which either inhibit or allow a productive mobilization of one's ethnic minority background. The magister model of teaching tends to be dominant in *career system* countries with a diversity-neutral approach towards educational policy, while the pedagogue model is more common in *job system* countries, especially when this is associated with a diversity-friendly teacher recruitment policy. Naturally, such tendencies are not the result of institutional determinism but rather the outcome of constraints acting on the agency of TIOs and the implementation of their individual projects.

The French and the Spanish vignettes are cases in point. Evren has interiorized the French republican ethos; he adheres to a strict separation of his public role and private ethnic belonging to the extent that he refrains from communicating his immigrant origin to his pupils. He unsurprisingly aligns with the model of knowledge provider. Raquel's case is similar in outcome but different with respect to the dynamics leading to this result. Her initial project of combining teaching and mediation broke down when she was faced with persistent hostility. Lacking personal resources and institutional backing to resist and overcome this obstacle, she gave up the more 'pedagogue' approach she had cherished. Institutional arrangements and educational policy options converged to exert pressure on her to comply with the magister model.

The two Dutch cases are emblematic of *job system* countries with an open diversity-friendly teacher recruitment policy. Both Sultan and Azize resolutely engage in a pedagogue interpretation of their teacher role and enjoy full recognition of their competences and ethnic background from the school management board. Obviously, this type of institutional setting does not protect TIOs from being contested; yet when tensions arose, the school authorities provided Azize with effective

backing so that she could feel secure in her professional and personal identity as well as in her role interpretation.

The Swiss and the German vignettes are good examples for countries where the *job system* applies (at least partially) in combination with a somewhat hesitant diversity policy. While their immigrant origin signalled an openness towards diversity, Aldin and Harun did not receive any support from their school hierarchies when confronted with challenges to their legitimacy from fellow teachers and parents.

The analysis of access to a teaching position showed that ethnic origin mobilization can only work as a resource under a specifc institutional structure of the professional feld (§ 2.3). Here again, the range of possibilities that TIOs have to interpret their role and mobilize their ethnic attribute are shaped by the specifc institutional setting of the context they work in. Moreover, the type and degree of diversity-sensitive teacher recruitment policy plays a role in managing any tensions that may arise in the professional arena and in legitimizing ethnic minority background as a resource in how TIOs play their professional role.

Contextual features infuence the way in which TIOs interpret their role, as we have seen so far. Yet other social factors contribute to determine teachers' role understanding and action: school sociology literature points out the impact of social origin in this respect. The explicit choice to work in a minority school is more often observed among teachers from underprivileged families than those from a middleclass milieu (Legendre, 2004). As primary school teachers are more likely to have a working-class background than upper secondary teachers (Charles, 2006), commitment towards teaching in a minority school is more likely to be found among the former than the latter.

A similar commitment to underprivileged groups is observed among the upwardly mobile second generation in the United States. Socially mobile minority children of immigrants, be they Mexican (Agius Vallejo & Lee, 2009), African-American (Lamont, 2000) or Asian-American (Su, 1997), are motivated to 'give back' to less fortunate co-ethnics by providing them with fnancial and social support. Here again, such behaviour varies according to social origin: children who grew up poor and achieved middle-class status within one generation more often exhibit a collectivist orientation, and want to 'give back' to poorer kin, co-ethnics and the larger ethnic community. By contrast, those who grew up in middle-class households tend to adopt an individualistic meritocratic orientation, and are therefore less likely to give back to poorer co-ethnics (Agius Vallejo & Lee, 2009).

In our European study of TIOs, commitment to co-ethnics may take the form of individual help to disadvantaged people living in close proximity to helpers, as in the United States; but more often it takes the form of an action addressing a collective recipient, be it the ethnic community, an underprivileged social category or a deprived section of town. In other words, commitment to teaching in minority schools appears to be a specifc form of 'giving back' for TIOs in Europe.

Our TIO respondents are quite a homogeneous group in terms of social origin, as we already pointed out.  However, commitment to teaching in minority schools tended to be articulated by primary school teachers more often than by secondary school teachers.

#### **5.7 Conclusions**

This paper presented and discussed fndings on inter-generationally mobile and educationally successful children of immigrants who are now professionally active as teachers. Based on a qualitative approach, the empirical material resulted from the pooling of interviews conducted with teachers of immigrant origin in fve European countries. The variety of country institutional settings is especially valuable for a comparative analysis inspired by the integration context theory.

The paper addresses three main topics: educational trajectories and professional choice, access to the professional feld and professional experiences. Two issues and their interactions run through the entire text: the resources that TIOs mobilize to create and maintain their upward social mobility and career, and the institutional opportunity structure that shapes access to the professional life.

The selection of respondents on the dependent variable of educational success resulted in homogenizing across informants and contexts the individual ability and motivational requirements critical for achieving tertiary qualifcations despite initial adverse social conditions. Findings about the resources mobilized for those requirements are in line with the conclusions reached in the overall 'Pathways to Success' and 'Elites' projects; namely individual agency, resilience, parental agency, social support, and social skills (Crul et al., 2017).

The specifc contribution of this paper resides in the analysis of the professional integration and career development of TIOs. The comparatively high share of TIOs in the sample who choose this career as a second-best option seems to be indicative of some fragility among children of immigrants; because of their not wholly successful performance in the education system, they end up resorting to teaching, a career that functions as a steppingstone for young people from a working-class or lower middle-class background when the obstacles to reaching their initial goal prove to be too high.

Mechanisms for allocating teachers to a workplace result as much from general, historically evolved country-specifc institutional arrangements, such as the civil service system, as from targeted migrant integration policies, such as teachers' recruiting measures. The interplay between the two creates an institutional opportunity structure that affects both the entry conditions into the workforce for TIOs and the leeway they have to shape and interpret their professional role.

The institutional opportunity structure infuences which attributes can appropriately be mobilized by granting or denying relevance to available resources. As a consequence, professional social networks established during the qualifcation path can either be practically meaningless or instrumental to granting access to a job. The same applies to ethnic background, which is worthless in some contexts – especially in *career system* countries – and valuable in others, particularly in countries or regions with a policy of promoting diversity among teaching staff.

One's legitimacy as a professional may at times be challenged if immigrant origin is interpreted as being a marker of an everlasting 'outsider' condition. It is important to note that such challenges and tensions may occur in all types of contexts, whatever the institutional opportunity structure. However, the type of structure infuences the kind of responses to such challenges. In *diversity-blind* structures, the single TIO is likely to be left to their own devices to sort out legitimacy issues. This type of response reduces the personal leeway for TIOs to interpret their role and forces some to play down their migrant background in their professional activities in an attempt to make it invisible. In *diversity-sensitive* structures that recognize ethnic origin as a resource, school principals or colleagues are more likely to use their institutional infuence to meet any challenges confronting a single TIO, thereby giving them support and legitimacy.

**Acknowledgements** We thank Christine Lang, Laure Moguérou, Emmanuelle Santelli, Agota Sanislo and Ismintha Waldring, who conducted studies on teachers of immigrant origin as members of the Pathways to Success and ELITES teams in Germany, France, Switzerland and the Netherlands respectively. They kindly shared their notes and writings and thoughts for the drafting of this overview article. We further thank Christine Lang and Ismintha Waldring for their insightful comments on a previous version of this paper.

#### **References**

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## **Chapter 6 Becoming Elite in an Egalitarian Context: Pathways to Law and Medicine Among Norway's Second-Generation**

**Arnfnn H. Midtbøen and Marjan Nadim**

#### **6.1 Introduction**

The extent to which children of immigrants are able to translate their educational achievements into high-status labour market positions has become a key question in research on integration and assimilation (Alba & Foner, 2015; Crul et al., 2016a; Tran et al., 2019). Although they often come from families with limited education, children of immigrants tend to have high educational ambitions, and many perform remarkably well in the education system (Heath & Brinbaum 2014; Kasinitz et al., 2008; Lee & Zhou, 2015; Shah et al., 2010). Signifcant numbers are entering elite educational felds and prestigious occupations. As in many other countries, the second generation in Norway is overrepresented in professions such as medicine and law (Østby & Henriksen, 2013), yet we still know little about their work trajectories and professional achievements. A pertinent question is what opportunities European labour markets offer highly ambitious second-generation individuals, and whether – and on what terms – they are granted access to elite occupations (cf. Tran et al., 2019).

Medicine and law are prime examples of elite professions, as they have challenging and highly competitive admission criteria, while yielding high levels of reward compared to other felds of higher education (Strømme & Hansen, 2017). In Norway, both professions are characterized by formal and informal *occupational closure*: access to these occupations is regulated formally (and institutionally) through high entry requirements for these study programmes and strict licence requirements for practicing these occupations. In addition, informal selection mechanisms produce a

University of Oslo, Oslo, Norway e-mail<EMAIL_ADDRESS>
M. Nadim (\*) Institute for Social Research, Oslo, Norway e-mail<EMAIL_ADDRESS>
A. H. Midtbøen

strong degree of social reproduction whereby students and employees from higherclass strata are overrepresented (Strømme & Hansen, 2017).

Such formal and informal occupational closure can represent obstacles for the second generation's access to elite occupations. They face greater challenges in meeting the competitive admission criteria, as they tend to obtain lower grades than their majority peers (Alba & Foner, 2015; Cools & Schøne, 2019; Heath & Rothon, 2014; Reisel et al., 2019). Furthermore, being visible minorities and having undertaken a steep social climb means that the second generation may experience being "other" in their educational and work context, making them vulnerable to subtle processes of exclusion that might shape their work experiences and trajectories (e.g. Dinovitzer, 2011; Hansen, 2001; Konyali, 2014; Puwar, 2004; Waldring et al., 2015). Building on the Norwegian *Pathways to Success* study, this chapter examines the common pathways to entering the elite occupations of medicine and law for descendants of labour migrants in Norway, how these pathways are shaped by the institutional arrangements regulating access to these occupations, and how the ethnic minority status of second-generation individuals shapes their experiences within elite occupations once they have gained access.

We start by embedding the Norwegian context in the broader comparative landscape of research on how institutional opportunity structures affect secondgeneration incorporation. Next, we discuss two strands of theory that help to shed light on the experiences of second-generation elite professionals: theories of occupational closure and of symbolic boundaries. We draw on insights from both theoretical perspectives in our analyses, concluding that while the occupational felds of law and medicine in Norway are open to newcomers who manage to pass the highgrade requirements, processes of ethnic segmentation seem to occur after employment is secured.

#### **6.2 The Norwegian Context**

Norway is an interesting contrast to the European countries typically examined in studies of second-generation incorporation, such as Britain, France, Germany and the Netherlands (cf. Alba & Foner, 2015; Crul et al., 2012, 2016a). On the one hand, Norway shares with these countries the experience of becoming a country of immigration in the late 1960s, when labour migrants from countries such as Pakistan, India, Turkey and Morocco started to arrive as part of the broader wave of post-war labour migration to Western Europe in response to recent economic growth. As elsewhere, many of these immigrants had low levels of education; they could not speak the host country language; they were culturally and religiously foreign to the majority population; and they were absorbed into the lower tiers of the labour market, often in declining industries and occupations (Brochmann & Kjeldstadli, 2008). On the other hand, Norway's institutional structure – its egalitarian education system, redistributive welfare state system and regulated labour market – stands out in international comparisons by offering a range of institutional opportunities for upward social mobility to children of immigrants (Hermansen, 2017; Midtbøen & Nadim, 2021).

First, due to a compressed wage structure and redistributive policies, income inequality is low in Norway and relatively few children live in poverty regardless of their parents' employment status. This is benefcial for all children, but especially for children growing up in poor families with low-educated parents. Indeed, recent comparative research has demonstrated that intergenerational upward mobility is more widespread in the Scandinavian countries than in countries such as Germany and the US (Bratberg et al., 2017).

Second, Norway's education system is characterized by a combination of a high level of standardization (i.e. low variation in school quality) and a relatively low level of stratifcation (i.e. a system of relatively late tracking). In Norway, the quality of education meets the same standards across the country, and tracking into vocational, professional or academic tracks does not occur until the age of 16, when students leave compulsory secondary school (after 10 years in a school for all levels of ability) and enter the high school system (Reisel et al., 2019). Compared to countries such as the US, this suggests that children of immigrants in Norway growing up in residentially segregated areas are penalized less by differences in school quality. And compared to countries with early-tracking systems, such as Germany, children of immigrants in Norway have time to catch up with their majority peers before choosing what tracks to pursue, and both they and their parents have the power to choose the direction of their future studies (Midtbøen & Nadim, 2021). Upon fnishing compulsory education at the age of 16, most Norwegians, including the second generation, go on to high school (i.e. upper secondary education), which consists of academic and vocational tracks. Academic upper-secondary tracks take 3 years, while vocational upper secondary tracks take 2 years. After these 2 years, students may spend 2 years in apprenticeship training or 1 year completing general subject supplements, providing them with the basic entrance requirements for higher education. Although children of immigrants generally tend to perform less well in their fnal secondary school examinations, their average high school completion fgures are identical to those of the majority population (Reisel et al., 2019).

Finally, the Norwegian system of higher education is predominantly public and free of charge. In striking contrast to the US, public universities in Norway offer a higher quality of education, are more competitive (and therefore attract the best students) and rank higher in status than the few existing private alternatives. In highstatus felds of tertiary education, such as medicine and law, public universities are by far the best option in terms of both quality and status (Strømme & Hansen, 2017). These features of Norway's system of higher education suggest that the threshold for ambitious second-generation individuals (who have often grown up in low-income families) to embark on a high-status educational track is comparatively low. The question is how diffcult it is for them to acquire the necessary educational credentials and, having done so, to translate their educational achievements into relevant occupational positions (cf. Tran et al., 2019).

#### **6.3 Accessing Law and Medicine in Norway: Standard and Alternative Routes**

Both law and medicine degree courses are offered at selected public universities in Norway, and the public education programmes in these felds are considered the most prestigious. Access to these higher education study programmes is mainly determined by the grades obtained in the centralized, state-run high school system (Strømme & Hansen, 2017). All students have to take the same exams and in contrast to many other countries, entry into these elite study programmes requires no extra tests, personal letters, recommendations or essays, thus limiting the infuence of social networks or mastery of specifc forms of expression on a student's chances of gaining admission compared to many other countries (Strømme & Hansen, 2017). At the same time, both medicine and law have highly competitive entry requirements that demand a high average grade. Medicine study programmes have the highest grade requirements of all Norwegian study programmes. The requirements for law are lower, but this was the study programme with the most applicants and the longest waiting list in 2017 (The Norwegian Universities and Colleges Admission Service, 2017).

Importantly, however, there are alternative routes if a candidate has not graduated from high school with good enough grades. It is, for instance, both possible and common to retake high school exams in special private schools in order to improve one's grades after completing high school in the public education system. This requires the economic means to pay tuition fees and be able to spend a substantial amount of time trying to achieve better grades.

Another alternative route lies in the actual study programmes. Full law study programmes are offered at three Norwegian public universities and consist of a 5-year Master's programme. An alternative route to a law degree is to embark on a Bachelor's degree in law, which has lower entry requirements. This degree does not qualify students to become lawyers and generally has a low status in the labour market, but after completion, graduates can apply for direct admission to the Master's level at the three universities offering this programme. However, the possibilities to enter at Master's level are limited, and the three Master's degree universities appear to be closing down this option in practice. Instead of following the 'alternative route' students have to apply for ordinary admission to the Master's programme on the basis of their high school grades. If they manage to enter the programme, the relevant subjects they have already completed can be accepted, so that they will be able to continue where they had left off in their study trajectories. However, only a minority of bachelor students meet the grade requirements, meaning that they need to improve their high school grades, even after obtaining a Bachelor's degree. Until recently, it was also possible to enrol in a private institution offering law courses and apply for transfer to a public law school at a later stage, but this route has become severely limited in recent years. In effect, the alternative routes to a law degree are becoming limited to retaking high school exams to improve one's grades and the only limit to this alternative is a student's willingness to spend time and money. The informants interviewed in this study had been able to choose this alternative route.

Traditionally, a law student's grades have been more decisive to their career opportunities than is the case for other higher education programmes. Norwegian law schools are characterized by continuous competition, in which only those with good grades can continue to compete for high-earning and high-status jobs, whereas the rest have to continue with more modest ambitions, or simply leave the feld (Strømme & Hansen, 2017). In order to work as a lawyer (*advokat*) in Norway, you must frst obtain a Master's degree in Law, and then pass a qualifcation as a lawyer. This entails a minimum of 2 years of legal practice, for instance as an associate lawyer (*advokatfullmektig*), whereby in most cases one must have tried three cases at a court, including at least one civil case. Within the feld of law, the status of lawyers differs widely according to the prestige of their law frm and case portfolios. Some of the most prestigious jobs are found in the public sector (e.g. judges or lawyer in the Legislation department in the Ministry of Justice or with the Attorney General).

Medicine in Norway is a 6-year programme offered at four universities. It is usually the most competitive feld of study to enter and has extremely high grade requirements. Admission is mainly based on an applicant's high school grades, but it is possible for candidates to improve their grades privately after graduating and to gain extra grade points by taking other university courses or acquiring relevant practical experience. Strømme and Hansen (2017: 172) characterize the route to gaining admission to medical school as a "long and risky process" that in many cases demands economic resources to fnance the diverse strategies for gaining extra points. Once in medical school, however, the programme is characterized by *low* competition, as most medical schools do not give grades, but rather use a pass/fail system.1 Unlike law students, medical students can earn their degrees in other countries and return to Norway to practice medicine, and there has been a massive increase in students using this alternative route to a medical degree.

In order to become a medical doctor, graduates have to go through a one-and-half year mandatory traineeship. Before 2012, these were allocated through a lottery that students from universities outside Norway were also allowed to enter. Nowadays, students must compete for traineeships by applying directly to relevant institutions. The new competition has fuelled charges of nepotism, whereby children of medical doctors are accused of having an unfair advantage in securing traineeships (Drange, 2020; Losvik, 2013).

<sup>1</sup>However, grades were reintroduced at the University of Oslo in 2013, and there are ongoing discussions about the grading system at other universities.

#### **6.4 Closure Mechanisms in Elite Professions: What Room Is There for the Second Generation?**

A defning aspect of *elite* studies and professions is their exclusivity. Only a select few are granted access to the status and rewards awarded by elite positions, and elite professions protect their exclusivity by closing off opportunities to 'outsiders' (cf. Murphy, 1988). Access to privileged positions is typically controlled by requiring formal educational credentials. The two professions of interest in this chapter – medicine and law – are both *licensed* professions. This means that they are regulated by law, so that unauthorized practice is illegal and educational requirements are institutionalized and sanctioned by the State. Licensing creates a monopoly situation that raises the demand for – and reward of – their professional services, which in turn functions as an indirect *institutional barrier* to access (cf. Drange & Helland, 2019; Weeden, 2002). Moreover, access to the required educational credentials, which is necessary to access the professions, is also characterized by institutional barriers, as elite educational tracks have strict admission criteria.

However, elite professions are not only protected by institutionalized barriers, they can also be characterized by more *informal* closure mechanisms, manifested in the social composition of those recruited to these professions. It is well documented that recruitment to high-level professions such as medicine and law is characterized by selectivity, as they tend to recruit professionals from a higher stratum of society. Strømme and Hansen (2017) show that medicine and law in Norway seem to be relatively closed professions in terms of their social profle. Both disciplines have high levels of self-recruitment, whereby students in these felds often have parents with the same educational background and higher incomes compared to students in other felds of higher education. In other words, there is reason to expect that those of higher-class backgrounds have more relevant social networks and experience a better "ft" both within the educational and work context.

Law appears to have even more skewed social recruitment patterns than medicine. Strømme and Hansen (2017) argue that this is due to the type of skills required in the two felds, as well as the type of competition fostered through the two educations. While medicine is largely based on a set of technical skills, law is a 'softer' feld requiring a vaguer body of knowledge and relying more on skills such as vocabulary, articulation and rhetoric. Furthermore, although medical schools in Norway have extremely high entry requirements, they are generally characterized by low levels of competition after entry is secured. By contrast, law schools have lower entry requirements, but are characterized by continuous competition. Thus, having parents in the same feld might be particularly advantageous in law as mastering the 'hidden curriculum' and having feld-specifc cultural capital is more important in this feld (Strømme & Hansen, 2017).

As the adult second generation in Norway are predominantly children of (lowskilled) labour migrants and refugees, we can expect them to be disadvantaged by the institutional and informal closure mechanisms in elite professions. On average, in Norway and elsewhere, children of immigrants obtain lower grades and test scores than their majority peers (Alba & Foner, 2015; Cools & Schøne, 2019; Heath & Rothon, 2014; Reisel et al., 2019), limiting their access to highly competitive educational felds. Furthermore, children of immigrants are 'different' to the students typically recruited into these professions, in the sense that they are not only often among the frst visible minorities in their specifc work environments, but are also often the frst ones in their families to pursue an elite education. Such differences are not necessarily obstacles to studying medicine and law, but subtle processes of exclusion might shape the second generation's access to the labour market and later work experiences and trajectories (e.g. Dinovitzer, 2011; Hansen, 2001; Konyali, 2014; Waldring et al., 2015).

However, Drange and Helland (2019) argue that occupational closure may also have a 'sheltering effect' on minority individuals once they have entered elite professions. They fnd that licensed occupations – of which medicine and law are prime examples – appear to offer protection against ethnic wage discrimination. The legal regulation of licensed occupations reduces the supply of employees and directs the demand for skills to the license holders, as others cannot legally supply the services in question (Drange & Helland, 2019). These factors may make employers and customers less inclined to practice ethnic discrimination, and thus protect secondgeneration individuals who have managed to secure access.

Thus, on the one hand, we could expect that once the second generation has achieved elite education credentials, their ethnic origin has little relevance for their further career paths. Lamont (1992) suggests that higher education can mark a more signifcant distinction than ethnic origin, and argues that the boundaries that the highly educated build between themselves and others "are likely to be more permanent, less crossable, and less resisted than the boundaries that exist between ethnic groups" (Lamont, 1992: 11). Although an ethnic minority origin might not become invisible, the blurring of boundaries can reduce the social and cultural distance between ethnic groups, resulting in minority individuals being seen as belonging to both the majority and minority group, or as members of one or the other depending on context (Alba, 2005; Alba & Nee, 2003). Following Drange and Helland (2019), closed elite professions might be a context that helps to blur the signifcance of an ethnic minority status.

Puwar (2004), on the other hand, argues that while minorities might be able to access elite professions that they were previously absent from, they are still considered outsiders as they conspicuously break the norm regarding who usually inhabits such positions. Although not all minorities will be seen to break the norm to the same extent (e.g. Indian doctors), minorities with a labour migrant background – typically associated with a low class background – can experience being seen as somewhat 'out of place' in elite positions. Puwar (2004) calls them 'space invaders' and argues that while those who usually inhabit such positions (e.g. majority men) are seen to have a natural right to belong in the elite, minorities who are more atypical in the profession (e.g. women or ethnic minorities), are not seen as having an undisputed right to occupy this space. The processes of exclusion in privileged positions can be extremely subtle (see also Neckerman et al., 1999). The professions commonly consider themselves 'colour blind', without recognizing that they operate according to implicit standards and norms that position minorities as different and put them "under the constant spotlight of surveillance" (Puwar, 2004: 117).

In line with Puwar's argument, studies fnd that levels of self-reported discrimination are indeed *higher* among highly-educated ethnic minorities and among those in high-status occupations than for others (Midtbøen & Kitterød, 2019; Steinmann, 2018). This might refect that high-achieving minorities expect that their ethnic background should be irrelevant or invisible more often than those lower in the occupational hierarchy. Furthermore, they work in settings in which they are expected to conform to white middle-class interactional styles, making 'minority climbers' (cf. Slootman, 2019) more likely to encounter discrimination and prejudice than their lower-class co-ethnics (Neckerman et al., 1999). In any case, the research literature suggests that educational and work achievements do not necessarily protect against experiences of exclusion (Konyali, 2017; Midtbøen, 2016; Neckerman et al., 1999; Puwar, 2004; Slootman, 2019; Waldring et al., 2015).

How children of immigrants who have gained access to high-status positions in the labour market manoeuvre in felds that traditionally have been reserved for the native majority has recently been set on the scholarly agenda in Europe (Crul et al., 2016a, b; Keskiner & Crul, 2016; Konyali, 2014; Midtbøen & Nadim, 2019, 2021; Rezai, 2016; Waldring et al., 2015). The current chapter contributes to this important line of research.

#### **6.5 Data and Methodology**

The Norwegian *Pathways to Success* study includes 62 in-depth interviews with children of labour migrants who arrived in Norway in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The interviews were carried out in 2016 and 2017. All of the informants had grown up in poor households in Norway, typically with a father in a working-class occupation or on welfare benefts and a mother outside the labour force. However, the second-generation informants have achieved advanced degrees in medicine, law, business and fnance. Refecting the demographic composition of the second generation in Norway, whereby children of immigrants from Pakistan constitute by far the largest group, the majority of the informants originate from Pakistan, but children of migrants from Morocco, India and Turkey are also represented in the study. Three-quarters of the informants were born in Norway, while the rest had either immigrated before school age or had arrived in Norway between the ages of 8 and 13. Given their parents' origins, all informants had a background that was likely to make them a visible minority and, for most, to be ascribed a Muslim identity. In this chapter, we focus on the informants with degrees in medicine and law, making up 40 individuals. This sub-sample comprises 24 men and 16 women, ranging in age from 23 to 47 years, with the majority being around 30 years. As our sample is not ft for systematic comparisons between ethnic groups, we concentrate on other comparative dimensions in the analysis.

To complement the qualitative data, we also employ Norwegian registry data to provide a statistical overview of the share of second-generation and majority individuals with degrees in medicine and law, as well as the share of individuals employed as medical doctors and lawyers in 2014. The registry data comprises the total population of majority natives between the age of 26 and 35, as well as Norwegian-born children of immigrants from Pakistan, India, Morocco and Turkey in the same age group. Table 6.1 provides an overview of the informants, separated by the felds of work, gender and ethnic origin.

Most of the informants within medicine were working in public hospitals, while some were working as general practitioners (GPs). Most of the lawyers were working in private frms in various felds of law, while some were working as civil servants. All informants were working in well-paid high-status occupations, but only a handful occupied top positions within infuential companies. Consequently, few of the informants constitute an elite in the strict sense, but as they are still quite young, the sample might be characterized as an *upcoming* elite of second-generation professionals in Norway (cf. Crul et al., 2016a, b).

We employed several strategies for recruiting informants. First, relying on snowball sampling, we used our extended networks and recruited informants who, in turn, identifed more individuals who met our sampling criteria. Second, we identifed informants with the help of student organizations and professional networks aimed at ethnic minorities. Last, we identifed individuals who met our sampling criteria by searching company websites and LinkedIn Premium, a social medium where professionals present their CVs. We conducted most interviews face-to-face and a few via telephone. Most of the face-to-face interviews took place at the informants' workplace or at a quiet café. These interviews lasted between one and oneand-a-half hours, while the telephone interviews were slightly shorter.

We used a slightly modifed version of the interview guide developed for the broader, comparative *Pathways to Success/ELITES* project, thus ensuring a high degree of comparability between our analyses and the other chapters in this book. All interviews were tape-recorded, fully transcribed and coded using HyperResearch. The interviews mapped the informants' educational and work trajectories, including their pathways to their current occupational position, the choices and refections they had made along the way, the role played by signifcant others and how they understand their educational and career trajectories. In the analysis, we frst traced the individual pathways to their current labour market position, examining formal and informal requirements for obtaining a degree, in the transition from education to work and for career advancement. Second, we analysed the signifcance and

**Table 6.1** Overview of the informants, by feld of work, gender and ethnic origin

salience of being an 'ethnic other' in the workplace, and the informants' experiences with and responses to subtle forms of exclusion.

#### **6.6 Institutional Barriers and Opportunities in Law and Medicine**

To what extent do the felds of law and medicine represent barriers or opportunities for ambitious second-generation individuals in Norway? Do these individuals follow the standard route through the education system, or do they pursue alternative routes because of the strong admission selectivity and high grade requirements?

Figure 6.1 presents the outcome of our analysis of Norwegian registry data, showing the share of those in the second generation who have obtained either a degree in law or medicine in the age group 26 to 35 years, according to their parents' country of origin (Pakistan, India, Morocco, and Turkey) and compared to the native-origin majority. The shares of second-generation groups who have *obtained a university degree* in these felds are striking; especially degrees in medicine stand out. Compared to the native majority, with the exception of Moroccan women, a larger share of all second-generation groups has obtained a medical degree. Particularly striking are the fgures for the Indian group: While less than 1% of all native majority men and 1.5% of all native majority women have obtained a medical degree, the fgures for second-generation Indian men and women are 14.3 and 19%, respectively. It should be noted that Indian immigrants in Norway are highly selected – their level of education by far exceeds the average in other labour migrant groups (Statistics Norway, 2010) – which probably explains their offspring's high educational levels (cf. Feliciano & Lanuza, 2017). However, the second-generation Pakistani group is also overrepresented, especially among those with a medical

**Fig. 6.1** Share with obtained degrees in law and medicine, age 26–35, by ethnic origin and sex. Percentage of total population in each group. 2014*.* (Source: Statistics Norway, own calculations)

degree, and this even applies to the male descendants of Turkish migrants. As these groups are less positively selected, this suggests that many children of labour migrants in Norway can access and complete these elite educational tracks.

Figure 6.2 shows the shares of the same groups that have managed to *secure jobs* as lawyers and medical doctors in Norway. Once again, the numbers are quite remarkable. While 1% of native-origin men and 2% of native-origin women are employed as medical doctors, almost 12% of second-generation Indian men and almost 17% of second-generation Indian women work as doctors. The secondgeneration Pakistani group is also clearly overrepresented among medical doctors. Among lawyers, there are few differences between the native majority and the second-generation groups, but second-generation Moroccan and Turkish women are both slightly overrepresented in this occupation.

Importantly, the two fgures cannot be compared directly, and therefore do not provide information on the share who have obtained a relevant job. In particular for the individuals holding a law degree, not all relevant jobs are captured by the work code "lawyer". Nevertheless, the statistical data suggest that among those who have obtained a degree in medicine or law and those who are employed as medical doctors or lawyers, all second-generation groups are either participating on a par with or are outperforming the native majority. This points towards these felds of education and occupation being open to newcomers who have not traditionally been part of the recruitment base, and stand in contrast to recent fndings from the US that suggest that many second-generation groups are not able to translate their educational achievements into corresponding jobs (Tran et al., 2019).

However, data on educational and occupational destinations do not say much about the *trajectories* towards getting there. Does the second generation follow the same paths as the majority into these positions? We build on the qualitative study of second-generation professionals' educational and work trajectories to address this question.

**Fig. 6.2** Share working as lawyers or medical doctors, age 26–35, by ethnic origin and sex. Percentage of total population in each group. 2014. (Source: Statistics Norway, own calculations)

#### **6.7 Second-Generation Pathways to Degrees in Law**

Our informants in the law sector have taken different routes to their fnal law exam. The frst barrier that prospective second-generation lawyers must overcome is to get good enough grades from high school to secure admission into law school. While the majority of our informants – three quarters – were directly able to meet the requirements at the time, the remaining quarter of informants relied on various 'second chance' options.

One recent law school graduate describes a circuitous route to law school and explains that it was far from certain that he would end up as a lawyer. In his second year of high school, he simply stopped showing up to class, and dropped out of school. Many of his friends also dropped out of school and never got an education, and some even went to jail. He says that he could easily have ended up on the same path. However, 2 years later, he realized that every career path he was attracted to required a high school diploma, so he decided to take the 2 years of high school that he had missed privately. He thinks that this is actually what enabled him to enter law school as he was more mature and motivated in high school the second time round and got much better grades than he would have done if he had stayed in high school initially. For him, the possibility of going back and retaking high school, albeit privately, was decisive.

Another alternative route to law school used by our informants was to enrol in a private institution offering law courses, and apply for a transfer to law school at a later stage. Informants choosing this option did so because their grades were not good enough to study law at a public university. They attended a private school for between 1 and 4 years before transferring to university, and their credentials are from the university law school. While they point out that this route clearly has low status amongst law school students, they insist that attending a private school has more benefts than merely being a less competitive route into law school. Students at private schools have more lectures and closer supervision than at university. Furthermore, these schools have the clear goal of helping them to attain high grades, while students at the university law schools are expected to take more responsibility for their own learning and success. Informants who had attended a private school emphasize that the close supervision they received there was an important asset that helped them achieve the grades they needed to eventually transfer to university.

As mentioned above, this route via a private school to university law school has become severely limited, or even eliminated, in recent years. One of the lawyers explains that this might affect the share of minority law students:

There were more minority students at [the private school]. Now I've heard that there are fewer minority students [in the university], you see it in the library, because [the private school] option has been closed down.

The private route to law school is portrayed as being of lower status, as it is used by people who were not 'good enough' to enter law school in the regular manner. To some extent this also appears to be understood as a 'minority strategy', perhaps refecting that minority students tend to have high educational aspirations irrespective of their educational achievements, and therefore must rely on this alternative route to access law school. Although second-generation students might disproportionally use alternative routes into this elite study, it is important to emphasize that most of our informants entered and followed the regular path.

#### **6.8 Second-Generation Pathways to Degrees in Medicine**

In contrast to our informants with law degrees, more than half of our informants within medicine – 13 out of 20 informants – took some sort of alternative route. The most striking example of a circuitous route to medical school is a male doctor who had been convicted and imprisoned after high school, but completed his high school diploma at a private school in addition to taking extra university courses before fnally being admitted to medical school. His story echoes that of the lawyer who describes himself as having been on a pathway that could easily have led to a criminal career rather than to getting a law degree. These stories illustrate how secondchance options can be of crucial importance to young people who are on the 'wrong track'. The practice of improving high school grades and taking university courses to gather extra points is common for prospective medical students and is also a strategy that was often employed by our informants.

The second main alternative route to medical school is to bypass the high barriers of the Norwegian system and attend medical school in an Eastern European country, before seeking to have one's degree approved in Norway. Three of our informants have taken this route. Their main reason for studying abroad was to circumvent the barriers in Norway. As one of them states:

Since they have put the admission criteria so high [...], I had to get my grade average up. And then I would have to turn all my 5's [second highest grade in high school system] into 6's, and I couldn't be bothered. I know people who have spent two and three years to manage to get admitted here in Norway. I didn't want to spend my energy on that.

Interestingly, recent statistical data confrms that the second generation is overrepresented among those who use studies abroad as an alternative route. While around one third of the native majority obtained their medical degree abroad, more than 70% of second-generation medical doctors in Norway received their degrees from universities abroad, especially in Eastern Europe (Cools & Schøne, 2019).2

Within both medicine and law, it is thus apparent that some of the secondgeneration professionals have entered their elite professions through alternative routes. The Norwegian education system, most notably because of the possibility to improve one's high school grades, provides a second-chance option for students who do not meet the highly competitive admission criteria of elite educations. The high share of the second-generation embarking on studies abroad points in the same

<sup>2</sup>The detailed numbers for medicine students do not appear in the paper and are provided by Sara Cools.

direction. Clearly, second chances and alternative routes are particularly important to second-generation individuals, as they are shown to have high educational aspirations despite having lower grade averages than majority students. These fndings from Norway correspond with results from similar studies in Europe (see other chapters in this book).

#### **6.9 Ethnicity as Burden and Resource in Law and Medicine**

Although many of our informants obtained their degrees through alternative routes or by second-chance options, they all succeeded in making their way into jobs as either lawyers or doctors. However, accessing the labour market is just one obstacle, the other is making a career in these professions. How open are law and medicine to 'ethnically other' second-generation professionals once they have secured employment? Our analyses suggest that an ethnic minority background can function as both a burden and a resource in the working lives of the second generation.

#### *6.9.1 Burdens of Belonging to a Minority*

Although our second-generation informants have succeeded in meeting the strict admission criteria to their professions, some still describe a constant awareness of the risk of discrimination. Indeed, this perception from childhood or youth on was an important factor that motivated several of the informants to work hard at school, achieve good grades, get internships or take on extra work during higher education. In other words, they hold that it motivated them to work 'twice as hard' and 'jump twice as high' as their majority peers in order to secure access to labour market opportunities further down the road. They are aware that even when they have managed to secure a position in line with their qualifcations, they are not automatically assumed to have the required competencies. Consequently, some of the informants believe that they need to make a special effort to prove themselves profcient and competent. In sum, they anticipate ─ and to some extent experience ─ being underestimated and met with a *burden of doubt* (cf. Puwar, 2004: 59).

In addition, the lawyers also describe a *burden of representation* (cf. Puwar, 2004: 62). Several of the lawyers in the study expressed concern over a series of recent high-profle cases in which ethnic minority lawyers have faced criminal charges for misconduct, threats and even human traffcking. The second-generation lawyers worry that these cases will reinforce stereotypes of 'immigrant lawyers' as unreliable and that these stereotypes will apply to them, potentially leading to a bad reputation and blocked career prospects. As Puwar (2004) argues, visible minorities in an elite profession are often seen to represent the capacities of 'their group', meaning that the actions of one individual infuence how others from the same group are met and considered. This is furthermore linked to what she (2004: 61) terms *super-surveillance*. Some of the informants highlight that their visibility as ethnic minorities in their workplace means that any mistake or mishap is particularly noticed, and potentially seen as refecting a lack of professionalism. They experience a heightened risk of easy judgements, where imperfections are easily picked up, amplifed and subsequently applied to others seen as belonging to the same group.

The burden of doubt, the burden of representation and super-surveillance are related to the visibility of second-generation professionals as 'ethnic others' in their respective elite professions. These burdens of ethnicity related to the ways in which boundaries are drawn in professional felds in which ethnicity, at least sometimes and in some contexts, appears as a bright boundary (cf. Alba, 2005). Such bright ethnic boundaries may have dramatic consequences. In the feld of law, experiences of blocked opportunities at mainstream frms have led some informants to create self-employment opportunities (see Midtbøen & Nadim, 2019). These lawyers describe subtle forms of occupational closure, whereby the most prestigious law frms appear to be out of reach for them. In some cases, the experience of blocked opportunities inspires ambitious lawyers to break out and start their own frms, after fnishing their term as a trainee lawyer and securing their licence to practice as a lawyer in a mainstream Norwegian law frm. Some of the self-employed lawyers in our study hold that their main motivation to set up their own frm was that they did not feel they got the recognition they deserved from their employers (see also Chap. 4). Instead of lowering their ambitions, they started their own frms where they could exploit their comparative advantage – their ethnic resources – and predominantly cater to an ethnic minority market.

#### *6.9.2 Ethnicity as a Resource*

Yet, being visibly different can also be an advantage *within* mainstream frms. One of the lawyers, for example, describes his situation as the only ethnic minority employee in a large law frm:

The advantage I think I have had here is that everybody recognizes me, everybody knows who I am. And when I go to seminars or abroad or wherever, I am noticed. [...] If you get on an e-mail list or on a case, everybody knows who you are. So it's easy to get known with a foreign background here. […] I see that many of those who started at the same time as me, they often get many small cases and some big. But I've almost only been part of the biggest projects, and I think that's pretty fun. And it [being visible] has been an advantage.

For this lawyer, being 'different' means that he is noticed and stands out from the crowd in a large frm, something that has afforded him opportunities and recognition that many of his majority peers have not experienced in the same way. Thus, as long as they prove themselves as well-performing professionals the visibility of the second-generation can work to their advantage.

Indeed, the informants often consider their ethnic minority background as a *resource* rather than a barrier in the labour market (cf. Konyali, 2014). Typically, they emphasize their ethnicity as a resource that gives them valuable language and cultural skills, which are recognized and made use of by their employers. However, this plays out somewhat differently in the occupations studied.