Overcoming Barriers. Career Trajectories of Highly Skilled Members of the German
5.2 A Biographical Approach to the Career Trajectories of the Second Generation
In the early Chicago School, ideas about the life cycle and biographical experi-ences were incorporated into sociological thought around migration (Thomas and Znaniecki 1958). Since then, there have been discontinuities in the biographical research traditions (Bertaux1981), and case-oriented approaches to life histories have occasionally turned to migration (cf. Breckner 2007), whereas the main tendencies of life course research and longitudinal studies (cf. Mayer2000;2009) have hardly addressed the effects of migration over a longer period of time.
Nevertheless, many of the subjects which have extensively been discussed in life-course research are highly pertinent to current scholarly debates in migration studies. For the purpose of my analysis, career trajectories in education and work (cf. Mayer2000) and status passages in the life course (Heinz1991,1996) count among the most important issues. Indeed, life course perspectives on immigrants’
access to the labour market have recently become an issue both in approaches with a quantitative (Kalter and Kogan2006; Kogan2007) and a qualitative (Nohl, Schittenhelm, Schmidtke, and Weiss2006) design.
5.2.1 Implications of the Biographical Approach
Biographical analysis is based on narratives about the entire life-history. Starting with an initial question, the research participants are expected to give in-depth accounts of their biographical experiences within their own frame of reference (Rosenthal 2004; Sch¨utze 2006). Referring to this method in my analysis, the aim is to identify sets of daily life knowledge which the interviewees had to develop in order to cope with their educational and professional paths. Using the documentary method of analysing the interview data (Bohnsack2007; Nohl 2010), the interpretation aims at understanding the coping strategies which the interviewees have employed during their career trajectories and how the various ways of mastering and representing one’s own life history are embedded in their implicit sets of knowledge and daily routines. Thus, the analytical approach provides detailed information about the transitions and stages undergone during the career trajectory, including the way in which the respondents perceive their own living conditions. The patterns of perception concerning one’s own living conditions are not simply the result of previous stages of one’s life trajectory. They also serve
as a point of departure for the further life history. Life experiences ‘which are meaningful for the biography and which become biographical stocks of knowledge give structure to the future career’ (Hoerning1996: 16).
According to Bourdieu (1986a), the concept of ‘cultural capital’ includes the individual’s whole set of skills and knowledge they have acquired, from certified qualifications and degrees to the practices and orientations of everyday life. This set is not only gained through access to educational institutions but through all kinds of networks in which a person is involved. Thus, the cultural capital of members of the second generation may vary according to the influences they have been subjected to, such as the status of their families of origin, educational paths, and peer networks.
Nonetheless, the effect of a person’s cultural capital is not directly translated into a person’s ability or interest in educational or professional pathways without the person being evaluated by other agents (Roscigno and Ainsworth-Darnell1999).
The impact of how a person is recognized socially is discussed in Bourdieu’s analysis of symbolic dimensions (Bourdieu1979). For this reason, cultural capital is not a fixed body of knowledge that is equally necessary and useful for all graduates.
Instead, we should use the term as a relational concept (Begriff der Relationen) in the sense of Norbert Elias (1996). Depending on whether the biographical agent needs to master status negotiations and disadvantages, the combination of skills and of social knowledge needed during one’s career may vary.
A sociological perspective on individuals who perceive themselves as devalued already has a tradition in Goffman’s study of ‘stigma’ (Goffman 1963), which examines the effects on stigmatized persons and their resulting stigma-management.
The biographical approach examines the dispositions and coping strategies, with knowledge implicit in them, and the potentially long-lasting effects on a person’s life trajectory as they become empirically evident from the life narratives. Even collectively shared experiences of non-recognition and stigmatization do not nec-essarily have the same effects on an individual’s life history, be it on a long or a short-term basis. In this regard it is the – available and applied – body of social knowledge within the trajectory that is addressed by a qualitative investigation.
5.2.2 Status Passages and Trajectories
Since the biographical agent’s situation and coping strategies during status passages have long-term effects on the entire career trajectory, my analysis emphasizes the transitional phases in an individual’s biography. However, different factors operative at the branching points may have similar effects on a person’s future career by increasing or decreasing that person’s cultural capital or their ability to develop and evaluate their certificates over time. In this sense, my theoretical model is not based on the search for a major cause which would explain disadvantages in the second generation’s trajectories and predominate over all other effects. On the contrary, it is the intersection of increasing or decreasing effects on a person’s cultural capital throughout their life history and especially during status passages that is the subject of the analysis.
For instance, ethnic segregation may be a result of different social mechanisms.
There may be boundaries created by ethnic distinctions and a subjective sense of belonging, linked to practices of social exclusion toward people defined as “other”.
This emergence of ethnic segregation, which is extensively discussed in migration research (cf. Wimmer 2008), is compatible with Weber’s classical approach to ethnically defined communities and distinctions (1980:237). But disadvantages for members of the second generation can also be the result of institutional settings, even without the presence of intentionally practiced distinctions toward immigrants or ethnically defined groups (Gomolla and Radtke2009). Take, for example, early selection at the status passage between elementary school and secondary school in Germany, which has a long-term impact on a person’s educational and professional pathway. For children who grew up in families with immigrant backgrounds, and especially for those who immigrated in their childhood, this early selection of one of three educational tracks allows too little time to compensate and to adjust to the educational expectations in the receiving country. Consequently, disadvantages that may affect members of the second generation may arise from discrimination mediated through social interaction and through institutional settings per se. By shaping the transition to one of the educational tracks, they can also have similar effects on the subsequent educational career. If the early selection process results in the individual moving to the lowest educational track (Hauptschule), with an increasingly negative impact which cannot be compensated for, in the long run this can result in not gaining access to the skilled labour market. The ultimate result is then a long-term consequence of the earlier branching point, independently of the reason for which the embarking has taken place.
Given this perspective, to what extent does the manner in which transitions are handled and mastered by the biographical agent have further impact upon the person’s career trajectory? Even though depending on a person’s set of knowledge and skills, this impact and especially the long-term effects, are not necessarily intended. In qualitative social research ‘trajectory’ has been a key concept used to describe those social processes in the individuals’ life history that are not completely under their control. In the work of Anselm Strauss (1991: 149–174) ‘trajectory’
is a term used to describe suffering and disorderly social processes (cf. Riemann and Sch¨utze 1991). One must, however, emphasize that social processes can go beyond a person’s control, even if they have no dramatic results. As Glaser and Strauss pointed out, the open-ended nature of a status passage is sufficient reason for undesirable results to occur: ‘Sometimes a passagee enters a passage believing it desirable but discovers that neither the passage nor its goal is desirable’ (Glaser and Strauss 1971: 106). If the subsequent career cannot be known beforehand, entering a status passage may also have undesirable consequences, and breaking away from a career on which one has embarked can be difficult. In this regard, the concept of ‘trajectory’ is also useful for understanding educational and occupational trajectories (Grathoff1991).
In theoretical debates of life course research ‘trajectory’ is mainly understood as a sequence of transitions or life events and implies an interrelation of impacts over time (cf. Sackmann and Wingens2001). Given this perspective, it is the genetic
structure of social processes and the interrelation between single transitions and life events that forms the core of the analysis, rather than merely a process of shifting and losing control. In this sense, a biographical approach, instead of being affected by biographical illusions, if we are to apply Bourdieu’s (1986b) criticism, also takes into account the dynamics of social processes unintended by the biographical agent.
5.2.3 Cumulative and Compensatory Effects Throughout the Trajectory
To summarize the previously discussed biographical approach, impacts upon the second generation’s access to education and skilled employment are examined by studying the way in which they affect a trajectory over time. Also, from a long or short-term perspective, the effects may be observed at different levels by looking at:
Institutional settings in education and work: Institutionally embedded in the German education system, trajectories are shaped by early selection processes, a subsequent division into three school tracks, and the hereby provided options arising at different stages of an individual’s career.
Social networks (family, peer groups, colleagues): Apart from family backgrounds, peers at school or workplaces do play a role in the sense of being ‘passagees at the same time’ and therefore decisive for negotiations on how to cope with status passages in the life course.
The biographical agent, his/her body of knowledge (skills, orientations and social strategies): Biographical agency in this sense is not beyond the impact of social structures or of any form of institutional or social setting.
It is the interconnectedness of these impacts over time that is the focus of my analysis. Cumulative advantages or – on the contrary – cumulative disadvantages are currently considered to be general mechanisms of inequality which affect any temporal process where a favourable or unfavourable position becomes a starting point that produces further relative gains or losses that may occur outside a person’s control over his/her life course (DiPrete and Eirich2006). Compensatory effects, on the other hand, are present if those factors that influence a career, either simultaneously or gradually over time, have contradictory results that tend to compensate for or neutralize each other.
5.2.4 Data and Methods
The data is drawn from the international research project “Cultural Capital during Migration” which examines highly skilled immigrants’ transition into the labour
market in great detail, including the stages, sequences and the social and institutional frames given through migration policies and labour market regulations in the compared countries (Germany, Canada, Turkey, and Great Britain). Apart from similarities in the educational titles in one of three professional fields (medicine, engineering, and management), the sample shows variations with regard to the countries of origin and the type of migration. Using a comparative research design, four main status groups were systematically chosen on the basis of their educational titles (whether obtained abroad or in the host country) and their residence permits.4 The following analysis is based on the status group of interviewees that have received their most recent educational qualification in Germany and, due either to citizenship or to residence permits, have full legal access to the German labour market.5 In order to understand the different pathways provided in the German education system the sample comprises 56 interviews with 30 university graduates and 26 vocationally trained participants.6By an initial question, intended to generate a narrative, the interviewees were asked to tell their life histories in great detail (cf. Rosenthal2004; Sch ¨utze2006). For data evaluation the documentary method was adopted (Bohnsack2007) – a procedure for interpretative data analysis based on Mannheim’s sociology of knowledge (Mannheim1997). In this method of qualita-tive data analysis, the interpretation of narraqualita-tive interviews emphasizes comparaqualita-tive case studies and tries to grasp coping strategies which the interviewees employed in institutional and social settings (Nohl2010). By focusing the second generation’s trajectories including a sequence of transitions the following comparative approach considers different school tracks and their consequences for the access to skilled employment. The cases chosen for this article (all of the research participants were either born in Germany or arrived as children because of their families’ migration) shed light on different institutional and social settings in educational tracks that lead to the Abitur (providing access to university) and, in the long run, tend either to be direct or non-direct pathways to skilled employment.
4It is an element of the methodology used not to focus on ethnically defined immigrant groups but to treat ethnicity as a possible emerging feature among the various influences that shape the outcome of labour market processes; see Nohl et al. (2006).
5These interviews were conducted in 2005–2009 at the University of Siegen. I wish to thank the young researchers Steffen Neumann and Regina Soremski as well as my former student research assistants H¨ulya Akkas, Kathrin Klein, and Stefan Kohlbach for their assistance in the inquiry and data evaluation.
6The participants are here distinguished by their highest degree, among the university graduates there have been participants who also have a vocational training degree. For the purpose of a comparative analysis on behalf of a theoretical sampling, cases of participants who arrived in Germany at a later stage of their educational career were included.