Agency and Adaptation: Strategies of Immigrants’ Descendants on the Swedish Labor Market

Abstract

This article explores how descendants of immigrants in Sweden understand labor market conditions, and how such understandings influence their occupational strategies. We interviewed 21 Sweden-born individuals with non-Western immigrant parents, and identified three strategies based on our analysis of the data: ‘choosing’ the right job, adapting the habitus, and using cultural capital in flexible ways. The first strategy covers interviewees working in jobs with labor shortages and/or high demand for employees with immigrant background. The second covers interviewees who could learn through failing, with substantial resilience and persistence. The third deals with interviewees who searched for jobs in branches that valued their particular skill set, entailing the importance of being flexible on the labor market