Publications

This open access book comparatively analyses intergenerational social mobility in immigrant families in Europe. It is based on qualitative in-depth research into several hundred biographies and professional trajectories of young people with an immigrant working-class background, but raised in Europe who made it into high-prestige professions. These biographies were collected and analysed by a consortium of researchers in nine European countries from Norway to Spain. Through these analyses, the book explores the possibilities of cross-country comparisons of how trajectories are related to different institutional arrangements at the national and local level. The analysis uncovers the interaction effects between structural/institutional settings and specific individual factors and family backgrounds, and how these successful individuals responsed to and navigated through sector-specific pathways into high-skilled professions, such as becoming a lawyer or a teacher. By this, it also explains why these trajectories of professional success and upward mobility have been so exceptional in the second generation of working-class origins, and it tells us a lot also about exclusion mechanisms that marked the school and professional careers of children of immigrants who went to school in the 1970s to 2000s in Europe – and still do.

Benefits

1. This open access book addresses social mobility opportunities 
   
   
2. Provides a comparative view on the upcoming elite among children of labour immigrants
   
   
3. Offers insights on the reproduction of status and failed intergenerational mobility
   
   
4. This book is open access, which means that you have free and unlimited access