How Work Organizations Shape Ethnic Stratification across Immigrant Generations: Assimilation, Segregation, and Workplace Contexts

How Work Organizations Shape Ethnic Stratification across Immigrant Generations: Assimilation, Segregation, and Workplace Contexts

Large-scale immigration has introduced salient new dimensions of ethnic stratification in Europe’s rich, liberal democracies—successful incorporation of disadvantaged, newcomer immigrant minorities now poses a critical challenge for the 21st century. Despite a vast literature on labor market inequalities between immigrants and natives, the great majority of these studies is based on surveys of individual workers and yield limited knowledge about the role of firms and workplace contexts. Still, there has been no systematical attempt to exploit linked employer-employee (LEE) data to assess how work organizations are linked to economic assimilation across immigrant generations. Here I bring a new organizational focus on workplaces as key sites where contemporary dynamics of ethnic stratification unfold at the micro level. The objective of OrgMIGRANT is to demonstrate how work organizations both contribute to and reflect changing patterns of ethnic stratification across immigrant generations. We will study workplace segregation and probe whether, how, and why ethnic boundary salience and immigrant-native inequalities vary by organizational context, net of worker traits. To this end, we will use economy-wide LEE data from Norway and comparisons with selected high-income countries (i.e., Sweden, Denmark, Germany, France, Canada, and the United States). Our world-class data allow us to situate workers inside workplaces, enabling the study of the organizational context of immigrant-native labor market inequalities in high detail using state-of-the-art panel data techniques. OrgMIGRANT will be organized into three work packages: (1) organizational sources behind native-immigrant workplace segregation; (2) organizational determinants of immigrant-native inequalities within workplaces; (3) a cross-national comparison of organizational variation in workplace-specific immigrant-native pay inequalities and the size of within-job pay gaps (i.e., same occupation and workplace).