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Inclusive Employment: Decolonizing the Danish Labour Market

This research project explores how well-educated refugees integrate into the Danish labor market from a postcolonial perspective. By looking at practices, language, and cultural expectations, it challenges existing norms of diversity management. The focus is on creating an intercultural space that values refugee resources. The study aims to disrupt post-colonial practices and foster inclusivity in organizations by reevaluating traditional notions of assimilation and identity. Through a practical-theoretical approach, it investigates how companies can leverage refugee experiences for intercultural competence.

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Inclusive Employment: Decolonizing the Danish Labour Market

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  1. A perfect match? A postcolonial perspective on well educated refugees at the Danish labour market University of Warsaw September, 2016 Vibeke Andersen & Iben Jensen, Aalborg University, Denmark

  2. Agenda • A perfect match? • A postcolonialperspective • White/Danish supremacy/National Capital • Project

  3. A perfect match? • Welleducatedrefugees – freepositions • Labour market as solution to integration in Danish society • Expectations of learninglanguage, culture and add with a Danish education • Focus is on deficit not on ressources • Diversity management is the existingorganizationaltool, but is most likelyreproducingexsistingcategories

  4. A postcolonialperspective ”Colonialismcontinues to live on in waysthat perhaps we have onlybegun to recognice” Nicholas Dirks Colonialism and culture (1992: 23)

  5. Edward Saïd • … “without examining Orientalism as a discourse one cannot possible understand the enormously systematic discipline by which European culture was able to manage – and even produce – the Orient politically, sociologically, militarily, ideologically, scientifically, and imaginatively during the post-Enlightment period.” (Saïd 1978:3).

  6. Postcolonialreadings in Scandinavia • The Norwegiananthropologist Marianne Gullestadargues: • 1) thatmissionaires have brought back pictures of ‘the passive, helpless, childish, barbarianAfricans”, whichcouldlegitmize the missionairesexistence in Africa. • 2) thatequality in Norway is based on sameness – refugees must ‘fit in’ but also accept never being a real Norwegian

  7. Danish/whiteSupremacy • To be Danish; born in Denmark by Danish parents, identifyingyourself as Danish and acknowledged by others as Danish is inspired by Pierre Bourdieu this is to have: National Capital (Jensen 1998) Ghassan Hage suggestedalso National capital in White Nation (1998)

  8. Project • Aim of the project is to explorehow a company is capable of creating a room for refugees as a ressource for interculturalcompetence • Followthree organisations whichare part of a projecthiringwelleducatedrefugees

  9. Methods • A practicetheoreticalaproach • Doings/sayings, relatings, practicearcitecture, materiality, bodies • Shadowingpractices, interviewing, documentanalysis, positioninganalysis • Action research • Creating an interculturalspace • Disturbingpractices • Put observed post colonialpracticesintowords

  10. References • Gullestad, M. (2007). Misjonsbilder – Bidrag til norsk selvforståelse. Oslo: Universitetsforlaget. [Mission pictures – Contribution to Norwegian selfunderstanding] • Jensen, I. (1998). Interkulturelkompetence I kompleksesamfund. Samfundslitteratur. København. [Intercultural communication in complex society] • Nicolini, D. (2012): Practice Theory, Work, and Organization An Introduction, Oxford. • Said, E. (1978). Orientalism. London: Penguin Books

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