Employment services in the context of migration-induced linguistic diversity

Project period: 9/2019 - 8/2021
Subsidy grantor: Austrian National Bank Jubilee Fund
Project team: Elisabeth Scheibelhofer, Anna-Katharina Draxl und Clara Holzinger

contact: [email protected]
research output: see links below - if you are interested in further publications from the project, please contact [email protected]

Dealing with diversity is critical to social justice in “super-diverse”
(Vertovec 2007) migration societies and a challenge to all actors involved. In particular, institutions are to question how diversity is to be handled, especially migration-induced and thus highly relevant linguistic diversity. As labor market access is substantial for social participation, the Austrian Public Employment Service (AMS) is a key institution in this connection.
AMIGS (ArbeitMigrationSprache; LaborMigrationLanguage) engages in investigating employment services in the context of linguistic diversity. Concretely, this is to be explored by taking the example of the AMS, with a particular focus on the internal perspective of this institution. The research endeavor will build upon the preceding TRANSWEL project (https://transwel.org/). This project identified difficulties in dealing with linguistic diversity – both among AMS clients and within the institution itself – which become manifest in language barriers and pressure put on street-level bureaucrats (Lipsky 1980).
The ongoing project is intended to investigate the ways in which AMS staff perceive handling linguistic diversity, which problem areas they describe in this regard, and which (institutional) solution strategies and patterns of argument become identifiable. The objective is to illustrate manifest and latent structures and regulations with regard to linguistic practices within the AMS institution and to explore their implications for the actors involved and the (re-)production of social inequality by way of linguistic practices.
The focus in this connection will be on the activities of state institutions in the context of linguistic diversity, having so far been given little scientific attention. In spatial terms, the study will concentrate on Vienna with its particularly pronounced spectrum of linguistic diversity.
An interdisciplinary team will be in charge of the present project. We plan to apply methodological triangulation in the framework of a qualitative investigation based on the methodological principles of Constructivist Grounded Theory (Charmaz 2006). To generate data, we plan to chiefly use problem-centered interviews (Witzel 2000, Scheibelhofer 2008) and focus group analyses (Kamberelis and Dimitriadis 2010) with AMS staff, both in client contact and at the management level. Additionally, ethnographic observations (Spradley 2009) in regional AMS offices and artifact analyses (Lueger 2010) of AMS publications will be carried out.
An interdisciplinary scientific advisory board consisting of Brigitta Busch, Katharina Brizic, Julia Dahlvik, Mi-Cha Flubacher, Johanna Hofbauer and Nora Ratzmann will support the project team.