Becoming employable: how migrants navigate norms of employment, ethnicity, and gender within Swedish municipal labour market programmes

This article investigates how migrant and refugee participants in Swedish municipal labour market programmes make sense of work and identity within the context of activation policies. While these programmes aim to promote integration and employability, they often reflect and reproduce normative ideals tied to ethnicity and gender. Drawing on qualitative interviews with participants from three municipalities, the study demonstrates how individuals navigate subject positions offered by the activation programmes and how these positions are shaped by ideals of the ‘abstract worker’ and normative practices of ‘doing employment’. The findings reveal how municipal labour market programmes simultaneously enable and constrain participants: they open paths to employment and independence for some – particularly migrant women – but often reinforce ethnicized and gendered norms that limit participants’ agency and opportunities. Participants’ experiences show that employability is not a neutral concept, but one deeply embedded in cultural and institutional expectations around Swedishness, masculinity, and femininity. This study contributes to debates on the social justice implications of activation policies by highlighting how local labour market programmes both discipline and enable. The article argues that policies aimed at inclusion may, paradoxically, reproduce exclusion through the very norms they seek to enforce. Understanding how employment is shaped by culture and power relations is essential to design labour market interventions that foster real equity.