Alternative Perspectives on Immigrant Accommodation to Society: Implications for Organising, the Labour Market, and Workplace Integration

The key focus of our analysis in this chapter is on three different perspectives of immigrants’ accommodation to the host society that are, based on our literature review, most commonly debated and used: assimilation, integration, and inclusion. Our analysis is aimed at better understanding the meanings underlying different ways of conceptualising immigrants’ accommodation, and how these meanings have varied over time, as well as examining their implications for the social accommodation of immigrants. In order to explore how and with what consequences these three concepts from the societal level of analysis might manifest themselves concretely within organisational practices, we draw on a fictional vignette that illustrates what these conceptualisations might mean in concrete terms for organising and for immigrant integration into the labour force. We describe the kinds of organisational practices associated with each and point out how persistent power differentials almost inevitably influence the degree to which organisations are able to achieve the ideal of more inclusive practices.