The Politics of Skills Recognition and Migrants’ Discrimination at Work: the Case of Soft Skills in the Netherlands

Skills play a central role both in labour migration policies that differentiate between migrants in terms of their disposal of skills and in migrants’ chances for being hired in the labour market. The focus is mainly on skills as attributes that individuals would embody and on the levels of those skills (high-low). However, taking a Bourdieusian perspective (Bourdieu, 1977, 1984, 1986) allows us to see that skills do not just represent a disposition in migrants’ habitus, they have a profound relational nature in terms of whether they are recognised or not by states and employers. Moreover, skills are not just a matter of levels but also of kind. Especially in post-Fordist economies and underregulated labour markets, soft skills – like being communicative, creative, proactive, assertive, authentic, teamplayer – have become favourite standards and criteria employers use to select applicants and assess employees. In several research projects in the Dutch public sector, we found that this soft skills control at hiring procedures and performance assessments facilitates the discursive performativity of migration policies to become operational in fuelling discrimination against migrants. It does so in several ways, such as: 1. Soft skills have a fetishized nature. As linguistic signs they do not have a stable reference point in applicant’s or worker’s selves (Urciuoli, 2008), but do infer social processes. For example, instead of referring to someone’s assumed personal or psychological attributes, communicative skills infer social or relational processes of communication (DiFruscia, 2012). The identification of migrants in Dutch migration policies as people who would represent deviating cultural characteristics, creates a habitus (Bourdieu, 1977) of insecurity among migrants that hampers their performance in these social and relational processes. That underperformance is subsequently blamed on themselves: they would fall short in soft skills. 2. Soft skills are in the eyes of the beholder. Due to their denotational indeterminacy, soft skills can easily be used for strategic reasons (Urciuoli, 2008) and fuel symbolic violence (Bourdieu, 1989) against migrants by failing to recognise the soft skills they might perform. Contrary to the classical definitions of skills in terms of knowledge and expertise or abilities to carry out a craft, soft skills have a low degree of institutionalisation (see Bourdieu, 1986, on cultural capital). That means that it all depends on the very subjective nature of the interpretation of selectors and supervisors. Since soft skills and migration policy categorizations focus on the same thing, i.e. assumed identity and personality characteristics, migration policy’s negative framing of these characteristics easily influences selectors’ and supervisors’ assessment of migrants’ soft skills.