What Turns Migrants into Ethnic Minorities at Work? Factors Erecting Ethnic Boundaries among Dutch Police Officers

Abstract

Transnational migration flows have revitalised the interest in ethnicity in social sciences. The ethnic boundary approach (Barth, Wimmer) argues for a non-essentialist understanding of ethnicity and calls for detecting the factors that turn migrants into ethnic minorities. Based on ethnographic fieldwork among Dutch police officers between 2008 and 2013, this article presents three factors that together constitute a structural framework that produces events of ethnic boundary construction (salient ethnic identity plus ethnic closure) between migrant and non-migrant officers: (1) ethnicised precarity; (2) ethnic conflicts triggered by the ethnicising discourse in Dutch media and politics on migrants and migration; and (3) the quasi-therapeutic management style applied in the police organisation. It further calls for a differentiated understanding of migrants’ precarity, questions explanations of ethnic closure in terms of stereotypes and critically scrutinises socio-psychological approaches of ethnicity and diversity management.

Keywords

cultural fundamentalism discrimination diversity ethnicity ethnic boundaries ethnic inequality labour control labour market migrants precarity

Introduction

Transnational migration flows have created a renewed interest in ethnicity in social sciences. The ethnic boundaries approach (Barth, 1969, 2007; Wimmer, 2008a, 2008b, 2009, 2013) provides a fruitful approach to migrants and ethnicity by going beyond essentialist assumptions. It calls for the need to explain how migrants may become ethnic minorities and to detect the factors that fuel the ethnicisation of relations between migrants and non-migrants through the construction of ethnic boundaries (salient ethnic identity plus ethnic closure).

This article presents three such factors that are operational in the work settings of Dutch police officers: (1) ethnicised precarity; (2) ethnic conflicts triggered by the ethnicising discourse in Dutch media and politics on migrants and migration; and (3) the quasi-therapeutic management style in the Dutch police organisation. It is based on ethnographic fieldwork (diaries, observations and interviews) between 2008 and 2013.

Ethnic Boundaries

It is impossible to discuss all approaches in the complex field of ethnicity studies here, but following Andreas Wimmer (2009, 2013), a mapping of this field may start with Johann Gottfried von Herder’s classical understanding of ethnicity. Herder saw ethnicity in objective terms, as something shaped by the particular cultural traits an ethnic group shares in a stable and consistent way, as a quasi-natural or primordial heritage (see Roosens, 1998). He portrayed ethnic groups as bounded entities, each with a specific culture, a dense network of solidarity and a shared identity that distinguish it from other ethnic groups (Wimmer, 2009).

Herder’s objective understanding of ethnicity has been questioned, though. Max Weber pointed out that the basic issue of ethnic groups is not their objectively shared culture, but their subjective identifications. He defined ethnic groups as ‘human groups that entertain a subjective belief in their common descent’, regardless of their objective foundations (Weber et al., 1978 [1922]: 389). Others highlighted the variability in the sharing of cultural characteristics, in ethnic in-group solidarity and in the salience of ethnic identity (Brubaker, 2004; Wimmer, 2013).

In this line, Fredrik Barth (1969, 2007) introduced the ethnic boundary approach, further developed by Andreas Wimmer (2008a, 2008b, 2009, 2013) and embedded in a wider literature on symbolic and social boundaries (see Lamont and Molnár, 2002). Key to Barth’s and Wimmer’s work is their plea for a non-essentialist (contextual or situational) understanding of ethnicity. They argued that there is nothing natural or self-evident about ethnic groups, their emergence requires an explanation instead. The key to understanding emergent ethnicity is not provided by pre-existing cultural traits – norms, values, language, rituals, religion and so on – that would characterise and distinguish an ethnic group. Instead, ethnicity is basically about acts of boundary making, marking off one’s own putative ethnic group in opposition to ethnic out-groups, instrumentalising available cultural characteristics – even inventing them on the spot – to render such oppositions and boundaries credible. It is ‘the ethnic boundary that defines the group, not the cultural stuff that it encloses’ (Barth, 1969: 15). The belief in a common ancestry is a consequence of political action to erect ethnic boundaries rather than its cause (see Jenkins, 2008: 10).

The concept of ethnic boundary constructions has both subjective and objective dimensions and applies when a symbolic, a social and a material element are present. This symbolic element is about ethnic salience, that is, constructions of subjective distinctions between ethnic in-group and out-groups to which people subscribe themselves and ascribe others. That is when people map their life-world into categories of ethnic group-belongingness and identify each other in these ethnic terms instead of, for example, professional terms. Ethnic boundaries have a social element when these people act upon such ethnic distinctions, prefer interactions with ethnic in-group members and avoid communication – or even enter into conflict with – ethnic out-group members. A material element emerges when people favour or privilege fellow ethnic in-group members when distributing resources. Ethnic closure involves these social and material elements (Wimmer, 2013).

Wimmer proposed a research agenda and called for detecting the factors that fuel the (un)making of ethnic boundaries (Wimmer, 2008b, 2013). These factors are best to be identified in those institutional settings in which both ethnic and non-ethnic principles of identification and socialisation are available, where ethnicity is not necessarily salient but may become so, to see when and why ethnic boundaries emerge or disintegrate (Wimmer, 2013). The labour market and work contexts qualify for such settings. Numerous studies, including Heath and Cheung (2007) and Van Tubergen et al. (2004) – see McGovern (2007) – have shown that migrants may face severe inequality in the labour markets of many countries, suggesting that ethnic identity salience and closure are real possibilities in labour settings.

The ethnic boundaries approach opens new perspectives to look at such labour market inequality. It argues that migrants’ ethnicity may become salient through ethnic boundary constructions, but that cannot be taken for granted (Siebers and Van Gastel, 2015); whether migrants turn into ethnic groups requires an explanation. However, with a few exceptions (e.g. Janssens and Zanoni, 2005; Siebers, 2009b), most studies on migrants and ethnicity at work reflect an essentialist approach à la Herder: they take the ethnic salience of migrants for granted and focus on its effects. With a few exceptions (e.g. Brynin and Güveli, 2012), many studies of labour market inequality between migrants and non-migrants sample migrants while assuming ethnicity.

In short, the ethnic boundaries approach invites scholars to go beyond essentialism and raise fine-grained questions about the factors that (1) produce ethnic salience, (2) foment ethnic in-group favouritism in behaviour and (3) privilege the distribution of resources along ethnic lines. This article aims to contribute to the identification and disentanglement of those factors in Dutch police officers’ work settings.

Context and Methods

In Dutch official classifications, so-called ‘non-western’ migrants have their origins in the Caribbean, Latin America, Africa, the Middle East or Asia, except for Indonesia and Japan.¹ First and second generation migrants from these areas occupy subordinated positions in the Dutch labour market (Statline.cbs.nl; see also Andriessen et al., 2012; Tesser and Dronkers, 2007). They are underrepresented in the Dutch police force as a whole (De Vries et al., 2010), especially in higher qualified functions (Boogaard and Roggeband, 2010). Police selectors treat them differently in application interviews (De Meijer et al., 2007) and they face cooperation problems with non-migrant colleagues (Heijes, 2007). These facts suggest that ethnic boundary constructions may occur in the Dutch police. It constitutes an institutional setting in which ethnic identity is optional but not necessarily salient. This makes the police an appropriate context to detect factors that fuel ethnic boundary constructions (see Wimmer, 2013).

To explore these factors, ethnographic research has been carried out. A triangulation of methods (diaries, shadowing and interviews) enabled the collection of valid and encompassing data on both officers’ meaning making (salience of ethnic identity) and behaviour (ethnic closure) as well as on relevant contextual factors. Potentially, the reliability of officers’ statements could have been affected by their desire to stay in line with the law and by the researcher’s identity influencing the ethnographic relationship. These biases turned out to be limited, though. Respondents recurrently made statements that violate the law against discrimination. The non-migrant male researcher’s findings of the current study align very much with those of researchers with a different identity, including Bonnet and Caillault (2015, French background), Boogaard and Roggeband (2010, female background) and Çankaya (2011, Turkish-Dutch background), as well as with the national chief of the Dutch police, Gerard Bouman, stating: ‘The poison of exclusion creeps into our organisation’ (NRC Handelsblad, 11 April 2015).

In 2008 and 2009, 20 respondents in various regions kept a dairy for a week, registering their interactions with colleagues who might be identified as having a different ethnic identity and whom they work with on a permanent basis. In both the diaries and subsequent interviews, respondents were asked about events at work in which their ethnic identity became salient. Regarding each event, questions focused on its context, what happened, who did or said what, what were the factors that triggered the event, what were its consequences and how was it managed.

In 2011–2013, local contexts were studied in more depth in 13 months of observations and interviews in regional police forces in the south-western part of the Netherlands, in Amsterdam and in Tilburg. Each participant was shadowed (Czarniawska, 2007) for several days to identify events in which officers’ ethnic identity played a role. These events were reconstructed in subsequent interviews asking similar questions as in the first phase, not only focusing on what happened but also on respondents’ interpretations and evaluations. When possible, events were reconstructed with several informants involved in the same event.

The total of 66 respondents were spread over non-migrants (38) and first or second generation migrants (28), mainly with a Turkish, Moroccan or Surinamese background, 19 were female and 47 were male. Apart from interviewees in staff functions (members of a diversity steering committee, the director of the police diversity expertise centre (Landelijk ExpertiseCentrum Diversiteit, LECD), an HRM official and a confidentiality person), respondents were directly involved in the primary process of policing (55) and criminal investigation (6), including two (deputy) district commanders and 10 (deputy) team leaders.

Data analysis focused on comparing events in which respondents’ ethnic identity became salient and events in which they identified themselves and others in non-ethnic or professional terms. Within the former category, events in which salient ethnic identity led to ethnic closure were distinguished from events when salient ethnic identity had no behavioural or material consequences. Next, factors that differ between the three categories of events were detected to see what role they played in these events. The factors that form a pattern in the data will be discussed below, using as illustrations two cases in which those factors became operational. These cases highlight two officers with a migration background, Dinesh and Pinar (all names are pseudonyms, all quotes are translated from the Dutch original).

Ethnicised Precarity

I am not willing to change my whole personality … And I said that to the committee. If you’re looking for someone who bangs his fist on the table, that’s fine, but that’s not who I am.

These words stem from Dinesh, a Surinam-born operational commander of the Dutch police. His words refer to the event in which his application for becoming a deputy team leader was turned down. His district commander argued he was not ‘authentic’ enough, he needed to be more ‘assertive’, to dare to stand up against his superiors. Dinesh referred his lack of assertiveness to his ethnic background, claiming that ‘his culture’ was about values like respect and calmness, not about ‘Dutch’ values like ‘blatancy’ and ‘assertiveness’ that the application committee looked for. He was upset when recalling this event, expressing a sense of insecurity.

Discussion

His case illustrates ethnic boundary construction among Dutch police officers. First, like many migrant officers, Dinesh interpreted his case in terms of salient ethnic categories: ‘Dutch’ versus ‘his culture’. Likewise, many non-migrants in Dutch organisations argue that this ‘lack of assertiveness’ or ‘modesty’ of migrants would represent cultural elements that stem from their ethnic backgrounds (see Siebers, 2009b). Next, the social element of ethnic boundaries applies since such events negatively affect migrant officers’ cooperation with non-migrant colleagues. Finally, material exclusion is evident as Dinesh did not get the job.

The constructed nature of ethnic boundaries is apparent here. It is quite unlikely that the ethnic categories ‘Dutch’ versus ‘non-Dutch’ would, in fact, coincide with the distinction ‘assertiveness’ versus ‘non-assertiveness’, that officers would take these ‘values’ to work from their community or country of origin. That would essentialise the Dutch into being assertive. It would likewise essentialise all non-Dutch cultures of origin – as different as Surinam, Turkey, Morocco and so on – as having ‘non-assertiveness’ as a common basic cultural orientation. It makes sense to follow Barth’s (1969, 2007) assertion here that cultural distinctions are invented to underscore the plausibility of ethnic categories and boundaries.

Such cultural essentialist constructions of ethnic categories take place on the basis of a very real difference between migrant and non-migrant respondents in the intensity of experiencing insecurity, also confirmed by Çankaya (2011). Migrant officers’ insecurity easily translates into less assertive and less proactive behaviour and a lower degree of participation in work-related communication compared to non-migrant colleagues (Siebers and Van Gastel, 2015). This insecurity is reminiscent of what Anderson (2010) and Lewis et al. (2015) coined as precarity, that is, conditions of uncertainty, insecurity, instability, discrimination and vulnerability in the labour market. Migrants are over-represented in such conditions that feed their wider sense of socio-ontological insecurity. Lewis et al. (2015) found such precarity among migrants with an illegal status, asylum seekers and refugees in the UK. Piore (1979) linked precarity with temporary migrant workers, whereas Anderson (2010) associated precarity with the impact of UK legislation on migrant labourers. They all relate migrants’ experiences of insecurity to unstable legal and labour conditions.

By contrast, the migrant police officers in the current study dispose of a Dutch passport and have relatively stable labour contracts. Thus, even migrants with stable legal citizenship and labour conditions may suffer from such experiences of insecurity. Dinesh’s and similar cases suggest that the subordinated position of migrants in the Dutch labour market translates into experiences of insecurity that subsequently are ethnicised (i.e. their behavioural consequences are understood in cultural terms stemming from their ethnic backgrounds) by both non-migrants and migrants (see Cederberg, 2014). Thus, ethnic categorisations are legitimised that in turn may fuel ethnic closure again. The vicious circle is closed here, even for those migrants with stable legal and labour conditions.

Siebers (2009b) pointed out that even the risk of being identified as the ‘ethnic other’ is enough for migrant employees to experience such insecurity due to the visibility of their ethnic markers (language accent, specific clothing like headscarves, physical traits,² particular religious rituals, specific food and so on). Actually having experienced ethnic boundaries oneself in the current job is not necessary, the risk that ethnic markers may provoke ethnic boundaries in the minds and behaviour of non-migrant colleagues seems enough to foment such insecurity.³

In short, there is an interplay between precarity and ethnic boundary constructions in which both fuel each other and in which the macro context (migrants’ subordinated position in the labour market and ethnic closure) imposes itself on micro interactions at work. In this interplay, the ethnicisation of precarity (framing migrants’ lack of assertiveness due to insecurity as cultural traits stemming from their ethnic backgrounds) plays a vital role.

Ethnicising Discourse

The Pope had said something about Muslims, that the Prophet Mohammed had converted everyone into a Muslim by the sword … The next day at work there was a newspaper on the canteen table with an encircled heading quoting some Afghan saying: ‘Pope go to hell’. As usual, we started the day at half past seven with the briefing, with about 30 police officers … Suddenly, a colleague started to speak in anger: ‘You Muslims have to knock it off; you think you can allow yourselves everything. We Christians, we will attack the Turkish consulate and we will teach you what violence is.’ Another colleague added: ‘It is about time to take the white cone hats out of the closet’ … Then the team leader simply said: ‘Stop it, we are going to brief.’ He went on with the briefing as if nothing had happened … Well, although I am very articulate, I did not know what to say. I clammed up completely.

This quote stems from Pinar, an officer with a Turkish background. After the incident, she went on sick leave for three months:

I couldn’t go to work … I want to integrate in society, but then you … go back to your own culture. Well, you have the need to talk about it, but in your own language. You only wish to talk with people who understand you. For me it was very hard to explain to a Dutch social worker what I experienced inside. Many Turkish people live for their honour … Maybe this is unthinkable for a Dutch person, but at that moment your sense of honour and pride is extremely affected … [I wasn’t] able to go to work while the other colleague was unaffected and could simply go on with his work. It is supposed to be the other way around. How can the victim be stuck at home for three months, while the aggressor can continue?

Discussion

Pinar’s case clearly reflects the three elements of ethnic boundaries. First, ethnic group classifications became salient as Pinar and her colleagues identified each other in opposing categories. Pinar’s colleagues took the distinction between ‘Christians’ versus ‘Muslims’ to construct such an opposition and threatened her with violence as an assumed member of the opposite group, even invoking Ku Klux Klan images. Subsequently, Pinar felt thrown back upon her Turkish background that she rendered meaningful pointing to her Turkish language, culture and values. Next, ethnic closure in social and material terms became apparent as the incident disrupted her cooperation in the team for three months. She also felt discouraged to talk to the social worker she identified in ethnic – ‘Dutch’ – terms. Eventually, she lost her job in the team.

One option for interpreting these findings is offered by socio-psychological approaches in terms of cognitive distortions like stereotypes (Blommaert et al., 2012). Whether consciously or unconsciously, stereotypes would exist permanently in our minds (Chen and Bargh, 1997; Greenwald et al., 2002), would become activated cognitively with the right social stimuli and consequently would be applied socially in discriminatory behaviour. Stereotype activation and application would take place in a mechanical and automatic way (Chen and Bargh, 1997; Devine, 1989; Ellemers and Barreto, 2008; Greenwald et al., 2002), whenever one is confronted with visible ethnic markers. Some socio-psychological studies (e.g. Devine, 1989; Moskowitz and Ignarri, 2009; Stewart and Payne, 2008) found that these processes can be controlled somewhat by deliberate cognitive effort, but not fundamentally. Socio-psychological studies write about stereotype activation and application in a quasi-natural or essentialist way, devoid of context (time and place), similar to Herder’s approach of ethnicity.

However, this essentialism is either based on field experiments in which the salience of stereotypes is simply inferred (not proven, see Blommaert et al., 2012) from discrimination behaviour or on laboratory research without addressing the question of whether experimental findings’ validity can be extrapolated to real life events. The current study’s findings on such events among Dutch police officers question such essentialism.

First, if stereotypes would become activated and applied mechanically whenever officers observe each other’s ethnic markers, one would expect that migrant officers would face ethnic closure or discrimination on a very frequent, if not permanent, basis. The current study’s data suggest otherwise, though. Only in 44 per cent of the days respondents reported on in logbooks and interviews did they recall an event with colleagues, supervisors or civilians in which they became aware of each other’s ethnic identity. Regarding most working days, they explicitly indicated that no such event of ethnic salience occurred. As a minority, migrants more often face those who may be classified as ‘ethic others’ so they reported more such events (on average three such events in five days) than their non-migrant colleagues (1.8 such events in five days). Next, three-quarters of events of ethnic identity salience involved no ethnic closure. Sometimes, migrant officers were appreciated for communicating more effectively with migrant civilians due to speaking their languages (see Boogaard and Roggeband, 2010). Ethnic closure was triggered only in a quarter of reported events of salient ethnic identity.

These findings must be interpreted with caution. The sample is limited and self-reporting may not be free from biases regarding what actually happened and what respondents actually felt and thought. This holds particularly true for implicit stereotyping. Nevertheless, if the quasi-natural and essentialist assumptions of socio-psychological approaches were true and the controllability of especially implicit stereotypes were indeed limited, one would expect that events like Pinar’s would occur on a much more frequent basis and that salient ethnic identity would almost inevitably trigger ethnic closure. This study’s findings deny these expectations and thus cast further doubts on whether events like Pinar’s can be explained by cognitive processes of stereotyping.

Second, socio-psychological approaches cannot explain the origins and content of what they consider to be stereotypes. Meanings attributed to the ‘ethnic other’ may be negative or distorted, but that tells us nothing about where they come from or about their specific content. Pinar’s briefing event was triggered by a specific mediated occasion involving conflicting statements by the Pope and Muslim leaders. The media also delivered the categories to classify each other, that is, Christians versus Muslims, as well as the conflictive meanings to solidify the opposition between them. There is a pattern of similar events among Dutch police officers that resemble what Siebers and Dennissen (2015) found among Dutch-Moroccan Muslims at work. When specific (inter)national events or statements by politicians like Geert Wilders are transmitted by Dutch media, they spark interactions between migrant and non-migrant officers in which they take over the ethnicising discourse on migrants and migration in Dutch media and politics (Siebers and Dennissen, 2015). This discourse not only delivers the occasions for events like Pinar’s to occur, but also provides the ready-made opposing ethnic categories to colleagues to classify each other as well as the conflictive meanings to exclude or confront each other (see Cederberg, 2014; Fox et al., 2012).

These meanings epitomise what Ralph Grillo (2003) coined as cultural essentialism, that is, a system of belief that maps the world into reified homogeneous, bounded and static ethnic communities, existing side by side, defining the essence of an individual’s identity as belonging to such a community. Thus, it encourages non-migrant officers to hold individual migrant colleagues responsible for what other members of assumedly the same ethnic category have done, for example, acts of terrorism, crime or oppression of females or homosexuals (see Mepschen et al., 2010).⁴ Verena Stolcke (1995) took this cultural essentialism on board in her concept of cultural fundamentalism, that is, the view that the cultural traits of different ethnic communities are incompatible or incommensurable. When a female officer with a Turkish background asked her non-migrant supervisor why her request for promotion was turned down, she was told: ‘You and me, we have been enemies for centuries already.’

It makes more sense to understand events like Pinar’s as resulting from discursive constructions stemming from the ethnicising discourse in Dutch media and politics instead of from cognitive distortions generated in a quasi-natural way devoid of time and context. This ethnicising discourse on migrants constitutes the corollary of the ethno-nationalist preoccupation with Dutchness and national identity in Dutch media and society (Duyvendak, 2011; Van Reekum, 2012; Van Reekum and Duyvendak, 2012) and sparks ethnic boundary constructions, making use of whatever ‘cultural stuff’ that is available in this discourse to make such boundaries credible.

In Pinar’s case, religion appears as such ‘cultural stuff’. It played a prominent role both in the occasion (mediated statements by the Pope and Muslim leaders) and the categories her colleagues used to frame their attack against her, that is, Christians versus Muslims. However, it is very unlikely in highly secularised Dutch society that these colleagues would identify themselves as Christians on other occasions. It is more likely that they used religious distinctions to underscore the ethnic boundary between ‘Dutch’ and ‘non-Dutch’ that structures the ethnicising discourse in Dutch media and politics. Likewise, Pinar talked about ‘Turkish’ values of honour and pride that would be ‘unthinkable’ to ‘Dutch’ people.

Moreover, Pinar’s event is very similar to other events of ethnic boundary constructions triggered by the ethnicising discourse in Dutch media and politics in which not religion but other ‘cultural stuff’ like language was deployed. Also migrant officers without any connection to Islam, like Dinesh, suffer from ethnic boundary constructions similar to Pinar’s case. Next, there is no pattern of differences in the ways Muslim and non-Muslim migrant officers or officers with Moroccan, Turkish or Surinamese backgrounds react to ethnic boundaries. The ethnicising discourse not only contains homogenising views of the ‘ethnic others’, the ethnic boundaries it triggers at work also have a remarkable homogenising effect on their ‘victims’’ reactions.

Quasi-Therapeutic Management⁵

Many organisations struggle with the daily practices of multicultural teams. The positive aspects of diversity are undisputed: more creativity, flexibility, broader vision, better customer responsiveness, more learning and inspiration. But unfortunately this surplus value is not straightforward. People simply have preferences for things known, for those who look like themselves, they are troubled by culture and language differences and are blinded by stereotypical images and expectations.

This quote stems from the Dutch Foundation for Psychotechniques (NSvP, 2010b). To get rid of these negative psychological preferences, troubles, stereotypes and expectations, another NSvP text (De Vries, 2010: 8) recommends:

[Dialogue is a] special form of conversation that is focused on inner search. Not the solution of a problem is central, but a quest to find the essence of a problem. Dialogue is a self-exploration that you go through together.

After three months of sick leave, Pinar was invited for such a dialogue session with her non-migrant team leader and the two colleagues who had threatened her. With a tremble in her voice, she said she had declined the invitation. The team leader had not intervened in the heat of the moment and now he was about to throw her to the wolves again, she said. In turn, her declination was unacceptable to the team leader who forced her to leave the team. She lacked the ‘mental resilience’ to handle situations like these and had a deficit in ‘openness’, ‘flexibility’ and ‘assertiveness’, he argued.

Dinesh was not promoted because of a supposed similar deficit in personality traits, that is, assertiveness and authenticity. However, when asked what authenticity actually means, his non-migrant HR adviser could not give a clear answer and a blush of shame crept up her face. She admitted: ‘I must confess that how we deal with it varies a lot.’ Yet, in a subsequent interview she regained composure and stressed that authenticity is about ‘looking for the true self of a person … You look for who someone really is.’ The official employer vision paper of the Dutch police (Landelijk Programma HRM Politie, 2008: 77–8) reads:

The police organisation pursues diversity and this requires … authenticity of leadership … Leaders coach and impassion employees to let them excel in things they are good at; this allows employees to act in accordance with their own views … Leaders must be capable of touching upon employees’ authenticity.

Methods intermezzo

The Dutch Foundation for Psychotechniques (Nederlandse Stichting voor Psychotechnieken, NSvP) is a major Dutch knowledge institute. It supports research projects, awards grants, organises seminars, conferences and workshops and publishes journals and books (www.innovatiefinwerk.nl). While doing fieldwork, it became clear that many aspects of the ways in which police managers deal with cases like Pinar’s and Dinesh’s were inspired by the discourse and practices promoted by the NSvP. Therefore, NSvP texts were studied, observations were made in NSvP meetings and NSvP members, including its director, were interviewed.

Discussion

NSvP texts, LECD texts and statements by police managers re-label ethnicity into ‘diversity‘ and understand it exclusively as a business case, that is, as functional for task performance. Very declarative statements argue: ‘Diversity offers opportunities to increase the innovative capacity of the organisation’ (NSvP, 2010a). NSvP texts, Pinar’s team leader’s dialogue invitation and Dinesh’s superiors’ statements coincide in approaching management in terms of personality traits. Both Pinar and Dinesh were excluded based on supposed deficiencies in such traits. NSvP texts also portray diversity in terms of personality traits: as essentialist (devoid of time and context) traits that individual employees bring to work with a positive performance spin-off. In case these personal diversity traits fail to deliver, NSvP has instruments on offer, like dialogue, to get rid of hindering negative attitudes and stereotypes.

NSvP claims that personal diversity traits are good for performance not only contrast with evidence – meta-studies show that diversity’s effects on performance are far from straightforward (e.g. Stahl et al., 2010) – they also outmanoeuvre justice and power considerations (Lorbiecki and Jack, 2000; Noon, 2007). If NSvP texts pay any attention at all to such considerations, they simply argue that promoting the business case is enough to guarantee justice and equality that, consequently, do not require any further attention. Moreover, the individualisation and psychologisation of management and ethnicity, approaching them in terms of personality traits, draw attention away from management and ethnicity as social phenomena and thus render power relations invisible and justice considerations unsayable (see DiFruscia, 2012).

That explains the remarkable insensitivity of police managers, like the ones supervising Pinar and Dinesh, to the ethnic closure migrant officers are confronted with. It clarifies why Pinar’s team leader ignored her colleagues’ aggression towards her in the briefing event, only interested in that day’s targets. It also elucidates why he did not take her discrimination complaint seriously and why he failed to take disciplinary action against her colleagues’ blunt violation of the law condemning discrimination. The outmanoeuvring of justice considerations was apparently so strong that it even kept him from doing what the police are supposed to do, that is, to enforce the law and provide protection. By obliging Pinar to enter into dialogue with her colleagues, he utterly ignored the power inequality between them. For similar reasons, Dinesh also felt betrayed by his superiors.

While ignoring power, psychologising approaches of management and ethnicity reflect socio-ideological control (Alvesson and Kärreman, 2004) and identity regulation (Alvesson and Willmott, 2002). These are forms of post-bureaucratic labour control, deploying Foucauldian techniques of confession and avowal (Covaleski et al., 1998) or quasi-therapeutic management techniques (Costea et al., 2008), such as coaching, mediation, personal development plans and psychological contracts. Such instruments of very real power exercise aim to control workers’ subjectivity, that is, personality traits understood as ‘soft skills’. Such ‘soft skills’ are very fuzzy (Moss and Tilly, 1996) and hard to operationalise in specific terms (Grugulis and Stoyanova, 2011). Bonnie Urciuoli (2008) underlined their denotational indeterminacy, that is, they have no objective existence other than as signifiers without any context-independent lexical meaning. They do not refer to concrete and discrete phenomena in the real selves of workers, but gain their meaning from their strategic use.

This indeterminacy of soft skills grants police managers an arbitrary control over officers, symbolised by the blush of shame on the face of Dinesh’s HR adviser when she admitted that the use of ‘authenticity’ varies a lot. Moreover, her second answer to the question what authenticity means and the employer vision paper quoted above emphasise the agentic capacities of employees and call upon leaders to unleash employees’ authentic ‘true self’, but simultaneously she and the district commander deployed authenticity as a criterion to police and disqualify Dinesh’s subjectivity. When Dinesh was asked whether he wanted to become authentic as demanded by his managers, he said: ‘No, because I want to be myself.’ Dinesh experienced his managers’ authenticity demand as alienating, that is, exactly the opposite of what authenticity is supposed to represent. As an empty signifier, authenticity can be used at will, as an arbitrary instrument of power. The indeterminacy of soft skills renders the power of those entitled to define them almost uncurbed (Grugulis and Stoyanova, 2011). As long as non-migrants are overrepresented among those with this definition power, migrants will remain overrepresented among those who have to suffer the consequences of this arbitrariness.

This same indeterminacy leaves migrant officers almost defenceless when being confronted with ethnic closure. First, they have no legitimate discursive ground from which to contest this power exercise due to the positivity and attractiveness (Foucault, 1972) of the HRM discourse that frames soft skills. Who can oppose a discourse that is supposed to set free one’s authenticity or boost one’s personal development? Second, the psychologisation of work turns virtually every psychological trait into a candidate for becoming a job-related soft skill and thus a criterion of assessment, which subverts the distinction between job-related and non-job related criteria of assessment (Grugulis and Stoyanova, 2011). This distinction is vital for discrimination complaints like Pinar’s, since complainers must demonstrate that non-job-related criteria like ethnicity have been applied. That becomes very difficult when ethnicity is reframed as a bundle of vaguely defined job-related soft skills. Third, quasi-therapeutic management allows managers to put the blame of ethnic closure on its victims, like Pinar and Dinesh, for having deficiencies in their psychological features (DiFruscia, 2012).

In short, quasi-therapeutic management and its re-labelling of ethnicity into soft skills favour both the emergence and the solidification of ethnic boundary constructions among officers. It does so by promoting an essentialist understanding of ethnicity, by outmanoeuvring power, inequality and justice considerations, by discrediting law enforcement, by facilitating the arbitrary and total power exercise of non-migrant managers, by rendering the migrant victims of ethnic closure virtually defenceless and by blaming these victims themselves. This impact of quasi-therapeutic management on ethnic boundaries overrules its, in principle, positive framing of ethnicity as conducive to organisational performance, embedded in a positive HRM discourse of personal growth and development. This positivity makes it all the more difficult for the migrant victims of ethnic boundaries to defend their interests.

Conclusions

This study contributes to the ethnic boundaries literature by detecting three factors that constitute a structural framework within which events of ethnic boundary constructions are triggered among Dutch police officers. First, there is migrant officers’ precarity status of insecurity, due to their subordinated position in the labour market and previous experiences of ethnic boundary constructions together with the ethnicisation of precarity’s behavioural consequences that puts the blame on migrants themselves. Second, the ethnicising discourse in Dutch media and politics on migrants and migration provides both the occasions and stigmatising categories and meanings for ethnic categorisations to become salient and ethnic conflicts to occur between migrant and non-migrant officers. Third, quasi-therapeutic management creates favourable conditions for both the emergence and the reproduction of ethnic boundaries. These factors not only provide the macro conditions, the ethnic categorisations, stigmatising meanings and incentives for subsequent behaviour, but also the occasions for ethnic boundary construction events. Such occasions include (inter)national mediated events, politicians’ statements and HRM events like performance assessments or promotion decisions. These factors and dynamics are new to those already identified by Wimmer (2013).

These factors intersect in various ways. For example, ethnic conflicts fuelled by the ethnicising discourse in Dutch media and politics boost migrants’ precarity (insecurity). This discourse favours the framing of precarity in ethnic terms, which encouraged Pinar to reject the quasi-therapeutic mediation invitation. The quasi-therapeutic focus on soft skills incites non-migrant managers to draw on their own subjective interpretations of such desired skills and traits due to their indeterminacy, giving free space to discursive constructions stemming from Dutch ethnicising discourse in media and politics to become operational.

This article adds to the understanding of migrants’ precarity in the labour market (Anderson, 2010; Lewis et al., 2015; Piore, 1979) that the insecurity and vulnerability associated with precarity may apply even to migrants who currently work in stable labour and legal conditions.⁶ The subordinated position of migrants in the labour market as well as (previous) experiences of ethnic boundary constructions may suffice to produce insecurity and vulnerability among them. These findings call for a differentiated understanding of migrants’ precarity at work, with various dimensions or components.

Next, the consequences of government policies for migrants’ position in the labour market are not limited to specific regulations (Anderson, 2010), but include a wider discursive impact transmitted by the media. The detection of this ethnicising discursive impact producing ethnic boundaries at work is relatively new (see Siebers, 2010; Siebers and Dennissen, 2015, for exceptions). It mediates the impact of the growing preoccupation with Dutchness and national identity in Dutch politics and society (Duyvendak, 2011; Van Reekum, 2012; Van Reekum and Duyvendak, 2012) on lasting insecurity and ethnic inequality in work settings (Siebers, 2010).

The current study’s findings underscore the contextuality and variability of ethnic boundary constructions in several ways. First, in another Dutch public organisation, the tax administration, Siebers (2009b, 2010) found similar ethnic conflicts triggered by Dutch discourse in politics and media. However, in again another Dutch public organisation, the department of rural planning of the ministry of agriculture, Siebers and Van Gastel (2015) found hardly any such conflicts. The main difference between these organisations is the kind of primary process. The tax administration and the police are law enforcement organisations. Dutch media and politics recurrently associate migrants with crime and terrorism questioning their loyalty to the Dutch state and society and portraying them as a security threat (Buonfino, 2004; Siebers and Dennissen, 2015). These associations are directly relevant to law enforcement and are voiced in the ethnic conflicts occurring in these organisations. By contrast, these associations are irrelevant to the geographic coordination tasks of the department of rural planning, where hardly any such conflicts emerge. Further research on the moderating role of the kinds of primary process in ethnic boundary constructions triggered by ethnicising discourses is called for.

Second, salient ethnic identity and subsequent ethnic closure are also variable and contextual within the police organisation itself, very much dependent on whether Dutch media and politics provide a specific occasion for such boundaries to be constructed. Without such occasions, other factors like professional or collegial discourses may take over and orient officers towards very different meaning making and behaviour. This contextuality and variability question socio-psychological assumptions that stereotypes would trigger events like Pinar’s in an automatic or mechanical way once people with different ethnic markers meet. Further research is required to determine the role – if at all – of stereotypes produced by cognitive processes vis-a-vis discursive constructions stemming from ethnicising discourses in fuelling ethnic boundaries in real life settings.

In addition, this study found that management approaches inspired by a socio-psychological focus on personality traits are an accessory in facilitating and solidifying ethnic boundaries among Dutch police officers. These findings align with previous studies (Siebers, 2009a; Siebers and Van Gastel, 2015; Zanoni and Janssens, 2007) that show that post-bureaucratic management approaches aggravate ethnic inequality at work. They underline the crucial role played by the psychologisation of both overall labour control and diversity management in (re)producing ethnic boundaries between Dutch police officers.

Finally, the identification of factors fuelling ethnic boundaries was made possible only by adopting a non-essentialist approach to ethnicity. Only an approach that does not take the salience of ethnicity for granted can demonstrate the factors that produce this salience in particular contexts. Only a non-essentialist approach can uncover the essentialism embedded in these factors, that is, in the ethnicisation of migrants and their precarity as well as in the business case for diversity pin-pointing ethnicity as an essentialist trait of migrants’ personality. In short, only a non-essentialist approach to ethnicity can show how and why migrants may become ethnic minorities.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

The author would like to express his sincere gratitude to all who supported this research, to all respondents who were so kind as to express their experiences and give their time to this research, to Paul Mutsaers and the Dutch Police Academy for their role in the data collection as well as to the reviewers to previous drafts and the Editor of Sociology for their very useful comments.

Funding

This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial or not-for-profit sectors.

Notes

Hans Siebers has studied social sciences and history. Currently, he is an associate professor at Tilburg School of Humanities, Tilburg University, the Netherlands. His research focuses on diversity, ethnic identity and ethno-migrant inequality involving migrants and non-migrants in work settings as well as on discourses on migrants and migration in politics and media. He has published in books by, for example, Edward Elgar, Ashgate, Routledge, SAGE and Kluwer, and in several journals, including Work, Employment and Society, International Sociology, Current Sociology, International Review of Modern Sociology, Scandinavian Journal of Management, Journal of Management and Organization, South African Journal of Labour Relations and International Journal on Multicultural Societies.

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What Turns Migrants into Ethnic Minorities at Work? Factors Erecting Ethnic Boundaries among Dutch Police Officers

Abstract

Keywords

Introduction

Ethnic Boundaries

Context and Methods

Ethnicised Precarity

Discussion

Ethnicising Discourse

Discussion

Quasi-Therapeutic Management 5

Methods intermezzo

Discussion

Conclusions

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

Funding

Notes

References

Quasi-Therapeutic Management⁵