CONNECTING WITH WORK: The role of social networks in immigrants searching for jobs in Finland

In Finland, the number of immigrants has risen rather significantly since the early 1990s. Owing to various historical, geographical, and economic factors, the country was relatively ethno-culturally homogeneous and isolated until recently. The rapid increase in immigration has also led simultaneously to an equal increase in concerns about immigrants’ eventual employability. In order to promote immigrants’ integration in the labour market, as well as in society in general, the Integration Act was adopted in Finland in 2006. The aim of the Act was to enable the new immigrants to successfully get off to a start, in collaboration with such actors as municipalities, Employment Offices, and non-governmental organisations (SOPEMI 2006). As a result, several language and vocational-training measures were developed to facilitate their transition into the job market. However, despite these measures, the labour market position of immigrants still looks less satisfactory. According to Statistics Finland, the unemployment rate of immigrants stood at 20 percent in 2008. Although this indicated an improvement compared with the previous years, this figure was still three times higher than that for the whole workforce. The unemployment rate could in fact be much greater than the stated figure in practice, as it did not include immigrants that were temporarily employed under the subsidised and labour-training measures introduced by the labour administration.

The unemployment figures were especially high for immigrants originating from the developing countries, in particular those from Iraq (62 percent), Somalia (53 percent), Iran (47 percent), Morocco (44 percent), and Vietnam (40 percent). In contrast, immigrants from the developed countries enjoyed the most favourable situations, with the nationals of Norway (8 percent), Sweden (9 percent), UK (10 percent), and USA (10 percent) showing the lowest unemployment rates. The proportion of people with temporary and part-time jobs is also reported to be much higher among immigrants than the mainstream population, which may reflect the precarious situation of immigrants in the Finnish labour market. Immigrants, especially from the developing countries, are also more often employed in low-prestige sectors. The service sector in particular has been one of the principal sectors of their employment. Ethno-specific occupations, such as mother-tongue teacher, interpreter, and school helper that require the use of immigrants’ native language, are other areas of their employment. Owing mainly to the shortage of labour, immigrants are also increasingly expanding their presence in the health-care sector.

The underperformance of immigrants in the Finnish labour market has been suggested to stem from several factors, including the lack of Finnish-language skills (e.g., Romakkaniemi and Ruutu 2001; Forsander 2002); the lack of Finland-specific cultural competence and informal capital (e.g., Koistinen 1997; Forsander and Alitolppa-Niitamo 2000); the lack of employer recognition of non-Finnish education and work experience (e.g., Sutela 2005); the lack of trust towards immigrant workers (e.g., Trux 2002; Pehkonen 2006); and discrimination (e.g., Paananen 1999; Ahmad 2002; Pohjanpää et al.2003). Given the many personal and structural impediments faced by immigrants as highlighted in the earlier research, the role their social networks have played to overcome these barriers in accessing the labour market is the topic of this article. More specifically, the study looks at the extent to which immigrants’ networks have acted as a resource-opportunity structure in obtaining employment opportunities during their entire period of residence in Finland. Adopting a new job-acquisition model, it offers a detailed investigation into how job information that resulted in employment among immigrants was acquired and disseminated, how the jobs themselves were applied for, and what was the role of their personal contacts in locating and securing them. It further explores in what contexts the job information was received, who were the conduits of job information, what relation they had to the informants, and in which ways they had themselves connected with the information they supplied to the informants. In addition, the study investigates whether reliance on networks in job-search efforts had altered during different time periods in Finland.

Social networks have been considered to play a vital role in facilitating the processes of both job search and occupational attainment by operating in conjunction with human capital. Their function as a gateway to the job market has been amply highlighted in studies carried out in various institutional contexts. Even as early as the 1930s, De Schweinetz (1932) observed the frequent use of contacts in job-seeking among full-fashion hosiery workers in the USA. Later systematic studies from the 1960s onwards have also consistently pointed to this (e.g., Brown 1965; Rees and Shultz 1970; MacKay 1971; Granovetter 1974; Corcoran et al. 1980; Lin et al. 1981a). More recent studies have also corroborated the importance of social resources in job search and occupational attainment (e.g., Marsden and Hurlbert 1988; Marsden and Campbell 1990; Wegener 1991; Bian 1994; Völker and Flap 1999; Korpi 2001; Zang 2003).

One important feature of networks is the diffusion of information about job openings in workplaces. The role of networks may become especially significant in a tight labour market situation when the number of vacancies is disproportionate to those who want to fill them. Social contacts that are current employees can effectively serve as the transmitters of information about invisible vacancies and options, which may otherwise remain inaccessible to job seekers. Networks can also act as good sources of influence. This is especially true about contacts that are situated in jobs of better socio-economic status. Owing to the additional leverage and influence that high-status positions grant, the prestigious contacts may substantially affect the hiring decision of the recruiters because of the greater asymmetry in authority and prestige vis-à-vis the decision-makers (Lin 1999). Network recruitment also reduces reduction costs for both sides of the labour market, by rapidly linking organisations to suitable workers and workers to better organisations. Network recruitment also reduces uncertainty by hiring new workers that are similar in characteristics to those currently employed. As Baily and Waldinger (1991) point out, when hiring takes place through networks, the new employee is never fully a stranger. Moreover, network recruitment also helps to strengthen the employment relationship by conveying a set of expectations and understandings common to workers and employers (ibid.).

Recruitment through networks is also said to improve the quality and quantity of information that both workers and employers require in order to make a measured decision (e.g., Waldinger 1997). Network recruitment can provide additional information to both sides of the labour market. On the one hand, contacts recommending the job seeker can provide employers with information about various attributes of the applicant that are relevant to the execution of the job at work such as skills, experience, and industriousness – all of which are difficult to judge before a candidate has in fact taken on a position. On the other hand, they would also be able to supply the applicant with more information about the job itself, which otherwise would be difficult to obtain through formal channels. This would enable the applicant to make a more considered decision when accepting a job offer, which in turn may also decrease the likelihood of quitting. Recruitment through networks also functions as a remedy for solving temporary labour-shortage problems for employers. Using the current employees, employers can obtain a pool of job applicants in a rather swift and inexpensive manner. For job seekers, too, the use of informal search methods is practical as they are relatively low-cost in terms of time and money, and they are likely to generate a quick response that would allow the search process to be either terminated or redirected towards other employers (Mallier and Bailey 1997).

Research on labour market integration of immigrants also converges to suggest that social networks act as a crucial resource-opportunity structure and constitute a form of social capital on which immigrants can rely in order to improve their socio-economic conditions in the new country (Sanders and Nee 1996). The networks facilitate a mechanism by which immigrants secure job opportunities (Baily and Waldinger 1991; Sanders et al. 2002) and create the basis for mutual cooperation (Portes and Sensenbrenner 1993). Particularly in the post-immigration period, the role of networks is especially important, since being newcomers to the host society, immigrants often may lack locally valuable work experience and skills in the mainstream language. Immigrants landing in communities that have well-developed networks are reported to be more effectively integrated into the new society than those in communities having poorly developed networks (Hagan 1998). However, in their study on racial and ethnic differences in job-search strategies in Atlanta, Boston, and Los Angeles among Asians, Blacks, and Hispanics, Green et al. (1999) also reflected on the downside of social networks. They reported that, although informal networks provided crucial employment opportunities, reliance on family members and friends had often landed them in low-prestige jobs.

While it has been shown that social networks help get immigrants a foothold in the local economy and society, there is generally much less research on what may potentially promote immigrants’ reliance on networks. Apart from contributing to the scant information available on the labour market situation of immigrants in Finland and the role of their networks in job acquisition, the aim of this article is to argue that discrimination prevailing in the common labour market can substantially increase immigrants’ dependence on network assistance for their economic survival and can discourage them from seeking employment through formal channels of job information. Drawing on the empirical observations gained from investigating the entire employment careers of 40 immigrants, the study also suggests that discrimination may not only contribute to immigrants’ low occupational attainment by confining them to low-prestige occupations but also indirectly lead to the structuring of ethnically dominated networks among them.

To date, studies on the role of social networks in occupational attainment have predominantly been conducted in the USA. The importance of social networks has often been brought to light with reference to these studies. The significance of networks may vary with respect to different institutional and cultural contexts, however. For example, one crucial respect in which the USA and Finland, and also many other European countries, differ is in the presence of a national employment agency. The USA lacks such an agency, while Finland has an extensive nationwide system of public employment agencies that employers are required to inform about job openings. Job seekers thus have access to a continuously updated source of information about new employment opportunities at their disposal. This difference could mean that the importance of social networks varies in the two countries. Considering the lack of a national employment agency in the USA, social networks could be assumed to matter more there than in Finland. One of the aims of this study, therefore, was to test this assumption by establishing whether and to what extent the role of social networks in the acquisition of employment opportunities differs in Finland with its different institutional and cultural setting.

Data for the study were collected in 2003–2004 through 40 semi-structured qualitative interviews with first-generation male immigrants aged 22–60 originating from Pakistan and India that were residing in the greater Helsinki area. Greater Helsinki houses the majority of the immigrant population in Finland, and the same held true for the immigrant groups included in this study. There were approximately 2,000 immigrants from the Indian subcontinent in Finland in 2003. Access to the informants was gained through some ethnic-group members who were asked to name some of their ethnic peers with whom they largely did not have personal relations, whom they might have come across at a social gathering or had heard of through some friend or acquaintance. The aim behind this strategy was to maximise the inclusion of individuals who were beyond the contact persons’ immediate social networks and to spread the sample to a larger sample of the population. Having obtained the names, four informants were randomly selected from these referrals. The procedure was repeated, and the four informants then became a source of the acquisition of further informants for the study.

The in-depth interviews aimed to investigate the entire occupational careers of immigrants from the time of their arrival in Finland to the present. Exploring an informant's occupational history often proved to be a time-consuming task, as elucidating various details of the job-acquisition process required repeated and consistent probing that extended the interview time. The need for consistent probing was especially needed in cases in which the informants regarded certain details as unimportant or trivial, which were in fact indispensable from the viewpoint of the research objectives. The interview was lengthened further when the informant had a long occupational career. Consequently, the interview time varied from 2.5 to 6 hours, with an average of 3.5 hours.

For both practical and theoretical reasons, a number of objectives guided the choice to consider all the employment spells of a person. First, it made it possible to include individuals of all occupational statuses – employed, self-employed, and unemployed. Second, it introduced the opportunity to consider the extent to which various factors, particularly length of residence, Finnish-language proficiency, and locally-acquired work experience, had helped immigrants in attaining occupational mobility. Third, it increased the probability of reducing the period-specific character of the research findings and of highlighting the trends. It made it possible to assess the degree to which different job-search methods were used over different time periods, and to observe whether their distribution had changed over time. Restricting the investigation to the current/last and/or first job of the informant, which was a common pattern in many earlier studies (e.g., Granovetter 1974; Corcoran et al.1980; Lin et al.1981a, b; De Graaf and Flap 1988; Lai et al. 1998), may have hampered the achievement of these objectives.

The 40 interviews offered a total of 166 job spells, which were taken as units of analysis. In cases in which employment opportunities were located through personal networks, an attempt was made to examine in detail the role and characteristics of the social contact through whom a certain employment opportunity was obtained. These included, among others, gender, ethnicity, education, sector of employment, the social tie's relation with the informant, the context in which job information was transmitted, and the amount and form in which the social tie helped the informant in obtaining the job.

Seventy-two percent of the jobs were located in the common labour market, while the remainder were in the ethnic labour market. The ethnic labour market here refers to those businesses, generally restaurants, which are owned by employers who are of the same origin as the informant. The majority of the jobs, i.e. 93 percent, were in the private sector, and most of the rest were in the municipalities. Most of the jobs had not been advertised: 72 percent as opposed to 28 percent. The number of job spells per informant ranged from one to 15, with a mean of 4.15 (std. deviation 2.99), and the duration varied from one month to 22 years, with a mean of 1.87 years (std. deviation 2.75). The entire job career in Finland at the time of the interview extended from eight months to 22 years, with a mean of 7.37 years (std. deviation 5.38). The length of residence, on the other hand, varied from two to 33 years, with a mean of 14.05 (std. deviation 8.39).

More than half of the informants (55 percent) had obtained university education or professional diplomas from the country of origin, followed by those with secondary education (33 percent). The remaining informants had received between six and nine years of schooling. As regards Finnish-language proficiency, 61 percent of informants assessed their oral language skills as either good or excellent, followed by those with satisfactory skills (35 percent). The remaining two informants reported having no skills. At the time of obtaining a job, half of the informants were between 26 and 35 years old, followed by those between 19 and 25 years of age. At the time of the interview, 53 percent of these were employed, 30 percent self-employed, and 10 percent unemployed. The rest were outside the labour market.

As regards the sector of the current/last job, the majority of the informants (53 percent) were employed in the restaurant and catering sector, followed by cleaning (13 percent) and construction (8 percent) sectors. Forty percent of the informants had experienced at least one business spell in Finland. Although this may convey a sense of strong entrepreneurial spirit among the Indian subcontinent immigrants, it could also be due to a lack of opportunities, and also human capital, which pushes immigrants to self-employment. Evidence from other studies also suggests that self-employment among immigrants is widely considered the most likely means of attaining, and of surmounting structural barriers to, economic mobility in the new society (e.g., Portes and Bach 1985; Sanders and Nee 1996; Nee and Sanders 2001; Ho 2002).

Some limitations of the present study should also be discussed. The first one relates to the memory aspect of the informants. Since the study explored their entire occupational careers, the informants had to recall fine details of the various aspects of the job-acquisition process that in some cases went back more than 10 years. It could therefore be expected that cognitive distortions may have accompanied the recall process. When this took place in the interviews, it was mostly related to the specific date or month in which some job started or ended. However, in the course of the interview, the informants were often able to recall or correct the supplied information.

Second, although the article provides comprehensive information on the intensity and effectiveness of the informants’ job-search methods in cases in which they have been successful, there is no information on the methods employed in cases in which the outcome was negative. Investigating such cases would have given valuable information, but it was not feasible to collect such information in the present study because of the additional time it would have added to the interviews (average interview time 3.5 hours). Even if it had been possible to collect data on these unsuccessful cases, it would have been limited to jobs in which active search was involved. Employment opportunities do not always come along as the result of active and purposeful search, however. Sometimes people take on positions for which they have not actively pursued and about which they learned as a by-product of some social interaction unconnected with job seeking. The informants in the present study received information in this way in nearly 18 percent of the cases, for example, and collecting information about unsuccessful cases would thus have been limited to a certain type of job-search effort. This particular limitation is not just a characteristic of the present study but extends to almost all studies investigating the issue in question.

The informants employed a number of job-search methods, which are here categorised into three types: impersonal, personal, and direct approaches. Earlier studies on the subject have generally also divided different job-search strategies into the particular three categories (e.g., Reid 1972; Granovetter 1974; Holzer 1988; Blau and Robins 1990; Montgomery 1992; Silliker 1993; Zottoli and Wanous 2000; Mau and Kopischke 2001; Sanders et al. 2002; Frijters et al. 2005). However, there may be some differences with regard to what kinds of job-acquiring situations were classified under the three particular job-finding techniques. It would therefore be important to give a description of what these methods stand for in the context of the present study. The impersonal method here refers to cases in which no intermediary was involved in locating job information or in providing practical assistance to the informant in applying for the job. In contrast, the personal method refers to cases in which the process of acquiring information or job application occurred with assistance from a social contact. The direct-approaches method refers to cases in which the particular job was not advertised, and the informants contacted the employer directly, either in person or by written application, without any assistance in locating information or in applying for a job from anyone. In these cases, the job seekers did not have any personal relations with the employer.

In order to find out systematically how the informants became connected to jobs, the job-acquiring process was explored along two dimensions: first, how the information about a certain vacancy had been located, and second, how that job had been applied for and obtained. A graphical illustration of this strategy is provided in Figure 1. This strategy of dividing the job-acquiring process into two parts has theoretical affinity with some earlier job-search models. For example, in his job-search and choice model, Soelberg (1967) proposed that job finding comprised two phases: planning job search and job search and choice. During the first phase of job planning, a job seeker would allot various resources such as time and effort, and identify employment opportunities. The second phase of job search and choice begins with a more intensive effort to locate specific information about jobs and organisations. Bowen (1982) also proposed a two-phase model of job search, where the first phase of the job search involves determining the availability of more desirable employment alternatives, and in the second phase an individual determines the accessibility of that job. Later, Blau (1993, 1994; see also Schwab et al. 1987) also similarly distinguished between two phases of job search – preparatory and active. In the preparatory job-search stage, a job seeker makes an effort to acquire information about work opportunities through different formal and informal channels. The active search stage involves applying for jobs.

Although the job-acquisition model introduced in this paper has a conceptual affinity with the above-mentioned models, it also differs from them in two important ways. First, it more clearly and comprehensively divides the job-finding process into two stages of job information and job application, which the earlier, especially network, studies have not done in this particular manner. Second, it also allows the opportunity to see at what specific point of the job-finding process job seekers relied on formal or informal sources. Since the aim in the present study was to consider the degree to which the immigrants’ social networks helped them in entering the job market, the use of the particular model was especially useful as it permitted a more detailed assessment of the kind and level of assistance supplied by a contact, whether a strong or weak tie,¹ in landing a particular job at the stages of both information acquisition and job application. In certain cases, it is possible that the transmitter of information and the person who supplied the direct or indirect assistance² in applying for the job are the same. In such cases, the method of locating job information as well as the method of job application is personal. Alternatively, a job seeker may locate information through impersonal channels, such as newspapers or the national employment agency, and may also apply for that job through the impersonal method, namely without any contact assistance. In other cases, while the source of job information may be impersonal, contact with the employer may involve the personal application method. Conversely, the conduit of job information may be a strong or weak tie, but the job seeker might approach the prospective employer on their own.

The process of connecting to jobs for informants generally took place in the forms mentioned above. However, there were occasional further variations. For instance, as marked with the dashed line in Figure 1, a job applied for via the impersonal method sometimes also involved contact's direct assistance, as the case below depicts:

There were five such cases in the data. These jobs were classified as applied for via the personal application method, while the source of information was classified as impersonal. Such cases add further support to the job-acquisition model used in this study: the securing of a job may involve multiple stages, and job information, whether located through impersonal or personal sources, may be just one of the steps on the way to job acquisition.

Next we turn to the findings of the study. In accordance with the job acquisition model elaborated above, section 4 investigates the various channels of job information through which the informants had located their jobs and considers the role of their social networks in this process. It examines the nature of the social relations that provided the informants with the information and the circumstances under which this information was received and disseminated. Section 4.1 analyses informants’ reliance on social networks across different time periods. Section 4.2 considers the various ways in which the contacts themselves became connected with the job information they transmitted to the informants. Section 5, in pursuing the next stage of the job-acquisition model, discusses the multiple ways in which the informants applied for their jobs. In section 6, based on the empirical observations, it is argued that extensive reliance on social networks among immigrants may be an attempt to escape labour market discrimination. In section 7, a summary and conclusions are presented.

In line with the job-acquisition model, the article discusses first the search methods immigrants employed to locate job information and looks at the role of their social connections in the job-finding process. Table 1 reports on the various sources of job information utilised by the informants. As is clearly noticeable, the use of social networks was the most predominant method of entering the Finnish labour market among the immigrant groups included in this study. Of the 166 employment spells constituting the entire occupational histories of the 40 immigrants, in 72 percent of the cases the informants had acquired work by job information located through personal sources, as opposed to 19 percent of cases via impersonal means. The direct approaches were employed only in a few instances.

Table 1 further identifies the nature of the job-information source within the impersonal and personal search methods. The public employment agency was the general source of information for more than half of the cases in the ‘Impersonal’ category. The more frequent use of this information channel could be attributed largely to the effective nationwide system of agencies, which employers are required to notify about new vacancies in their respective municipalities in Finland. By contrast, in the ‘Personal’ category, the informants’ strong ties, including friends, relatives, and family members, were the principal sources of new opportunities. In 69 percent of cases, they had acted as conduits of information, which reflects the heavy reliance of the informants on such ties for entering the labour market in Finland. In contrast, reliance on weak ties such as acquaintances and work-related relations was found to be less common, occurring in 31 percent of the cases. In terms of ethnicity, most of the transmitters of information were Pakistani and Indian (63 percent), followed by Finns (30 percent) and other nationals.

The process of acquiring job information for informants occurred in various contexts. There were several instances when it resulted from active job searching and when it was passed on by the contacts voluntarily. However, in the majority of cases (43 percent), the contacts mentioned a certain employment opportunity on their own initiative. Job information was conveyed without the contacts being aware of whether or not the particular informant was seeking work. This finding is quite close to the observation that Granovetter (1974) made long ago that, rather than facilitated by searching, job information is often diffused as a by-product of other social processes. The transmitters of information were chiefly the informants’ friends, who probably also felt obliged to share information about job opportunities available to immigrants, which were otherwise limited, when the opportunities arose.

In order to see further whether reliance on social networks in locating job information had altered during their occupational careers in Finland, a comparison of the search methods the informants used in their first and current/last job is presented in Table 2. The time gap between the first and current/last jobs varied between one and 27 years, with a mean of eight years, and with 19 of the total 33 cases involving a gap of five or more years.

Personal sources of job information, in particular strong ties, stand prominent against both impersonal sources and direct approaches in the informants’ first jobs. One probable explanation for this relates to the fact that the immigrants, having recently arrived, lacked skills in the mainstream language, which may have reduced their ability to use more impersonal methods and thereby increased their dependence on social contacts in their job-search efforts. However, a lack of language skills may not have been the only reason, as personal sources still represented a considerable number of cases in the informants’ current/last jobs. This is fairly suggestive of the enduring role of social networks for immigrants in entering the Finnish job market. Nonetheless, the number of impersonal sources shows a rise in the current/last jobs, which, among others, may be accounted for by the fact that, after having resided and acquired human capital, in particular language skills, over a certain period of time in the new country, the informants were now better equipped to utilise other channels of job information.

Another way to find out to what extent reliance on social networks varied with respect to different time periods is to take into account the entire occupational careers of the informants. In order to achieve this objective, their occupational careers are divided into four time periods. Reliance on personal sources of job information was found to be prevalent throughout the occupational histories of the informants. In most of the cases (79 percent) during the first period, extending from 1970 to 1979, information was passed on by social ties. Reliance on social contacts is even more evident during the second time period stretching from 1980 to 1989: while there was no incidence of impersonal searching during this period, in the majority of the cases (91 percent) the distribution of information occurred through personal means. The period of 1990–1999, which was characterised by severe economic recession in Finland, was still one in which personal sources of job information continued to show a significant presence (72 percent). However, this period also witnessed a rise in the number of impersonal sources, accounting for 22 percent of the cases. In the last period, covering occupational activity between 2000 and 2003, reliance on social relations still characterised more than half of all the job spells (58 percent), although there was a decline in the use of such ties compared with the previous time periods. In contrast, the proportion of impersonal sources rose to 29 percent. This could be attributed in part to the fact that the likelihood of using a social contact in job search may decrease with an increase in labour market experience. The data confirm this possible connection: the proportion of individuals possessing two or more years of labour market experience in Finland increased from 35 percent in 1990–1999 to 73 percent in 2000–2003. The use of direct approaches generally remained insignificant throughout the four time periods.

In order to further accentuate the role of social networks in information diffusion, the various ways in which the contacts themselves became connected with the job information they supplied to the informants are discussed here. Again, the predominance of the personal ways of acquiring information was seen in the data. Excluding the cases in which the contact themself was the employer of the informant, in almost 70 percent of the remaining cases in which the contact was only a transmitter of job information, that information had been acquired through personal means. This figure is similar to that noted earlier (72 percent) when the informants had received information through their contacts. This finding may further substantiate the idea that reliance on personal networks was one of the dominant mechanisms for securing job information among the immigrant groups focused on in this study. In contrast, in only 5 percent of the cases had the contacts acquired information through impersonal sources such as newspapers or a public employment agency.

In this section, following the next stage of the job-acquisition model, the multiple ways in which the informants applied for their jobs after having located the information are considered. The role of social networks has also been quite significant in applying for jobs themselves, as in the majority of the cases (60 percent) informants had relied on their contacts’ assistance. Of these, 72 percent of the sources of network help comprised strong ties. The informants generally approached the employers through their ethnic ties, who in nearly half of the cases also accompanied them to a meeting with the employer. In most of these cases, the contact was also working at the same place and often passed on a good word for the job seeker. According to the informants, their recommendation had an important effect on the employer's decision to hire them. This finding is in line with the observations made in earlier studies confirming the important role of current employee referral on the success of a job applicant in the recruitment process (e.g., Fernandez and Weinberg 1997; Mallier and Bailey 1997; Waldinger 1997).

In some cases, the employers were informants’ own friends or relatives, thus excluding the need to involve any intermediaries. Sometimes earlier employment in a certain company also led to the acquisition of a job there later. Approaching the employer on the recommendation of a contact was among the other ways adopted by the informants for contacting the prospective employers that eventually resulted in their employment. Overall, in the majority of cases, the type of assistance received from the social contacts as discussed in the job-acquisition model in Figure 1 comprised direct rather than indirect assistance: 84 percent vs. 16 percent.

In the discussion thus far, an attempt was made to shed light on the crucial role immigrants’ social networks played in connecting them with the world of work. Reliance on contact networks in job search and social mobility is a commonly observed phenomenon in various institutional and cultural contexts. There is therefore nothing unusual about it when immigrants turned to network help when the need arose. However, discussions with the informants also offered many observations suggesting that the aim behind resorting to extensive reliance on personal networks was not merely to access a resource-opportunity structure. In fact, it also represented an effort to circumvent discrimination prevailing in the job market that not only rendered their personal qualifications less valuable, but also discouraged them from seeking employment through formal channels of job information. These observations are consistent with Portes and Rumbaut's (1996, 2001) argument that, in the face of a negative context of reception in the economy and society, social networks among immigrants may help them to overcome discrimination and racism in the new country. The informants’ accounts given below corroborate this point in a variety of ways:

The role of discrimination in restricting immigrants’ access to the job market also came to light when the informants were asked about three important factors that, in their view, were affecting the employment chances of their own ethnic group in Finland. The informants perceived discrimination based on various grounds by employers as the chief factor depressing their work opportunities in Finland. In contrast, human-capital-related factors – including the lack of Finnish language skills and the lack of locally-gained education and work experience – were considered the second and third most important factors, respectively. However, even when combined together, the significance attached to these two factors still remains much lower than that being given to the discrimination factor alone.

The importance of the role of employer attitudes in terms of gaining employment chances was also referred to in another context when the informants were asked about the main factor that in their assessment had contributed the most to obtaining a job in which they had contacted the employer without any network assistance. In many cases, the informants regarded the open-minded attitude of the employer towards immigrant recruitment as the principal factor for their success in securing a certain employment opportunity. In response to the question of how they perceived the role of their own personal credentials in this process, they stated that it was rather negligible. They referred to various instances in which the possession of relevant experience and education did not matter much due to the inflexible attitude of the employers. In order to further substantiate their claim, they also referred to a few cases in which they were refused jobs for which they had applied on their own, but were later able to obtain the same jobs from the same employers when these employers were approached through their contacts. There were also indirect references to discrimination in cases in which the informants attributed their success to a mere shortage of labour in a certain field; they often mentioned that they were the second preference for employers. For instance, a few informants pointed out that the jobs they obtained were characterised by short hours and inconvenient, often late-night, working combined with a low salary, which made mainstream workers unwilling to accept them, but which the informants did because they had no other option at the time. The chances of securing these jobs, they claimed, would have been much smaller had the job tasks not demanded an immigrant worker.

Some observations on the possible effect of discrimination on the occupational attainment of the informants are relevant here as well. The data suggest that about 90 percent of all the informants’ jobs were concentrated in the low-prestige sectors of the labour market, the restaurant and catering sectors being the most common. Low-status employment was prevalent not only among informants with low educational backgrounds, but also among highly-educated individuals. The pattern of low-status and incommensurate employment still persisted when factors conducive to occupational mobility, including the amount of locally-accumulated work experience, proficiency in the Finnish language, and length of residence, were taken into account. It is difficult to establish a straightforward relationship between discrimination and the confinement of the informants to low-prestige sectors as such. The excerpt of one well-educated informant given below, nevertheless, offers some idea of the long-term impact discrimination may have exerted on informants’ occupational attainment and on structuring certain types of employment careers among them:

The observations from the data also reveal that the informants’ networks were largely composed of ethnic ties and were primarily characterised by low socio-economic attributes. Around 80 percent of all the close ties on which the informants relied for various types of assistance were Pakistani and Indian, of which about three-quarters of them had jobs of low occupational prestige. The exclusionary mechanisms prevailing in the job market not only may have contributed to low occupational attainment of informants by confining them to low-prestige occupations, but also indirectly may have led to the structuring of ethnically-dominated networks among them. This is so because, when faced with discrimination, immigrants tend to rely more on their ethnic community in finding employment opportunities. However, a narrowly restricted interaction within the ethnic community, apart from potentially leading to the acquisition of low-status jobs, further reduces interaction with the mainstream society, which in turn facilitates the formation and strengthening of resource-deficient social networks among immigrants.

Interaction with the mainstream society is vital not only from the perspective of attaining indispensable cultural knowledge, language skills, and familiarity with the institutions of the new society but also in terms of gaining access to networks of better socio-economic status. This is because the ethnic group generally cannot provide employment chances situated higher on the occupational hierarchy. This may be particularly true in the case of Finland, where increased immigration is a recent phenomenon, and which lacks large viable ethnic communities that could provide their members with a more diverse range of opportunities. The empirical observations from the data add credence to this assertion: the acquisition of nearly all of the high-skilled jobs was facilitated by Finnish contacts.

There is relatively little systematic information on the job-search strategies of immigrants and on the role of their social networks in entering the job market in Finland. This article is an attempt to fill this gap. The findings of this study reflect that immigrants relied extensively on their social networks in the acquisition of employment opportunities in the Finnish labour market. This evidence is instructive in that, despite the presence of an extensive system of public employment agencies in Finland and the easy access this formal channel offers to job seekers regarding information about new vacancies, social networks seem to play as effective a role as they do in the USA with no public employment agency. The importance of personal networks for immigrants remained significant in the diffusion and provision of vital job information throughout their occupational histories. The role of personal networks was particularly crucial in the immediate post-immigration period as they lacked locally-gained human capital. Generally, immigrants’ strong ties including ethnic friends and kin were their chief sources of help, who represented a form of social capital on which they could rely in an effort to improve their socio-economic situation in the new society.

The empirical observations gained in this study on the extensive reliance of job seekers on their networks in connecting with work, on the one hand, reflect the sociocultural construction of the labour market: how economic action is embedded in other social processes (Granovetter 1974), rather than driven by just market rules of supply and demand, and human capital, as often claimed by certain conceptual paradigms such as neoclassical and human capital theories. Also, job-finding behaviour and recruitment practices are more than rational economic processes that are deeply structured by other social processes which closely constrain and determine their course and results (ibid.). On the other hand, they draw attention to the fact that such reliance on ethnically-dominated networks may have been promoted by discrimination prevailing in the job market that discouraged immigrants from seeking employment through formal channels of job information. Informants often perceived discrimination as depressing their occupational attainment despite their personal credentials by confining them to low-prestige occupations. Reliance on social networks relatively did not help them acquire better-status occupations, as the contacts were themselves concentrated in low-prestige jobs. Therefore, while the role of networks in forging links with the world of work has come out quite unequivocally as a precious resource-opportunity structure in this study, access to employment opportunities through formal channels is unquestionably also imperative. Besides constituting an important indicator of the acceptance and equitable life chances of immigrants in the new society, formal channels also offer a source of information about a diverse range of opportunities of varying socio-economic characteristics that are not necessarily accessible through immigrant contact networks.

References to labour market discrimination frequently made by the informants in the interviews further suggest that, notwithstanding the fact that the possession of human capital is essential for immigrants’ successful labour market integration, without considering the significance of the sociocultural and political context in which the labour markets operate, efforts aimed at creating equal employment opportunities for immigrants and vulnerable social groups are unlikely to bear fruit. In Finland, spurred by concerns of their eventual employability, authorities concerned with the integration of immigrants have taken several initiatives to facilitate their transition into the labour market. These efforts have commonly started off by directing language and vocational training at immigrants. Although these measures are self-evidently very important in improving their labour market situation, these initiatives have not generally proved sufficient to achieve the objectives.

The disparity between expectations and achievements in terms of initiative taken may also lie in the fact that the particular efforts have paid insufficient attention to the sociocultural dimension of the labour market, namely the exclusionary practices of employers who effectively control the job vacancies. As empirical evidence from several European and North American countries (e.g., Parekh 2000; Zegers de Beijl 2000; Rydgren 2004) also suggests, measures directed only at immigrants will achieve fewer anticipated goals unless accompanied by effective measures directed at the gatekeepers of the job market, who Paananen (1999) reported in his study as exercising their own ‘small-scale foreign policy’ in Finland. A change in their behaviour and raising their level of reflexivity may contribute more meaningfully to ameliorating the employment situation of immigrants than directing various measures at them as such. The role of discriminatory practices in the job market is important not only in shaping immigrants’ employment opportunities but also with respect to their occupational mobility. How does the interaction between the socioeconomic characteristics and ethnicity of the contact affect status attainment? A high-status contact of ethnic origin may not be as valuable in providing access to better-status jobs as a high-status contact of the mainstream society. Future research would therefore benefit this area by exploring the interaction impact of structural constraints, social networks’ characteristics and individual characteristics on immigrants’ job mobility in their new country.

If social networks serve as one of the effective means whereby immigrants gain job opportunities in the new country as this study suggests, what implications do these findings constitute for policy approaches committed to improving immigrants’ employment situation and prospects? One idea would be to introduce measures that would help to expand the networks of immigrants, and especially those efforts that would enhance their connections with the mainstream society. However, disadvantages in terms of networks of friends and acquaintances are difficult to surmount through policies. Although networks are an important source of employment opportunities and social mobility, effective networks in real life are rarely based on utilitarian premises. Instead, they are rooted in the structure of ongoing social relations encompassing various spheres of social life, which means that relationships formed in one context may yield benefits in other contexts, for instance in the acquisition of job information. In fact, relations perceived as formed on utilitarian grounds have the potential to seriously backfire rather than to bring in any benefits. The creation of social networks and the expansion of individual relations to various social contexts, therefore, are tasks that official policies cannot be expected to be addressing.

What, then, would help to improve the situation of immigrants in the labour market? Regulations aimed at combating discrimination and promoting equal-opportunity policies, and introducing language and vocational-training initiatives are some of the ways of improving the employment situation of immigrants at the governmental level. However, the concept of the effective and meaningful integration of immigrants extends well beyond the realms of government institutions, as it is enmeshed in a complex set of factors in society in which ethnicity, entrenched traditions, and existing sociocultural hierarchies play an important role in determining the opportunities of minorities and various immigrant groups. Successful integration is a two-way process: not only do immigrants adapt to the host society by learning its language, culture, and customs, but the host society also adapts to the immigrants by opening itself to their culture and by accommodating differences. The various language and vocational-training measures enacted will thus be prevented from attaining their full potential in the absence of a change in attitudes towards immigrants in society at large. Structural openness would create a tolerant environment that would allow meaningful interaction between immigrants and mainstream society at the micro-level. This, in turn, would facilitate the formation of multi-dimensional relationships and networks that would further create more diverse employment opportunities for immigrants in their new society.

This research was funded by the Otto A. Malm Foundation.

Akhlaq Ahmad is a post-doctoral researcher in the Department of Social Research, University of Helsinki, Finland. His research interests cover immigrants' labour market integration, discrimination and social networks.