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What Makes People Targets: A Multi-Actor Study of How Ethnic Discrimination is Perceived, Tackled and Avoided

Project description

What makes people targets of ethnic discrimination?

Despite all efforts in recent years towards inclusion and equal rights, ethnic discrimination in European labour markets still exists and is hard to recognise: it is the result of decisions often made behind closed doors. Adopting a multi-actor perspective, the EU-funded TARGETS project seeks to understand the relational process through which discrimination claims are either seen as valid or contested. The project’s work will improve on current approaches that measure discrimination from gatekeepers’ and victims’ perspectives separately. Moreover, it will contribute to theory development on how supply-side behaviour during the job search process can counteract labour market inequalities.

Objective

Despite progressive anti-discrimination legislation and the popularity of diversity policies touted as the key to a culturally diverse workplace, discrimination of ethnic minorities in the labor market is remarkably persistent and pervasive. TARGETS integrates literature from sociology, social psychology, organization and sociolegal studies into a novel multi-actor and dynamic theoretical framework to examine what makes people targets of ethnic discrimination. Both conceptually and empirically, the key contribution of our approach is that we define and operationalize discrimination claims as, inherently, relational. We test the core proposition that relational claims-making is the key mechanism through which discrimination is perceived, legitimated or contested by multiple actors. We develop and test this theory at two levels of analysis. At the macro level, we map how structures and practices, such as anti-discrimination laws and diversity management policies, can confer or deny legitimacy to discrimination claims, in the workplace and courtroom. These structures may create an 'illusion of fairness' that reproduce durable inequalities in the distribution of organizational resources, such as access to jobs and career opportunities. We then zoom in on the micro-foundations of the claims-making process, focusing on its relational and dynamic nature, respectively. First, using an innovative research design, we pioneer the use of linked, multi-actor factorial survey experiments to capture the discrimination attributions made by multiple actors (targets, perpetrators, allies and bystanders), simultaneously. Second, we collect real-time longitudinal data on the job search strategies that ethnic minorities adopt to avoid becoming targets. Our dynamic approach improves on existing accounts that all too often treat them as passive labor market agents, and contributes to theory development on how supply-side behavior can counteract labor market inequalities.

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HORIZON-ERC - HORIZON ERC Grants

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(opens in new window) ERC-2021-STG

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Host institution

EUROPEAN UNIVERSITY INSTITUTE
Net EU contribution

Net EU financial contribution. The sum of money that the participant receives, deducted by the EU contribution to its linked third party. It considers the distribution of the EU financial contribution between direct beneficiaries of the project and other types of participants, like third-party participants.

€ 1 184 500,00
Address
VIA DEI ROCCETTINI 9
50014 Fiesole
Italy

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Region
Centro (IT) Toscana Firenze
Activity type
Higher or Secondary Education Establishments
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Total cost

The total costs incurred by this organisation to participate in the project, including direct and indirect costs. This amount is a subset of the overall project budget.

€ 1 184 500,00

Beneficiaries (2)

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