Ethnic Diversity and Labour Shortage
Rhetoric or Realism in the Swedish Context

Paper presented at the Metropolis conference, 13-17 November in Vancouver, Canada in the workshop "Creating Opportunities for Refugee Integration" by

Per Broomé
Research Manager
Institute for Population Economics
S-211 52 Malmö
Sweden

 

The paper is short version of a coming book by
Per Broomé, Reserch Manager, Institute for Population Economics, Malmö, Sweden
(per.broome@beiab.se)
Benny Carlson, Associate Professor, Economic history, Lund University, Sweden
(benny.carlson@ekh.lu.se)
Rolf Ohlsson, Professor, Economic history, Lund University, Sweden
(mailto:rolf.ohlsson@ekh.lu.se )

The book will be published in spring 2001 on SNS Förlag, P O Box 5629, S-114 86 Stockholm, (an english version will be available January 2001), www.sns.se.

 

Abstract

Sweden as many other EU countries are facing a demographic dilemma during the next couples of decades. Among other things the dilemma contains a decreasing work force due to low fertility in the population and high retirements from working life that could lead to labour shortages and constrained economic growth. Increased labour immigration is proposed in many instances both in Sweden and elswhere to counter-balance the negative effects of the dilemma.

The argument put forward in this paper is that to be able to increase immigration the immigrants must be able to integrate effectively into the work force, and in Sweden they have so far not been successful in this aspect.

The paper analysis the problem of integrating ethnic diversity into organisations comparing private and public organisations in order to distinguish important factors that hinders integration of immigrants. The analysis is done from two perspectives; first as an organisational normative discussion, if increased ethnic diversity is good or bad for organisations, secondly reporting some of the experiences of ethnic diversity is in Swedish organisations.

The paper points out that there remains a lot of work to be done to make the labour market function effectively integrating immigrants. The conlucions also rise some vital questions to actors in the private and public sphere about what has to be changed in order to make ethnic diversity work and an increased immigation to Sweden succesful in the future.

 

Introduction

Demographic threat and immigration

From a demographic standpoint Sweden is approaching a difficult situation which many observers believe will place great strains on the Swedish economy. Some pessimistic judges believe the country is almost on the point of demographic catastrophe. Childbirths are falling and will continue to do so for a long time hence. In the long run this is undermining the possibilities for providing acceptably for an ageing population that makes increasing demands on the nation's resources. Other more optimistic observers point out that we can soon reckon upon an increase in childbirths. They go on to argue that an ageing population will not necessarily entail a cost explosion in medical services and welfare.

Both pessimists and optimists, however, agree that demographic developments will bring economic strains. There are going to be too few in the labour force having to support too many pensioners. Should economic growth proceed at a relatively high level in future imbalances will also arise in the economy, bringing in their train a severe shortage of labour in certain sectors of the economy.

To open the frontiers to labour immigration is regarded by both pessimists and optimists as a conceivable solution to this future demographic dilemma. It is thought that the prerequisite for this to be able to take place is that the economy should already accept diversity and take advantage of the special skills which immigrants possess. It is also necessary to sweep away the discrimination against immigrants, which characterises the labour market at present.

Immigration as a solution to future labour shortage

On the threshold of the twentyfirst century, against the background of the demographic dilemma confronting Sweden, voices have been heard which arguing volubly in favour of opening the frontiers and returning to the type of labour immigration which was customary in the 1950s and 1960s. For preference the new immigrants should be young, creative, talented, well educated and in possession of the highest skills generally. They ought also to be capable of getting into productive work as directly and swiftly as possible after arrival in Sweden. The dynamic, cultural and intellectual diversity introduced via immigrants' participation in production is necessary, according to this argument, in order to meet the challenges represented by the so-called "new economy". New ideas, new modes of thought and new blood are needed so as to seize the new opportunities. To take advantage of the special and different skills which immigrants possess, the business and industrial world must learn to accept diversity. Ingrained ideas about foreign workers must be changed, fear of foreigners combated, discriminatory features currently existing on the labour market eliminated. This change of stance is regarded as a necessary condition for being able to import labour in future.

This line of argument ignores much of the reality in which we live. It therefore seems inadequately thought out and superficial. There are many reasons why labour immigration can hardly be viewed as a realistic solution to the problems created by demographic change.

1. Practically all industrialised countries are experiencing demographic changes similar to those in Sweden. Sweden does diverge in one favourable respect however. The birth rate rose to one of the highest in Europe during the years 1983-1990. Despite the fact that such a massive exit from the labour force is in going on, the numbers in the productive 20-64 years age-range, i.e. those called upon to support the ever-increasing numbers of pensioners, will be largely unchanged at any rate until 2012. In other words Sweden finds itself in a demographically favourable situation compared with other industrialised countries.

The really serious economic problems caused by demographic change will arise mainly after 2015. The low number of births from the mid-1990s onwards - since there is a delivery time of approximately 20-25 years from birth to labour market - give the result that the numbers then making their début on the labour market will be diminishing. The picture of demographic threat which has been painted is thus not all that immediate in Sweden.

2. On the other hand the demographic base for the labour force will shrink in most other industrialised countries, since childbearing has been at a low level throughout the 1990s. According to an OECD report, net immigration some years into the twentyfirst century needs to be 5-10 times greater than at present in order to maintain the present proportion of the industrial countries' adult populations in jobs at a constant level. For example, net immigration to Italy and Great Britain would in each case need to rise to 7-8 millions over a ten-year period in order to keep this level constant. The corresponding figures for the United States and Japan are 60 and 20 million respectively. One implication of this is that in the foreseeable future there is going to be fierce international competition over potential migrants. The Swedish nation is unlikely to be particularly strongly placed in this intensive competition. Several reasons why this is so can be adduced: climate, different customs of socialising and drinking, taxes, and most of all perhaps the fact that Sweden has not been particularly successful in integrating the immigrants already here into the labour market.

3. Whereas capital flows are unhindered between different countries via the electronic circuits of the financial networks, the mobility of labour between countries is sharply limited. Despite the fact that all institutional barriers have been abolished within the EU, the mobility of labour between member-countries is marginal. In 1993, only 2 per cent of the labour force was working in another country of the Union, a proportion which has remained unchanged for ten years. In all probability this results from the fact that living standards have been eavening out between the EU countries during recent decades. Therefore the language barriers and social costs of migrating are considerably greater than the relatively marginal economic benefits which the individual believes he can gain by moving. Most of the indications are that labour mobility in the EU will not become particularly great in the future either.

This applies in all probability even if an "eastward enlargement" of the EU takes place. In all probability labour immigration from Eastern Europe will be negligible, as appears, for example, from a study comparing the situation when Greece, Spain and Portugal joined the EU. The incorporation of these countries into the EU did not give rise to any notable increase of migration. There is therefore no reason to believe that an eastward enlargement of the EU would give rise to any large-scale migration effects.

The opportunities for labour to come to Europe from outside the EU are also severely limited because of legislation, institutional conditions on the labour market, language, culture and xenophobia. The latter has increased in recent years, important factors underlying the increase of anti-foreigner sentiment, exemplified most flagrantly by LePen and Haider, being the economic and social problems created by earlier immigration. There is nothing to suggest any change occurring these attitudes in future.

4. There are small niches for highly educated and specialised labour in which a global market has developed: research, certain technical and financial occupations, and entertainment, including sport. In fact these niches are growing, but they constitute only a negligible share of the market. In spite of the vigorous expansion of the IT sector, the current National Labour Market Board statistics (April 2000) reveal a considerably larger shortage of labour in traditional occupational categories such as care and welfare services than in the computer sector. The shortage of computer specialists only comes in twelfth place among other occupational categories.

5. Up to now we have only paid attention to the quantitative aspect. But there are also qualitative problems, for example with respect to the replacement of an old-established and experienced Swedish workforce on the point of retirement with considerably younger and relatively less productive immigrants. The latter consideration will apply at all events during a transitional period before the newcomers have learnt the Swedish language and acclimatised themselves to Swedish working conditions. Although American conditions are not directly comparable with Swedish, an American study does show that if we take account of differences in so-called human capital as regards language ability and skills, two immigrants would be needed to compensate for one Swedish-born worker leaving the workforce.

6. Strident demands for the frontiers to be opened to increased labour immigration stand in glaring contrast to the conditions currently prevailing on the Swedish labour market, with low labour participation, high unemployment and heavy dependence of immigrants on welfare benefits. Ethnic and cultural diversity has been experienced, especially during the 1990s, as a big economic and social problem. The problems of integrating the immigrants already in Sweden into the labour market probably constitute the most important argument against immigration as a solution to demographic problems in the future.

Rhetoric and reality

Fine words about diversity and its blessings, declarations that we ought to open the frontiers to more immigrants and take advantage of immigrants' special skills in order to meet the challenges of the "new economy", appear in the highest degree rhetorical and contradictory against the sombre background described above, with high unemployment, low employment, low incomes, much early retirement and heavy social welfare dependency among immigrants currently residing in Sweden.

Instead, what has been going on in the Swedish economy during the past twentyfive years is a process which has entailed a homogenisation of the Swedish labour force in which Swedishness has been reinforced. With a little exaggeration it could be argued that an ethnic cleansing has occurred, meaning that large immigrant groups have gradually been finding it increasingly difficult to gain entry to the labour market while other groups of immigrants have simultaneously been getting signed off from the workforce.

In the situation prevailing at present, therefore, increased immigration of labour appears to be a completely unrealistic solution to the demographic dilemma confronting Sweden unless there is first some solution to the problems with respect to opportunities for immigrants to gain access to the labour market, which have gradually been getting worse. What we ought to do is test what an acceptance of diversity would signify in such a context - but also investigate what risks are inherent in diversity.

Our discussion in this paper will revolve around the opportunities and risks of diversity in the workplace. We shall concentrate attention on that aspect of diversity which has to do with immigrants, that is to say the ethnic or cultural aspect of the matter. There are other aspects of diversity in the workplace which relate to age, sex, functional disability, sexual orientation and so forth. None of these can be considered in isolation from the others, but we shall still direct attention to the ethno-cultural aspect. Secondly, we shall adopt a producer perspective. What do the producers - firms, organisations and government agencies - have to gain or lose by increasing human diversity in their activities?

However, in doing this it is necessary to base oneself on reality rather than rhetoric. This rhetoric about the blessings of diversity has culled its ideas and impulses primarily from an American reality radically different at bottom from the Swedish. It is not until we take the forces and tendencies in the Swedish economy as basis, using these as the starting point for our analysis, that we can say anything about the true opportunities and risks of diversity.

The current labour market situation of immigrants

Before carrying out this analysis we shall touch briefly on the current labour market situation of immigrants. We shall use non-Nordic citizens as a perhaps excessively clear example of the labour market situation also prevailing for the much larger population group formed by persons resident in Sweden but born abroad.

 

Table: Non-Nordic citizens compared with total Swedish population in age range 16-64 years, annual average employment 1999, all employed of both sexes.

Activity	Employment	Non-Nordic citizens	%	Total population	%
Agriculture, forestry and fishery		1100	1	35300	1
Manufacturing, extraction of minerals and power production		21600	20	759600	19
Building construction		1800	2	179300	4
Trade and communications		16700	15	674000	17
Financial activities and services		11300	10	420000	10
Education and research		11700	11	339500	8
Care and welfare		17400	16	761800	19
Public sector etc (other)		1200	1	208100	5
Personal and cultural services		12200	11	254700	6
Entrepreneurs and assistants		13200	12	432300	11
No information		30	-	3300	-
Total employed		108500	100	4067900	100
Total population		238100	-	5580800	-
Labour force participation rate		-	45	-	73

Source: AKU Yearly averages 1999, adapted from Tables 3A and 54, SCB

In the above table we find the current employment of immigrants of working age between 16 and 64 with non-Nordic citizenship. There are about 238 100 persons to be compared with about 370 000 foreign citizens and 1000 000 foreign born It is found that of these 238 100 persons, 108 500 are in jobs, i.e. non-Nordic citizens have a labour force participation rate of 45 per cent compared with the total Swedish rate of 73 per cent.

Immigrants' private and public sector employment respectively is derived from the table by adding together the categories, italicised in the table, with clear public sector dominance, viz "Care and welfare" and "Public sector activities etc". 17 per cent of non-Nordic citizens work in the public sector compared with 24 per cent of the total population, which means that immigrants are under-represented in public sector employment compared with total population. A report covering 24 per cent of government employees states that 11 per cent were of immigrant background compared with 20 per cent of the total population in the same age group, which strengthens the picture of under-representation of immigrants as a population group. Current studies in local authority districts (kommuner) also suggest a strong under-representation of immigrants in local authority organisations compared with their proportion of population in the district in question. (In these two studies the term immigrant includes both first and second generations.) In other words it can be reckoned that immigrants as a population group are under-represented in the public sector workforce to different degrees depending on which part of the public sector is under discussion. Statistically speaking, consequently, non-Nordic citizens work in the private sector to a greater degree than the total population.

What we are primarily discussing here is employment independent of the character of the job. For all that, the question of the job's content, degree of difficulty and level of skill in many ways plays a part in how organisations assess the opportunities and risks of diversity. As is shown in the table below, there are differences between the occupational distribution of non-Nordic citizens and that of total employment. By adding together the first three occupations, italicised in the table, it can be seen that 31 per cent of non-Nordic citizens have highly skilled occupations and that the corresponding percentage for total employment is 41 per cent. The big difference is in jobs requiring shorter college education.

Since the educational level of the populations compared can be placed on a par, even though the distribution of education among the populations is dissimilar and in many cases is higher in particular immigrant groups than in the Swedish-born group, this signifies under-exploitation of the skills of non-Nordic citizens.

Table: Non-Nordic citizens compared with total employment in age range 16-64 years, employment classified by occupation, both sexes, annual averages 1999.

Occupation	Employed	Non-Nordic citizens	%	Total employment	%
1. Management		3200	3	191200	5
2. Work requiring special theoretical proficiency		19700	18	646900	16
3. Work requiring shorter college education		11400	10	810400	20
4. Office and customer service		7100	7	436100	11
5. Service, care, sales		24500	23	746600	18
6. Agriculture, forestry, fishery		1500	1	97600	3
7. Handicrafts in building and manufacturing		9400	9	455400	11
8. Machine operative and transport work		15100	14	455700	11
9. Work not requiring special vocational training		16400	15	212100	5
No information		200	-	16900	-
Total		108500	100	4067900	100

Source: AKU Yearly average 1999, adaptation of Tables 3c and 55, SCB

This result is given further weight by studies suggesting that more than one half of immigrants who have jobs consider they are over-qualified for the job. The result is independent of whether the employer is in the private sector or public sector and is not surprising; on the contrary, it tends to confirm the statistical picture of incomplete exploitation of immigrants' skills and capabilities.

To sum up the current situation of immigrants on the labour market is characterised by low labour force participation rate, under-representation and under-exploitation of skill. It is observable, too, that the problems immigrants have in gaining entry to the labour market and staying there are not merely a cyclical economic phenomenon associated with the crisis years of the 1990s but also a structural phenomenon going back to the middle of the 1970s. In 1970, according to the population census statistics, foreign-born, foreign citizens and native Swedes had approximately similar labour force participation rates of around 85 per cent. The decreasing rate of labour participation is hence a continous phenomenon of ethnic homogenisation from the beginning of the 1970s until the end of 1990s.

Diversity in organisations

Good or bad?

The starting point for the discussion of the differences between private and public organisations is a normative organisational approach. Diversity may be a good thing: that is to say profitable, legitimising, image-creating, regarded as morally right or in some other way of value to the organisation. Or diversity may be a bad thing: that is to say it may entail increased costs, reduced profits, lost customers, damage the organisation's mode of functioning or bring other consequences of negative value. We do not aspire to settle the question whether opportunities or risks predominate in any particular case. It is probably up to every individual organisation representative and to those who can influence the organisation - customers/clients, employees and proprietors/managers - to make such judgements and arrive at the crucial decisions with regard to diversity. Our task, rather, is to put the ball into play, as it were, to bring the debate about diversity down to a sufficiently concrete level to facilitate dialogue and approaches to ethnic diversity in the workplace, in the organising of private firms and public agencies.

Viewed from an organisational perspective, the opportunities and risks of ethnic diversity are not uniform. A simple input-transformation-output model makes this clear. Opportunities and risks can be grouped by reference to input to the organisation (for example materials and personnel), by reference to the organisation's internal functions (for example division of labour, technology and management) and by reference to output from the organisation (for example goods and services). In other words the literature's basic recipe for ethnic diversity, can be sorted and analysed by reference to input, transformation and output. Input questions for an organisation concern the utilisation of a Larger Potential Workforce and a pool of talent to choose from, as a rule signifying increased opportunities for the organisation but hardly any risks. The transformation phase contains factors such as Increased Employee Loyalty, Increased Flexibility, Increased Creativity, Increased Openness, Increased Critical Scrutiny and Increased Knowledge Transference - factors which influence the organisation's mode of functioning and may be regarded as opportunities for raising the organisation's internal efficiency but which also entail risks. The organisation's output can be influenced favourably by the ethnic basic recipe's Better Customer Service, Increased Market Knowledge and Contact, and Better Image in Society, which as a rule does not generate any risks for the organisation. The risks with increased diversity within the organisation which are mentioned in the basic recipe, i.e. Communication Problems, Ethnocentrism and Stereotyping, Socio-Ethnic Stratification, Culture Clash, Test and Stress, Reduced Trust and Openness, Division into Organisation Cogs and Market Links, and Conflicts Disseminated Within the Firm, consist only of risks which affect the organisation's internal life.

The way these categories are arranged can be interpreted to mean that there are no risks with a larger potential workforce and a larger pool of talent. Underlying this view of the opportunities and risks of ethnic diversity are some simple observations. An individual organisation has no possibility of directly influencing diversity on the labour market as a whole, only of being influenced. The risk that an individual organisation runs if it intends to remain ethnically homogeneous is of selecting from a smaller supply of labour or a smaller pool of talent. For the majority of organisations, which of course are small, such a risk must be regarded as relatively little, as the net labour market supply changes slowly and a sufficient labour supply exists from the majority population. For large organisations, for entire branches or sectors of the economy, on the other hand, the analysis works out quite differently.

As regards the opportunities and risks, which influence the internal life of the organisation, its way of functioning and working, there is a palpable parallelism between opportunities and risks. On the one hand increased flexibility, creativity, openness, criticism and knowledge transference; on the other, communication problems, ethnocentrism, ethnic and social stratification, culture clash, stress and diminished security. Organisations endeavour to control their internal lives in relation to conditions in the outside world. The control may be overdone, tending to bring about stagnation through leaving too little space for experiment and development. In a situation where ideas are at a standstill, for example, the organisation endeavours first to break the standstill by creating increased space within itself to achieve some desired development, which simultaneously exposes the organisation to risks of failed experiments and unsuccessful recruitment. One means of creating such space may be to increase ethnic diversity in the organisation. But not all organisations find themselves in standstill situations. Many have increased profits, increased market shares and the conquest of new markets as their first priority. In such organisations or situations the risks of communication problems, culture clashes, unnecessary stress and diminished trust resulting from ethnic diversity are avoided. The benefits of ethnic diversity will then appear less important. Another well-documented phenomenon is that organisations, which are expansive in personnel terms, wish to control ethnic diversity by segmenting employees according to ethnic affiliation. The risks attached to diversity are evaded through ethnic segmentation or division of labour, but the dynamic opportunities are missed at the same time. A sector, a branch or an individual organisation may accordingly evaluate the opportunities and risks of ethnic diversity quite differently depending on the view of its own situation and thus the prerequisites for and management of increased diversity in its own organisation.

As regards the output effect of the diversity recipe in the form of better customer service and increased market capacity, it is hard to see any risks for individual organisations or larger economic aggregates. On the other hand individual organisations may evaluate the opportunities quite differently depending on which ethnic market they are operating in and contemplating operating in at future times, and in what way it is thought best to cultivate different ethnic markets. In such deliberations account must be taken of the possible risks of Loss of Old Customers/Clients. We shall now discuss how firstly normative and secondly empirical evaluations of opportunities and risks may turn out in the private and public sectors of the Swedish environment respectively.

PRIVATE VERSUS PUBLIC SECTOR

The variety among private and public sector organisations respectively is great. This is a matter of the nature of the activity, there being big differences, for example, between activities such as defence, research and childcare under public management and between activities such as ballbearing manufacturing, IT and cleaning services in the private sector. In many cases there are overlapping activities, and in many others there is organisation in hybrid forms and so-called privatisation of public activity, in which differences are of ownership and have nothing to do with the activity's nature or organisational form. Although the differences may seem greater between different activities within a sector than between the sectors and there are certain resemblances in the way private and public employers relate to immigrants, nevertheless there are also crucial organisational dissimilarities which make it interesting to distinguish between them in any discussion of the opportunities and risks of diversity. In other words the question is how private and public organisations respectively react/resoind to ethnic diversity in the world around them. Three terms are central to any discussion of organisational sector differences touching on diversity and integration of immigrants: boundary control, inertia and ruthlessness of organisations.

Boundary control

The boundaries of public sector organisations are controlled mainly by the heads of the organisation and in the final analysis by the state. The existing institutions, laws and rules are followed, and the work consists of performing tasks and implementing directives, laws and rules as commanded by the state. The boundaries of private organisations are controlled mainly by the market. The relevant institutions, laws and rules are followed, but the work itself is a self-appointed task. Consequently what happens is that public sector organisations tend to display a leaning towards the political powers-that-be in their attitudes while private organisations tend to be regulated by the market. The approach to ethnic diversity and integration probably does not deviate from this pattern. Public sector organisations rely on directives on the subject of diversity and integration while private firms endeavour to fit in with events and expectations on the market. Irrespective of sector affiliation, organisations avoid breaking existing laws concerning discrimination against ethnic minorities.

The term critical mass, to take one example of the above argument, has different meaning for public and private organisations respectively: political critical mass differs from private critical mass. Political critical mass may be illustrated by geographical concentrations of immigrants with problems which trigger local public measures to promote integration, such as the current "metropolitan programme", as it is called, introduced in selected parts of Stockholm, Malmö, Gothenburg and other cities. An identifiable ethnic group big enough to have an impact on a private company via the market can illustrate market critical mass. The relatively small ethnic groups in Sweden explain to a certain extent why so few firms in Sweden do little or nothing about ethnic diversity.

The control mechanisms in the respective sectors also have an influence on which strategies for diversity predominate in the public and private sector organisations respectively (although such formal strategies are relatively unusual so far). The strategies or rather plans in public sector organisations tend to be worded in accordance with the discrimination and justice paradigm and are characterised by words such as equality, justice, cultural diversity, risk-avoidance and the motto "Do unto others as you would have them do to you". The reason for this is that the guidelines for diversity are formulated by political actors, who also exercise control over the public sector organisations, and as a rule formulate their wordings in the diversity field in discrimination-and-justice terms. The strategies of private organisations tend to work in terms of the access and legitimacy paradigm using wordings such as difference, resources, opportunities and the motto "Do unto others as they would want you to do to them". The reason for this is that business actors firstly try to satisfy the market's interest in diversity and exploit its opportunities, and secondly endeavour to avoid infringing the discrimination paradigm. Any third paradigm focusing on the opportunities inherent in internal organisational factors, such as creativity or increased learning from ethnic diversity is of no interest in the choice of strategy by politically-controlled and market-controlled organisations. A more plausible conclusion concerning the internal organisational factors associated with ethnic diversity is to regard them as a part of a tactic for implementing the strategies. That is to say that an organisation, which wishes to establish an ethnic diversity strategy must manage the internal organisational opportunities and risks of diversity in the organisation's transformation process.

Inertia

Organisations' reactions to changes in the outside world do not happen instantly; inertia in the reactions contained in responses to the outside world's proposals is the norm. Of course inertia of reaction is susceptible of a good deal of quite rational explanations, one being as that an organisation has to have time to analyse changes in the surrounding world and find a suitable reaction. However, inertia also has less rational motives, as when it can be regarded as resistance to change rather than rational adjustment. In private organisations loyalty to customers and employees is cited as ground for such inertia, while in public sector organisations it is civil servant power that is cited. In the private sector it may mean that a temporarily achieved monopoly makes the organisation "lazy"; the organisation freewheels on its monopoly and those responsible share the surplus profits without preparing to meet future competition. The monopoly may consist of a special position on the product market and/or the factor market: the loyalty of customers and workforce is consumed slowly. In the public sector, officials can ignore changes in the outside world which are politically unwelcome or delay adaptation which is politically desirable but appears mistaken, unpleasant or difficult of implementation. Just as in the private sector, this can apply both to the public sector's range of products and to its procurement of factors. Adaptation to increased ethnic diversity in society can be delayed in this way by inertia in both public and private organisations, but for different reasons.

Ruthlessness

Ruthlessness or implacability of organisations is not a malfunction of the same type as resistance/inertia in the face of change. Ruthlessness is a consequence, rather, of a society, which is dominated by actors in the form of organisations. Non-organised persons, that is to say you and I as individuals, are ignored by organisations. The interests of organisations thus diverge from our interests as individuals inasmuch as they are narrower, more intensive, more refined and single-track. The dominance of organisations in our society has effects on both the integration of immigrants and the ethnic diversity of the organisations. An immigrant without a network will inexorably become either an employee of an organisation and/or the client of an organisation. There is no individual third way in a modern organised society apart from a business of one's own, usually small-scale. As an employee without a network in an organisation I am weak and have to put up with it that my individual interests are difficult to assert. As a client I am weak by definition and have extreme difficulty in getting my own individual claims met. The majority of individuals from ethnic minorities will accordingly find themselves in inexorable client-dependence on the public sector organisations or adapt themselves as over-qualified employees of private and public organisations.

The Swedish environment offers, in addition to more general differences between public sector and private sector of the above-mentioned character, distinctive features, which are of interest with reference to the development of ethnic diversity in both public and private organisations. One of these features is the relative size of the public sector in Sweden, where about one person in three is employed in the public service. Besides this, Sweden has historically been characterised by a strong central power, and this is the case even today. Many business firms in Sweden have relatively lengthy organisational experience of immigrants as labour, even though most of the "immigrant-packed" firms in goods production have been cutting jobs for several decades. The majority of public sector organisations have greater experience of immigrants as clients, patients, students etc. Both the special Swedish conditions and the more general situation of organisations in private and public sectors will be of interest when we now turn the spotlight on the respective sectors.

PRIVATE SECTOR

Analysis of input variables

Ethnic diversity of the supply of labour can play a part in private firms' recruitment. Big firms with large-scale national recruiting gain by exploiting the whole of the labour supply. Any limitation to certain ethnic groups means of course that recruitment is suboptimised, which probably signifies competitive disadvantages in the long run. Small firms, with demand limited geographically and in terms of skill, are unable to reap the same profits from the ethnically diverse supply. There are exceptions to this, as witness the example of Gnosjö below, which shows that if many small firms function as a cluster, a network, they may be open to a much larger part of the labour market than might be expected, which favours mobile groups among immigrants.

Growing firms have a special interest in looking at the whole of the ethnically diverse market. Growing firms not only have need of labour in an immediate sense but also have a need to equip themselves for growth by finding suitable persons to form a pool or labour reserve for future needs. Firms with stationary or declining production are less interested in the supply of labour, having a surplus of personnel if anything. In certain situations requiring reform of the firm's production or production apparatus it is a matter of wanting to get rid of old skills and bring in new, which increases the demand for personnel with skills different from those already available. In a situation with such recruitment requirements, companies search for new skills and are open to try out larger segments of the labour market supply than they would normally do.

It is hard to conceive that ethnic diversity on the labour market could be a disadvantage for any firm which determines its own recruiting. In times of severe labour shortage this leads to demands from the private sector of the economy for labour immigration, as we now see examplified in the Swedish debate, and thus to increased ethnic diversity.

Analysis of transformation variables

Which firms or parts of a firm have need of increased creativity, increased critical scrutiny, increased flexibility, increased knowledge transference and other possible effects of ethnic diversity of the workforce? It first has to be realised that the good aspects of ethnic diversity do not come alone but are always accompanied by the more risky aspects of diversity, such as increased conflicts, worse communication, diminished security and openness, culture clashes and stress. Firms accordingly weigh the good against the bad, which many times turns out to the disadvantage of ethnic diversity.

Least sensitive to ethnic diversity is the production of goods. This has a high degree of uniformity of production even though it takes place today in small series or even adapted to the customer (mass customisation) and in processes governed by computers.The risks with the negative aspects of diversity of staff are therefore relatively small, since the need for communication on the job is limited. But the benefits are relatively small too. Goods production is determined for the most part by the given production process and affords no scope for creative change in the short term. Work-team organisation in goods production is intended merely to guide and control processes and to avoid deviation from a quantitatively and qualitatively determined goal. Improvements and creative group decisionmaking therefore do not form dominant parts of the production process even though certain decisionmaking has been pushed further down the organisation in Sweden than elsewhere and left to work teams.

In the short term, service production involves a higher degree of adaptation to the customer/outside world compared with goods production. Much service production aims, like goods production, for a uniform production process - Macdonaldisation - but in much of service production, meeting with and adapting to the customer affords scope for creativity both at the immediate moment and in an ongoing process of change and improvement, for example in activities such as education and training, care, counselling etc.

Entrepreneurs in service production therefore evaluate the diversity package of opportunities and risks more closely than entrepreneurs in goods production do. In many firms in the service sector there is a striving for different types of work-team organisation similar to that, which occurs in goods production. The motive for this is more complex and varied than in goods production. For example, there is a desire to create self-control of the work and its results through observation and discussion within the work team. Work-team organisation is supposed to facilitate guidance and management of the service by making use of the team's cultural and creative capabilities. Deliberation over the work team's composition is therefore a more important issue to the service-producing than to the goods-producing firm, deliberation in which the need for the opportunities of ethnic diversity is weighed against the risks involved.

Analysis of output variables

Better customer contact and increased market knowledge can be effects of increased ethnic diversity in a firm. Large Swedish companies do not seem to regard this as a possibility as far as their export markets are concerned. One reason for this is that most large Swedish companies are entirely dominated by Swedish managers and salesmen, while almost all the immigrants in these firms work on the production side, "on the shop floor". No candidates for managerial or sales posts are being nurtured at all. On the other hand there are large Swedish service firms which have begun to notice immigrants as a home market, for example Telia in services, Svenska Handelsbanken in banking services and Pressbyrån with newsstands. From the assortment of firms, which cultivate immigrants as a home market, it may be concluded that it is in service activities that opportunities for diversity are most clearly discernible. It has to do with the character of service activity. The service is often performed in direct contact with the customer, and success at the job is more dependent on the seller's knowledge of the customer and the customer's impression of the person who performs the service than is the case of producing goods.

A quite different aspect of diversity can be succinctly entitled the "pizza revolution" to denote the ability of immigrants to create or contribute to private sector niche enterprises. These are enterprises, which find a product niche with the help of some product entirely new to the Swedish market, as happened once upon a time with pizza and kebab; enterprises which find a market niche in which to become established - a taxi or newsstand business - with relatively simple means; enterprises which bring new products to Sweden from Asia or the Middle East, capable of competing with Swedish products or with other imports; enterprises which can help, through immigrants' contacts, to establish Swedish products in their countries of origin, e g. wooden place mats in Asia. As a rule niche enterprises are established with the help of fellow-countrymen, kinsfolk or family. They are therefore dependent firstly on a group of people, or a part of it, having a strategy for entrepreneurship, and secondly on an environment in Sweden which gives scope for small businesses. Diversity of economic life increases in the form of an increased number of ethnic niche enterprises as a result of immigrants' entrepreneurship, but the ethnic diversity of Swedish firms is not thereby increased.

PUBLIC SECTOR

Neither in public sector agencies nor private sector enterprises do particular individuals determine the opportunities and risks of diversity. It is the organisational conditions of the activity in question that set the determinative terms for diversity. It is a matter of the organisation's situation, driving forces, institutional conditions and culture. Differences in these factors as between public sector and private sector, which we discussed briefly earlier, influence the prerequisites of diversity in the sector in question. The outcome of an analysis of diversity factors in the public sector will be apparent from the following general analysis of organisational variables.

Analysis of input variables

Greater ethnic diversity offers the same opportunities to public sector organisations as to private firms. However, public organisations do not compete on a market, so that sub-optimising homogeneous Swedish recruitment does not have the same clear consequences for public organisation as for market market-dependent private firms. On the other hand, the public sector deviates from private firms by virtue of its unique and uniform ideology and governance. The unifying ideology is sometimes lent distinction by the honorific of "community sector", which, in the long run at least, is governed by democratic public discussion and the common values that emerge. If diversity can be established with a common content of this sort arrived at by mutual discussion, it implies in principle that all organisations in the public sector will be characterised and guided by these values. Government and Riksdag have a crucial responsibility in this discussion through the direct shaping of requirements and rules for the public sector's practical approach to diversity. In this instance the country is not to be governed by legislation only but by directives and commands to organisations in the public sector. To base recruitment on the entire labour force will then no longer be a debatable question but a necessity for public sector organisations.

Analysis of transformation variables

The diversity opportunities and risks for internal organisation seem more difficult to analyse and evaluate than they are with regard to input. There are public organisations involved in many different activities with changeable conditions. Public organisations offer services from cradle to grave. However, one starting point could be that most public sector activities have had a long-lasting monopoly position which has been eroded during the 90s both financially and in terms of jobs and age structure. In addition, Swedish ethnic homogeneity has been reinforced during the 90s because of job cuts and rationalisation. From such a perspective increased diversity appears to be desirable in the highest degree. Stick-in-the-mud public sector organisations would have much to gain from increased diversity. Increased creativity, increased openness to exchanges of opinion, critical scrutiny, increased knowledge-transference and increased flexibility for employees are the very things which a torpid business needs to trigger a revivification. In the situation in which the public sector finds itself, increased turnover of personnel could be regarded as an opportunity rather than a risk!

If the opportunities furnished by ethnic diversity seem good in public sector activities, the risks also seem plentiful. However, on inspection they seem to be outweighed as a rule by opportunities, or else substantially reduced by the character of the public sector organisation. The risks for the public sector consist chiefly of the possibility that the level of organisational competence achieved may fall because of ethnic and cultural heterogeneity. The idea being that the organisation is unable to discharge its duties competently when culture clashes and communication problems render the transfer of existing knowledge within the organisation more difficult. As against this there is the value of the skills, different perhaps from those customarily expected in Sweden, which immigrants bring and transfer, and which in many cases develop and improve. Another risk is loss of the sense of ideological fellowship, which pins on to public sector activities such honorific labels as the public service principle, secrecy of information, ideals of equality and justice, and solidarity. To a large extent, however, these ideological "values" are embodied in legislation, guided by rules and traditionally well rooted in public sector organisations, which makes it difficult for an organisation to deviate from them, regardless of the personnel involved. There is also a risk of loss of internal confidence - trust - within the organisation. Modern Swedish organisation entails increased decentralisation not only of the execution of duties but also of decisionmaking. A crucial condition of the success of this type of highly decentralised organisation is that great trust should prevail between levels of the organisation, between managers and staff and between colleagues. Increased ethnic heterogeneity implies a risk of ethnic segregation in the organisation, culture clashes, communication problems and so forth. This probably leads (at least initially) to a diminution of trust between individuals and levels within the organisation. The magnitude of the trust risk is dependent on the degree of decentralisation in the organisation - the higher the degree of decentralisation the higher the risk. The public sector organisations are guided by the rule of law, official service regulations and public control. From this standpoint the risk of diminished trust in the internal organisation of public sector activities generally seems limited and manageable.

At this point it is impossible to ignore the fact that public sector organisations are increasingly being "privatized" in consequence of, and as a solution to, their present stasis. With such developments going on the opportunities inherent in increased ethnic diversity can be exploited in the numerous enterprises being established at the same time as the risks attached to increased diversity are being limited by virtue of the growth of competition in the sector.

Analysis of output variables

It is not entirely simple to identify which public sector organisations diversity suits best concerning output. A rough breakdown of public sector business to make a mental note of would be the exercise of authority powers and provision of services respectively. What opportunities and risks are associated with increased ethnic diversity in output terms in the different types of public sector business - in providing services such as nursery school, health care, eldercare and in the exercise of authority powers such as social services and tax collection?

Where business is dominated by exercise of authority powers the chances of accommodating ethnic diversity in the organisation are good. Much of the work is single-handed, with well-defined duties and rules for carrying them out and relatively well defined clients. On the other hand, perhaps the gains from diversity are limited in exercising authority powers - creativity and critical scrutiny not being of course the first duty of the person doing the exercising. Nevertheless the ethnic diversity of the authority can form a model influencing other organisations and individuals in the community and creating goodwill and an attractive image for the organisation concerned as a by-product.

The provision of services such as welfare and health care can profit greatly from increased ethnic diversity of personnel. Eldercare is often cited as an example of this, in which empathy and an intuitive approach to the elderly count for more than language skills and formal knowledge. There is much client contact in the delivery of services, requiring creativity and openness at the point of encounter. This gives scope scope for the positive aspects of diversity: the clients' own diversity can be met with better knowledge of their circumstances, and the diversity of personnel can be utilised to find creative solutions for the client. On the other hand service activities also carry the risks inherent in the diversity recipe: culture clashes, communication failure and ethnic division of labour. A feature which appears more accentuated in the services field than in exercise of authority powers since service organisations are usually flatter, more heavily decentralised and organised on more work-team lines.

Some propositions

Before we turn to the actual experiences of ethnic diversity in Swedish private and public organisations let us summarise the notmative discussion so far. On the input side of organisations the opportunities of an ethnicly richer supply dominates and risks are hard to imagine. Labour shortage should be a strong force to diversity in organisations generally. Competition among private firms for the best personnel is a possible, but not compulsary driving force in private firms towards ethnic diveristy. Governement politics should be the major driving force in public, non-competitive, organisations.

Inside the organisational boundaries private firms had to take into account both oppurtunities and risks as a "package" and seek an optimal staff for different types of work and different types of work organisation. The choices are voluntary as long as they are not disriminating according to law. The same arguments can hold for public sector organisations, but as they are not competitive the diversity policies should be desinged and thoroughly implemented by the governement.

Growing ethnic markets are another strong argument for diversity in private firms. The same argument does hold for public organisations, but is weaker as their relations to clients are more from above and coercive.

EXPERIENCES

What are the experiences of opportunities and risks in the private sector?

The private sector has little uniformity from an organisational standpoint. It consists of many firms with different production, of different sizes and with different owners, and so forth. However, a good number of these firms have extensive experience of immigrant labour, both from the labour immigration of the 1950s and 1960s and the refugee immigration of later decades.

Large parts of the traditional manufacturing industries, which have employed many immigrant groups in their production, have been rationalised and transformed at an accelerating pace, both technically and in their work organisation, since the 1970s. During this period the number of immigrants and proportion of refugees who are in jobs have diminished. During the 1990s especially, rationalisation of business and industry became intensive, being pushed in many firms in the direction of severely slimmed-down, "anorexic" organisations. Another consequence of this, when immigrants were being dismissed from firms to a larger extent than native Swedish labour, was more ethnically homogeneous organisations. Other parts of the private sector have grown during the 1990s and are still growing fast. It is mainly the service and other sectors related to the "new economy" that is creating more jobs. But the experiences of the past are of importance when assessing immigrants' opportunities and risks in the present. The following citation illustrates some of these opportunities and risks as they appear in the private sector:

The enlargement of the labour supply resulting from immigration played a role in business firms' opportunities for recruiting personnel when labour shortages arose in the Swedish labour market. Experiences in this regard are positive:

"Our experiences are positive in the main. We would not have got through the 60s, 70s and 80s without the immigrants."

The risks attached to diversity are also part of business firms' experiences, and were a cause of frustration:

"There are a lot of problems with immigrants and they have increased with our new organisation. There are prayer-mats in some cupboard at the workplace. There are men who won't take orders from a female work leader. It is race-hate against Turks that I don't like. You need help yourself sometimes," confesses a work leader.

Lack of internal training of immigrant personnel and subsequent disqualification hit both immigrant and firm:

"A whole lot of the immigrants we took on in the 60s and 70s we didn't given enough development to, as regards language training for example. This costs us a lot. So nowadays we insist on Swedish, spoken and written, otherwise they don't get a job at Volvo."

Our interviews among private firms give no ground for believing that anyone there is thinking about the opportunities of making use of immigrants' cultural, social or linguistic experience. Neither is it common for anyone to regard immigrants themselves to be enriching the quality of service, the workplace or the native Swedish employees save in exceptional cases. The perceived competitive advantages of having immigrants are associated instead with their ability to provide service to their own ethnic groups, to their own countrymen in the Swedish market. For good or ill, there seems to be a propensity among Swedish employers to try to ignore an employee's ethnic background. On the other hand they refrain from exploiting the opportunities of diversity fully but also hope to avoid the risks. As is shown, for example, by the following citation, in which it is emphasised that individuals are judged on their merits:

"This is a well assorted firm. We have few problems with immigrants, although there are conflicts. But there is no policy for immigrants, we mix them according to their skill, but sometimes there is a Yugoslav shift of course. Perhaps we aren't multicultural, although we are international. Absolutely our best worker is a Yugoslav and has very high status. Our best engineer is Italian. You can't be a racist here; whichever way you turn there are immigrants."

Then what is it we expect of immigrants, since we obviously do not regard their culture-specific experiences as a plus except in service production focused on their countrymen in Sweden. The concentration on skill seems to be decisive in the private sector. Yet not only technical skill but, as has been discussed so often in recent years, social and linguistic competence, as appears from the following citation:

"There is less and less room for the traditional immigrant ... It is mainly in two fields, firstly social skill, the ability to work together with others and communicate in a natural way, secondly the ability to learn new methods and techniques ... that the most tangible change has taken place."

As far as can be judged the motives underlying the attitude of private business firms to immigrants are fairly self-serving as a rule. When there is a shortage of labour immigrants are used to advantage. When important skills are in demand, ethnic background is ignored and it is preferred to view all as professional individuals. In other words the primary motive of the private Swedish firm up to the present has mainly been to maintain production, not a diverse work force. There is an awareness of the "pizza revolution" in Swedish society, but there is difficulty about reaping the benefit of the opportunities it offers in the firm's less penetrable structures.

Diversity tested in many cases

Ethnic diversity of personnel has been put to the test by private firms ever since the 1950s. Ethnic niches have been developed in various occupational fields and in individual firms. The experience gained from these experiments in diversity obviously has a role to play in present and future diversity strategies in Sweden. Let us look at some examples, which may illuminate important aspects of these events in response to the questions: "What is it that has been tested?" and "What is the result of the trial?" The examples we shall discuss are a large corporation, SKF (Svenska Kullagerfabriken) of Gothenburg, business firms in the local authority district of Gnosjö, and ethnic niche enterprise.

SKF: This corporation has had numerous experiences, which in broad terms tally with those in other large goods-producing operations in Sweden. Here are some of the most important responses to the above questions.

SKF has given jobs to large numbers of immigrants since the 1950s, and there have been some periods when up to 40-50 per cent of the production workforce have been immigrants. The company therefore has substantial experience of the whole of Sweden's immigration period from the end of the Second World War to the present day. SKF believes that there are clear boundaries between immigrants and Swedes in the firm in spite of the common blue overalls. Such a boundary has to do with cultural distance; the greater the distance the harder to integrate at the workplace. Another boundary is the sharp distinction between workers and staff, a boundary also marking the distinction between Swedes and immigrants in the firm. The distinction between immigrants and Swedes has also denoted favouritism for Swedes in internal training.

The diversity experiment has turned out well in many ways. In times of labour shortage such as the 1960s and 1980s it has been possible to maintain production with the help of immigrants. The job, and proficiency at it, like the blue overall, has as a rule led the way to a certain degree of integration in the workplace.

But negative aspects show themselves too. Old immigrants who have missed internal training are the first to go when industrial reorganisation is taking place. Segregation into ethnic groups and sharp boundaries between workers and staff form powerful obstacles to integration in the workplace which take a very long time to change. Immigration during the 50s and 60s was different from that of the 80s. Immigrants of the 50s and 60s vintage stayed at SKF and became accepted. Those who were recruited during the 1980s have been made redundant relatively quickly except for the Vietnamese, who are regarded as capable workers. Responsibility for the redundancies among Iraqis, Iranians, Somalis and other groups is described as resting on themselves, their motives, education, traditions and interests, not on any fault of the company..

The recruitment of immigrants during the 1980s is regarded as a failure in SKF, as also is the lengthy period of lopsided selection for internal training, to the detriment of immigrants.

Gnosjö: The situation of immigrants on the Swedish labour market is very weak. There are gleams of light here and there, however. Where the "here" and "there" are located is apparent from the wide regional disparities in immigrants' employment levels in Sweden. One positive example is Gnosjö. There has been immigration to Gnosjö since the 60s, and 28 per cent of the town's inhabitants today have a foreign background. Employment in Gnosjö is high for immigrants as well. The Bosnians who arrived during the period 1992-94 may be cited as an example. Gnosjö's employment figures for this population group are 85 per cent of men and 60 per cent of women, compared with Stockholm's 35 and 21 per cent respectively, for example, or Malmö's 14 and 9 per cent.

There are several explanations of Gnosjö's successful workforce integration, including strong economic growth and a rapid expansion the district's business and industry even during the 1990s, a large element of manufacturing industry, and an efficiently functioning labour market based on the numerous small firms' networks and cooperation.

Gnosjö's immigration experiences have been good. As in the case of SKF, it is emphasised that without the influx of migrants, Gnosjö's business enterprises could not expand as they do. No really high risks or disadvantages of immigration are recorded at the present time. There is awareness that social integration takes time, that there are residential areas in which most inhabitants are immigrants, and that the immigrants have no political representatives on the district council. But there is also awareness that immigrants earn good money, purchase houses and choose to stay in the district.

The business firms in Gnosjö perceive one problem. They are aware that Gnosjö's manufacturing industries have a relatively low technical level. This has made it easy to employ immigrants even of low education and language ability. But as time goes on the technical level of many firms will have to rise, for example those which are subcontractors to large industrial corporations, and then the demand for employee skills will rise. Confronted with these developments, as in the example of SKF cited above and as a large part of Sweden's manufacturing industry has experienced, people in Gnosjö feel a degree of disquiet: how will they cope with the raising of the technical level and how will the necessary training be conducted? There is a realisation in Gnosjö that reorganisation of industry entails the risk that immigrants of poor education and limited language ability may find themselves being made redundant.

Niche enterprises: The desire of immigrants to establish their own businesses is not just a reaction to an unfavourable labour market situation. There are other driving forces, which coincide, to a large extent with those, which motivate Swedish entrepreneurs. It is a matter of a living entrepreneurial tradition, of models, advisers and practical possibilities, of access to resources such as low living costs, borrowing facilities, availability of partners and employees, and not least, daily help and support from family and kinsfolk. It appears that these conditions vary in strength among the different immigrant groups as they do between different groups with a Swedish background, which goes some way to explain the varying establishment frequencies to be found in different population groups. For many immigrant groups, self-employment is and will continue to be a vital factor in immigrant integration in Sweden.

Immigrants establish themselves mainly in retailing and restaurant businesses. These are labour-intensive activities which require relatively little branch familiarity and limited start-up capital, and which also do not make very high demands on knowledge of the Swedish language. Self-employment possibilities are only partly a function of expertise, availability of capital and so on. The crucial factor is what scopes the market offers for establishing a business in the district.

Certain immigrant groups have a high propensity to establish businesses compared with Swedes. This has made clear marks, visible and appreciated, on Swedish society: different food, different music, different restaurants, shops with different ranges of goods for sale - in other words an ethnic diversity of supply on many markets in Sweden. The diversity experiment has been so satisfactory that the question is whether there could not be more ethnic diversity in business enterprises; more and properly-established (as opposed to "black economy") domestic services, more imported goods, more products of ethnic culture, more ethnic exporting firms etc, if the scope for self-employment were enlarged and its legal forms simplified.

What are the experiences of pportunities and risks in the public sector?

During the 70s and 80s, public sector employment increased massively, only to come to a standstill in the 90s and then gradually diminish somewhat. The expansion mirrors an enlargement of public sector services. However, the sharp increase of employment in the public sector from the 70s onwards, in combination with large-scale immigration, did not lead to a corresponding increase of immigrants in jobs. Some of the reasons for the low employment of immigrants in the public sector emerge to light when one examines the way in which the sector assesses the opportunities and risks of ethnic diversity. The value-judgments below, with accompanying citations, tell us something about the public sector's attitude to ethnic diversity, which has an impact on the opportunities and risks of diversity in a future perspective:

Labour shortage makes ethnic diversity necessary and possible:

" There was a shortage of cleaners at the Landsting (county council offices) all through the 80s, so we had to take whatever we could get, in principle off the street. It was immigrants from all over the place. Usually we were able to form work teams from the same ethnic group so that communication with the many new ones was made easier."

Better service for immigrants:

"At social services we have hired a social secretary from Iran; she is competent and is able to help us to understand some of the immigrants' problems and the immigrant groups. It's good: our service to immigrants is getting better."

Immigrants are good as "diversity consultants":

"At our school we have taken on an after-school leisure assistant who is an immigrant. He is popular and plays a big part with our immigrant children and also for the climate at breaktimes and in school."

Immigrants can fill a vacuum:

"We have two male cleaners at nursery school who are immigrants. They are great with the children."

How to get pizza on the table and avoid interpreting costs:

"At the hospital we have 90 per cent immigrants in the kitchen. The spices that get into the bacon and beans are a bit odd at times, but it works fine now, creative multicultural meal preparation. We have quite a lot of medical staff who are immigrants as well, nurses and doctors, which is good because we're located in a big immigrant district. We don't need interpreters."

The motives for employing immigrants, if we summarise the interview replies, are that there is a shortage of labour, that better service can be given to immigrants, that there is an extra role to be played in improving the climate for immigrant children at school, that it is possible for a cleaner to perform a collateral "child-minding" function, that the product will become different and that the need for interpreters is avoided. And no doubt these motives are admirable. Yet up to now they have not led to extensive employment in the public sector. In spite of the massive expansion of jobs since the 1970s it has been possible to find Swedish-born persons for them, and despite the fact that it probably worsens the service to important client groups the number of immigrants in the organisation is kept down or else they are brought in at low level.

The internal organisational advantages of a diverse workforce are hardly given any prominence in the interviews. The opportunities to which the literature draws attention, such as increased flexibility, increased creativity, increased openness, critical scrutiny and increased knowledge-transference are touched on only in a few instances in passing, and more indirectly, if at all.

Nor do the responses in conversations with managers and personnel managers in local authority districts follow the templates in the literature for the opportunities afforded by diversity. Here is a rough selection from these interviews:

The customary example and attitude:

"It's good to have a woman immigrant on the eldercare work team. They often have a different and better attitude to getting old and how to look after old people. But not too many."

They ought to start from scratch:

"Immigrants can hardly reckon on getting jobs appropriate to their education or status in their homelands. If I went to Turkey I would hardly get a senior management job. I would have to start again. Learn Turkish, qualify again by starting a new career and so on. The same thing applies in Sweden. It doesn't pay to employ an immigrant in the public sector in Sweden if he can't speak Swedish well and wants to start in a low position."

There ought to be some form of compulsory labour:

"We have many unemployed immigrants in the municipality. We can't employ them as things are today. At the same time there are a lot of jobs in the district that don't get done, relatively simple jobs like cleaning, clearing the forest, care of old people etc. One possibility would be joint responsibility of residents in the district, including giving people tasks to do. A sort of third sector, with low wages, with a training element, doing urgent tasks that are a preparation for 'real jobs'."

I never thought of it:

"I have never thought on those lines, that the municipality should employ immigrants. About 28 per cent of our population are of foreign origin, but we (the municipality) haven't more than a handful of immigrants in jobs out of about 1100 head (municipality employees). On the other hand we have no unemployed immigrants and no strong expansion in the municipality either. But in the long run that's going to be a big question."

Speculations about the unknown may decide the issue:

"We were going to hire two Iraqi fellows a year or so ago. They were simply best. We had a whole lot of questionings among the staff about this. How will it go with Islamic men and Swedish women working together and suchlike. We stuck to our guns. Unfortunately they got jobs in their home districts and we had to take our second choice who were Swedish."

Integration is not on the agenda:

"We have no policy at all when it comes to employing immigrants. We have equality rules of course, but they don't apply to ethnicity and I don't know of any other rules. Nor is this discussed from an employer perspective at the municipality's management level, as far as I know."

The interview responses can be interpreted to mean that diversity of the workforce is hardly a question to which the local authority as employer devotes any time. No attention is paid to the opportunities of diversity in the work organisation, and in acute cases only the misgivings or risks people believe they know about are articulated. Since in many cases people have no experience of diversity in the workplace, these are mostly speculation.

The replies can also be interpreted to mean that the respondents look at the individuals' qualifications, not at their origins. In most instances this probably means that an immigrant has to start from the beginning again in Sweden, learn the language, obtain Swedish qualifications and commence a new, or perhaps a new-old, career.

One motive for diversity that is emphasised is the waste of resources entailed in joblessness. A conceivable measure of some kind of temporary compulsory work ought to be introduced at local authority level, where such an arrangement could be administered, or else that the waste and its negative consequences for society should be attacked in some other way.

Local authority managers do not invoke motives for diversity such as profitability, goodwill or ethical considerations or else they repudiate them. It is also fairly clear that there is a lack of guidance as regards the attitude to diversity in the workforce, both in the management function and the employer function: no thought has been given to the issue at all; political leaders seldom give clear directives; rhetoric and planning often seem to replace firm decisionmaking and concrete activities; there are no rules about diversity. The issue may be addressed or ignored as the individual sees fit -in the short run at least - or else handed over to the local authority officers responsible for personnel affairs, care being taken not to commit ethnically discriminatory acts in personnel matters.

Diversity untested in many cases

Diversity in the ethnic sense seems to be untested in the public sector organisations we have examined, these being mainly organisations at municipality level. In a way this is a paradox. Here in Sweden we have had a generous immigration policy (or rather a refugee policy perhaps) but no generous integration in that sector of the economy which is publicly owned and of which politicians are in charge. It is not the intention here to probe more deeply into the circumstances expressed by the paradox. But it may be observed that as integration is relatively untried in the public sector, there ought to be few concrete experiences telling against the opportunities inherent in an increase of ethnic diversity in the sector. To test out the possibilities of diversity and learn to manage its risks requires a new policy for the public sector organisations as employers. Politicians are the heads of public sector organisations and must state how diversity is to be introduced and how integration is to be created, which emerges with great clarity from the interviews with managers in the municipal sector.

Although ethnic diversity of personnel seems relatively untested in large parts of the public sector, obviously there are immigrants employed in public organisations, as we showed in the statistical snapshot above. Moreover, in a number of organisations the experiences have been adapted and made use of in practical integration work. The situation has been especially noticed during recent years and a substantial number of measures have been introduced to influence public sector organisations in the direction of integration of ethnic minorities. Integration measures include both the influencing of opinion by leading politicians, improved legislation and directives to public sector organisations. So far, however, these measures have not led to real progress, as is evidenced by criticisms emanating from such quarters as trade union organisations and the discrimination ombudsman.

Finally, let us show by means of a solitary but illuminating example from our studies in integration how the opportunities of diversity can be restricted in a public service business. An example which also illustrates the development over the last thirty years of barrier-building against integration in both public and private sectors. A bus company, publicly owned, describes its conditions of recruitment of bus drivers as follows:

In the 60s we required no driving licence but gave them training

In the 70s we required some sort of driving licence

In the late 70s we required a driving licence from one of 10 recognised countries

In the early 80s we required a Swedish driving licence

In the late 80s a Swedish driving licence and spoken Swedish

In the early 90s a Swedish driving licence, good Swedish and social skills

This is not an example showing that ethnic diversity has not been tried by the bus company (in fact the company hires many immigrants since the 60s and 70s when there was a shortage of drivers), merely one showing how a company's policy renders it difficult for increased diversity to establish itself in an organisation. It also says something about how criteria are utilised in order to get the personnel wanted in different workforce situations. Firstly it is evident that the requirement for documentation of technical qualifications to drive a car is made more stringent during the period in question, making it more difficult for an immigrant to get a job with the bus company. Secondly, the language proficiency requirement gradually becomes stiffer, which also makes it more difficult for the immigrant. Thirdly, in the early 90s a new social skills requirement appears which is difficult to interpret but will in all likelihood form a new obstacle to an immigrant seeking a job. Fourthly, there is an underlying criterion, which grows in rigour, viz. the requirement of Swedishness in documentation, in speech and writing, and finally in behaviour, which is probably the most difficult obstacle for an immigrant to overcome when applying for a job as a bus driver.

Conclusions

Some concluding final remarks can be made from the discussion and analysis in the paper. On the whole labour shortage seems to be a strong driving force on the input side for organisations to engage themselves in ethnic diversity. An increasing demand for labour in an organisation does not however open up for ethnic diversity in itself nor does an abundant supply of immigrants on the labour market.

The law against ethnic discrimination seems to have a limited effect on organisations´ interest to engage in managing diversity.

Organisations do not generally evaluate ethnic diversity, opportunities and risks, ex ante for their internal organisations. If they hire immigrants, and many do and have done, they consider the positive and negative sides of ethnic diversity ex post, a reactive behaviour. Organisations seam also to try to avoid risks with diversity. If they hire immigrants they use different means to minimize conflicts and other negative effects with diversity. The opportunities of diversity in the transformationprocess in organisations are on the whole neglected.

Growing ethnic markets is a rather strong motive on the output side for both private and public organisations to make the organisation more ethnic diverse - even if it this as a start is an isolated phenomenon in the organisation which as a rule leads to linking types of ethnic segmentation in the organisation.

There are quite a lot of differences between organisations in their approach to ethnic diversity. This is among other things due to their status as private or public and their differences in boundary control. Barriers to ethnic diversity exist in both private and public organisations, but for different reasons. In private firms the obstacles is partly a reaction on earlier experience and avoidance of anticipated problems of diversity. Lack of political management and implemented guidelines for diversity seam to be the major causes of hindrance to diversity in public oranisations.

Inertia is a cause to the slow integration of immigrants in both public and private organisations. Strong, rather independent public organisations do not immediately have to follow undemanded central politic wievs of ethnic diversity. Private organisations often lack the driving forces to engage in diversity, diversity does not pay, they just have to obey the laws of dicrimination.

The ruthlessness of organisations hinders diversity in organisations. It makes immigants to clients in the eyes of public organisations and a reserve labour force in the eyes of private organisations.

The future path for Swedish organisations will in the short run in some cases go in the direction of increased ethnic homogenisation, for example through the establishment of increased skill requirements and risk avoidance as the above example has illustrated. In other cases, political action, growth of ethnic markets and severe imbalance between supply and demand for labour will lead to recruitment of more ethnically diverse personnel. The question is, in the longer run, which moral standards and organisational behviour will emerge as a qonsequence of the demographic forces and political action. Will the road turn from refugee receiving to labour immigration and from toothless laws of discrimination to effective laws of equal opportunities? Will the public sector go ahead with ethnic diversity to show the private? Will the private sector become a playground for ambitious young Swedes and a few collegues from abroad who could match the rising competence requirements of private oranisations? Irrespective of the answers to those questions it is very clear that Sweden has to perform integration of immigrants into the work force much better than hitherto in order to be able to compete for new labour immigration in the future!

 

References

AKU Grundtabeller, Årsmedeltal 1999, SCB.

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