Becoming Elite in an Egalitarian Context: Pathways to Law and Medicine Among Norway’s Second-Generation

This chapter examines the extent to which elite occupations such as medicine and law are open to ambitious second-generation individuals in Norway, with regard to both institutional access and social inclusion. We use population-wide registry data to study the share of second-generation individuals who have degrees in law and medicine and are working as lawyers and doctors. Drawing on 40 in-depth interviews with children of labour migrants who have managed to secure jobs as lawyers and medical doctors, we moreover explore the informants’ pathways to their current labour market positions and their experiences of both barriers and opportunities in their work contexts. Although medicine and law are elite fields characterized by occupational closure, both in their access policies and in their recruitment practices, second-generation individuals are overrepresented in both fields, especially in medicine. However, the qualitative data suggest that many have accessed these fields through second-chance options or alternative routes. Furthermore, although many informants are able to take advantage of their ethnic minority background in their working lives, some also experience the burden of feeling ‘out of place’ in work places traditionally reserved for majority individuals of elite social origins. The following chapter paints an optimistic picture of second-generation access to elite positions in institutional terms, while simultaneously suggesting that formal access does not necessarily protect against subtle processes of exclusion.