Who Recruits and How? The Economic Expertise of Youth Integration Professionals

How do job placement specialists acquire knowledge of the markets, and do they put it to use? At deliberative committee meetings on the funding of youth integration projects, we observed the construction of a shared representation of the workings of local-level job markets. Transition-to-work professionals develop their economic expertise primarily from two sources to which they are professionally close: the young jobseekers themselves and the vocational training professionals. The unequal distribution of economic expertise is intensified by structural differences in the capacity to put it to use for each of the deliberative stakeholders.