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Paper short abstract

Based on ethnographic research with employers and recruitment agencies in Romania, this paper examines how Institutional Whiteness is reproduced in labour recruitment from Southeast Asia through seemingly neutral criteria such as discipline, cultural fit, and adaptability.

Paper long abstract

This paper explores the everyday reproduction of Whiteness in labour regimes in post-socialist Europe. Drawing on qualitative interviews in construction, hospitality, and recruitment sectors, the paper examines how Whiteness operates as an implicit institutional norm shaping ideas of employability, integration, and “good work,” while remaining largely unspoken. Rather than being articulated through explicit racial categories, Whiteness emerges through seemingly neutral institutional criteria such as work ethic, discipline, cultural compatibility, hygiene, adaptability, and non-conflictuality. These criteria function as normative benchmarks against which Asian workers are evaluated and managed, while European norms of work, communication, and embodiment remain unmarked and universalized. Recruitment agencies play a key mediating role in translating racialized assumptions into technical, legal, and managerial practices, including screening procedures, cultural profiling, and narratives of suitability tied to hierarchy and compliance.

Situated in a post-socialist European context often framed as racially neutral and peripheral to colonial histories, the paper shows how Institutional Whiteness is reproduced through colorblind governance and pragmatic justifications related to labour shortages and market efficiency. Asian workers are constructed as temporary, compliant, and socially invisible solutions to structural labour gaps, while Whiteness functions as the taken-for-granted standard of sociality and professionalism. By approaching labour recruitment as a state-saturated ethnographic site where migration policy, market logics, and moral economies intersect, the paper demonstrates how racialized inequalities are sustained through ordinary institutional practices that present Whiteness as a taken-for-granted standard of sociality and professionalism, while shifting the burden of adaptation, endurance, and persistence onto migrant workers.