The research presented in this paper investigates how vocational competence is recognized, valued, and transformed within immigrant integration processes in Sweden. Through the biographical case of “Amir,” a car mechanic who migrated from the Middle East and rebuilt his career in a Swedish automotive workshop, the study applies Pierre Bourdieu’s conceptual triad—capital, habitus, and field—to vocational education and training (VET). Using restorative hermeneutics and narrative analysis, the research traces how Amir’s embodied cultural capital—his practical know-how, diagnostic intuition, and workshop ethos—intersects with the institutional demands of Swedish VET, where evidence-based documentation, linguistic fluency, and certification shape professional legitimacy. The paper shows how immigrant workers translate and convert their pre-migration capital portfolios within a new socio-institutional field, revealing that competence is not an individual attribute but a social relation mediated by recognition. Amir’s trajectory illustrates the cumulative conversion of embodied, linguistic, social, and symbolic capital, resulting in the reconstruction of professional identity and belonging. By situating this analysis within the literature on vocational capital and immigrant integration, the paper contributes to theoretical and policy discussions about equitable pathways in contemporary VET. It concludes with implications for pedagogical design, emphasizing mentor brokerage, language-embedded learning, and institutional scaffolds that enable capital conversion rather than assimilation. While the research focuses on Swedish context findings are relvant to other European national contexts particulalrly having significant migran population working in the automotive sector.

This study adopts a biographical and interpretive qualitative approach to examine how immigrant vocational workers reconstruct their professional identities through processes of recognition. Biographical research offers a means of connecting individual trajectories with wider social structures, capturing the dialectic between lived experience and institutional context (Alheit & Dausien, 2002; Merrill & West, 2009). In vocational education and training (VET), where learning often occurs through embodied and relational practices, narrative inquiry is particularly suited to revealing how meaning is made through everyday encounters (Goodson & Sikes, 2017). Amir’s case was selected not as a representative sample but as a critical case (Flyvbjerg, 2006) — one that illuminates broader mechanisms of capital conversion within immigrant integration.

Amir’s journey reveals that the heart of vocational learning lies not in the acquisition of techniques but in the pursuit of recognition—the moment when one’s competence becomes visible and valued by others. His transformation from a peripheral worker to a respected professional embodies the conversion of vocational capital through linguistic mastery, social trust, and institutional endorsement. Yet his story also exposes the fragility of recognition: it depends on fields willing to see beyond their own norms. In a global era of migration and labor mobility, the capacity of VET systems to recognize diverse capitals is both a moral and practical imperative. By designing pedagogies and policies that honor the multiplicity of vocational knowledge, societies can move toward what Honneth (2012) called a “recognitive order”—one where social freedom arises from mutual respect. Ultimately, the lesson of Amir’s case is that integration begins not with teaching newcomers what they lack, but with recognizing what they already know. When vocational systems learn to see that, they do more than integrate individuals—they renew their own fields.

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