Vocabularies of motive among employers conducting criminal background checks

Abstract

The use of criminal records in the recruitment process has increased dramatically in Sweden over the past decade. The article analyses the various vocabularies of motive used to account for the practice in order to examine how it is justified and legitimized by those resorting to it: employers, representatives of employers’ organizations and union representatives in the business sector who endorse criminal background checks as part of the employee screening processes. The dominant vocabulary as articulated in the interviews appealed to notions of corporate risk and security. However, it was contested by an alternative vocabulary focusing on an individual’s right to privacy and reintegration, and by a third vocabulary centring on the notion of trust. To stress their character as moral actors, employers who checked criminal records avoided relying on the risk vocabulary alone. They tended in addition to incorporate elements of the rights vocabulary to justify their actions against the values embodied in it. Even though the results of the study suggest parallels between the increase in the use of criminal background checks and a shift toward a ‘control society’ or a ‘society of exclusion’, they also show that legal rights of the individual still inform the justificatory discourses at least in Sweden.