With increased mobility, rapid demographic change and the growing diversification of economic and cultural landscapes, the social integration of youth through school and the professions has come into unprecedented critical scrutiny across Europe. In parallel, interactional competence has been put in the forefront of educational research and policy as key to people’s adaptation to and membership in the ever-changing social world. The two focal objects of these debates, however, have so far been approached separately: What is the role of interactional competences in young people's pathways from education to work? To what degree do interactional competences function as catalysts for recognition and success, as a target of (often implicit) institutional mechanisms of evaluation? This project is designed as an interdisciplinary investigation into the dynamic relationship between young people’s interactional competences and the larger social institutions within which they operate. The project’s empirical focus is on a number of key moments in the social trajectories of young people (up to the age of 25): Obligatory and post-obligatory schooling, professional training, job interviews, speech therapy sessions and the first steps into work life. These represent institutionally defined, highly selective stepping-stones into the future, where interactional competences play a central role – whether officially recognized as such or not. Bringing together five research groups from applied linguistics, education sciences, psychology of work, sociology and speech therapy, the project addresses the following questions: - Legitimate competence: What are the concrete institutional demands and expectations that school and the professions put on young people's interactional competences? - Mechanisms of legitimization: What are the micro-mechanisms through which young people’s interactional competences are assessed in the very course of practical activities within the institutions, as part of larger (both overt and hidden) processes of social legitimization? - The social construction of the institutional order: How do these competences and the mechanisms of their legitimization in turn both shape and reflect social institutions and people's understanding of these? - (Dis)continuities between key moments of youths’ trajectories: What continuities and discontinuities exist between the institutional logics of assessment regarding young people’s interactional competences at key moments on their path towards the world of work and adulthood? A qualitative methodology is used to investigate the complex relation between young people's actual practices within the institutions, their enacted representations of institutional norms and the declared institutional policies. Focusing primarily on the micro-details of social interactions, the project offers empirically grounded knowledge about the concrete institutional conditions that shape young people’s access to the work market and to higher education. Its added value lies in addressing interactional competences in a way that transcends both the disciplinary and the empirical compartmentalization that generally characterizes the study of institutional practices. The findings are expected to offer significant input for future social and educational policies. The project enriches an interdisciplinary understanding of concepts that are fundamental to research in the human and social sciences, such as interactional competence, social representation and institution, and provides significant steps toward designing and implementing qualitative research methods that are intercompatible among the participating disciplines.