UNIVERSITY OF CALGARY

Empowerment and Conformity: An Ethnography of a Bridge-to-Work Program

for Immigrant Women

by

Leah Soveran

A THESIS

SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF GRADUATE STUDIES

IN PARTIAL FULFILMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE

DEGREE OF MASTER OF ARTS

DEPARTMENT OF SOCIOLOGY

CALGARY, ALBERTA

APRIL, 2011

© Leah Soveran 2011

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Abstract

This thesis examines a government-funded bridge-to-work program in Calgary, Alberta.

Delivered by a nonprofit immigrant-serving agency, the program is designed to help

immigrant women who have a background in accounting prepare for entry-level accounting

jobs and start rebuilding their careers in Canada. Drawing on institutional ethnography and

governmentality theory, the research uses participant observation and interviews to explore

how the work of program staff and participants is shaped by relations of ruling and

techniques of governance. The focus is on the self-formation work that participants are

invited to undertake in order to adapt themselves to Canadian work place expectations.

iii

Acknowledgements

First, I want to thank the program staff and participants who were instrumental to this

research. Thank you for talking with me, for being my friend, for opening up your work,

daily activities, your goals, and your struggles to my observations and questions. I enjoyed

my time with you immensely.

To my supervisor, Dr. Liza McCoy, your patience, kindness, careful attention to detail,

tireless edits, wisdom, and insight have been instrumental in getting me here. You believed

that I could do this when I doubted and gave me the courage to keep going. Thank you.

To my husband, Rhett, who was beside me through all the ups downs: excitement during

fieldwork, bewilderment during analysis, and the writing stage...I turn to one author’s

humorous observations of her writing process, as they reflect my own:

For the best part of two years, the book has been constantly in my space, whining,

stonewalling, refusing to play ball. I’ve been hating it, loving it, neglecting it;

threatening, cajoling, pleading, throwing it out with the bath water, retrieving it;

practicing tough love, bribery and suggesting it go play in traffic. Once I even told it I

wasn’t its real mother (Rosoff, 2010, http://www.megrosoff.co.uk).

And you, Rhett, were beside me through all of these stages, believing in me, convincing me

that I could do it, celebrating with me at each milestone. I couldn’t have done this without

your constant support and love. Thank you.

There are many friends and family who have given me support and shown me patience over

the last three years, I thank you.

Thank you to Dr. Gillian Ranson and Dr. Shibao Guo, who made up my committee with

Dr. McCoy, for taking the time to read my thesis and providing helpful feedback.

This research was funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of

Canada, the Queen Elizabeth II Scholarship and the Alberta Graduate Student Award.

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Table of Contents

Abstract.................................................................................................................................ii

Acknowledgements..............................................................................................................iii

Table of Contents.................................................................................................................iv

Chapter One: Introduction .................................................................................................. 1

Economic Immigrants and the Labour Market ............................................................... 2

Researcher’s Background ................................................................................................ 7

Research Project Overview ............................................................................................. 9

Coming Up .................................................................................................................... 12

Chapter Two: Research Context ....................................................................................... 14

Problematization of Immigrant Women and the Labour Force .................................... 14

Experienced Barriers & Strategies for Getting Past Them ........................................... 17

Immigrant Women and Family Life .............................................................................. 21

Integration/Assimilation, Multiculturalism and Discrimination ................................... 22

Governmentality Theory ............................................................................................... 25

Governmentality overview. ................................................................................... 26

Two axes: government and the self. ...................................................................... 26

Liberal, enterprising society. ................................................................................. 28

Governmentality and power. ................................................................................. 29

Institutional Ethnography .............................................................................................. 31

Standpoint .............................................................................................................. 31

Work ...................................................................................................................... 32

Institutional discourses .......................................................................................... 32

Ruling relations ...................................................................................................... 33

Research Questions ....................................................................................................... 34

Bracketing Concepts of Immigration Patterns .............................................................. 35

Chapter Three: Methods .................................................................................................... 37

Field of Study ................................................................................................................ 37

Interviews ...................................................................................................................... 38

Depth and detail. .................................................................................................... 39

Vivid and nuanced. ................................................................................................ 40

English as a second language ................................................................................ 40

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Transcription of interviews .................................................................................... 42

Observations .................................................................................................................. 45

Accounting classes ................................................................................................. 45

Classroom .............................................................................................................. 46

Observing their work ............................................................................................. 47

Writing up fieldnotes ............................................................................................. 48

Data Analysis ................................................................................................................ 49

Limitations ............................................................................................................. 51

Ethical Implications of Research ................................................................................... 52

Chapter Four: Program Information and Funding ........................................................ 54

Enhanced Language Training, Bridge-to-Work Project ............................................... 54

Relations of Accountability: Funders and Community ................................................. 56

Introduction to the Staff ................................................................................................ 59

Program Curriculum ...................................................................................................... 60

Technologies of Governance ......................................................................................... 61

Surveillance and self-reflection ............................................................................. 61

Logic model ........................................................................................................... 62

Tensions in Relations of Accountability ....................................................................... 63

Program outcomes: participants must be placed in work placements ................... 63

Program outcome: participants must find accounting jobs .................................... 64

Increased Participant Support: Steps to Meet Goals ..................................................... 66

Career counselling ................................................................................................. 67

Workshops ............................................................................................................. 67

Work placement Friday meet-ups .......................................................................... 68

Monetary aid for continued training ...................................................................... 68

Work of Selecting Students for Success ....................................................................... 69

Funders’ mandates ................................................................................................. 70

Program mandates ................................................................................................. 70

Subjective criteria .................................................................................................. 71

Introduction to the Participants ..................................................................................... 73

Chapter Five: The Work of Conformity ........................................................................... 84

A Typical Day ............................................................................................................... 84

Chapter Introduction ..................................................................................................... 86

Techniques of Governance – Program Activities ......................................................... 87

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Fitting In Culturally: “It is Important” .......................................................................... 87

Employment Counselling Discourse ............................................................................. 91

A note on conformity ............................................................................................. 91

Self-Work Required to “Fit In”: The Work of Conformity .......................................... 92

Self-presentation .................................................................................................... 93

Workplace values ................................................................................................... 95

Soft skills: appropriate interpersonal relationships and communication ............... 96

Positivity Discourse ....................................................................................................... 99

Self-presentation .................................................................................................. 100

Positive attitude and workplace behaviour .......................................................... 101

Positivity in communication ................................................................................ 102

The Women’s Self-Formation Work ........................................................................... 102

Chapter Six: The Labour Market and Workplace Organization ................................ 117

How to Access the Labour Market .............................................................................. 117

From bottom up: start at entry level .................................................................... 117

Specialize by gaining education and accounting designations ............................ 119

Know and use job search skills ............................................................................ 121

Make a plan to advance career ............................................................................. 125

Participants’ Responses to the Work of Accessing the Labour Market ...................... 127

Starting at entry-level difficult to accept ............................................................. 127

Starting at entry level makes sense ...................................................................... 128

Effects of the recession ........................................................................................ 130

Difficulty of marketing oneself when over-qualified .......................................... 133

Mixed responses to job search skills training ...................................................... 138

Making Visible the Labour Market & Workplace ...................................................... 140

Laws, regulations and work-life balance ............................................................. 140

Hierarchy ............................................................................................................. 143

Gender relations ................................................................................................... 144

Understanding the Labour Market and Workplace through Experience ..................... 148

Importance of culture and communication .......................................................... 148

Types of work placements ................................................................................... 149

Discussion of the placement experience .............................................................. 149

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Chapter Seven: Discussion and Conclusions .................................................................. 153

Funding Relations, Technologies of Governance, Discourses and the Institution ...... 153

Catching Up Ten Months Later ................................................................................... 158

Conformity, Neoliberalism and Assimilation ............................................................. 163

Conformity ........................................................................................................... 163

Neoliberalism ....................................................................................................... 165

Conformity and assimilation................................................................................ 166

Immigrant Women and Family Life ............................................................................ 168

Suggestions for Further Research ............................................................................... 169

References .......................................................................................................................... 173

Appendix A: Interview Topics ......................................................................................... 184

Appendix B: Logic Model Table ...................................................................................... 186

1

Chapter One: Introduction

A quick Google search for “Alberta immigration policy” directs you to the Government

of Alberta’s Employment and Immigration website’s policy page subtitled “Alberta looks

to immigrants to fill skill shortages” (Government of Alberta [GOA], 2010). In 2005, a

policy called “Supporting Immigrants and Immigration to Alberta” was enacted to help

attract and retain immigrants who would contribute to the Alberta skilled work force. The

policy states that “Over the past 20 years, Alberta’s economy has grown at an average

annual rate of 3.7%” and it is predicted that in the next ten years there could be a shortage

of approximately 100,000 skilled workers (GOA, 2005, p. 4). With this economic

backdrop, the policy has “four key strategic directions”, which are to support communities’

work in welcoming immigrants, increase the number of immigrants who decide to settle in

Alberta, expand the programs that help immigrants with settlement and integration, and

help immigrants access the labour market (GOA, 2005, p. 6).

The policy sets out strategies to achieve these directions, such as creating resources and

programs to 1) increase Albertans’ understanding of diversity and multiculturalism, 2)

market Alberta and the opportunities available in the province, 3) increase funding for

settlement and language services for immigrants, and 4) work with regulatory bodies to

create a system to access and recognize immigrants’ foreign qualifications and skills (GOA,

2005). This thesis examines a government-funded, bridge-to-work program in Calgary,

Alberta that falls under the third strategic direction, as it aims to help skilled and educated

immigrant women, who have a background in accounting, to access labour market

opportunities.

The program is provided by a not-for-profit immigrant serving agency funded by the

Canadian federal government and the province of Alberta. Through classroom-style

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training, the program is designed to give the women greater business English language

skills and information about the labour market and how to access it, which is followed by

an unpaid, entry-level work experience in the field of accounting. My research began by

using qualitative interviews and participant observation to examine the conscious work that

the staff and program participants did to make the program happen, and move the

immigrant women closer to entering the labour market. By examining the work of the staff

and the participants, I have made visible the organizing discourses and work processes that

the staff gear into in order to make teachable the vast array of information they aim to pass

on. It is this interface that I have aimed to study, an interface that exists in the interaction

between staff and participants, not only with each other, but with the networks of

discourses and institutional relations that are taken up in the work.

Economic Immigrants and the Labour Market

Immigration has long been used in Canada as a supplement for the low fertility rate and

to meet labour market demand, especially in the contemporary context of economic

globalization and capitalist expansion. There are currently three categories or types of

immigration, each with certain criteria used to select permanent residents: first, the

economic category includes those who have sought to live in Canada, including their

spouse and dependents, and have been screened based on their language ability, education,

and skills; second, the family class category are those joining family who are already

settled in Canada; and third, the refugee category are those who have entered Canada

“require[ing] protection or relief”1 (Citizenship and Immigration Canada [CIC], 2005, p.

101). My focus for this thesis is on the economic category of immigrants who are accepted

for permanent residency in Canada based on their education and skills.

1 Li (2003) provides a more detailed description of the selection criteria for these categories.

3

The Immigration Act of 1967 created the points systems that ranked possible immigrants

based on their age, language abilities, education, employment opportunities in Canada, and

whether they had family in Canada already. Prior to this Act, immigrants were selected for

permanent residency to Canada based on their nationality and race, which decidedly

favoured those who were white, British or European and likely to assimilate to the

preferred monoculture that the Canadian government sought to create. Therefore, this Act

eliminated the discriminatory process of immigrant selection previously practised in

Canada. The points system has allowed Canada “to rigorously calculate and control the

effects of migration in line with [its] larger interests of governance and legitimation”

(Walsh, 2008, p. 796). In 1976, a new Immigration Act allowed for further governmental

planned immigration, as government could set target numbers for each immigration

category of economic, family or refugee (CIC, 2006). A neoliberal model of policy was

adopted throughout the 1980s and 90s that emphasized skills, flexibility, and autonomy in

ideal immigrants. The points system used for evaluating the economic potential of

individuals expanded and intensified as economic strategies focussed on “global economic

integration, [and] the dismantling of social-welfarism” (Walsh, 2008, p. 797). For example,

the skilled category of immigrants was expanded to include the business class, and then a

separate points system for entrepreneurs and investors was added in 1986. In the latter half

of the 1990s the Canadian government modified the points systems so that more pointed

were awarded to the categories of skill and work experience (Walsh, 2008).

While skilled immigrants with professional experience and credentials are viewed as

having good prospects for successful integration and economic achievement, more

importantly, in the era of increased globalization, their skill sets are perceived as beneficial

for the Canadian economy, as they provide a net benefit to Canada compared to refugees

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and family class immigrants, who have been admitted in declining numbers (Aydemir,

2011; Creese, Dyck & McLaren, 2008; Li, 2003a). The Canadian government “inverted the

ceilings governing admittance and made the skilled or independent class the primary

component of entry” over the family or refugee classes (Walsh, 2008, p. 802). The number

of refugees admitted to Canada decreased from 15.7% in 1983 (CIC, 2007) to 9% in 2010

(CIC, 2011). Of the immigrants who entered Canada as permanent residents in 1983, 54.9%

were family class and 27.1% were economic immigrants (CIC, 2007), whereas the

preliminary numbers for immigrants who entered Canada in 2010 as permanent residents

indicate that 21% entered as family class immigrants and 67% were economic immigrants

(CIC, 2011). It should be clarified that in the economic immigrant category the percentage

is made up of not only the principal applicant, who is the skilled worker, but also those who

come with them, such as their spouse and children. While couples entering Canada as

skilled workers must choose one principal applicant, they can also receive up to 10 points

based on the accompanying partner’s education and work experiences, as well as whether

they have family in Canada (CIC, 2004).

Although the human capital approach to immigration policy has led to more highly

skilled, economic immigrants entering Canada in the last two and a half decades, recent

research highlights the negative employment outcomes immigrants have been experiencing

in this time. Despite the high educational status of immigrants compared to native-born

Canadians, quantitative research continues to show wage discrepancies between

immigrants and their Canadian-born counterparts that has worsened over the last several

decades (Ngo & Este, 2006; Reitz 2007, a,b). Peter Li’s (2003a) thorough examination

reveals that immigrants, particularly visible minorities, earn less than those born in Canada

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after accounting for education and other significant variables.2 Satzewich and Liodakis

(2007) provide similar findings using 1996 census data that shows that immigrant and

Canadian-born men earned more than their immigrant and Canadian-born women

counterparts. Immigrant women, whether ‘white’ or a visible minority, earned less money

than immigrant men and Canadian women and men.

In addition to pay inequalities, evidence from Statistics Canada demonstrates that “only

40% of immigrants who could converse in either English or French found jobs in their

original occupational groups” and the percentage is much lower for those from Asian and

South American countries as compared to those from English-speaking countries (Ngo &

Este, 2006, p. 29). Another study of “404 visible-minority professional immigrants,

reported that only 18.8% of the respondents worked or had worked as professionals in

Canada” (Basran & Zong, 1998, cited in Ngo & Este, 2006, p. 29). Immigrant men and

women have found it difficult to enter into professional careers similar to the types of work

experience they had before immigrating and that are commensurate with their skills.

Immigrants commonly hear that their credentials and work experience, which granted

them permanent residence in Canada in the first place, are not accepted by employers. This

often means retraining and gaining Canadian credentials as the strategy for employment

success (Adamuti-Trache, 2011; Aydemir, 2011; Bauder, 2005; Buzdugan & Halli, 2009;

Grant & Nadin, 2007; Guo & DeVoretz, 2006; Houle & Yssaad, 2010; James, 2009; Reitz,

2007a,b; Sommerville & Walsworth, 2010). In addition, wage disparities between

immigrants and Canadian-borns have long been demonstrated in research, and the wage

gap has been shown to be larger in recent decades than in the past, despite immigrants’

2 Li’s (2003a) assessment is based on a meta analysis of mainly quantitative studies on immigrant earnings,

and his own analysis using the Longitudinal Immigration Data Base for the years 1980-1997.

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increasing education levels upon entry to Canada (Li, 2000, 2001, 2003b; Retiz, 2007a;

Wanner, 2003; Wald & Fang, 2008).

Immigrants who are in regulated professions often find it time-consuming and costly to

do the necessary upgrading in order to work professionally (Basran & Zong, 1998; Boyd,

2001; Grant & Nadin, 2007; Man, 2004; Ngo & Este, 2006; Ogilvie, Leung, Gushuliak,

McGuire & Burgess-Pinto, 2007). While those who are in non-regulated professions are

free to apply for jobs immediately, they have a very difficult time finding professional jobs

commensurate with their experience and skills. They must often start in entry-level

positions sometimes not related to their previous field and do further upgrading or

retraining in order to gain Canadian credentials that employers are more likely to respond

to (Fong & Cao, 2009; Gilmore, 2009; Man, 2004; Matthews, 2006; McCoy & Masuch,

2007; Ng, 1988; Reitz, 2001).

English language communication is often identified by researchers and policy makers as

a problem for immigrants, despite the increased language level proficiency required of

permanent residents. The English as a Second Language (LINC) program offered through

federal funding in Canada does not provide a level of English language training required to

work at a professional level (Boyd & Cao, 2009). Those immigrants who do have high

levels of English communication ability note that they feel discriminated against because of

their accents, which often never completely disappear (Creese, 2010; Creese & Hambere,

2003; Harper, Pierce & Burnaby, 1996; Paredes, 1987; Raouli, Dyke & Mantler, 2008).

The focus of past research has largely been on the barriers immigrants face in entering the

labour market and the struggles that immigrants face in rebuilding careers similar to what

they had before immigrating.

7

While the research on immigrants to Canada outlined above applies to immigrant

women, women also experience unique challenges in entering the labour market; first,

because they face the double barrier of being women and foreign-born, and second, because

of their traditional role of being responsible for family and home life in addition to trying to

find work outside of the home. For these reasons, the experiences of immigrant women

have also been studied separately from immigrant men; this more specific literature will be

further discussed in the next chapter.

Researcher’s Background

The continued difficulties immigrant women have in gaining access to the labour market

and finding employment success have led to a change in demand for services. Research has

demonstrated that immigrants would be benefited by more English language training at a

business language level, specific skills training, and tools that allow them to navigate the

job search and application system. I saw this first hand when I did a work practicum at an

immigrant serving agency in my undergraduate degree. I volunteered in the employment

department, whose purpose was to give their clients, most of whom were highly educated

and skilled, the tools to meet their employment goals. The employment department’s

counselling foundation was to help their clients identify employment possibilities, establish

realistic goals, and identify the solutions or corrective actions needed to achieve the goals.

Finally, a plan of action was to be implemented that aimed at labour market integration.

Throughout the process it was thought important that the women took the initiative to

create career goals and be self-sufficient in their plan to achieve them.

I started my practicum by observing the various interactions between the clients and the

staff; initially I observed in order to learn or understand the work of the staff, but I also

became aware of the interactions and how the clients responded to the information they

8

were given. The clients’ responses were usually of gratitude for the information and help

they received, but they were also occasionally confused by, sceptical or dismissive of the

advice and specific plan they were encouraged to adopt; sometimes clients expressed

thankfulness for the service they received while simultaneously expressing that they needed

more help or still felt uncertain about what they needed to do.

The staff worked very hard to provide services to the clients, juggling these tasks with

their responsibilities to the funders, which included tracking all the services they provided

in various formats and following up with clients to receive their evaluation of services

received, all for the purpose of writing and providing reports to the funders. In a reflective

paper I wrote and handed in at the end of my practicum I wrote:

At practicum I learned how difficult it is to work for a non-profit organization. Not only

are you concerned with your job, such as being the best employment counsellor you can

be, but a big part of the job is attaining funding and proving that you are doing an

excellent job. You have to do your job and then do your second job, which ensures you

get your pay cheque.

One of my responsibilities the first semester of my practicum was doing evaluative follow-

up with the clients by asking them survey questions where they rated the services they

received. It was a necessary process in order for the department to provide the funders with

the requested report, but created even more paperwork for the counsellors as it was one

more way they recorded their client interactions.

While asking the clients about the services they had received, I came across a difference

in perspective between clients and staff. The clients wanted help with finding a job and

sometimes thought the service was there to provide them with a job; their satisfaction with

the service was dependent upon whether they had a job or not. The department staff

explained to me that they did not view finding the clients jobs as their goal. They tried to

help the clients with creating a plan to find a job and the tools with which to find a job

9

themselves. It seemed that part of being a successful program, even if the clients had not

found jobs, was in communicating clearly to the clients what they could expect from the

service.

In order to continue to receive funding it was important that the feedback from clients

was at an extremely high or perfect (100% satisfied) rating. I found out that it was

important to clearly reiterate to clients what services they were being asked to rate in the

survey and remind them what services the department aimed to provide. What was made

visible to me was the complex relationship that the department had with their clients and

with the funders who supported the work they did. I wanted to better understand the work

of the staff and the work of the clients in the clients’ transition to the labour market; this

experience has thus informed my present study of the Women’s Settlement Agency3

(WSA) bridge-to-work program where I have examined the staff’s and participants’ work

within the context of distinctive relations of funding.

Research Project Overview

The staff did conscious work through the classroom instruction and activities to pass on

information to the participants about the labour market, about what makes a good Canadian

worker, and how to take up the work of becoming a good Canadian worker. The

participants did conscious work to take up this information and to make the suggested

changes in themselves in order to take part in the Canadian labour market. The work for the

participants was more than simply acquiring a vast amount of information about the

Canadian labour market and learning how to write a résumé; they were asked to do a

particular type of work on the self in order to conform to Canadian standards and

expectations of behaviours, styles of communication, and interaction with the people

3 The WSA is a pseudonym for the agency where I did my research.

10

around them. They had to refashion their dispositions and self-presentation to fit into the

Canadian workplace. I use Nicolas Rose’s (1990, 1998) and Mitchell Dean’s (1998, 2010)

work on governmentality theory to explicate the type of work on the self the immigrant

women were invited to do in the project.

My research study was informed by the project of Institutional Ethnography (IE), which

is a framework of method and theory conceptualized by Dorothy Smith (2005) that allows

the researcher an entry point into a field of study. IE directs the researcher to begin in the

actuality of particular people, taking their standpoint in order to bring into view whatever

can be seen from their location and from their experience. The intention of the researcher at

this point is not to study the people, but to examine their daily work activities and

understand what they see; to look at their environment and use their perspective to

understand what larger discourses and organizing institutions become visible that may

coordinate the work that they do in some way. I used the standpoint of the immigrant

women and program staff, with a focus on their daily activities, to uncover the ruling

relations that organized and informed their daily work. The project of IE ultimately directs

the researcher to examine these discourses and ruling relations, which becomes the focus of

the inquiry, and which the staff gear into in order to make teachable the vast array of

information they aimed to pass on. Their specific experiences in a local setting, in a

particular time and place, are understood in the context of the discourses and institutional

work processes that exist translocally in the larger society that organized these experiences.

It is this interface that I have studied, an interface that exists in the interaction between staff

and participants, not only with each other, but with the networks of discourses and

institutional relations that are taken up in the work.

11

Three institutional processes became visible as central organizers in the work of

program staff and participants, which are 1) funding relations between government funders

and the immigrant serving agency; 2) employment counselling discourses; 3) the labour

market as an institutional realm that is interconnected with other social institutions and

ruling relations. The staff’s work was largely organized by the institutional work processes

that exist in the relationship with the funders of the program and which directed the

activities in which staff and participants took part. The staff’s work relied upon the

discourse of employment counselling as they aimed to make teachable the information the

participants needed to know and take up in order to access the labour market according to

Canadian standards and norms. Finally, the staff took up the work of making visible the

labour market as an institution, which included more specifically the field of accounting as

a professional institution in Canada that one can work within without being regulated, but

in which one can also strive to gain a regulated designation. The participants were invited

to do the work of entering the labour market as they were requested to make career goals

and create steps in order to attain their career goals.

The research discusses what work is involved by both immigrant women and the

program staff in order to prepare immigrant women for the workforce; it also makes visible

the ruling relations that coordinate these efforts. In doing so it is hoped that this thesis will

contribute to several academic discussions. First, this research contributes to the broader

literature on immigrant women in the Canadian labour market; second, and more

specifically, as a study using institutional ethnography and drawing from governmentality

theories, it is hoped that it will contribute to both of these arenas of discussion as well. It is

also hoped that the research will provide insight into how the services provided to

12

immigrant women may be continually bettered through any specific recommendations that

may come out of my observations and interviews.

Coming Up

In the following chapter I will discuss the relevant literature that has come before my

study, and demonstrate how my research fits into the landscape of qualitative literature on

immigrant women entering the labour market in Canada. In addition, I discuss how

governmentality theory is used to explicate the self-work that the program invites the

immigrant women participating to take part in. Institutional ethnography is the theoretical

and methodological framework that informs my study and provided the point of entry in

which to do my fieldwork. In chapter three, I lay out my research design and reflect upon

the fieldwork experience as I discuss my methods in doing this research study.

Chapter four discusses the work processes involved in creating and implementing the

program, and the accountability relations between the program staff and the funders that

mediate much of the work staff does. I also introduce the program in more detail and

include an introduction to the participants in the program.

In chapter five, I begin by describing a typical day in the classroom and discuss the main

project goal, which is to direct the women in the self-work required to fit into the Canadian

workplace. This work of fitting in is a nuanced and complex work of conforming, which

was taken up by the participants in various ways: it was difficult, exciting, resisted and

undertaken with ease.

Chapter six examines the work the women take part in to restart their careers in entry-

level accounting positions, as the program sought to make visible the labour market in

various ways: how to gain access to it, the laws and regulations that organize it, the ways in

which the participants’ were to conform to the workplace culture and do interpersonal

13

relationships in expected Canadian ways, and how the field of accounting is organized in

Canada. Finally the participants’ work placement experiences are discussed as the place

where they put into practise the lessons learned in the classroom.

In chapter seven I discuss in greater detail the conclusions that can be drawn from this

research, how they fit into conversations about integration patterns of immigrants to

Canada, and provide suggestions for government-funded programs and future research.

14

Chapter Two: Research Context

In this chapter I provide a brief overview of the trajectory of research that has been

done on immigrant women in the last four decades, with a focus on the qualitative studies

done in the last fifteen years. These studies have provided depth of understanding into the

economic and social experiences of immigrant women as they seek to settle into a life in

Canada and restart careers. Next I explore the theory of governmentality as a way to

understand the work on the self that is done in the WSA program that has been studied.

Governmentality allows us to examine how governing bodies, in this case government

funders and the program staff, guide self-formation activities that the immigrant women in

the program were encouraged to take part in. The participants were invited to take part in

work upon themselves to refashion their dispositions and attitudes to conform to Canadian

labour market expectations of workers. Institutional ethnography (IE) is also taken up in

this chapter as the theoretical and methodological framework that I used to guide my field

research of the WSA bridge-to-work program. IE provided me a point of entry into the

setting to explore the work being done by the staff and participants in the program.

Problematization of Immigrant Women and the Labour Force

The quantitative literature has made it clear that immigrant women experience wage

discrepancies compared to men and women born in Canada and immigrant men, and that

both immigrant men and women experience difficulties in beginning professional careers in

Canada. The qualitative studies that followed this research indicate that immigrant women

find it difficult to find professional jobs commensurate with their skills and experience.

There are barriers that educated, skilled immigrant women, in particular, encounter as they

seek to restart the careers they had before immigrating. Among the various strategies

employed, one is the use of bridge-to-work programs that provide enhanced business

15

English training, a volunteer work experience, information about the labour market and

tools with which to navigate it. However, little is yet known about how these programs

instruct participants and provide these tools and how the immigrant women take up the

work involved.

A brief look at the history of research on immigrant woman reveals that although

immigration to Canada has always been an integral part of nation-building, and there was

continual research on immigrants in the 20th

century, research on immigrant women in

Canada only began with a general resurgence of attention to issues unique to women in the

early 1970s. With the initiation of research on immigrant women in Canada, the

problematization of their experiences was concurrently constructed. Information about

immigrants in general had been gathered prior to this through official Census data and the

Employment and Integration Commission, but it was community and women’s groups who

first took up the investigation of the experiences of immigrant women specifically (Ng &

Estable, 1987). The statistics provided a departure point for the mainly qualitative research

that has followed; the data at this time showed that while immigrant women clearly had

something to contribute to Canada, being more highly educated than their Canadian-born

counterparts and having higher participation rates in paid labour than those women born in

Canada, their potential contributions were thwarted by being “one of the most invisible and

disadvantaged segments of society” (Ng & Estable, 1987, p. 29).

The research that demonstrated immigrant women earn less than other segments of the

population, and that immigrant men and women find it difficult to begin professional

careers in Canada similar to their previous work experiences, has been corroborated in

qualitative studies that focus on immigrant women in particular, which is the focus of this

chapter. Research from the 1980s showed that women have long been directed into lower,

16

working class job sectors.4 Studies documented that immigrant women with limited English

or French language skills were provided positions in the lower echelons of manufacturing

industries (e.g. garment workers), service industries (e.g. restaurants, food, cleaning

service), and private, domestic services by those in upper classes (Ng & Ramirez, 1981, as

cited in Anderson & Lynam, 1987). The more recent literature demonstrates that

immigrant women who are skilled and have experience in professional work fields continue

to be under-employed, often working “survival” jobs that are low-skilled, and somewhat

easy to attain, or find themselves in more professional type work but in entry-level

positions. Xinying Hu (2005) indicated that the immigrant women in her study pointed to

“survival” jobs as constraining their ability to keep searching for professional work. Shan

(2009, p. 359) describes the “gendered and racialized labour market transitional

experiences of the women” in her study, as they all experienced employment in lower-level

positions than they had held before immigrating, and a majority retrained in Canada into

female-dominated fields despite having practised in male-dominated fields in China.

Several other studies also demonstrate that those women who find office or professional

positions are still are not doing work that is commensurate with their credentials and work

experience. Nonetheless, there are those who build careers in Canada, and use a variety of

strategies to overcome the barriers they face (Creese et al., 2008; Creese & Kambere, 2003;

Dossa, 2003; Grant & Nadin, 2007; Guo & DeVoretz, 2006; Man, 2004; McCoy &

Masuch, 2007).

4 Class is understood as Ng (1988, p. 88) explains it: not simply a theory, but “a relation discoverable in the

everyday world of experience.”

17

Experienced Barriers & Strategies for Getting Past Them

Qualitative research has sought to better understand the experiences that immigrant

women have in their journey of entering the workforce, and the overarching message is of

the many barriers that impinge on women’s successful entry into the labour market. This

literature has been organized in several different ways: research has focused on specific

barriers encountered (Dyck & Kambere, 2003; Grant & Nadin, 2007; Harper, Peirce &

Burnaby, 1996; Hu, 2005; Man, 2004; Raouli et al., 2008) and has examined the barriers

within the context of immigration and economic policies (Creese et al., 2008; Dossa, 2003;

Lee, 1999; Man, 2004; Ng, 1988, 2006).

While most studies that take up immigrant women and the labour market discuss the

various barriers the women experienced, some studies also focus on the steps that

immigrant women take in order to get past them. The perspective of some studies is to

focus on the structural barriers as systemic discrimination and portray the difficult journey

that immigrants embark on to restart their careers. Other studies portray the immigrant

women as having more agency and choice, and focus on the strategies they use to integrate

into the labour market and build their careers. These nuances in the literature are discussed

in more detail below.

The language barrier is cited by many immigrant women as one of the hardest parts of

settlement and finding work (Creese & Kambere, 2003; George & Ramkissoon, 1998; Hu,

2005; Khan & Watson, 2005). Even with a proficient grasp of the dominant language in

order to communicate, a high level of English (or French) is required for many jobs. If the

job requires communicating with the public or clients, or if “oral presentation, conflict

resolution, and negotiation skills” are required, which they are in many professional roles,

it can take a long time to achieve this level of proficiency (Lee & Westwood, 1998, cited in

18

Raouli et al., 2008, p. 33). Many women report that the free, government-funded language

training programs do prepare them for entrance into the labour market (Hu, 2005; Man,

2004). However, studies have examined the resourcefulness of immigrant women as they

seek out extra English classes, English tutors, and accent reduction courses in order to feel

competent in the work force (Creese et al., 2008; McCoy & Masuch, 2007; Ngo & Este,

2006).

The lack of recognition of international experience and international credentials, and the

demand for Canadian work experience are three barriers discussed in almost every piece of

literature written about immigrant women and the labour market. Foreign skilled workers

are told that employers in Canada need people with their training and skills. They are

granted permanent residence based on their credentials, skills, work experience, and

language proficiency. Yet, when the time comes to restart careers in Canada, the regulating

professional bodies and employers in non-regulated fields do not recognize immigrants’

previously gained qualifications (Cardu, 2007; Grant & Nadin, 2007; Hu, 2005; Man, 2004;

Shan, 2009; Somerville & Walsworth, 2010), and employers do not know how to guess at

whether the immigrant women’s past experience is what they are looking for (McCoy &

Masuch, 2007).

For those in regulated professions there are costs to having their credentials assessed

and often retraining is required to update them to meet Canadian standards. The process is

time consuming, as seeking certification often involves doing course work as well as

acquiring experience in the field (Grant & Nadin, 2007; Man, 2004; Ngo & Este, 2006),

and credentials are often devalued in the process, assessed at a much lower level of

education in Canada than they were in the country where they were gained (Andersson &

Guo, 2009). In Shan’s (2009) study, women in regulated professions chose to re-educate in

19

non-regulated professions instead of going through the process of seeking, in the case of an

engineer and doctor for example, a Canadian license. McCoy and Masuch (2007) found

that women in non-regulated professions also often choose to go through retraining, or

training in entirely new fields, in order to have Canadian credentials to which employers

will favourably respond.

Lack of information about the labour market is another barrier that has recently been

discussed in the literature. Hu (2005) explains that information about labour market

regulations and policies, hiring processes, and one’s specific professional field in order to

create a career goal with the appropriate steps required are all areas of knowledge that

immigrant women in Canada need access to. In addition, immigrant women need to learn

how to market themselves within the specific context of a local labour market. Hu (2005)

expressed the cultural differences her informants became aware of:

They were unable to market themselves in the job market. Another critical reason for

not displaying themselves competently and “aggressive” [sic] enough is culture

difference. ‘We Chinese people regard humbleness is [sic] a virtue, but here they think

you lack ability. It is totally different’ (p. 3).

Immigrant women must educate themselves about such things as learning how to network

to find job opportunities, write Canadian-style résumés, and perform successfully in an

interview with the assertive or seemingly “aggressive” self-presentation expected and

rewarded by Canadian employers, which is part of the required “soft skills”, a term that is

part of the employment counselling discourse used by employers, government, and the

agencies that serve job-seekers preparing for the labour market.

These “soft skills” are culturally mediated and immigrant women do not have

knowledge of them upon immigrating to Canada. In the literature, “soft skills” refer to

Canadian forms of self-presentation, including attitudes, dress, or body language that are

20

expected, and how to navigate workplace relationships appropriately (Bauder, 2005).

Learning to incorporate Canadian soft skills requires an amount of ‘self-work’ on the part

of immigrant women as they incorporate this information and refashion themselves to find

success in the workforce. Ngo and Este (2006) explain that their respondents learned that

there were aspects of themselves that required adaptation as tension existed between their

own culture and values and Canadian culture and values. Yet, Ngo and Este (2006) said

that while it was not always easy to make these changes, their respondents were adaptable

and resilient, willing to learn how to act, look, dress, use mannerisms and ways of

communicating that would be more Canadian, as they understood this would be the way to

find success in the Canadian labour market. Similarly, other studies also found that

immigrants were adaptable to Canadian society and work culture. While Hu (2005) pointed

to survival jobs as limiting immigrant women’s time and resources to look for professional

work, other studies have indicated that immigrant women learn from their transitional or

‘survival’ job experiences, which provide a knowledge base of where to make necessary

changes in order to fit in when they found that their cultural values were dissimilar (Cardu,

2007; George & Ramkissoon, 1998; Ngo & Este, 2006).

Another oft-repeated strategy that immigrant women used was to maintain existing

networks, and build new networks by joining self-help groups and volunteering in their

ethno-community and the greater community (Bauder, 2005; Chiang, 2008; Couton &

Gaudet, 2008; Creese et al., 2008; Da, 1020; George & Chaze, 2009; Ngo & Este, 2006).

They also sought out networks with Canadians specifically in order to learn how to be

“Canadian” in an attempt to fit in and find professional work (Ngo & Este, 2006).

There are also studies that examine the immigrant serving organizations and programs

that are available to help women integrate into society and enter the labour market (Dossa,

21

2003; Harper et al., 1996; Lee, 1999; Paredes, 1987; McCoy & Masuch, 2007; Ng, 1988,

2006) and Guo (2008) and Schmidt, Young & Mandzuk (2010) examine non-gender

specific programs. Indeed, McCoy and Masuch (2007) found in their institutional

ethnography of immigrant agencies in Calgary that the most effective programs in helping

immigrant women were ‘bridging’ programs that were offered to provide a way past the

‘glass wall’ that serves to keep immigrant women from entering mainstream office jobs.

These bridging programs provide enhanced English training appropriate for the workplace,

technical training in software, knowledge about Canadian workplace policies, hiring

processes, and steps to take in order to access the labour market, and then a work placement

in order to receive Canadian experience. Such programs have led to immigrant women

gaining entry-level administrative or office jobs rather than ‘typical’ food services or retail

positions. However, more research is needed to examine how these bridging programs

teach these skills and how the immigrant women appropriate the instruction provided.

Immigrant Women and Family Life

Studies that focus on the integration of immigrant women into Canada also often examine

how their responsibilities for children and family life are managed in cooperation with their

work outside of the home, or the steps taken in order to gain work outside of the home (e.g.

Cardu, 2007; Couton & Gaudet, 2008; Creese et al., 2008; Dossa, 2008; McCoy & Masuch,

2007; Raouli et al., 2008; Worts & Boyd, 2009). Many of the studies demonstrate that the

immigration experience is difficult, and the double work between home life and paid work

for women is one more of these struggles (e.g. George & Ramkissoon, 1998). However,

some recent articles have focused on the utility of the family household, as the social

network of the household is a resource or strategy for the work of integration and entering

the labour market. Creese et al. (2008, p. 286-87) found that “it is precisely the flexibility

22

of households as a unit that may enable immigrants to survive and possibly to begin the

process of integration in an ambivalent environment that both 'welcomes' immigrants and

tells them to 'stay out'.” It was the women and extended family who made re-skilling (going

back to school, getting more training) possible for the men. Women held the families

together and took over child-care responsibilities when there were no extended family

networks to rely upon. With extended family networks, women had more opportunity to

pursue re-skilling and start careers, but this still had to happen slowly, as working part-time

was generally required by all family members at some point in time. McCoy and Masuch

(2007) found that the women in their study used the strategies of re-education to find office

jobs, often with the support of their husbands, who worked transitional, easy to find jobs,

and put off going back to school or finding “career” jobs to allow their wives to do so first.

Husbands and wives worked together to make the family financially viable and move

forward with full integration into Canadian society and the labour market.

Integration/Assimilation, Multiculturalism and Discrimination

There is a vast amount of research on immigration and ethnic relations in Canada that

approaches this broad empirical area from the standpoint of the various patterns or models

by which immigrants become integrated into Canadian culture. These past investigations

examined the experiences of settlement, occupational and educational aspirations and

attainment, and the ways that old-world identity and ties were managed throughout these

experiences, with “some conceptualiz[ing] the immigrant settlement process as a trade-off

between integration and ethnic maintenance” (Satzewich & Liodakis, 2007, p. 224). The

words used to describe the broad patterns of such experiences have been assimilation,

segregation and acculturation or integration; assimilation is generally used to refer to a

unidirectional process where the immigrant person changes to become like the dominant,

23

“absorbing” culture in terms of such things as attitudes, values and behaviours

(Calderwood, Harper, Ball & Liang, 20095; Fleras & Elliott, 2007b). Segregation is the

explanatory model for when dominant and subordinate groups live separate and apart, and

acculturation or integration the process whereby the dominant and subordinate groups

influence each other mutually through interaction in a bidirectional model. Assimilation

was the pattern once endorsed by the Canadian government, as preference was shown for

white, English-speaking immigrants; from 1867 to just after the Second World War

Canadian immigration was very selective allowing at first only those from Britain or the

U.S. and then allowing immigrants from Europe (Andersson & Guo, 2009; Fleras & Elliott,

2007b). The way the Canadian government approached relations with First Nations people

also demonstrates segregation policies, as the reservation system kept them segregated

from the rest of society, while assimilationist policies were used as the long-term strategy

for “dealing with” First Nations youth who were put into the residential school system.

However, integration became the model preferred post-World War II, which is when

multiculturalism becomes part of the discussion (Fleras & Elliott, 2007b).

Multiculturalism as official policy in Canada was created to protect immigrants and

take steps in eradicating systemic discrimination and overt racism, and has allowed space

for immigrants to feel that they may retain their cultural identity (see Fleras & Elliott,

2007a for full arguments). However, while Peter Li (2003a) is an advocate for

multiculturalism, he is sceptical about whether acculturation or integration really means

anything other than ‘slow’ assimilation. In other words, Li (2003a) questions whether

multiculturalism policy has achieved its popularly understood goal of “the persistence of

5 Calderwood et al. (2009, p. 113) discuss what “social work professional values” means in the literature they

review, which ranges from issues of humanitarian ideals like self-determination to broad theoretical

frameworks, such as feminism.

24

cultural diversity or ethnicity and a resistance to assimilation” (p. 50). He further argues

that the pattern of assimilation has been implicitly endorsed in academia by measuring

immigrants’ ‘success’ by how much like native-born Canadians they can become and how

quickly this can be achieved, “despite the popular belief that official multiculturalism has

enabled immigrants to preserve their cultural distinctiveness in the process of becoming

Canadians” (Li, 2003a, p. 50). The argument is that immigrants’ right to maintain their

“cultural distinctiveness” while afforded full equality with native-born Canadians, as

protected by both the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms and the Canadian

Multiculturalism Act, is not being made a reality when the expectation is that they conform

to the dominant culture in order to find vocational success.

The literature on immigrant women has revealed that most studies take the standpoint

that the various barriers experienced are indicative of systemic discrimination. It is true that

much of the research indicates that to overcome these barriers immigrants must employ

strategies that often include becoming like Canadians. However, these changes to the self to

take on the “Canadian-ness” required for success are not heralded in the reviewed literature

as following an assimilationist pattern; such language has not been employed and such an

approach not taken. Rather, the studies have simply shown that the barriers exist, such

strategies to overcome the barriers are required, and that the response to this situation from

immigrants is not always the same. In most studies the response from immigrants is

frustration and disappointment that such systemic discrimination (in the form of these

barriers) impedes their entrance into the labour market. Yet, some studies also discuss their

immigrant respondents’ point of view that while the barriers themselves prove frustrating,

adjusting to life in Canada can also be an exciting learning process about a new culture and

25

country for immigrants, who feel thrilled to call Canada home and call themselves

Canadian (Matthews, 2006; Ngo & Este, 2006).

While assimilation became somewhat of a ‘dirty’ word, as multiculturalism policies

prompted the new catchwords of integration and acculturation, perhaps Li (2003) is correct

in his critique that in the end assimilation is what takes place and is encouraged both

popularly and in academia. However, it is also perhaps too limiting to assume that all

newcomers to Canada view assimilation (or whatever term one might give it) as a wholly

negative experience. There is a great deal of evidence that immigrant women experience

difficulties in entering the Canadian labour market specifically, and that they must employ

various strategies to find employment success. However, studies have provided mixed

evidence of the attitudes or reactions to these experiences; sometimes the research uses the

discourse of barriers and difficulties experienced in getting past them, and sometimes a

discourse of agency and strength of immigrant women is used, as they employ strategies to

find employment success, and find enjoyment in aspects of their experiences. Pertinent to

this research, some of these strategies include the need for women to work on themselves

for successful recommencement of professional careers; this required “self-work” refers to

the work that women perform on themselves, such as learning the “soft skills” required to

access the labour market, with changes made to dispositions and self-presentation styles in

order to market themselves in a way that Canadian employers (presumably) appreciate and

will respond to favourably.

Governmentality Theory

Government and employers have deemed it important for those in the workforce to

acquire “soft skills” in order to be employable, and governmentality theory and the

technologies of the self as taken up by Nikolas Rose (1990, 1998) and Mitchell Dean

26

(1995, 2010) help to explicate the techniques of government that act upon the conduct of

individuals, and guide the “self-work” of individuals, both of which take place in this

project.

Governmentality overview. The study of governmentality is a project which deals with

how governing takes place through rationalities of government, where rational refers to

strategic ways of thinking (Dean, 2010; Rose, 1990). Government in the context of

governmentality is conceptualized thus:

Following Foucault, I have suggested that we use the term ‘government’ as a

portmanteau notion to encompass the multiple strategies, tactics, calculations, and

reflections that have sought to ‘conduct the conduct’ of human beings (Rose, 1998, p.

52).

Government does not only refer to the political structures in place in a state or nation, but to

the variety of institutions, organization and agencies that govern. Dean explains the phrase

‘conduct of conduct’ as used by Foucault by first drawing attention to the different

meanings of the term ‘conduct’:

It means to lead, to direct or guide, and perhaps implies some sort of calculation as to

how this is to be done. The ethical or moral sense of the word starts to appear when we

consider the reflexive verb ‘to conduct oneself’...Another sense of the term is as a noun.

‘Conduct’ here refers to our behaviours, our actions and even our comportment, i.e. the

articulated set of our behaviours. Again the sense of self-guidance or self-regulation may

often be involved...Putting these senses of ‘conduct’ together, government entails any

attempt to shape with some degree of deliberation aspects of our behaviour according to

particular sets of norms and for a variety of ends (Dean, 2010, p. 17-18).

Taking together the notions of government and governmentality, we see that they refer to

the various strategies and methods for shaping or conducting the behaviours and

comportments of human beings.

Two axes: government and the self. Governmentality has two axes: the first is the

governmentality axis and the second is the axis of self-formation (Dean, 1995). The

governmentality axis includes the techniques and instruments of government and

27

institutions to accomplish ruling of subjects; these include forms of expertise, knowledge,

its programmatic character, language and vocabulary (Dean, 1995). Institutions such as

prisons, education systems, and homes, use procedures such as surveillance, rewards and

punishments, or a system of norms and judgements to shape human behaviour according to

specific goals. Through such strategies authorities act upon the lives and conduct of persons

“to avert evils and achieve such desirable states as health, happiness, wealth, and

tranquillity” (Rose, 1998, p. 152).

Dean (1995) argues that to fully understand the governmentality axis one needs to

include the second, related axis of self-formation, because to do so keeps within view the

agency of individuals that governmentality maintains: this is the way that the domains of

government have cultivated and stylized personal attributes and capacities, which require

individuals’ own efforts to make changes on the self. In ethical self-formation one acts

upon oneself using technologies of the self to make changes on “body, soul, thoughts,

conduct and way of being” in order to achieve the goal of “happiness, purity, wisdom,

perfection, or immortality” (Rose, 1998, p. 153). Rose (1990, 1998) and Dean (1995, 2010)

use the concepts of technologies of the self to discuss the various techniques or methods in

which the work to ‘conduct the conduct of human beings’ is done.

While the techniques themselves are many and varied, Foucault (cited in Rose, 1990, p.

241) offers this explanatory description of techniques of the self, which are:

...models proposed for setting up and developing relationships with the self, for self-

reflection, self-knowledge, self-examination, for the deciphering of the self by oneself,

for the transformation one seeks to accomplish with oneself as object.

In examining the “psy” arena and therapeutic movement that has grown since World War

II, Rose (1990) argues that technologies of the self have emerged whereby science and

behavioural techniques have been constructed to reshape human conduct. Forms of self-

28

inspection, -regulation, and -control have arisen to assist in the “refashioning of the self”

(Rose, 1990, p. 242). Professional help from experts is available to assist in this process and

is accompanied by the belief that one’s self can be changed and that one has the ability to

make these changes on the self. The idea of technologies of the self underpins the idea that

working on oneself is possible and self-transformation achievable.

Liberal, enterprising society. The techniques of government, institutions, and the self

together act so that a liberal, enterprising culture emerges where the state relies on the

enterprising autonomous activities of its subjects to advance the nation`s interests, as they

seek their own personal advantage:

Neoliberalism is thus more than a phenomenon at the level of political philosophy. It

constitutes a mentality of government, a conception of how authorities should use their

powers in order to improve national well-being, the ends they should seek, the evils they

should avoid, the means they should use, and crucially, the nature of the persons upon

whom they must act (Rose, 1998, p. 154).

Thus arises the conception that the self is to be enterprising, that its project is to show

initiative, ambition and be personally responsible in order

to maximize its own human capital, project itself a future, and seek to shape itself in

order to become that which it wishes to be. The enterprising self is thus both an active

self and a calculating self, a self that calculates about itself and that acts upon itself in

order to better itself (Rose, 1998, p. 154).

In this context, what is deemed problematic is determined by its lack of enterprise; lack of

enterprise is viewed as a weakness or failing, and corrections are made with the purpose to

increase the enterprising capacity of the organization or individual. (It is the work of

government to recognize that some people are incapable of doing such self-work, and to

categorize them as such.) The links between the axis of government and axis of self-

formation are viewed at this intersection: persons are governed and govern themselves in

tandem towards the end of being enterprising. The goal of being enterprising thus requires

29

individuals to conduct themselves with “energy, initiative, ambition, calculation, and

personal responsibility” (Rose, 1998, p. 154).

Governmentality and power. In Rose’s (1998, p. 151) chapter seven, “Governing

Enterprising Individuals,” he discusses the idea that in advanced liberal democracies

humans are individuals with rights and freedoms. Humans as ‘selves’ means that people are

meant to strive to be autonomous, and seek out a meaningful life as enterprising

individuals. In western, liberal democracies the self is no longer regulated by religion or

“traditional morality”; rather, individuals have rights and freedoms. Rose (1998) discusses

Foucault’s conceptions of subjectivity and power as useful because he rejected the idea of

power as a negative and dominating force that represses its subjects. Rather Foucault

thought of power “as the creation, shaping, and utilization of human beings as subjects.

Power, that is to say, works through, and not against, subjectivity” (Rose, 1998, p. 151).

Secondly, power is often thought of as the ‘state’, which is in opposition to ‘private life’.

However, Rose explains that the Foucauldian conception of power is that it exists in all

practices that administer, rule or guide people and their behaviours, both on macro and

micro levels:

To analyze the relations between ‘the self’ and power, then, is not a matter of lamenting

the ways in which our autonomy is suppressed by the state, but of investigating the ways

in which subjectivity has become an essential object, target, and resource for certain

strategies, tactics, and procedures of regulation (1998, p. 152).

There are a set of relations that exist between political power and human subjects then, as

they become intertwined through the liberal, politicized ideals for the self: “autonomy,

fulfillment, responsibility, choice” (Rose, 1998, p. 152).

Rose (1998) acknowledges that an obvious critique to this theory is that talk of

enterprise is simply obscuring language, and is creating the capitalist illusion that people

30

are actually ‘sovereign individuals’. Governments in advanced, liberal democratic societies

are not altruistic administrators with utopian dreams. However, Rose (1998, p. 155)

describes liberal political thought since the 19th

century as “structured by the opposition

between the constitutional limits of government on the one hand, and on the other, the

desire to arrange things such that social and economic processes turn out for the best

without the need for direct political intervention.” Rose (1990) argues that the groundwork

for such modern democracy, which requires individuals to internally regulate themselves,

and removes the pressure to externally regulate people, was laid when individuals were

taught to control their own lives emotionally, while, indeed, being politically subordinate.

Mitchell Dean (2010) grants that government as an activity attempts to shape the

freedom of those governed; yet the governed remain free, as they are actors who have

choice in the actions and behaviours in which they take part, and can even choose actions

not thought of by the government. The ideas of personal autonomy of the self and political

power are not in direct opposition to each other. Rather, self autonomy is “one of the

objectives and instruments of modern mentalities and strategies for the conduct of conduct”

(Rose, 1998, p. 155). Rose reminds us once again that “governing in a liberal-democratic

way means governing though the freedom and aspirations of subjects rather than in spite of

them” (1998, p. 155).

Rose’s and Dean’s formulations of governmentality and technologies of the self help to

explicate the field of immigrant integration that has been the starting place for my research.

The program I studied is a domain in which technologies of governance were used in the

explicit shaping of conduct, competencies, dispositions, and knowledge. The program also

encouraged the participants to practise self-formation and techniques of the self, as they

have agency and choice in how they decided take up the self-work suggested based on their

31

own ideas about what they wanted their lives and careers to look like in Canada. The

women’s own self-formation projects seemed to sometimes come into line with the

governmental self-formation projects and sometimes not, as viewed through the women’s

reactions to the work they were invited to do; sometimes the work was resisted and other

times it was taken up enthusiastically.

Institutional Ethnography

The theoretical and methodological framework for this study has been informed by

institutional ethnography (IE), which is a project of inquiry that brings focus onto the work

that is actually happening in an actual location. Institutional ethnography aims to make

visible or knowable the greater institutions that organize aspects of society and our

everyday lives and activities, often in ways that we do not think about or recognize. In this

way, IE locates the actual work done in actual sites by individuals into translocal

coordinated processes.

Standpoint. First, the concept of “standpoint” in institutional ethnography has been

utilized to focus the research; Dorothy Smith (2005) explains standpoint as the researcher

taking up “the social positioning of the subject of knowledge, the knower and creator of

knowledge” (p.9) yet without “identify[ing] a position or a category of position, gender,

class or race within society” (p. 10). Standpoint is a point of entry into the research that

begins in the place of those of interest. The researcher stands with them to get their view of

what is happening around them. It is the bigger processes or institutional relations that they

are experiencing that the researcher wants to see made visible. For my research, this

perspective starts from the actuality of the everyday world of the staff and immigrant

women participating in the program. Using the methods of observation and interviews, I

have deliberately chosen a standpoint that focuses on making visible their everyday

32

activities and work, which is the second IE concept utilized: the focus on the everyday work

of the research participants.

Work. I investigated the work of the staff in implementing the bridge-to-work program,

and also how the bridging program’s activities and goals intersected with immigrant

women’s work of refashioning themselves in such a way as to find success in the labour

market. Institutional ethnography describes the concept of work to be more than just the

labour that is expected by employers. It is used in a generous sense to refer to the everyday

activities of people that take “time and effort, that they mean to do, that [are] done under

definite conditions and with whatever means and tools, and that they may have to think

about” (Smith, 2005, pp. 151-152). McCoy (2007, p. 110-111) explains that the notion of

work, as used in institutional ethnography:

is an empirically empty term; it does not define types of work or identify some activities

as work in contrast with other activities that are found not to be work. Its value lies in

directing analytic attention to the practical activities of everyday life in a way that begins

to make visible how those activities gear into, are called out by, shape and are shaped

by, extended translocal relations of large-scale coordination (what Smith calls relations

of ruling).

Part of understanding how the work of immigrant women is involved in larger, more

generalizable institutions in this context is to be cognizant of any institutional discourse that

is activated in the classroom and interviews.

Institutional discourses. It is through any discourse used that a sense of the institutional

work being accomplished comes into view. Smith (2005) explains that institutional

discourse comes to exist out of the actualities of the work that people do; and it is from this

process that particular actualities are transformed into “generalized forms in which they

become recognizable and accountable across the local settings of institutional work” (p.

186). McCoy (2007, p. 118) explains that institutional discourses are:

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widely shared professional, managerial, scientific, or authoritative way[s] of knowing

(measuring, naming, describing) states of affairs that render them actionable within

institutional relations of purpose and accountability...conceptual systems, forms of

knowledge that carry institutional purposes and reflect a standpoint within relations of

ruling.

Such discourses are transmitted through popular media, in formal education, or through

interacting with work processes. I was interested in the work of the staff and more

specifically, the self-work of immigrant women as they transformed themselves to enter the

Canadian labour market, and this took place at the interface of their work and the

discourses they took up to assist in this work.

Ruling relations. While the women’s viewpoint and everyday work is the starting place,

the goal is to locate their local experiences within the social context of their lives, and

reveal the broader ruling relations or institutions that are organizing their experiences. In

this way, the agency of women remains in view because entry into the research begins with

their standpoint, while the “aspects of the institutions relevant to the people’s experience,

not the people themselves, [are what] constitute the object of enquiry” (Smith, 2005, p. 38).

Ruling relations are textually mediated relations “that connect us across space and time and

organize our everyday lives” (Smith, 2005, p. 10). They are forms of knowledge that are

exterior from people, running through society, that coordinate and control people’s actions.

A complex coordination of ruling relations create institutions, institutions that may not be

named and may cut across certain named organizations. Dorothy Smith (2005, p. 225)

conceptualizes institutions as:

Complexes embedded in the ruling relations that are organized around a distinctive

function, such as education, healthcare… [It] is the intersection and coordination of

more than one relational mode of ruling…In institutional settings people are active in

producing the general out of the particular.

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Dense networks of institutional relations shape our lives as they are organized throughout

society. Such institutions might include corporations, bureaucracies, mass media, and the

unnamed ruling relations that interconnect all of these.

Thus, institutional ethnography is a method of inquiry that does not analyze and interpret

the findings by any predetermined conceptual theory or framework; “rather, exploration

and discovery are central to its project” (Smith, 2005, p. 50). Only the actualities of the

participants being observed or interviewed enter into the scope of the researcher; as the

participants’ lives open up to the researcher, the larger institutions that intersect with their

lives become visible, and the researcher creates a “map” upon which people’s everyday

experiences become situated. Beginning with the standpoint of immigrant women who

were involved with a particular program gave direction to my research, which also included

those people who were visible because of their involvement in the institutional processes,

namely the staff that were involved in creating and managing the program. Together the

program staff and participants’ experiences and their work were part of the ongoing

inquiry, and the map, piece by piece, came together to reveal the three broader institutional

relations that organized their work. Governmentality theory intersects with the project of

institutional ethnography in that governmentality theory also works to make visible the

governing institutions that guide the self-formation processes in order to ‘conduct the

conduct’ of individuals.

Research Questions

Based on the direction of preceding literature and guided by the approach of institutional

ethnography, my thesis attended to the following questions:

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• What is the work that immigrant women are doing to refashion themselves in order

to find success in the Canadian labour market? How did they respond to and take

up the instruction received in the program?

• How is this program offered to immigrant women organized? What did it teach and

how was it delivered? What was the work of staff in organizing and delivering this

program?

• Are there any institutional discourses used? What are the institutions present that

are organizing the work of the staff and participants?

These questions directed my field research, the design of which will be discussed in the

next chapter.

Bracketing Concepts of Immigration Patterns

I bracketed the concepts of assimilation, segregation and integration as I asked my

questions for this research study. These models for understanding immigration patterns are

focused on the outcomes of the immigration process as it is played out in Canadian society.

This study took a few steps back in the process and examined the area of explicit work that

took place by both immigrant women and workers involved in their settlement in Canada.

By bracketing the concepts of assimilation versus integration, I examined how the women

and workers thought about the process as it was happening; for it was a field of conscious

work for them, something they were doing. My role was to explore how they experienced

this process and how they thought about it rather than to provide an answer or label for the

experience or outcome. While I know that the concepts of segregation, integration and

assimilation exist as explanatory tools, I am not bound to them and did not need to impose

them.

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Therefore, the focus of this study has been to investigate how immigrant women and

workers accomplish the work they are doing, as little is known about the intersection

between the self-work of immigrant women in learning how to “be more Canadian” and the

guidance provided by agencies in facilitating this work. This ethnographic study also

examined how immigrant women took up the suggested self-work, revealing that it was

very nuanced: sometimes they found themselves fitting more into Canadian ways of

participating in the labour market or expressing themselves, and found themselves liberated

or empowered by the new information and experiences; other times they perceived the

suggested self-work as very difficult and perceived themselves as unable to mould

themselves or their self-presentation appropriately; they were asked to stretch themselves in

ways that made them both nervous and excited, and the work was understood as both

difficult to take up and a way to learn and expand themselves.

In the next chapter we turn to my research design, as I discuss the ethnographic methods

I used to explore the work that took place in the WSA bridge-to-work program.

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Chapter Three: Methods

In this chapter I discuss how I went about conducting a study that utilized qualitative

methods to retrieve the data required to investigate my research questions, which aimed at

discovering how a program assisted immigrant women with their entrance into the

Canadian labour market. In order to explore my research questions, I observed a bridge-to-

work program that sought to guide immigrant women through the self-formative work

explicated by governmentality theory in order to access the labour market. The data from

which to begin analysis also came from interviews with the staff and participants; these

interviews aimed to help me understand the work that each did; for staff I enquired after

their work in developing the program, and for the participants I enquired after their work in

immigrating and entering the Canadian labour market, which included their activities in the

program.

Field of Study

The program studied was offered through the Women’s Settlement Agency (WSA) in

Calgary, and offered occupational skills training for those who had trained or work as

accountants before immigrating. The program had already been offered to two intakes of

participants, and the cycle that I did my research on was their third intake of participants.

The program was made up of two components; the first was fourteen weeks of classroom

training and the second part of the program was a ten-week work placement. My field

research was done during the classroom training, which took place from July to October,

2009. I began by interviewing several of the staff a couple of weeks before the program

began to gain an understanding of how the program was set up and the work that had been

done to organize and implement it. My observations of the classroom began once the

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program started. As the program progressed, I did interviews with the participants and

second interviews with several of the staff.

Interviews

Before the program began, I interviewed the manager of the department in which this

program was funded and managed, the project coordinator and the classroom facilitator,

who both helped to construct the program and facilitated it in the first two intakes. I then

interviewed two more project managers who were involved with the third intake of the

project, and the career counsellor hired for the third intake. I also did a second interview

with the main classroom facilitator and the department manager about halfway through the

program, as I followed up with specific questions that came out of my observations. After

interviewing the fifteen participants in the program, I did 23 interviews in total by the end

of my field research.

I had intended to interview at least ten of the participants, but as I built a relationship

with the participants, I realized that it would have perhaps been viewed as leaving someone

out if I did not make an effort to interview all 15 of the women, which I was very happy to

do. On the first day that I was in class to observe, I told the class who I was, a little bit

about my research, and how I would like for them to be involved. I had them look over

consent forms for me to observe the classroom, explaining that if they did not want to sign

the consent form to allow me to observe, they would not be included in any of my

observation notes; all of the participants signed the consent forms and took a copy home for

themselves. I said that if they wanted to be interviewed they could talk to me about it and

we would set up a time at their convenience.

Although the women were instructed to ask me about having an interview, I realized that

they were often shy about this and if I mentioned the interviews I hoped to do in our casual

39

conversations during class breaks, women were eager to be interviewed once I had brought

the subject up. The interviews with me were an opportunity for the women to practise their

English with someone who spoke English as a first language. Some of the women who

expressed that they were less confident in their speaking abilities waited to be interviewed

until closer to the end of the fourteen weeks of class time; perhaps this was sometimes done

purposefully, as they felt their communication abilities to have improved. Most of the

participants in the program improved their language skills noticeably throughout the

fourteen weeks of the program, so my interviews held at the beginning of the program were

sometimes the most difficult in terms of us being able to understand each other. The

interviews were all held at WSA, usually after the class ended for the day in an available,

empty classroom, but sometimes held during a lunch break if that was what would work for

the woman’s schedule. They all signed consent forms before the interview began, and took

a copy home for themselves.

Depth and detail. I created a list of topics to address in each ethnographic interview,

with main topics and follow-up questions or probes (Rubin and Rubin, 2005). The topics

were created keeping institutional ethnography’s focus on the “work” that the interviewee

did:

The concept of work and work knowledge as they are conceived in institutional

ethnography orients the researcher to learn from people’s experiences regarding what

they actually do, how their work is organized, and how they feel about it (Smith, 2005,

p. 155).

I was seeking to have conversations with my interviewees that would result in gaining

information that had depth and detail with “vivid and nuanced answers, rich with thematic

material” (Rubin & Rubin, 2005, p. 129).

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I sought detail in asking them to explain very specifically each aspect of their work

process. By requesting depth, I would probe past their initial responses to find out what

they meant if they used words in specific ways; for example, if the staff member told me

that they invited candidates to the program for interviews to ascertain their personal

characteristics that might indicate if they were ready for the program I inquired as to

exactly what was meant by “ready,” what personal characteristics were looked for, and

exactly how this helped the staff select participants for the program.

Vivid and nuanced. Good ethnographic interviewing also seeks conversations that

provide vivid and nuanced descriptions. Rubin and Rubin (2005) explain that vividness

provides the emotional context of the descriptions offered, and nuance is garnered by

seeking detailed descriptions that convey that experiences in life do not always fit into neat

categories of black and white: “nuance is about showing that things are not always true or

not true, that they may be true in part, or true in some circumstance or at some time” (p.

132). Sometimes I heard contradictory accounts of how the program was run; this did not

mean that I was not receiving a “truthful” answer, but indicated that the work was nuanced

and sometimes changeable depending on circumstances. If interviewees did not always

provide the same information or descriptions of the way the program was set up or run it

gave me an opportunity to see different points of view and gain a nuanced understanding of

the work involved in running the program.

English as a second language. I intended my audio-recorded interviews to be semi-

structured, by asking open-ended questions about their immigration experiences, activities

since arriving in Canada in terms of preparing to enter the labour market, and their thoughts

on the program and the work it suggested for them to do. I was seeking to find out about

their experiences in immigrating and wanted to elicit what Rubin and Rubin (2005)

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describe as vivid descriptions that are garnered from talk not only about intellectual

experiences but emotional ones, as well. However, I soon realized that the language level

of my interviewee changed how I held my interviews and the responses I would be able to

get from the interviewees.

My first interviews were more difficult than I was expecting in terms of language and

communication abilities between the participants and myself. I had prepared general topics

to bring up about the women’s immigration experiences and time in Canada, but I soon

realized that I could rarely simply say, “Tell me about your immigration experience” and

get any answer at all, even an initial response to which I could follow up with further

probes. I most often received blank looks in response. I had to be more specific. I would

introduce the topic by saying that I wanted to hear about their immigration experience, but I

had to follow it up with specific questions, such as why they chose to come to Canada,

what they had thought of Canada when first arriving, what were the hard and good parts to

immigrating. The language barrier meant it was difficult to always get answers that were

full of depth and detail. Although, I found they were pleased to talk about their immigration

experiences and the type of activities they had been doing in Canada once they understood

what I wanted to talk about in our interview; it was an opportunity to talk about what was

for most of the women the biggest decision and change they had made in their lives.

I thought of the women’s stories as happening in a chronological timeline, therefore I

started with the question, “How long have you been in Canada?” and continued with

“Where are you from and who did you come with?” After those initial questions I asked

about: education and work experiences before coming to Canada, the decision to

immigrate, experience of first arriving and settling in once in Canada, how did she find

WSA, courses or workshops involved with, any other career-motivated experiences, what

42

she has been learning in the workshops, job-seeking experience in Canada (if any yet), and

career goals. The topics I prepared to discuss with them became much more detailed as I

soon learned I needed to bring up very specific topics or questions to talk about so that they

would understand what it was I wanted them to talk about.

Because my interviews were staggered throughout the fourteen weeks of class, this

meant that I asked questions in my later interviews that I did not ask in the interviews from

the first week or two of class, such as questions about their perspective on classroom

material and the work they were doing in class. In addition, their answers to the questions

varied depending on when the interview was held; for example, when I asked what stood

out for them in the program material or what they thought about the program, they often

brought up what was being talked about at that time. The women I interviewed in the last

few weeks of class were able to talk about more of the work they had engaged with

throughout the program. These later interviews were usually longer, as the women had

more to discuss and often had clearer ideas about what work they were doing to prepare for

the labour market, and what they found interesting, useful, or difficult. As well, towards the

end of the classroom portion of the program often their ideas about what steps they planned

to take in terms of starting their careers once the program was over were more thought

through and decided upon. During the interviews I was mindful of how the women drew

upon broader discourses and course content in producing an account of their experiences,

goals and strategies, which also showed up more in the later interviews than those done at

the beginning of the program.

Transcription of interviews. I transcribed all of the interviews myself as soon as

possible after the interview. Poland (2002, p. 632) discusses many challenges that

transcription can pose, and the first is that oral communication does not follow rules of

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grammar, such as the use of run-on sentences, which is how most people talk. I edited my

transcripts once they were typed out to make sure they reflected the meaning of the talk as I

listened to it, checking to make sure my written rendition was reflected in the intonation

and pacing of the auditory version. A second transcription challenge that Poland (2002)

discusses is making sure that when the speaker is mimicking or quoting someone that this is

reflected in the written account. I experienced this in my interviews and was careful to

represent this type of talk as accurately as possible in my transcriptions.

I was careful to reflect laughter, coughing, emphasized words or syllables by increased

volume or intonation, any other noises made in the environment or by the people in the

interviews, interruptions and the pauses in speech by noting these in the transcription, in

order to provide a realistic pacing and context to the interview. Of course, as Poland (2002)

points out, the body language, glances, nods, or facial expressions that convey so much

meaning in oral communication, and that affect the tone of an interview, are missing from

an audio-recorded, transcribed version of the interview.

I was also careful to include any “ahs” and “ums” in the interviews into the

transcriptions, and in the interviews with participants who speak English as a second

language, there was a lot of this type of staccato talk with many starts and stops. Some of

the quotes in this thesis have been cleaned up in order to make the meaning of the passage

clear, but where the “ums” have not clouded the meaning of the passage, and perhaps have

helped in conveying the proper pacing or meaning of the passage, they have been included

as in the original. The interviews with the program participants were much more difficult to

transcribe than the interviews with staff, as often words or parts of sentences were very

difficult or impossible to understand in the audio recording. I worked very hard to

accurately transcribe these interviews, and where I could not understand what was being

44

said I made it clear in the transcription that a word, phrase or sentence was missing.

Transcribing these interviews as soon after they took place as possible was helpful, as I

could often remember what was said even if it was not very clear in the audio recording:

the women were often easier to understand in person than they were in the recording.

However, if I was not certain about what was said I never guessed, but left the words or

phrases blank and noted as such in the transcription.

The discussion about transcribing interviews “verbatim” is detailed by Poland (2002),

where he criticizes the positivist notion that an oral interview can be captured verbatim

textually. I remain aware that my interviews were collaboratively constructed in a dialogue

between myself and the interviewees, both staff and students. For example, if I was not

certain that I had understood what my interviewee had said or what they meant, I would

repeat back what I thought they had said to have them clarify whether I had understood

them properly. They would either agree or further clarify how they had meant to

communicate their story or account. While this is true of all my interviews, I am

particularly aware that in the interviews with the program participants, whose English was

a second language, their interview stories are understood within the context of a great deal

of talk between them and me, as together we created an account of their story in English.

The program participants often could understand what I was saying better than they could

communicate back in English; they easily could tell me if I had understood or not and

would either clarify what they meant further or agree with my summary of their account.

For this reason, in the analysis, large chunks of data were collected together so that I could

read passages in context. I often went back to the original documents to read the passage I

was interested in within the context of a greater part of the interview or in its entirety, and

re-listened to the recording as I did my analysis (more on data analysis later). While I

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attempted to create trustworthy transcripts, I remain aware of their limitation in portraying

the full experience of the interview.

Observations

I observed one or two days a week, for about six to eight hours per week, for the

fourteen weeks of class time. A schedule was proposed by the program organizer based on

the activities in the program, as she hoped to provide me with observations of each topic in

the class curriculum as well as the opportunity to observe a variety of different classroom

activities. The schedule was created to provide observations that emphasized the

communication and workplace culture and practicum/workplace preparation training that

took place, rather than the training in accounting software.

Accounting classes. The accounting software classes were set up so that the participants

were on their computers following instructions on navigating the software and doing

practise lessons. Each accounting class was very similar in style, from the few such classes

I observed. I had a difficult time understanding what was being discussed or taught, as I

have very little accounting knowledge and it was difficult to follow what was going on as

the women worked on computers. The program staff were hesitant to have me observe

many of these classes because they did not facilitate them; they had guest lecturers

facilitating them and the staff did not want them to feel uncomfortable. At the beginning of

my field research I thought that these classes would all be the same and observing a limited

number would suffice, which was the staff’s perspective as well. However, by the end of

the program I realized that I needed to have a better understanding of this portion of the

program and I specifically asked the participants to tell me more about these classes and

what they were learning.

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Classroom. Observing the classroom provided me with the opportunity to see the work

of both the program staff and the immigrant women participating as it took place. My focus

was on how the labour market and the personal skills and attributes presumed necessary

were discussed by instructors and students, and the kind of work that participants put into

acquiring these skills. Institutional ethnography as the informing project for this fieldwork

directs the researcher to view the work of the participants, where “[t]he sense of work used

here is precisely to create work knowledge that is as close as possible to what an individual

does in time, in a particular actual work setting, and in relation to particular others” (Smith,

2005, p. 156). I also observed any institutional discourse used as the course material was

presented and then taken up and discussed together by staff and participants, as my

observations were largely of talk taking place between participants and in the classroom

lessons facilitated by the talk of staff.

The more I got to know the staff and participants, the more my observation became

participant observation. I would join groups when the class broke into smaller group

discussions or projects. Generally my role when I joined these groups was to simply listen

to what they were discussing, but I joined in when they asked me for my ideas or to help

with their English in spelling, communicating ideas, or pronunciation. I was also one of the

few native Canadians in the room of whom they could ask questions about cultural ideas or

scenarios; there were an unlimited number of topics that I was asked about in the classroom

because I had the Canadian perspective: dress, English communication, workplace culture,

community resources, customs or traditions, sports, hobbies, schooling, etc. I would speak

up in class every now and then if I had a question or something to contribute. I was still

more an observer than a full participant, but I became a part of the group.

47

The participants and I talked in class during group work, but also engaged in extended

conversations during the classroom breaks where we discussed our lives and they could ask

me more questions about myself, Canada, or for help with their English communication. I

learned that the participants were very concerned with understanding Canadian culture and

with having good communication skills with diminished accents so that Canadians would

be able to understand them. I found my participation in this manner a way of giving back.

As the researcher, I was not in their space simply taking from them for my own research

experience. Rather, my presence as an observer was also viewed as a helpful resource and

there was an exchange that took place between the participants in the program and me,

wherein I was able to contribute something to them.

Observing their work. My aim in my observation of the program and interviews with

staff and participants was to make visible the intersection of what immigrant women were

told they must do and how they went about doing it in the bridging program. I wanted to

gain a clear understanding of the work that goes on in the program by the staff and the

participants, and the greater organizing institutions that mediated this work.

I followed the observation guidelines set out by Holstein and Gubrium (2008, p. 374),

which advise the researcher to “minimize presumptions about the empirical world while

striving for close, searching descriptions of everyday life...to understand social reality on its

own terms, ‘as it really is’.” Because I participated in a practicum in my undergraduate

degree in a similar setting as this fieldwork was done I thought that my fieldwork setting

might be difficult to see through ‘fresh’ eyes because I had observed and been a part of

similar settings. Holstein and Gubrium (2008, p. 390) use the term “analytic bracketing” to

refer to “setting aside all assumptions about forms of social organization and structure.”

While I was observing I intentionally tried to look as if I had never seen such a setting

48

before. I tried to focus on what was happening in the setting and how, rather than leaping to

any whys about what was happening (Emerson, Fretz & Shaw, 1995; Holstein & Gubrium,

2008).

I generally sat in a corner of the class room with a notebook and pen in hand. As I was

observing the classroom, it was easy to inconspicuously take bulleted notes of what I was

observing in the classroom. As I was observing the classroom for four to six hours at a

time, writing down activities in the sequence they took place, and noting interactions or

taking down quotes helped to remind me of various episodes to write up later in my

fieldnotes. Within 24 hours I would sit down with my handwritten notes and type up the

day’s observations.

Writing up fieldnotes. Writing up ethnographic fieldnotes is an activity that creates a

construction of events through the perspective of the observer. It is not simply mirroring the

observed reality in a written account. Descriptive fieldnotes reconstruct moments or scenes

from details selected from memory, which are usually drawn up from jotted notes

(Emerson et al., 1995). “At best, the ethnographer ‘recreates’ her memories as written

scenes which authentically depict people’s lives through selected, integrated details”

(Emerson et al., 1995, p. 67). However, similar to the objectivity emphasized by Holstein

and Gubrium (2008) in naturalistic observation, Emerson et al. (1995) explain that

evaluative descriptions are to be avoided in specific ways, such as not using visual clichés

or labels, nor evaluative adjectives or verbs.

Writing my fieldnotes was directed by Emerson et al. (1995), as they draw the

ethnographer’s attention to 1) writing good description using concrete details to create a

vivid image, 2) focusing on dialogue that I usually paraphrased or used indirect quotes for,

49

but sometimes also used exact quotes jotted while in the field, and 3) characterization of

participants through description of their dress, movements or ways of talking or acting.

I also employed written “episodes” in my fieldnotes, which Emerson et al. (1995, p. 87)

describe as “still-life” incidents. A string of episodes put together are called fieldnote tales;

if the researcher is in one setting with the same people doing similar activities, episodes are

often linked and an extended tale is wont to make sense in the fieldnotes. Because of the

nature of my setting—being in a classroom for four to six hours at a time with the same

people—this was often the way my fieldnotes were written. However, Emerson et al.

(1995) warn against trying to create a falsely cohesive narrative out of episodes, so

although I wrote my notes up chronologically, they did not necessarily flow as a unified

narrative of the day from beginning to end.

Data Analysis

I used Hyper Research software to organize and hold the data; I read over the interviews

and observation fieldnotes, line by line, as I watched for patterns to index the data

according to categories of discourses or work processes. In this way chunks of data from

across the interviews and observation notes were indexed together to be examined further. I

created my categories according to activities, topics, events and types of talk, being mindful

that I was paying attention to the description of what was taking place or talked about

rather than categorizing or indexing in an interpretative manner.

In my interviews with the staff, I was examining the work they had done to organize the

program. I wanted to know what they could tell me about how the program operated and

the relationship with the funders that this involved. Similarly, with the student interviews, I

wanted to know about the actuality of how their immigration experience had been in terms

50

of the work they did to get to Canada and the activities they had taken part in since arriving

to prepare for entering the labour market.

Throughout the interviewing and observations I was also aware of how the staff and

program participants talked about their experiences. Dorothy Smith (2005) explains the

importance of being aware of the institutional discourses being used in the setting of the

research; the researcher approaches the problematic from a standpoint within the

institutional relations that have created the problematic. Smith (2005) discusses the “text-

reader conversation” as the conversation the reader (researcher) has with the conversations

and observations—the text—under scrutiny; in this conversation the reader takes up the

text, which remains “anchor[ed] in the local actualities in which people are at work” to

examine the “institutional discourses [that] regulate people’s local activities” (p. 105).

Institutional discourse can subsume the actual work taking place in the setting, which

makes it necessary for the researcher to be aware of it and be able to seek out the actual

activities that take place that are perhaps taken for granted and would therefore not be

explicitly discussed by the participants. I was aware that there was an institutional

discourse that the staff used to discuss the topics taken up in the program that had to do

with immigration, settlement and the labour market preparation they were doing in class. In

my analysis I examined my interviews and observation notes for how the participants

started to use the same language or not, as they took up the work the program staff

suggested to them throughout the program.

With large sections of the interviews and fieldnotes indexed, I could generate reports

that brought together all portions indexed under the same categories. I then examined the

passages together to note how the particular discourse or type of work under scrutiny was

used or talked about. I was particularly aware of any places where there were discrepancies,

51

inconsistencies, or on the other hand, if there were marked similarities in the way that

people spoke about topics or their perspectives on a type of activity or work that was being

examined in the report.

Limitations. I experienced what Dorothy Smith (2005) called institutional capture.

When the discourse used by the informant or participant is well understood and used by the

researcher, it can lead to descriptively empty interviews; the researcher may not dig deeper

in interviews to find out the activities or work that are taking place and which the

institutional discourse effectively covers over and dismisses as understood. I was aware of

the institutional discourse that was used and I started to use it myself. It became difficult to

see what was being discussed or referred to in any way but the institutional perspective,

meaning that I implicitly understood the activities taking place from an institutional point

of view. I forgot that the discourse covered over the actual work taking place that I took for

granted as understood. For example, discussions about “job search” seemed very natural to

me and it was difficult to bring myself outside of the institutional framework to be able to

explain what kind of work was being done in the activities included in job search, such as

all of the nuanced work that went into creating a résumé and preparing for job interviews.

Similarly, research projects guided by institutional ethnography often involve interviews

where the focus is on the experience and daily activities of the informants. Liza McCoy

(2006) discusses how this information is to be viewed in an IE analysis: “The analytic goal

is to make visible the ways the institutional order creates the conditions of individual

experience...From this initial exploration of people’s descriptions of their experiences, the

researcher can identify specific institutional sites, work processes, or discourses for further

investigation” (p. 109). The challenge is to keep the institution visible and not shift the

focus to the experience of the informants. I initially had a difficult time understanding how

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institutional discourses were organizing the work of staff and students and keeping my

focus on the institutions and work processes and not just the experiences of the staff and

participants.

When I think about possible gaps in the research or what data are missing, there is one

particular example that comes to mind. When the staff talked about needing to select

students who were positive or showed a positive attitude I accepted this at face value and

did not ask them what they meant by this. I had my own ideas of what “positive” means

that are certainly culturally mediated and that have been formed through my very specific

and personal experiences. I did not ask for clarification on what the staff meant by this,

which contributed to, or was indicative of some of my institutional capture. This became

problematic when I realized that a discourse of positivity was present in my data, as the

necessity for positive thinking and attitude was discussed often. I was able to examine my

fieldnotes for when such talk was employed for clues as to how it was used and when, but it

would have been helpful to ask staff how they thought of it at the beginning of my study

when they first discussed the idea with me.

Ethical Implications of Research

I do not believe that this study posed any serious ethical problems. All the participants’

information has been kept confidential, as has the organization and program information. In

addition, attempts at anonymity in this thesis have been made through using pseudonyms

and making any necessary changes to identifying information. I assured the staff involved

at WSA that as a researcher my stance is empathetic to everyone involved, including the

immigrant women and those running the program.

The interviews with immigrant women covered many aspects of their immigration

journey, and the focus of the research was not on any deeply personal aspects of their lives;

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it was about their professional aspirations and the self-work required to achieve this

success. As previous literature has documented that the road for immigrant women into the

workforce is often characterized by many barriers, the interviews sometimes covered topics

upsetting to the interviewees. However, interview participants were informed in advance

what topics were to be discussed in the interview, and told that they could stop the

interview at any time or choose not to discuss anything they did not wish to.

The women and I got to know each other over the course of the program, as I was there

observing the classes and sometimes participating in classroom discussions; we often had

interesting conversations about our lives informally during classroom breaks as well. Any

information gathered about them or their lives during these informal conversations was also

kept confidential. Because I formed a relationship with them, albeit a professional

relationship, I made efforts to exit the field in such a way that they knew they had the

continued support of the organization and its available services, and could also remain in

contact with me via email.

In the next chapter, I begin my data analysis by examining the work the staff did to

develop the program, and how that work was organized by the relations of accountability

with the government funders. Specifically, I will introduce the staff, program curriculum,

the use of a logic model that was the main organizing instrument for the staff’s work, and

the immigrant women who participated in the program.

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Chapter Four: Program Information and Funding

Enhanced Language Training, Bridge-to-Work Project

The Women’s Settlement Agency (WSA) is a not-for-profit, charitable and multi-

department organization specializing in programs to help immigrant women in the various

aspects of settlement and integration into life in Calgary. WSA is supported by corporate,

government and foundation funding. The project upon which this research is focused is an

Enhanced Language Training (ELT) bridge-to-work program for internationally trained

accountants. The project seeks to help skilled immigrant women enter the labour market in

accounting. It consists of two parts: fourteen weeks of classroom training and a ten-week,

unpaid work placement. Fifteen immigrant women are accepted to take part in the program

after going through a selection process. There are three staff who operate this project: a

project coordinator who oversees the program, a main classroom facilitator, and a career

counsellor who helps with classroom facilitation and provides individual career

counselling.

The ELT project is part of an initiative by Citizenship and Immigration Canada (CIC),

which launched in January 2004 in order to assist highly skilled immigrants with their

transition into the Canadian labour market. These programs are funded by CIC in

cooperation with a variety of service providers, including provinces and non-governmental

organizations, such as WSA (CIC, 2008c). Each year CIC puts out a national call for

proposals to which service providers, such as WSA, respond. In many provinces, a

government ministry receives federal funding from CIC to combine with its own funding;

Alberta Employment and Immigration (AEI) partners with CIC to oversee projects in

Alberta, which are jointly funded by both government ministries.

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In my conversations with the program staff, they would correct me if I referred to the

project as a “program,” clarifying that it was a “project” because it would not become a

program until it had two years of confirmed funding. WSA received funding for two

intakes initially, which took place in 2007-08. After the second intake, the staff applied for

continued funding, and after a lengthy application process where the funders and WSA

staff worked to create amendments to the project in order for it to meet its goals more

effectively, they gained funding for the third intake to take place for July to December

2009, which this research studied. However, in the spring of 2010, CIC provided funding

for a further three years, with two intakes per year, which moved the project to official

program status. Throughout this thesis I use the term project and program interchangeably.

As the department manager, Charlotte6, clarified the difference between project and

program for me, she defended the process, because although it is time consuming to

reapply for funding every two years, it creates accountability that keeps a program from

becoming stagnant. She explained that programs like this need to keep evolving, not only

because regular assessment leads to continued improvement, but because projects must

adapt to the economic times and the objectives of government. Gaining program status

indicated that the outcomes from intake three met the funders’ expectations and the WSA

staff’s continued amendments to the program had led to project outcomes that met with

funder approval.

One of the main CIC-funded programs offered to immigrants is Language Instruction for

Newcomers to Canada (LINC). LINC is only offered to permanent residents or those who

are in the process of receiving permanent residency and have been in Canada for less than

three years. LINC provides language training that covers the Canadian Language

6 Pseudonyms have been used for all program participants and staff to provide confidentiality.

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Benchmarks levels 1-10; however, this is not adequate language training to prepare

someone for the professional workplace (Boyd & Cao, 2009). The ELT funding stream

was created to fill the language training gap for Canadian Language Benchmarks levels 7-

10, and includes industry specific language training to assist internationally trained

professionals and trades-people find jobs in their field (Boyd & Cao, 2009).

In addition to providing job-specific language training, the ELT programs aim to provide

labour market information that includes “activities and experiences to help newcomers

prepare for the realities of the Canadian work environment” (CIC, 2008b). ELT projects

can also include a bridge-to-work component, as the WSA project did, in the form of the

unpaid work placement. CIC (2008b) intends for the programs to provide “orientation to

the local labour market, assistance in finding employment in the immigrant’s field of

specialty, mentoring, work placements, cultural orientation in the workplace and

preparation for licensure exams and internships.” The WSA staff view the bridge-to-work

component as instrumental in helping women who are foreign trained accountants into the

labour market, as they gain Canadian work experience, which they can put on their résumé,

and hopefully also gain a Canadian reference. The staff’s perspective from working with

immigrant clients was that programs that prepare them for their specific industries and

provide work placements were the most successful tools for assisting them into the labour

market in Canada. Several staff had worked with similar types of pre-employment

programs and thought that the ELT program, with job-specific language training and a

bridge-to-work component, was needed in Calgary.

Relations of Accountability: Funders and Community

In order to receive government funding, the organization had to provide documentation

that showed they had offered programs that had already been successful and delivered the

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service that was advertised to clients. As well, the proposal to CIC included letters of

support from local organizations and companies with whom they had partnered, and who

could vouch for the WSA’s integrity in their services offered and the relationships they

held with community partners. For example, the WSA holds formal networking events and

invites local businesses to the event to talk to WSA clients about their business and possible

job opportunities. Such partners wrote letters of support and those who could, would also

declare that they would be willing to take a WSA client for a work placement.

The staff continued relationship building work once the program started, specifically to

create sustainable relationships with work placement partners so that they would continue

to accept participants from each new intake. Charlotte’s goal was to create a good

reputation for this project and the WSA accordingly by providing programs recognized in

the immigrant community as being successful, to reflect well upon WSA as an institution,

and to make it the institution immigrants choose to go to for help. The staff cultivated

relationships with all those they collaborated with, including their corporate and

community partners, work placement partners, guest speakers and lecturers, and those

involved with class field trips. She explained how important this is to the overall success of

the project:

So the more successful we are on an ongoing basis the more qualified candidates that

we’re gonna have, the more companies that have had a positive experience with our

students, or, and or support from our staff during the process the more are gonna come

on board, and they’ll tell their colleagues, which happens: ‘oh we can’t do it, how about

you try [the WSA]’ and so on.

Although service providers are in competition when it comes to obtaining the limited

government funding available through AEI and CIC, Charlotte explained that it is

important that they all work together to provide the best services possible to the client pool

they all serve. These relationships are developed at the level of staff members’ relationships

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and at the level of organizations and the reputations they hold with each other, which

exemplifies some of the interpersonal, relationship-building work required of staff that

often goes unacknowledged in any formal sense, although the general idea is not unspoken

or unrecognized by the staff.

The WSA also needed to demonstrate that they would be able to prepare immigrant

women to work as accountants in Calgary, and so they established a relationship with the

Certified General Accountants (CGA) Association of Canada, as Charlotte explained:

CGA pointed us to someone...who does a pre-CGA program, which talks about learning

styles and studying and as part of our program we have incorporated that, and

incorporated his presentation into the program. Um, yeah, so they would want to see

that you’ve connected and researched accounting, that you actually know. So CGA

supported us and provided a letter of support, as well as provided us with a lot of

advice, um and contacts within the field.

This demonstrated to the funders that their program for accountants had the support of the

Canadian accounting designation body.

The completed proposal also included information about WSA as an organization; they

had to show that the proposed project fit within the WSA organizational mandates and

provide information about the success of similar projects that WSA had carried out in the

past.

The WSA also had to demonstrate in their proposal that there was a need for a bridge-to-

work program for accountants specifically. They did market research into the accounting

field in Calgary which supplemented their own experience working with immigrant-serving

agencies. One staff member had worked with a corporate readiness training program in

Calgary prior to working for WSA, and she noted that there were always a large number of

accountants in the program and they were the easiest to find work placements for. Another

staff member knew from a personal contact that large accounting firms in Calgary were

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finding it difficult to hire accountants, as they seemed to be in short supply in the city. They

also knew that they would not be duplicating services, as at the time there were no other

programs for immigrant accountants. However, two more programs for immigrant

accountants have since begun in Calgary, which are run by other immigrant serving

organizations.

A second strategic reason for choosing accounting was in order to retain funding;

renewed funding is granted based on the program meeting its projected outcomes. One

common expected outcome that funders have of the bridge-to-work programs is that the

participants eventually find full-time work in their field. The WSA wanted to create a

program that would be successful in finding the clients work placements and then have

them successfully transition into full-time accounting jobs. Charlotte explained the decision

to do a program for accountants as a “sure fire bet...because of the diversity of everyone

needs an accountant...it’s not just accounting firms, but it’s every business has a

bookkeeper.” The choice to focus on women with accounting backgrounds was thus based

not only on meeting a demand in Calgary’s labour market, but also on an ability to meet

their program goals to ensure continued funding of the program.

Introduction to the Staff

Once the program had secured funding, Charlotte, who had a career development

certificate, hired staff. Lauren was hired as the project coordinator while she was working

at WSA as a LINC teacher. She had previous accounting experience as well, which made

her a desirable addition to the team as they developed the project. Julie was hired as the

main classroom facilitator, with a background in teaching adult literacy. She explained that

her many years living abroad gave her the desire to work with an immigrant population

when she moved back to Canada.

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Lauren and Julie developed the program together, which included designing curriculum

and the schedule, coordinating fieldtrips, guest speakers, and work placements. They

decided to include training in taxation software and bring in supplementary accountants as

guest lecturers to cover the other accounting training. Julie wrote up detailed lesson plans

with homework assignments and developed the curriculum in a publishable format, should

they decide to publish it. Lauren attended to most of the record keeping and report writing

required by funders, which went through her manager, Charlotte, who then prepared the

final reports to the funders.

In the third intake, the role of a career counsellor was added, and Esther was hired to

facilitate some of the classes, particularly those regarding job search, and hold one-on-one

career counselling to give extra support to the students. Esther had a certificate in career

counselling and had worked previously with new immigrants in a similar style of

employment program. Lauren left WSA and the program before intake three began, and

Sahana was hired as the new project coordinator just before the work placements started.

Originally from India, she worked as an accountant in Africa and the United States for

eight years. She moved to Canada in 2008, and took classes toward a CGA accounting

designation while doing this job of project coordinator. Sahana had a bachelor’s degree in

biological science, a master’s degree in English, and a Masters of Business Administration

she did while in the United States.

Program Curriculum

The program staff created a classroom curriculum that reflected the ELT mandate in five

modules covered in the fourteen weeks of classroom training: General Canadian and

workplace culture, oral business communication, written business communication, job

search, and practicum preparation. The classroom teaching sought to prepare the clients for

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their work placement, which included understanding such things as Canadian workplace

culture, typical organization of various workplace types, and appropriate workplace

behaviours. It also sought to explain how the labour market works so that the clients

learned how to find, apply for and obtain jobs, and to understand what the field of

accounting looks like in Canada, and Calgary more specifically.

Aside from incorporating the objectives that CIC mandates for all ELT programs, such

as the focus on business language training and labour market information, the staff had

their own ideas about what needed to be considered when developing the program. Most

importantly, the staff kept in mind the lifestyle of their clients. For example, some of the

women to be involved in the program were likely to be mothers with children of varying

ages to care for, which meant that these women would have responsibilities and time

constraints outside of the program. The staff took this into consideration when they

proposed a schedule, workload and homework, and project objectives. They scheduled the

class to start late enough in the day for mothers to be able to drop their children off at

school or daycare, and had it end early enough in the afternoon to pick children up again.

The staff were conscious of the fact that many of the women were also enrolled in evening

or weekend accounting classes, some in addition to having children, and so they were

careful about how much work they assigned to be done outside of classroom hours.

Technologies of Governance

Surveillance and self-reflection. The program included techniques of governance as

methods of doing the work of shaping the conduct, knowledge, and dispositions of the

participants. The strategy of surveillance of knowledge was used by having the women do

homework assignments and prepare class presentations that required them to take up the

information and discourses used in the class and repeat them back. This strategy allowed

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staff to view how the participants were taking up the knowledge while requiring them to

take it up. Secondly, the staff required the participants to take part in self-reflective

activities, such as journaling and providing feedback to each other on class presentations. In

this way, self-reflection was a required technique of the self to encourage taking up the

behaviours, attitudes, and values the program conveyed to the women as systems of norms

and standards expected of them in the Canadian labour market.

Logic model. The logic model is a technique of governance that government funders use

to guide the work of ‘conducting the conduct’ of individuals. The outcomes-based logic

model for this program laid out three levels of outcomes to achieve: initial, intermediate

and long-term (an abbreviated form of the logic model is in Table 1B, Appendix B). The

outcomes were measured using both specific, quantifiable indicators and more abstract,

textually based evidence. The staff had to organize their work so that it produced

measurable reportable outcomes, as the outcomes had to be met in order to receive

continued funding for further intakes. For the staff who had been hired to work specifically

with this program, which was everyone except the department manager, renewed funding

was necessary in order to keep their jobs; the tension this created is discussed below.

The logic model for this project oriented the work of staff as they facilitated passing on

to the participants the knowledge outlined by the ELT stream of programs; it also laid out

the outcomes that needed to be met, which ensured that the program was accomplishing the

goals set out in the logic model. The staff used their past experiences in providing career-

development programs to activate an employment counselling discourse that made

teachable the types of behaviours, competencies, dispositions and comportment that the

participants were to take up in their self-reformation projects of becoming professional

workers in the Canadian labour market.

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The activities or work of the staff were categorized in the logic model, which outlined

the purpose of each activity and how to best accomplish it in order to deliver the expected

outcomes. The activities that were regulated included promoting the project, recruiting and

selecting students for the program, curriculum development, facilitation of the enhanced

English language training, running the bridge-to-work aspect of the program, follow up

with students and partners, and project evaluation.

Tensions in Relations of Accountability

Program outcomes: participants must be placed in work placements. Staff were

held responsible for meeting the outcomes listed in the logic model in order to receive

continued funding. Within these accountability relations there existed tension because

many of the factors involved with meeting the outcomes were outside of staff control. One

of the key ways that this tension was felt was that one of the tools to measure outcomes in

the logic model is that “90-95% of participants [are] placed into work experience

positions.” Yet, factors outside of the staff’s control, such as the economy, impacted the

work placements in particular. The work placements for intake two began in the midst of

the economic recession in 2008, which made it very difficult to find placements for all of

the participants. When companies were under financial stress, perhaps under-employed

because of not having the funds for staff, an unpaid work placement to supervise was

viewed as a burden rather than helpful. The program did not guarantee to the participants

that they would have a work placement; however, they extended considerable effort to get

everyone into a position, as the work experience is considered an important step in helping

the participants find work after the program and, importantly, they must have at least 90%

of the participants placed.

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Whether companies were willing to take on students was outside of the control of staff;

instead they employed strategies to manage the difficulty of setting up work placements so

that they could continue to meet their expected outcomes. The staff negotiated with

potential work placement partners, requesting placements that were shorter than the ten-

week placements in the program outline, or changing the timing of the placement, which

was supposed to begin as soon as the classroom portion of the program was finished.

Through such negotiations, all of the participants were put into placements, and in the event

of shortened placements the staff had the participants come into WSA to do further learning

activities to keep them engaged for the full twenty-four weeks of program they were told

they would receive. By the time intake three was at the work placement part of the

program, the economy had improved and finding work placements was not as difficult.

However, the recession impacted the participants in intake three, as many cited the

recession as one of the key reasons they had applied to the program in the first place; this

will be discussed further in chapter six.

Program outcome: participants must find accounting jobs. A second tension in the

accountability relations was the work of meeting the funders’ measurable outcome of

participants finding work after the program. One of the key logic model outcomes was that

“85-90% of participants who complete the project find employment in the accounting

field.” Yet, once again unexpected situations outside the control of the staff arose in each

intake that affected whether the participants would look for an accounting job after the

program. For example, some participants became pregnant, changed their mind about

staying in the accounting field, or their husband’s career trajectory changed. If a

participant’s husband lost his job, needed to go back to school or spend more time

retraining than expected, she would need to take an immediately available job to maintain

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the financial viability of the family instead of waiting and working toward getting a job in

accounting.

However, the fundamental tension in this accountability relation lies in the fact that

bridge-to-work programs are designed to teach clients how to find jobs in Canada, rather

than find them a job, as demonstrated in the project mission to “Enhance the capacity of

foreign trained accountants to access jobs related to their profession.” Whereas finding the

participants work placements was the responsibility of the program staff, staff were not

responsible for finding the participants jobs, nor did they guarantee that participants would

find a job, although these are the performance measures for the funder. Charlotte conveys

this difficulty:

That’s the irony. Well, actually it is. It is and it isn’t, right? We can’t promise them

jobs, but what we’re trying to do is get their foot in the door. And when you consider

that their specific barriers and the [feedback] that they get—which may or may not be

bullcrap, right—um, is their language is too low, they don’t have Canadian experience,

um those are the two major things that they, that immigrants will hear. So we, to the

funder’s credit, they give us three and six months after right [to look for such

outcomes]…But the whole reason why they fund these kinds of programs is to bridge-

to-work, so while we cannot guarantee it, it is sort of uh, the outcome.

The strategy used to negotiate this tension was to manage the clients’ expectations about

what this project was intended to do for them. While the clients often entered the program

with the mistaken view that the program would get them a job, it was the staff’s

responsibility to give them a clear view of the true intention of this project. Further to this,

the project coordinator had each potential participant read through documentation that

clearly laid out what the project was intended to do for the women and what it was not

intended to do for them: to prepare them to enter the labour market and provide a work

placement, but not actually provide a full-time paid position at the end of the project.

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Ultimately, that responsibility rested with the women themselves, which was one of the

main factors outside of staff control when it came to meeting funding requirements.

Although there were events in clients’ lives that were outside of staff control, staff

carefully manage the experience and motivation of the participants so that barring any

external event that changed their prospects for getting a job, they would continue to seek an

accounting position after the program was over. Charlotte discussed these issues:

And it is, it is frustrating, right, because you can’t control human factors. You can’t

control what’s going on in the lives of the participants, um you can’t control…whether

or not they’re going to learn and understand culturally appropriate behaviours in the

workplace, which has sometimes been an issue. Um, you can’t control whether or not

they seem perfectly ready or perfectly psyched and then the next minute or even a

couple months down the road they lose it and feel overwhelmed. And we can’t control

employers, but [what] we want to do is sort of create the best possible circumstances for

them, the best chance, the best opportunity and that is sort of the goal of it. But we are

held to those outcomes from the funders.

Further to having the program participants realize they were responsible for finding a job

and staying motivated to do so, the staff had the participants create career action plans,

which was an activity the logic model required to take place. The women had to set specific

career goals and think of the different steps they would need to meet these goals. They

filled out the action plan in the first week of the class and again before they began their

work placements fourteen weeks later. After the fourteen weeks of class the women had

heard guest lectures on the accounting designation, gone on tours of schools where they

could retrain, and learned how to search and apply for jobs in Canada. In short, they had

been given information to help them create more concrete steps to achieve their career

goals.

Increased Participant Support: Steps to Meet Goals

Several changes to the program were made for intake three to help with achieving the

outcomes set out in the logic model, and ensure that the participants would remain

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committed to the goal of finding an accounting job. Thus, the changes were all aimed at

providing more support for the participants. The changes were made both from the staff’s

desire to improve upon intakes one and two, and also in compliance with the funders’

wishes as they negotiated renewed funding for intake three.

Career counselling. In the first two intakes the main classroom facilitator and project

coordinator did not have time to provide individual assistance or career counselling to the

clients during the program; the first addition was adding an employment counsellor to the

staff to do the enhanced relationship building they saw as vital to maintaining the women’s

motivation for the work they must do to find jobs and also their relationship with the WSA.

In the first two intakes it was felt that the students needed more accountability after

finishing their work placement, as Charlotte explained:

I’ve seen a lot of bridge-to-work programs, and we sort of forget about them after they

graduate, right, so they finish their ten weeks and we do the three and six month call but

are they moving up? Are they progressing? What kind of barriers are they running into?

… So it’s not enough that they get out there, they need to have a support system in

place, and to continue their learning either informally or formally.

In addition to providing individual support during the program, the career counsellor’s role

was to keep in contact with the women after the program’s completion to assist in the

process of looking for jobs or any other support they required as they adjusted to a job. The

staff were focused on meeting outcome targets, that is that participants find jobs, but they

were also keen to help the women through the process of adjusting to their jobs. The staff

wanted the women not only to get jobs, but to keep them and build their careers.

Workshops. The second addition to the program was workshops that began once the

third intake was over. The funders and staff were in agreement that continued interaction

with participants post-program would be effective in maintaining the participants’

motivation to meet their career goals. The employment counsellor was the primary staff

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member who organized the workshops, which gave her a platform to maintain contact and

structured support with job search and post-employment challenges. There were ten

workshops that covered topics very similar to the program content, such as written and

verbal communication, workplace relationships with coworkers and management, the

organizational structure of typical Canadian workplaces, and how to look for jobs and do

job interviews.

Work placement Friday meet-ups. Although a third addition was not required to

obtain funding, the staff decided to implement Friday afternoon meetings each week during

the work placements for the participants and staff to meet together. These two-hour

sessions were a time for the staff to remind the participants, while they were actually

experiencing a Canadian workplace, of important workplace cultural issues and for the

students to bring up any challenges they faced and discuss what they were learning. It

provided a way for the women to think through their experience and have native Canadians

help them make sense of anything they found confusing.

Monetary aid for continued training. In addition to the increased support via the work

of relationship building through additional staff and workshops after the work placements,

Charlotte explained that another way support was provided was through monetary aid. AEI

allowed them to take some of the money not used in one of their budget streams and pass it

directly on to the women in the program by reimbursing partial costs of additional English

classes or classes towards an accounting designation, which the participants often took in

the course of building their careers in Canada. All of the support offered to the students was

to enhance the potential for the participants to meet their career goals. While the individual

career goals of the participants varied, the staff wanted to see the women move up in their

careers, and achieve higher status positions accompanied by higher pay. In the staff’s view,

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achieving one’s career goals is interconnected with the ability to integrate into Canadian

life generally. In Charlotte’s own words:

And that’s something that we try to broaden the funders’ perspective on this as well, is

that we, it’s not just employment, right, we want to make sure that they are integrating

‘cause all the literature suggests that it takes a minimum of ten years for an immigrant to

feel like they’ve transitioned, which is a phenomenal amount of time. And I’ve spoken

to lots of immigrants who have been here much longer than ten years, and they, they’re,

you know, settled down and have employment but they still don’t feel Canadian, or

whatever that means, so to see them involved in post-secondary institutions to working

at an entry-level or mid position, um to see that they have a circle of friends, um either at

work, or other classmates either at WSA or at the post-secondary institution is all part of

that transition.

The staff came to hold the view that helping immigrant women enter Canadian life and the

labour market required not only a view to their careers and finding jobs, but that they must

also take into consideration their integration into Canada more broadly. The logic model,

which reflects the funders’ wishes for the program, indicates this as a long term program

goal as well: “Immigrant women effectively contribute to their communities and to

Canadian society.” The second long term goal is: “Foreign trained professionals integrate

into the Canadian labour force in accounting positions in Calgary.”

Work of Selecting Students for Success

The work of staff is to have the clients take ownership of doing the work in the program

and of finding a job afterward; the program and the participants were in a symbiotic

relationship where they depended upon each other to meet their goals. For this reason,

selecting the students for the program was done very purposefully and with great care so

that those most likely to succeed, and help meet funders’ targets, such as finding full-time

work in the field of accounting, would be selected. The project manager looked after all of

the promotion, recruitment and orientation to the program as guided by the requirements of

the logic model.

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Funders’ mandates. CIC’s guidelines set out several requirements for the participants

chosen for the program; first, all clients served must be new to Canada, which means they

have been here for 0 to 3 years. However, AEI’s mandates allowed the program to serve

Canadian citizens. Because this project was jointly funded, it had more flexibility with this

stipulation and could accept clients who had lived in Canada for longer than three years,

but only twenty percent could be Canadian citizens. Often women immigrants spend the

first several years in Canada taking LINC classes and settling their families, so it is

common to find women wanting to enter bridge-to-work programs who have lived in

Canada for over three years.

Program mandates. Candidates to the program filled out a written application and had

to submit necessary paperwork, which included their permanent residency card and a

résumé listing their education credentials and work experience. Candidates had to have

some sort of accounting or finance background in order to be considered; this was

interpreted very broadly so that the participants had a variety of credentials and work

experience. For example, they might have had an unrelated degree in music, but ended up

working in an accounting or finance related position. The candidates were also screened for

whether they had any Canadian work experience in accounting and if they had already been

through any similar programs, for if either was the case, they were not allowed in the

program. Charlotte explained that this was funder stipulated but was also an ethical

consideration so that the program and resources could help those who have not yet had

these experiences. A fourth requirement was the language proficiency of the clients. The

staff determined what Canadian language benchmark level would be required for entrance

to the project. Based on the staff’s past experience working with similar programs, they

determined that all participants would need at least a level six language benchmark in the

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four areas of language competency: speaking, listening, reading, and writing. Charlotte

emphasized that this was a minimum and the higher the language levels the better, as

English communication ability was cited as an important factor in making the transition

into work life easier.

Determining how the participants would afford to live while in this project was another

consideration for staff when they screened candidates, not because their financial situation

determined whether they would be accepted, but because the staff needed to know if they

would be able to assist the participant if she needed it. While this program did not cost

anything for the participants, taking part in it would often limit the amount a participant

could work, as the program was a full-time commitment, with class running Monday

through Friday, 9:30am to 3:30pm. The project had funding to pay for such things as transit

passes and any required child care; the parents organized the child care outside of WSA and

were reimbursed monthly. Immigrants who have been in Canada for over three months are

eligible for a living allowance through Prospect, which is an Alberta initiative to provide

immigrants one-time learning grants; this meant the staff were more likely to accept women

into the program who had lived in Canada for a minimum of three months and could apply

for Prospect funding if they had no other source of income.

Subjective criteria. Candidates who met these criteria and found eligible to enter the

program were invited to do a face-to-face interview with the project coordinator. The above

criteria were a concrete checklist used in order to screen applicants. However, the interview

step introduced the next set of criteria the staff used, which was more subjective and

intuitive. The project coordinator, who did the interviews, had the work of selecting

students whom she thought would be the most likely to do well in the program and do the

work required to achieve the program’s objectives. The project coordinator selected

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participants who exhibited certain personal characteristics and experiences, which she

developed from her experience in the first two intakes. She noted any traits that accounted

for, or explained why certain clients excelled in the program and others struggled.

Specifically, the project coordinator described the type of women she looked for in this

way:

You have to be open, so open, malleable, willing to learn, um, positive. If you're not

positive about your chances of success it slows you down considerably. You might be

successful in the project and finish it, but you'll still take a long, long time getting

where you want to go. So, your attitude is huge.

The women selected for the program had some of the following experiences: past Canadian

work experience in the form of a “survival” or low-skilled, non-accounting job; they had

done some form of retraining or re-education; or they volunteered in any capacity. While

these criteria were also assessed via the résumés provided in the application process before

the interview, the project coordinator asked about these types of experience in the

interview, as they were often not listed in the women’s résumés. All of these experiences

were thought to show that the immigrant woman had a desire to work and integrate into

Canadian life. These types of past experiences also indicated that the individual was able to

make a commitment to the responsibilities they sought out, and the program required

participants to complete the program and work placement. Women who were highly

motivated and driven were sought, as Lauren explained what type of person she looked for

in candidates: “Their initiative, their commitment, their investment in themselves, their

willingness to get out into the community, um and attempt to fit in culturally: a lot of these

things are important....[and get] everything possible out of the project. Ask lots of

questions, be very inquisitive and...contribute a lot.”

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Lauren contrasted her explanation of what characteristics she looked for in participants

with those who applied to the program whom she viewed as unprepared for the work

involved. The staff wanted women who showed a serious commitment to preparing for and

entering the workforce. Candidates who had been out of the workforce for a long time and

had not taken steps to prepare themselves for entry into the labour market before applying

for the program were not accepted, as Lauren explained:

If a person seems to be sequestered in her home and hasn’t taken any classes since 1992

and hasn’t upgraded her computer knowledge and hasn’t been outside volunteering or

working in any way, shape or form, um, it’s indicative that they’re not ready to work

because they have not shown ANY advancement towards finding work.

She considered evidence that women were not good candidates as “gaps in employment

history, switching back and forth from program to program, um, are they only taking free

programs or are they investing their own money in their own education as well.” The

program’s continued funding relied on choosing participants who would do the work of

finding an accounting job and integrating into a full life in Canada.

Introduction to the Participants

The fifteen women participating in the third intake were from a variety of places

including China, Russia, Bolivia, Philippines, Moldova, Taiwan, Kenya, Bangladesh, and

Belarus. They decided to immigrate to Canada for a variety of reasons, such as for the

adventure of moving and learning about a new country and culture, for a better life for their

children, to live in a country they thought safe because of political and economic stability,

to gain a Canadian passport to allow for more travel, for more job opportunities, and in

some cases because their partners already had immigrated to Canada before they were

married. Some of the women had been in the country for many years, raising children,

others had arrived just months before the WSA program began. Two of the women from

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China had immigrated to Canada years previously, but had returned to China to raise their

child with the help of their parents while their husbands stayed in Canada to begin their

careers and create financial stability.

Most of the women had engaged in multiple strategies to restart their careers in Canada.

Some of the women had done so prior to the WSA program, while others spoke of taking

part in these strategies while in the program. The first thing that almost all of them did upon

immigrating to Canada was enrol in English as a Second Language (ESL) classes, although

a few of the women had excellent English before they moved and had never taken an

English class in Canada. Several had held survival jobs and many had done some form of

volunteer work. Being an accountant in Canada requires some retraining in order to

understand the basic principles and practices used in Canada. There are entry-level

bookkeeping type jobs that do not necessarily require specific training, but if the women

desired to work in higher-level positions, they needed to retrain or re-educate.

A common first step to seek out more education in Canada was to have their credentials

assessed by International Qualifications Assessment Service (IQAS), a service offered by

the Government of Alberta that compares foreign trained credentials to Canadian education

credentials. The Government of Alberta Employment and Immigration (2010) website

explains that, “IQAS Assessments are designed to increase access and entry to: the job

market, educational institutions and professional regulatory organizations.” However,

several of the participants in the program explained that they had heard through their

immigrant networks that IQAS assessments were known to be helpful in retraining so that

Canadian institutions know what a person’s existing credentials are comparable to, but

were not taken into consideration by employers. The IQAS assessment was used by the

women who wanted to enrol in a training program in Calgary to demonstrate what previous

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education could be transferred to the program, and what classes they needed to complete

the program.

There were several retraining options that the women took part in, with the accounting

certificate and diploma from Southern Alberta Institute of Technology (SAIT) Polytechnic

being the most common. Classes taken at SAIT or Bow Valley College can also be put

towards gaining an accounting designation once you have been accepted into the

designation program, which several women were also planning on doing. The accounting

designation in Canada are Chartered Accountants (CA), Certified General Accountants

(CGA), and Certified Management Accountants (CMA).

Two women took courses through a national accounting company that provides its own

training program for doing income tax. Another strategy was to find out about the Calgary

labour market by utilizing services offered in Calgary, such as Alberta Works, another

Government of Alberta initiative that offers a variety of services for job seekers in four

areas: Employment and Training Services, Income Support, Child Support Services, and

Health Benefits (Government of Alberta, 2004). The women took part in meetings with

employment counsellors, received help with résumés, and took workshops on such things

as how to network and answer questions in job interviews.

Despite all of the strategies used to work towards employment, including the accounting

classes many women had already taken, the women had sought out this program. Not all of

the women had tried to look for work first, but those who had, had not found accounting

jobs; the work placement that would give them Canadian work experience to put on their

résumés was one of the most common reasons for applying to the program. There were

women who had taken accounting classes, some even had already received accounting

certificates, yet had not started to look for work yet because they were not confident that

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their English communication skills were high enough for an accounting job. They wanted

the accounting-specific language training offered by the program along with the additional

accounting software training. It was the participation in all of these strategies and activities

that Lauren was looking for when she selected students for the program.

The brief introductions to the women below are based on my interviews with them,

which took place throughout the fourteen weeks of classroom training. Because some of the

women were interviewed at the beginning of the program and other’s towards the end of

the program, they had been exposed to varying amounts of the employment counselling

discourse and work of doing career planning. As well, some of the participants had sought

out help from employment services and employment counselling prior to being in the WSA

program, and so had been introduced to the employment counselling discourse already.

Some participants’ used more of this discourse when they talked about their experiences

and had more carefully laid out future career plans than others based on how long they had

been in the course when I interviewed them and what kind of programs and services they

had already accessed.

Alejandra had excellent English-speaking skills and was very highly educated. She

arrived in Calgary from Bolivia six months prior to joining intake three for the WSA

project, but had previously been in Canada for four months in 2004 on a student exchange,

so it was not her first time here. She had a bachelor’s degree in economics with a major in

finance and a master’s degree in business administration also majoring in finance. She

worked for five years at an intermediate level in accounting before immigrating. Alejandra

had already been accepted to the accelerated CMA program, which she planned to take

classes towards while working in an entry-level accounting position.

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Dipika came to Canada in January 2008 after finishing her master’s degree in accounting

in the United States, where she then worked as an accountant for two years. She had

planned to stay in the United States, but immigrated to Canada after she married her

husband, who was from her country of Bangladesh and had already immigrated to Canada

before they met. Dipika planned to work towards a CGA designation while she also worked

as an accountant.

It took Wendy two years to persuade her husband to immigrate to Canada with her from

China. They arrived with their daughter in 2005. Three months after arriving in Calgary

Wendy took English classes full time while her husband worked full time and took part-

time English classes. Before immigrating, she took an accounting diploma with an auditing

major, and worked for several years doing accounts receivable and payable for one

company. In Canada, she had two jobs before enrolling in the WSA program: one as a

cashier in a hospital parking lot and the second working in a coffee shop. She and another

immigrant employee were laid off at the coffee shop at the end of May 2009; they were told

it was because of the spring season and economic recession. Wendy planned to go to SAIT

to get her degree in applied business administration with an accounting major.

Hua first moved to the United States from China with her husband before they moved to

Canada in spring 2009. Her husband had lived in the United States for many years already

as well as various places in Europe because of his work as a chemical engineer. They

applied for permanent residence in Canada instead of the United States, however, because

she said that it takes a lot longer to get a Green Card than permanent residence in Canada.

Hua used to be a music teacher but switched to accounting because she thought it would be

an easier career to transfer to a life in Canada than being a music teacher. Before

immigrating, she worked as an accounting assistant for two years, and then as a junior

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accountant in the U.S. for six months. Hua said that working in the U.S. was very difficult,

as she felt her computer skills needed improving, along with her language and knowledge

of the culture; for these reasons she sought out the WSA project before trying to find a job

in Calgary.

Karama immigrated to Canada in March 2009 from Kenya after marrying her husband

who had lived in Canada for three years and the United States for four years, working as an

accountant. Karama spoke English, the official language, for her schooling in Kenya, and

had excellent English speaking abilities but still found the transition to speaking English all

the time in Canada difficult. She had taken concentrated courses in accounting during high

school, but had not gone to university. She worked as a general accountant for a couple of

years before immigrating. She hoped to take part-time classes toward an accounting

certificate, which she said would be viewed as comparable to a master’s in Kenya, while

working as an accountant full-time. She did not say that she intended to move back to

Kenya, but she liked the idea that if she ever did go back she would have what would be

considered a very good education from Canada.

Darja immigrated to Canada in 2008 from Belarus after meeting and marrying her

husband. He was already living in Canada and met her while in Europe on holiday. They

had their first child in March 2009. She had a degree in economics, but also took

accounting courses outside of the university. She worked for a small company for two years

doing a wide range of entry-level accounting work. She found this—in her words—boring,

so she switched her profession to marketing management where she worked in a retail store

ordering inventory. While she preferred this profession to accounting, she told me that in

her research about the Canadian labour market she could not find information on doing that

kind of job here; therefore, she decided accounting would be a better choice for Canada,

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and became more interested it as she learned the software used in Canada. After she arrived

in Canada, Darja’s preparatory work included taking English classes and a Quick Books

accounting software course also offered through WSA. Darja considered doing a CGA

designation at some point in the future, but wanted to get an entry-level accounting job and

gain Canadian work experience before taking more accounting classes. Darja became

pregnant with her second child towards the end of the program and so she postponed

finding an accounting job.

Alina, from Russia, was one of the older women in the program, which she brought to

my attention in our interview because in Russia, she explained, people were discriminated

against for jobs based on age; this made it difficult to find a job past the age of forty. She

was divorced from her husband and told me that she had also been discriminated against for

jobs in Russia because of this. For these reasons, and also because she was very close to

being a victim of a bombing in a public market, she immigrated to Canada. Alina received

a degree from a University of Economics and then worked as an economist until the fall of

communism in her home country; with the political situation so changed, she soon lost her

job. She then moved into bookkeeping and accounting, where she did all types of

accounting for nearly ten years. Before she immigrated she was working as the chief

accountant in her company. She took five months of LINC IV and V English classes after

arriving in Canada, but had not taken any other classes yet. Her career plan was to study to

get her CMA designation while working in an entry-level accounting position.

June moved to Canada with her husband in 2005 from China. However, after having her

first child in 2008, she spent a year back in China with her family, so had moved back to

Canada just before the WSA program began. June had excellent English skills, gained from

taking English in university and from working as a reception captain in a five-star hotel

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where they had many international guests. She had a degree in management and after

finding the hotel reception work boring she decided to move into the hotel’s human

resource department as an administrator. In this position she did accounting-type tasks such

as payroll. When she moved to Canada she realized that human resources required a higher

level of communication skills than she thought she possessed. For this reason, and because

she viewed accounting as a very stable profession, she decided to forego the human

resources path to pursue a career in accounting in Canada. Before June had her son, she

worked for two years in Calgary as a customer service clerk in a print shop while

completing an accounting certificate at SAIT. Her son lived with her parents in China for

several months while she took accounting classes at SAIT while in the program at WSA.

Lynn and her husband emigrated from China to Canada with their eight-month-old son

in 2004. However, Lynn moved back to her home country with her son soon after for

almost four years, while her husband stayed in Toronto to build his career. During the four

years back home, she decided to do her master’s degree in business administration. She

came back to Canada in 2008. In Calgary, Lynn took LINC English classes and one

accounting course at SAIT. She also enjoyed volunteer work doing the taxes of new

immigrants to Calgary at another immigrant serving agency. In China, she had worked for

the same company for eighteen years and was the chief financial officer when she left for

Canada. She looked for accounting work right after she moved back to Canada, and sent

out 500 résumés looking for work in upper level, management accounting positions. She

was invited to job interviews but was not hired, which led her to take this program. She

considered getting a CGA designation, and received an assessment from CGA that told her

she only needed to take five classes. She was not sure if she would pursue it, however.

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Priya emigrated from Nepal to Canada with her husband and four-year-old daughter in

2009, only a few months before entering the WSA program. She had a master’s in business

administration but told me it was quite different from an MBA in Canada. She worked in a

bank as a customer service clerk, a teller operator, and then as an assistant accountant

before immigrating. Priya wanted to get an entry-level accounting job while she took

evening classes towards a designation. She became pregnant with her second child during

the project and so decided to take time off from starting her career to have her baby.

Sara immigrated with her husband to Canada in 2004 from China. When Sara first

arrived in Calgary she worked at an Asian supermarket and took English classes. She then

had two children, one in 2005 and the second in 2008. When she found out about the

project it seemed like a good opportunity to begin her transition from being a stay-at-home

mother to restarting her career in accounting. She had a diploma in economics information

management, and worked for approximately seven years as a bookkeeper before

immigrating. She planned to transfer some of her credits gained in her home country into

an accounting diploma, and had not decided whether she would also pursue a degree and

accounting designation.

Abby immigrated to Canada in 2006 from Taiwan. Before immigrating, she graduated

with a university degree in business administration with a major in accounting. She took

more accounting courses after this degree and worked as a junior then senior accountant for

a large company for five years. She then went back to school to become a Certified Public

Accountant (CPA), which is similar to the Canadian designation of being a Chartered

Accountant. After she got her CPA she did a two-year graduate program in accounting, and

then worked doing accounting research development for two years before immigrating to

Canada. She took English classes in her first year in Calgary and after six months got a job

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at a grocery store, where she still worked three years later. Abby also did volunteer data

entry work at a local not-for-profit organization. She took accounting classes towards an

accounting diploma, but with no plans to pursue an accounting designation. She used to

work 12- to18-hour days in Taiwan and did not want to work such long hours now that she

lived in Canada. She did not accept a work placement in the WSA program and left the

program.

Lian moved to Canada from China with her husband and son, then ten years old, in

2003. Lian had worked in a bank in China for 15 years after she received an urban finance

diploma from college. The government put her in the bank teller position when she

graduated so she had never had the experience of looking for a job. She was advised by a

friend when she moved here that accounting would be a good job in Calgary and somewhat

related to her banking experience from China. After taking LINC and ESL courses for two

years, she began taking accounting courses at SAIT and attained both an accounting

certificate and diploma. After the WSA program, she also planned to take classes toward a

CGA designation while working as an accountant.

Lilliana immigrated to Canada with her husband in 2009 from Moldova. She had two

undergraduate degrees, the first in fine arts and the second in economics. Her work

experience before immigrating included several years working as an accountant, during

which she was promoted to senior accountant. Lilliana’s fine arts degree included studying

French and English literature; her English skills were very good as a result. In Canada, she

worked at a grocery store part-time while enrolled in the project. She planned to get her

CMA designation while working full-time in an accounting position.

Malaya emigrated from the Philippines to Canada in 2006 with her husband and three

children. Malaya worked in a thrift shop for two years in Calgary as a cashier and then

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started doing accounts payable, just before she was accepted into this program. However,

she said it was very basic bookkeeping work and it was not considered the type of

accounting work that would disqualify her from being accepted to the program. Malaya had

a four-year bachelor of science in business administration degree, with a major in

accounting. She also became a Certified Public Accountant, and worked for two years as an

external auditor for a company with international affiliation with Price Waterhouse

Coopers. She then started her own small grocery retail store, which she had for 15 years

until they immigrated. She took computer classes at SAIT and the internal tax preparation

courses offered by a company that does income taxes, and also planned on getting

accredited as a CGA.

The women were selected for the program because of their education and work

experience gained from their home country, as well as their work, volunteer and

educational experiences gained in Canada. Many of the women had already experienced a

Canadian workplace through volunteer or survival jobs and had been exposed to the

employment counselling discourse through other services and programs. We can see that

many of them had already incorporated the program’s messages about gaining more

education and setting an accounting designation as their career goal.

In chapter five, we follow the participants and staff into the classroom to better

understand how their day was structured and the daily activities they took part in together. I

situate myself into the field as well, as a participant observer who was neither immigrant

nor staff. I discuss how the staff used an employment counselling discourse to

communicate to the immigrant women the work they needed to do in order to gain access

to the labour market. I also examine how the participants took up the self-formative work

the program invited them to do as they took on the knowledge imparted to them.

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Chapter Five: The Work of Conformity

A Typical Day

The room the class is held in looks like a typical room for learning: a desk is set up at

the front of the room with books on it and there are tables and chairs set up in a u-shape

facing front. The wall behind the instructor’s desk has a long white board on it; there is a

world map to its left and a large paper tacked to the wall on the right headed with

“Classroom Guidelines” with a list below. The classroom is one half of a larger room that

is partitioned by a long folding wall pulled shut. There are windows on the other two walls

that look out upon downtown Calgary. They make the room a very bright space. In the

corner between the windows stand two large cupboards, full of Government of Alberta

workbooks, English dictionaries and other resources to use in the job search process, such

as books on writing résumés. There is a flip chart at the front of the room; pages are often

ripped off to be used by the students for classroom presentations and there are sometimes

helpful reminders written on it for the students, such as “use full sentences when

speaking.”

A typical day in the program classroom begins a few minutes before class starts at

9:30am with the women chatting as they come into class and get settled into seats with

their bottles of water and books. The class begins with Julie, the main classroom facilitator,

going over “housekeeping tasks” such as childcare reimbursement, transit passes, or

language assessments. From there the morning lesson begins. For example, one day in the

first week of class the lesson begins with Julie asking the women to think about the

characteristics of a good employee. After the women discuss their ideas in small groups,

the class comes together to talk about what they have come up with. Class discussion is

followed with another group project, where they read through a Government of Alberta

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workbook detailing the characteristics of good employees. They are instructed to

summarize eight of the characteristics per group and then present them to the class. Julie

walks around the room helping the students as they work with words they do not know. As

two students lapse into their first language, Julie reminds them that English must be spoken

at all times in class, pointing to the guidelines posted on the front wall.

There are two fifteen-minute breaks, one in the morning and one in the afternoon, as

well as a half-hour lunch break. After lunch, the presentations continue; in between

presentations the students and Julie discuss certain key characteristics of a good employee,

such as having a positive attitude, how to dress professionally and for Canadian weather,

and the importance of having a work-life balance where they are able to focus on other

aspects of their personal life in addition to their work life. The next lesson after the

afternoon fifteen-minute break continues the conversation about the important qualities of

a good employee using a second government issued book to direct the class discussion. The

day ends, typically, with a discussion of the homework assigned that day and work that is

due or expected for the next day.

During the class breaks the women talk and get to know one another. The women move

into groupings which generally reflect cultural and language background, although there

are exceptions. They discuss a variety of topics together, just as women getting to know

each other are wont to do. They discuss their children, homesickness, the absurdities of

Canadian culture and living7, hopes for the future, and concerns about getting a good job.

They trade information regarding schooling, transit, what they have heard about the labour

7 For example, from my fieldnotes: “Lilliana says that yes, it is so hard to get used to different foods and that

she was also surprised that here in a civilized country she has to share her laundry with the whole building in

a big room. She says that they have made washers and dryers in small sizes in Europe and she doesn’t know

why here they have to be so big so they cannot fit inside your apartment, so that you have to go down to a big

room with all the machines and do it there.”

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market in Calgary and their own experiences, and local resources to aid with integrating

into life in Canada and the labour market. During the breaks I usually stay in the

classroom with the participants, who are very welcoming to me and enjoy asking me

questions about myself, my schooling, knowledge of the labour market and their English

pronunciation. We discuss travel and food and the weather, and what we like to do in our

spare time and during vacations. I am not one of the staff members and their relationship

with me is less formal than with the staff. Newcomers often do not have very many

Canadian-born friends initially, and because they often are involved in programs such as

this one at WSA, or English classes, they get to know other immigrants first. The staff tell

me that the students like to talk to me because I am the resident Canadian who can answer

questions and help them understand Canadians.

Chapter Introduction

In this chapter I provide an overview of the program activities followed by a discussion

of the main project goal as voiced by the program staff, not as written in the logic model.

The program aims to help immigrant women fit into the workplace, to understand

Canadians and Canadian workplace culture and to feel comfortable working in this

environment. The work of fitting in includes an amount of self-work on the part of the

participants, as they refashion their attitudes, self-presentation, workplace values and styles

of communication to conform to Canadian normative practices and standards. Lastly, I

explore how the women took up the suggested self-work, which was often to choose to do

the self-work whether it came naturally or was difficult, and was sometimes to resist the

work, whether because it was incoherent to their own understandings of what it was to be a

professional worker or because they viewed themselves as incapable of taking it up.

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Techniques of Governance – Program Activities

While some classes were very traditional with Julie, the main instructor, providing

information in the style of a lecture, there were a variety of different activities that took

place in the fourteen weeks of classroom training. Group work was something Julie

included purposefully, as the ability to work in a team of people was an oft-repeated

workplace expectation, as were presentations. The students were required to do multiple

mini-class presentations and two major class presentation; usually these assignments were

done in groups, but the students also did at least one presentation by themselves. On the

days the women were doing accounting lessons, which were almost entirely learning

accounting software, a guest instructor facilitated and the women used laptop computers.

Each Friday afternoon the class ended early and the students, put into groups, went offsite

to do assigned group projects, such as practicing English speaking skills by talking to a

person in a position of authority outside of the WSA, or making practise phone calls to each

other pretending to be either a recruiter calling in response to a job-seeker’s job application

or the job-seeker.

Fitting In Culturally: “It is Important”

When I sat down with Lauren, the first project coordinator, to discuss what she saw the

program trying to accomplish, she did not refer to the logic model and its list of outcomes,

rather, she told me of a couple of “messages”, as she put it, that they want the women to

understand throughout the program. The first message she talked about was fitting in. The

program was developed to impart the message that entering the labour market and starting a

career in Canada was not only about getting a job:

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The truth, from what I see or have interpreted, is that we're trying to help these students

fit in, understand what is required, and have a sense of accomplishment, but getting a job

is not the full accomplishment, it's fitting into a new environment and feeling like they're

able to feel confident in that... They would rather just be employed but they don't

understand why [they haven’t been hired], it's a big blind spot; I think that's why focus is

not on employment. For the staff, we focus on helping them fit in and if they get a job

great. For the students, they don't understand why they're not getting work, but they

want a job. And so we're actually teaching them what's in their blind spot.

While there was a convergence between the program’s and participants’ goal with respect

to finding accounting jobs, the program staff’s focus on having the women do work that

would lead them to fit in and feel confident in an ability to fit in was not initially shared by

the participants. The program staff described this as the participants’ “blind spot” about the

need to fit into the workplace in order to find labour market success: obtaining and keeping

a job in Canada was about fitting in culturally as much as it was about having the

accounting skills required by the job description. It took several weeks for the students to

understand that this was the program’s intended focus, but even after they came to

understand this, it did not mean they always accepted this focus on doing work to the self to

fit in culturally; this was the first area of resistance discussed with me by staff. The women

expressed dissatisfaction with how the curriculum was intentionally organized with

communication and culture first and the accounting classes and job search strategies

coming afterward. Julie accounted for the curriculum order:

The reason that I sequenced it this way was because I felt that it was really important to

gain a basic understanding of culture, cultural constructs and their awareness of their

own culture in order to set a foundation for everything else because absolutely

everything else you do is imbued with some sort of cultural connotation.

The staff explained that the students often entered the program with a specific view of what

it meant for the program to help them find an accounting job: English skills, accounting

skills and Canadian work experience. The participants wanted vocabulary training,

accounting classes and to learn how to do job search in order to find a job; their focus was

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very much on what they needed to do to get a job. Instead, the women were expected to

trust that the program was organized in such a way as to help them enter the labour market

without a full understanding of how it was going to accomplish that and what kind of work

was required of them.

Several weeks into the program I witnessed the resistance to cultural training when I

heard the women talking amongst themselves about how they would like the accounting

classes to begin. At six weeks, Julie also heard the feedback and asked them how they were

feeling about the program in class. The students responded that the first few weeks of

communication classes seemed repetitive. They liked it better once the accounting classes

and work placement preparation had begun. They told her they had wanted to have these

classes begin immediately in the program and did not know why they had to wait. Julie

explained in a short speech that communication and culture were very important parts of

the program:

‘You need to see it all together, the speakers, accounting, communication, culture and

Esther's job search help and one on one counselling—they all come together to make up

the program.’ Julie says that they are all important parts of preparing them for the

labour force and that when they get into the workforce and think back on the program

they will realize how important the culture and communication parts have been to the

job—the most important parts in fact (fieldnotes).

Julie also reiterated to the students something I had heard from her and other staff members

already: that the staff care not that they just get jobs after this program, but that they fit in

and feel comfortable in their jobs enough to keep them and move up in their field.

At the end of the third intake, when the participants were in the last weeks of their work

placements, Esther emphasized this message once again; she told the participants that they

needed to take up the work of fitting in culturally while in the program, because once they

were in the work force it would be a different environment with little support from co-

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workers. She had attended a conference regarding immigrants in the workplace, where the

main speaker was an immigrant himself, working in the immigrant serving sector. She

discussed his main point of view with the participants:

The biggest barrier that immigrants face is the lack of integration into the Canadian

work culture. She says that Canadian employers don't want to have to do anything extra

to help immigrants fit in, and they would view that “as a pain” if they had to do anything

extra. Esther looks around at the women as she is talking and says that it’s the truth. The

speaker said that Canadians don't know that immigrants don't know how to fit in; they

just assume that immigrants know what to do and know what's going on even if really

they have no idea (fieldnotes).

The response by one of the program participants, Lilliana, on this day indicated that she had

received the message about how important it was to fit in and was amenable to this work.

Lilliana responded to Esther by saying that she wished she could have been at the

conference because she understands they are supposed to adapt, but wonders what else they

need to do. The other participants were nodding in agreement, and their overall response

indicated that they were willing to do whatever work was required of them to fit in, to

conform, to change the self in the required ways, but still felt unsure about what that would

require of them once in the workplace. Esther’s response to this question was vague, but

she reiterated that the speaker said “they need to give the immigrants more training in this

[that immigrants need to fit in culturally]” in addition to making sure that immigrants know

how to write a good résumé. She reiterated that immigrants need to be aware that

employers do not understand their needs and the difficulties they experience in fitting in.

Therefore, immigrants need to learn how to fit in better without expecting help from

employers. The message to the women was that they were expected to do this work. While

Esther did not have a detailed list of all the ways they needed to do it on that day, the class

curriculum, which the women had already been through, covered a vast array of the

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detailed ways the women were to work at conforming to expected Canadian standards in

the workplace.

Employment Counselling Discourse

The program used what I refer to as an employment counselling discourse, by which I

mean the textually mediated ideas and strategies used by job-seekers and those who help

job-seekers, employment counsellors. In North America, it is a large-scale discourse that is

transferred textually by governments and employment counsellors on their websites,

through their brochures, booklets, pre-employment counselling program curriculums, and

videos. These resources are used to teach people how to look for work and how to be a

good employee.

The employment counselling discourse was used to frame the delivery of activities that

helped the women to understand Canadian culture and the labour market and how to

integrate into each. In order for the women to integrate into Canadian society and the labour

market more specifically, the program suggested to the participants that they do self-work

in order to mould their bodily comportment, attitudes, behaviours, and interpersonal skills

to be in line with Canadian workplace norms and expectations. The purpose of the program

was to mould the women to conform to the expected, Canadian ways of conducting

themselves, doing their work, and the values that shape these aspects of self in order that

they would gain access to the labour market and find employment success.

A note on conformity. The women came from a variety of background cultures, work

experience and educational experiences. They brought with them to Canada professional

identities developed in a different culture. They were used to a professional atmosphere that

was often different from what they were told they would find in Canada. They were told

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they needed to adjust their behaviours, conducts, ways of doing work, doing relationships

and sometimes even values. They were told how to conform.

The idea of conformity often holds negative connotations—especially in an

individualistic society such as Canada, where emphasis in the labour market is on one’s

individual accomplishments and getting ahead by standing out above the rest. Conformity

often is thought to limit someone to certain, expected ways of being that confine one to do

less or be less free. However, the expectation that participants were to modify parts of their

selves to conform to Canadian society was revealed in this study to hold a variety of

meanings for the women in the program. The women told me why they decided to

immigrate to Canada: for adventure, to learn a new language and culture, for better jobs and

education opportunities, for a good future for their children. Conforming to a new culture

for women who have chosen to immigrate can be a positive experience, especially when

being asked to conform meant being more active, assertive and less deferential than they

would have been in the past. Working to modify parts of the self and conform was also a

nuanced experience in the sense that the work was sometimes resisted and found difficult

and sometimes celebrated. Sometimes the work on the self meant attending to parts of the

self that were more similar to Canadian culture than the home culture; this was often

exciting and liberating. I examined the various Canadian workplace expectations and

standards to which the women were asked to modify aspects of the self, as well as the

nuanced ways in which the participants responded to these messages and took up the self-

work the program suggested they do.

Self-Work Required to “Fit In”: The Work of Conformity

There were specific ways that the program endeavoured to show the women how to fit in

through a cultural understanding of what it means to be a professional in Canada. The word

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professionalism was often used to encompass a wide variety of ways to become a Canadian

worker, and included being aware of and modifying one’s: 1) self-presentation in dress,

bodily comportment, confidence and initiative, 2) workplace values, which inform

behaviour in the workplace, and 3) “soft skills”, which means to do interpersonal work

relationships and communication in appropriate ways.

Self-presentation. Within the employment counselling discourse, the staff encouraged

the participants to be self-reflective and self-aware of every aspect of themselves, which

included their self-presentation. The labour market in Calgary and especially the field of

accounting, the staff said, was very conservative. The women were encouraged to present

themselves in a professional, that is conservative, manner in terms of the way they dressed;

this included the moderate styles, size and colour of jewellery they wore, the sparing use of

perfumes, and neutrally-coloured and styled clothing. In class the staff and participants

together created checklists of acceptable clothing—dark clothes, appropriate skirt lengths

that were below the knee, closed-toe shoes—and unacceptable clothing styles—capris,

sports sandals, bright colours, big jewellery. A representative from the Walk in Closet

spoke to the class to explain that it is a non-profit organization that collects professional

clothing and gives it to women in the labour market who cannot afford to purchase the

appropriate wardrobe. Each participant spent an afternoon at the Walk-in-Closet where staff

helped them to pick out appropriate clothing for the workplace.

Along with professional self-presentation in dress, the women were to be mindful and

reflect upon their bodily comportment. The women were to be conscious of their physical

mannerisms that might reflect nervousness or that would be distracting to those with whom

they were talking. They were advised to avoid touching their hair, to hold their arms and

legs in a folded, discreet manner, to make eye contact to show respect and represent

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themselves as truthful, to smile at co-workers in a friendly but professional manner, and

how to shake hands and introduce themselves appropriately.

One afternoon, after lunch, the women were sitting in their usual semi-circle at tables in

the classroom when Julie came in. Without saying a word, she went around the circle, and

stood in front of each woman with her hand held out until the student held her hand out

towards her to grasp. Julie pointedly made eye contact with each student, and introduced

herself by saying, “Hello, my name is Julie.” The first few women smiled and nodded at

her and shook her hand from their seated position. Then Dipika said hello and introduced

herself back, at which point Julie pulled on her arm, motioning for her to stand up. Julie

stopped and told the class that they were to do as she had done: you introduce yourself

upon introduction, make eye contact and stand up to shake someone’s hand. Julie

explained that Canadians think it is important to have a “good” handshake, which is two

firm pumps; this was compared to a handshake that resembles a “limp fish”, which was to

be avoided as a weak handshake that could easily flop about. Julie said that Canadians

would view a person with such a handshake as weak and perhaps not to be trusted. The

women looked at her in disbelief, but she reiterated that although it did not necessarily

make sense and was not fair, that is the way it is in North America.

An important aspect of self-presentation and monitoring bodily comportment was to do

so with apparent confidence; this was exemplified in the classroom preparation when the

students were told how to behave in a job interview: show up fifteen minutes early; the

interview begins as soon as you walk in the front door, so be polite to the person at the

front desk and anyone else you might meet while in the building, janitor included; take

your coat off in the waiting room before being called into the interview; if asked if you

would like something to drink say no, as you could risk spilling on yourself; sit with ankles

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crossed and hands folded in lap, smile and make eye contact. As they went over each point

in the class the women mimicked the body language being discussed, pulling in their arms

and legs, folding ankles and pressing hands into laps and sitting straighter in their seats.

Every detail of the job interview experience was discussed in class to prepare the

participants for what to expect, as well as to prepare their bodily comportment and

behaviours in advance, in order that they could present themselves as confident at their jobs

interviews.

Workplace values. The employment counselling discourse was used to explain that

professional behaviour is to incorporate understanding Canadian workplace values, such as

the North American relationship to time, the importance of a work-life balance and

building relational “soft skills”, which is something Canadians value and will also be

discussed here as a category for self-formation on its own. The staff explained that “time”

is very important to Canadians; they respect time and are considerate of how they use their

time and other people’s time, which was why there were strict classroom rules regarding

punctuality and being absent from class. The staff told the women that these classroom

rules, which also included a dress code, were to mimic what they would experience in the

workplace. Lauren explained:

Sometimes it's cultural, understanding time, and in Canadian culture time is of the

essence. So if they don't get it, we remind them...Yeah, and if you think about going out

in the workforce, if you're late and absent, I'd fire you. You know, so [if there are

punctuality or absence issues in class] I'll say, ‘Why are you doing this? How are you

helping yourself in any way if you don’t follow the rules of where you are?’ And so

those little opportunities make [a] huge, huge difference in how they treat and respect

the group, and...they also start to break down relationships and if one of the things we’re

trying to do is teach them how to fit in, when you do things like be late or absent...you

actually start to build barriers, and when you already have barriers, ah, you don't add

more.

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The program sought to demonstrate to the women what Canadians value and the

importance to their success in the workplace of adopting these values for themselves.

The term “work-life balance” was part of the employment counselling discourse

employed to discuss how a good Canadian worker structures her life. Canadians, the

participants were told, value their free time, such as long weekends to leave the city, time

with family, volunteer activities, and enjoying exercise or artistic hobbies. The staff

suggested that it was important for the participants to have other things to focus on in their

lives other than their jobs. In class, the staff and participants discussed how this affected the

participants’ behaviour in the workplace in specific ways such as working overtime and

taking time off. The staff explained that employers expect staff to take vacations and to

have any overtime work approved. The message was that they were to strive to be “well-

rounded” in the ways suggested and to examine their lives and to do the self-work required

to modify their values and behaviours accordingly.

Soft skills: appropriate interpersonal relationships and communication. In the

context of the workplace the women were taught that fitting in means more than being a

good accountant; it includes a set of relational “soft skills” that Canadians value in the

workplace. As Julie explained to me:

You know, your work experience, your education is important, but just having those two

things alone isn’t going to get you a job. It’s being able to present effective soft skills

that really makes the difference to [not only] get into the job, but also to retain the job.

The message in the program was that Canadians value building workplace relationships,

and how to build and manage these relationships was described in very specific ways that

required certain attitudes and behaviours. First, the project staff suggested that it was very

important for the women to be polite, friendly, and purposefully try to get to know their co-

workers. They were told they should go out for lunch with co-workers or sit in the lunch

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room to eat, not at their desks. The women were told that making “small talk” with their co-

workers was very important; this was described as purposefully taking breaks during work

to talk about non-work related matters and enquire about how their co-workers were doing.

They were taught how to share appropriate information about themselves that was non-

work related but not too personal. Appropriate topics to talk about included weather,

children, sports, and hobbies. Topics that Canadians do not discuss, they were told, include

money or details about family life.

The ability to fit in with co-workers by making small talk was a topic discussed

frequently. In fact, the importance of being able to make informal small talk was even a

topic for discussion when the AEI funding representative came to observe the class one

day. The funder representative spoke to the program participants and began by extolling the

bridge-to-work, ELT programs in general for their success in helping new immigrants enter

the labour market. She explained that the program model had evolved over time as they

received feedback from the work placement employers involved. Some of the feedback

provided was that even if the immigrant’s work was done well, they were still lacking

interaction with other employees. She explained that this is viewed as problematic because

employees have to be able to relate to others so that they can work together as a team. She

smiled at the women and suggested with a nod of her head that they had probably already

heard about the importance of teamwork in this program. The women all nodded and

smiled in reply; they had heard this message repeatedly. The funder provided a further

example of what she meant: when three Canadians get up for a drink of water they are

likely to have a conversation with each other, what Canadians call the proverbial water

cooler chit-chat; she explained that new immigrants need to learn this skill of small talk as

well. She repeated what the staff had told the women on several occasions: to find and keep

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a job requires that they be able to communicate and understand culture, which was just as

important as having the accounting skills required for the job.

The project had a strong language focus intended to provide the participants with the

business English required to be effective in the workplace. Lessons covered on vocabulary,

grammar and pronunciation, as well as workplace related topics such as how to write a

business email, answer the telephone, leave a voice mail message and how to communicate

in a formal business meeting. However, the communication lessons were as much about

communicating in culturally appropriate ways to fit in as they were about the mechanics of

the English language. In these lessons the women were instructed to understand and imitate

the communication style of Canadians, which was explained in class to be a balance

between being polite and friendly. For example, in the email etiquette class Julie explained

to them what “short worded” means:

She says it means that you have appeared a bit rude and abrupt in the email. She says

that if you are “short” with someone that means that you have been rude to them. Julie

emphatically tells the class to remember that in Canada we don't want to offend anyone!

She says that we want to be polite, not just in small talk, but in all communications

(fieldnotes).

The specific example of how to write a polite email was about the way one replies and the

phrases and words used:

Julie writes on the board an example email and reply, “Hi Julie, I was wondering if you

would like to go for a coffee with me at Tim Horton’s today after work? Betty” and an

example response of: “Hi Betty, No thanks. Julie” ...Julie looks around and says that

they need to provide some sort of reason why she can’t go for coffee. Someone offers

that maybe she has a doctor’s appointment after work. Julie nods and writes an

alternative response on the board: “Hi Betty, I would love to go out for coffee with you,

but I can’t. I have an appointment.” (fieldnotes)

When examining formal and informal phrasing in another class, the women were taught

that formal language is mainly used in written documents, and informal language is used

when speaking to each other. Canadians, they were informed, are polite to one another

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despite the informal language used in verbal communication. The women were expected to

use this style of communication as they practised in the class lessons and with each other.

Positivity Discourse

A positivity discourse was activated throughout the program. It overlaps significantly

with the employment counselling discourse, and could be thought of as part of the

employment counselling discourse. The discourse was activated through government-

issued texts, videos about the workplace, and the curriculum text, which relied heavily on

the employment counselling discourse. Positivity talk was employed throughout the

program and in regard to almost every topic the curriculum addressed.

I first heard staff use positivity talk when they explained that they used a positive

attitude as a selection criterion when interviewing potential students for the program, as it

helped to identify individuals most likely to be receptive to and successful at the kind of

self-formation work the program taught. In addition, the staff viewed a positive attitude as

essential in keeping the women motivated to do the self-work the program requested of

them, as well as providing an inoculation against the frustrations they often experienced in

class, the work placement and their continued search for work after the program, as Lauren

explained:

If you're not positive about your chances of success it slows you down considerably.

You might be successful in the project and finish it, but you'll still take a long, long time

getting where you want to go. So, your attitude is huge...Also, [we prepare them for]

possible challenges that might arise in a work practicum, whether it’s having to do with

knowing the job, dealing with people, cultural issues, the logistics of getting there, how

do you keep positive during this time, because it’s like going into a new culture. There’s

going to be some element of culture shock going on. And um, how do you stay positive

during that whole time because invariably there is some sort of challenges that can be a

challenge to self-esteem. And then, of course, how do you stay positive during the whole

job search, and looking towards the future in terms of planning goals and an action plan

for what they’re going to do.

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The staff told me it was difficult for the students to learn how to have a good attitude and

stay motivated, and so such traits were continuously discussed and honed throughout the

class. Esther warned the participants one day in class, “‘You must apply for jobs, send...out

résumés, search...for jobs and network’... She says this is the stage where a lot of people

experience discouragement and one needs to employ a lot of positive self-talk” (fieldnotes).

In one of the classes just before the work placements began:

Julie looks around the room and says that it is important to put their knowledge and

good attitude together and then they will be successful in their work placements! She

emphasizes once more that having a good, positive attitude is very important to have

along with all the knowledge they have gained in the class (fieldnotes).

Once the women were working in their placements, having a good attitude and staying

positive continued to be an often-discussed topic in the Friday afternoon meet-up sessions.

Self-presentation. Positivity was also portrayed as an internalized way of being and

thinking. The participants were told that the ideal self-presentation included appearing

confident, having a positive attitude, and showing initiative, as these were important

qualities that made them attractive to employers. In a class on how to network, Julie

explained that talking to strangers required them to be confident and positive: “Julie tells

them emphatically that they need to be the confident and positive person she knows they

are! The women are writing these things down as Julie talks” (fieldnotes).

The discourse of positivity and showing initiative also informed the instructions the

participants were given about how to answer interview questions. In answer to the practise

interview question “Tell me about your ability to work under pressure”:

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Julie suggests that they could give a past story about how they handled working under

pressure to demonstrate this answer. She says the question is about time management

under stress. Julie asks, what are positive ways to answer this? Sara says that she could

ask her co-workers for help. Julie says that this should not be her only answer, because

she also needs to show her own initiative. Alina suggests that she say that she organizes

her schedule to get all her work done on time. Julie says that yes, it is about being

organized so when pressure comes you have the time to do it. She says that

communicating with the boss and team workers about what is going on and perhaps

asking for more time is a good way to answer the question.

Through such lessons, the messages to the women were not only on how to answer

questions but also provided a suggestion about how the women were to appropriately act in

the workplace.

Positive attitude and workplace behaviour. The program curriculum covered a lot of

material on how to appropriately act in the workplace, and having a positive attitude was

part of all of the behaviours in terms of habits and etiquette, from being hard-working and

meeting work deadlines to refilling copier paper and keeping the office kitchen clean. On

one of the last days before the participants began their work placements, Julie showed the

class a video called “First Impressions: Etiquette and Work Habits for New Employees,” in

which the employment counselling and positivity discourses were activated. Afterward, in

the class discussion:

Julie asks the class, what is a good work ethic and what is another way to call this?

Wendy answers that it is attitude. Julie smiles and says yes! ‘Attitude is the most

important thing you can carry away from this program, and only you can determine it’

(fieldnotes).

While the video had covered many topics, such as clothing, body language, and proper

etiquette, the importance of a having the right attitude was the final point Julie left the

women with.

In the workplace having a positive aspect to one’s self-presentation meant activating this

discourse in speaking up with helpful ideas and contributions, being a problem solver and

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learning how to handle conflict in appropriate ways. A government-issued booklet called

“Positive Works II” was used, which provided example scenarios where someone might get

frustrated in the workplace; the class broke up into groups to brainstorm ways to problem-

solve such scenarios. The emphasis in all problem solving solutions was to stay positive in

all interactions. The message to the women was to portray themselves as positive people

who can handle any situation in the workplace.

Positivity in communication. The participants were encouraged to communicate in

positive ways. The staff taught the participants to give feedback to each other’s class

presentations in the “sandwich” format: start with a point of positive feedback, then include

any constructive criticism and then end with positives again. They were reminded at the

start of every presentation session to stay positive in their feedback to each other. The staff

pointedly created an atmosphere of positivity between the students and themselves by

remaining positive in the feedback they continuously gave students and by talking

positively about all of the course content under discussion.

The program staff activated an employment counselling discourse along with a positivity

discourse to suggest the appropriate self-presentation to take on, with preferred styles of

communication, and appropriate “soft skills”, workplace values and behaviours in order to

fit into the Canadian workplace culture. We will now turn to how the participants in the

program took up these discourses and responded to the invitation to take part in the self-

work of reforming themselves to fit in and conform to Canadian workplace standards.

The Women’s Self-Formation Work

The women had been carefully selected for their orientation to self-improvement, their

motivation and desire to do the work required in the program. However, the work of

moulding parts of the self to conform to Canadian standards was not always easy or

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accepted without resistance. Nonetheless, the women were engaged in the self-formation

work and had agency in how they decided to respond to it. They had choice whether they

were to accept the prescribed work and changes to the self or whether they would resist the

work and retain their own values, behaviours and sense of how to present themselves.

Many of the women in the program told me they decided to immigrate to seek out a new

life and understand a new culture. Immigrating to a new country was often expressed as an

adventure and a way to expand themselves and their understanding of the world. Several

women explained this point of view when they talked about the work they were doing in

class. They gladly took up the work to conform to Canadian standards with this in mind,

which is not say that it was always easy, but it was not resisted. Wendy, one of the

participants from China, was a mother to two children. She was very outgoing, usually with

a smile on her face, and laughed easily. She told me that she wanted to fit in; her strategy

for finding work going forward was to work on her professional English vocabulary,

improve her communication skills and work on her understanding of how to fit in. She told

me there were a lot of differences between where she is from and Canada:

And uh, they have difference in China in Canada; I think there is difference uh (pause)

different culture and different uhhh environment, different, people are very different. So

how to look, just like Lauren said, “How to fit in!” In Canada, fit in with Canadian

peoples I think is very important. Don’t just hold myself to traditional ideas, you know.

Sometimes I need to forget it, yeah, I think. If I forget something maybe I can get this

new idea. Yeah this is my strategy. So I really wanted to really quickly fit in to Canadian

environment.

She was told that fitting in is important to Canadians, and she took up this discourse as she

sought to understand and do the self-work encouraged. Specifically, she worked to

incorporate the styles of communication, workplace values and ways of doing relationships

to which the class introduced her.

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Hua, also from China, told me that she thought of herself as a shy person. However,

from my own observations of the classroom, she was one of the students who enjoyed

chatting with those around her regularly and seemed outgoing and talkative. Similar to

Wendy, she explained that although immigrating had not been easy, she wanted to move to

another culture to expand herself and learn from the experience:

Generally, it’s good. Because, mm, from my understanding about life, I really want to

know more about the world. I think that is, uh, a good experience for people...I think, to

know more, to expand your views of the world...So you can know more the world than

others because you experienced, not you travelled, it’s not you watching TV, “Oh, I

know this!” No, it’s totally different when you live there, to know different culture,

different language, different people, I think that is a good experience.

In her own way, Hua explained why this project was structured with classroom training and

a work placement: the self-formation work that the students do in the classroom to try and

learn the language, cultural and accounting lessons was enforced by the learning that took

place through the work placement experiences. The self-work of fitting in became the work

of practicing it, testing out the newly modified behaviours and skills. Hua was happy to

take up the work encouraged in the program to understand Canadian culture, deliberately

doing the self-work that would mould parts of herself. She had her own reasons for why she

thought this was important, her own project for self formation.

The work of self-formation was complex and nuanced; many of the women described

immigrating and finding work in Calgary as a difficult experience, but in the next breath

described their experiences and the task of learning a new culture as a dream come true. In

some cases women accepted and incorporated aspects of the suggested work into their

professional identity, while they resisted other aspects of the work suggested because it did

not fit with their own ideas and understandings of what encompassed professional conduct.

When the women were amenable to conforming parts of themselves to Canadian standards

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of behaviour or values, the work was sometimes easy or natural, and in other instances it

was still very difficult.

Priya had immigrated to Canada only a few months before the program began. She had

excellent English-speaking abilities already, and although speaking the language made the

move easier, she was still getting used to aspects of Canadian culture and she missed her

family. She indicated that she accepted that the self-work suggested in the program was

necessary to finding a job and that she was willing to examine herself for where changes

need to be made, “I have to adapt my working style...I have to change and adapt for here,

and attitude to time, I have to change and like this.” She said that where she came from

they had a more relaxed view of time, which was different from how Canadians view time;

this was an area of self-work that Priya felt she had to take up if she wanted to meet

employer expectations. In addition, she was made aware that she had to make particular

changes to an aspect of her bodily comportment. She had difficulty incorporating the

suggested changes, but acknowledged she needed to do the work in a good-natured manner

in the classroom:

Julie asks the class what they thought of the video. There is a discussion about the

importance of body language. The fact that Priya was shaking her head in a way that

surprised Esther is brought up. It seems that Priya was shaking her head from side to

side (ear towards shoulders) to mean yes instead of nodding. There is a lot of laughter

during the conversation and Priya is good naturedly laughing and teasing herself by

saying that she really had to practise to nod and stop herself from doing what is natural;

she clasps her hands to either side of her head as if she is trying to hold it still and

everyone continues to laugh. Julie says that it is hard work to change these things within

us and to do things differently. She says to just wait until we have the taped interviews

this weekend because then they will all be very aware of their own habits and body

language (fieldnotes).

Each participant had a video-recorded mock job interview that they watched afterward and

received feedback on from the staff. Their body language, such as how they held their arms

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or what they did with their hands, and style of speaking, such as the speed or use of filler

words or ‘ums’, was critiqued in the feedback.

Although Hua was eager to learn how to fit in to Canada, the work involved was not

always easy. She had previous accounting work experience in the United States but told me

those six months were very difficult for her. After this difficult experience, and upon

moving to Canada, she decided that she needed a program such as this one to help her

understand about Canadian culture and workplace culture so that she would feel

comfortable working in Canada. She explained that part of her difficulty in the United

States was that she did not understand that she needed to try and talk to her co-workers:

As you just mentioned, when I was working in [the United States] I found something is

difficult, so I want to prepare well for the next time [that I have work in North America].

I don't want to be so frustrated because I don't know that. And it’s not good for me, and I

think it’s not good for them [Canadian co-workers]. Because if I feel [the small talk is]

difficult, I think the people who[are] working with me [will] also feel [it is] difficult.

And I don't want me to act so strange for them, because that will make me feel bad. So

it’s like, I don' t know if you have that kind of feeling, I feel when I am quiet in my seat,

when I am doing something, and they are talking something, for me, I just think, ‘Why

you don’t go to do your work?’ (Laughs.) It’s like that, ‘Why you spend so many time to

talking?’And at that time I think it is like that. But maybe their way, they think, ‘This

person is so strange! Why they don’t talk to us?’ (I laugh and so does she.) It's like that.

So now I understand maybe that is something, it's part of job!

Hua wanted to fit in, as her past experience led her to believe that this would make her

working experience more enjoyable and easier. The program’s goal was to have the women

understand how to fit into the work culture by helping them to understand the behaviour of

their Canadian co-workers, and to learn how to behave in similar, accepted and understood

ways. After all, it is easier for a program to do work on modifying a group of people in a

class, than to create a program that would enter a large number of workplaces to try to

modify the workplace.

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Hua explained that learning strategies, such as small talk, to fit in also helped her to

decipher the way that Canadians have professional relationships with each other. She told

me how she interpreted what small talk meant:

So, but now I realize that [small talk] is like the polite way to say, ‘Hello.’ To say ‘Hi’

but just a further, a little bit further than ‘hi’. But it's something you need to do, so now I

realize, ‘Oh, this is just to show that you're polite.’ But at that time I didn't know that, so

I really feel [it was] hard.

Hua explained that small talk meant learning how to have a type of relationship that is

uniquely Canadian; it was learning to be polite and friendly with her co-workers even if she

was not going to become close friends with them. She found the idea of having non-work

related discussions at work strange initially, but she demonstrated a willingness to take up

this work and pushed herself to exhibit the behaviours she was told she needed to do in

order to fit into the Canadian workplace. Indeed, when Hua and I talked ten months into her

new job post-program, she told me she liked her job and the people she worked with; many

of her new co-workers were women similar in age to her and they had a lot in common to

talk about.

Wendy was also eager to fit in and was a very outgoing person. She was amenable to the

message that “soft skills” were important, which meant she needed to have strong

interpersonal skills to fit into the workplace culture in Canada. She felt that in this regard

she fit better in Canadian work culture than in China’s. She said that she liked to chat and

make jokes. For her, the small talk expected and the relaxed atmosphere of the Canadian

workplace was wonderfully suited to her personality and style of self-presentation, whereas

in China she said relationships with co-workers were more serious. She felt that co-workers

should talk with one another, but she was concerned that in China if she was too relaxed

and made jokes she would not be accepted by her co-workers:

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Wendy: So I, I feel very pressure while working [in China] because while working we

should talk with each other, I think maybe talking and making some joke. I really like

making joke (laughs). But maybe some people don’t like making joke like I made

it...Sometimes I feel different [in China]. Yeah, maybe some um, not different, but while

working in my country sometimes the relationships is very serious, I think. Because in

China there’s many people was heard by employer’s friends, or very close relationships,

the people. So I can’t (pause) figure out who is there, who is uh, who is have the

relationship with who. It’s very complicated.

Leah: Like somebody might be friends with your boss?

W: Yeeaaah!

L: Like someone you have to be careful [with], is that what you mean?

W: Yeah, in China it’s very complicated.

Despite several minutes of talking about this I was not sure what she meant by the

complicated work relationships in China, but it had something to do with not ever knowing

who was friends with whom and how they had gotten their job. She said that her perception

of the Canadian workplace was that it was simpler. She felt she fit naturally with this aspect

of the Canadian workplace culture.

Despite feeling she fit better with aspects of Canadian work culture, learning the

nuances of how to build relationships was not always straightforward or easy for Wendy. In

her job at a coffee shop she found all of her co-workers very friendly, but she could not

figure out why they had not become better friends. The friendliness would have been an

indicator of a close friendship in China, but she did not experience this in her coffee shop

work relationships.

Wendy: Canadian people is very friendly uh, and uh, and they are uh (laughing) I can’t

say more than that, but I think that they are friendly but keep their priv. Uh how you

say?

Leah: Private?

W: Yeah, keep their private space. It’s not very easy to make the close friend, right?

L: And is that similar to China or is that different?

W: Different. I think it’s different. ‘Cause in China always if you feel very friendly with

each other, I think that you very close, very close relationship.

Understanding that Canadians are polite, friendly and use small talk to build relationships

helped her to make sense of her coffee shop experience:

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Wendy: Right now [in the program] I learned Canadian culture and compare, in my

heart, in my inside I compare my work experience, it’s very I feel very clearly, I think it

make it very clearly about the case.

Leah: Mm hmm. So what you’re saying is that what you’re learning and you compare it

to your work experience, they fit together—

W: —Yeah. They fit together.

She had learned in the program what to expect in a professional job where she was to make

small talk and be polite and friendly but without necessarily expecting that she and her co-

workers would become close or intimate friends.

Just as Wendy felt her outgoing personality was more suited for Canada than China,

another student, Alina, was confident about her ability to fit into Canada, feeling she was

more suited for the Canadian workplace culture than Russia’s. Alina was one of the older

women in the program, who moved to Canada with her adult daughter. She had a lot of

energy and expressed repeatedly her joy at the opportunity to begin a life in Canada even

though she was in her forties. When I asked her if she felt there was anything she needed to

change about herself to fit into the workplace her response was to laugh and tell me that she

had enough “soft skills”. Alina was excited about learning new things and the program’s

goal of producing a confident, enterprising job seeker aligned well with her own self-

formation program:

I don’t like boring life... If you don’t try to improve yourself, or do something new, or to

know something...I don’t know. It’s so boring. We need to. Now I have time, my kids

[are] adult[s]. And I have time, I have wishes. I hope I am in the best place in the world

now. (Laughing) And I can try everything...It’s so simple to learn.

Alina felt confident she would get a job quickly, and taking up the program discourse, said

that it is “because I think that I am suited, more suited, or more fit, I don’t know, for

Canada than for Russia. (Laughs).” For example, she explained that in Russia if one smiled

at co-workers in the corridor they would think the person was “crazy,” or perhaps did not

have enough work to do. She enjoyed hearing that in Canada one is to be friendly, smile

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and make small talk with co-workers. This program intersected well with her own career

aspirations, and she found the messages to conform to Canadian expectations of values and

behaviours liberating. She was eager to expand herself in new ways and learn how to fit

into Canadian culture.

Although the work requested of the students was sometimes perceived as suited to who

they were already, at other times the work seemed foreign and was difficult. There were

instances when students did not always feel that they naturally fit with the prescribed self-

formation, and they experienced feeling a sense of deficiency in some of the capacities

suggested. Some women resisted taking up certain work suggested altogether or, if they felt

they must take on the capacity, found it a very onerous task to mould aspects of themselves

appropriately. Abby had an accounting designation, master’s degree, and a lot of work

experience from her home country; she had worked long hours building her career before

immigrating. However, she was unsure of her ability to find accounting work because she

lacked confidence in her communication skills and ability to work with Canadians. She had

worked in a grocery store for several years in Canada and felt comfortable in these

surroundings:

I...[work] as a customer service. I know how to get along with everyone and I know the

language in the supermarket. Because first time in this class, I scared to speak English, I

don’t know everyone. But in the supermarket to me is safe place... I’m not scared to

speak English in grocery store because to me is safe place...Yeah, I think I need to feel

more comfortable. Because I know that my confidence [is] in my accounting, not my

confidence in my skills...in how to do this job with Canadian people.

Before starting the program, Abby felt that it would help her to get a job as an accountant,

but she came to think of herself as deficient in certain ways to the point where she lost her

confidence in herself. She had several interviews for the work placements, but felt very

negative about the experience, and decided that her career goals had perhaps changed:

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Yeah before I think about after this project I can find accounting job here. But now I

think I don’t, I don’t want because if you see that they reject you many times in

interview, you will lost your confidence. And now I think if I cannot find a job, maybe

my career is customer service, so I am okay. I think about my communication skills and

for me it’s still a problem. I cannot speak like June or Hua. Because last time the

company interviewed three people and I know they choose her because...you know, they

like people that can talk, that can communicate basically, and I know they will choose

June.

Abby took up the discourse of the importance of positive attitude, and when she reflected

upon herself in comparison, she explained that she did not have the right attitude, which she

compared to one of the other women in the class:

Abby: I just don’t know how to start. June, I know she do very well...Yes, I want to

learn but I scared to say. And everything June can do...She has a good attitude, yeah.

I: And you don’t think that you do?

Abby: I don’t. I learn lots from her. (Laughs). I hope that if I can have the same attitude

as her that I can find a job.

I: Yes, they talk a lot about positive attitude in this class. Is that a cultural difference?

A: Personality. [It’s a personality difference.]

For Abby the program did not increase her confidence; rather, she came to believe that she

was deficient in some way. Abby was offered a work placement, but it would have been for

a shortened amount of time, and she ended up declining a work placement altogether.

While the women perhaps understood that things were done differently in Canada, they

sometimes showed resistance to take up the work, not necessarily out of a sense of

deficiency, but because it contradicted their own ideas of how things should be done or

how they saw themselves as professionals, which they preferred to maintain. Malaya said

that after living and working in Canada for three years she was familiar with Canadian

work culture, and some of the information on these topics confirmed how she had

understood her work experiences. In my interview with Malaya, she specifically brought up

Canadians’ politeness and the small talk in which they engaged:

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Your politeness, your small talk. But I don’t do that very much because I’m, I’m the

person like, how do you call that? I just, I just do my job. And although I listen to them,

I seldom give my small talk about myself because I am shy, and the language, and

they’re talking about their high school, their experiences, of course, [because they are]

from here and sometimes I can’t relate. So. But I do listen; it's just that I don't have

much of small talk.

First, we see that Malaya distanced herself from Canadian politeness and small talk: “your

politeness, your small talk.” She told me that she viewed small talk as taken advantage of

by her former co-workers: “And sometimes after just a few minutes I try to go back to my

work again. ’Cause it’s not just small talk I notice. Sometimes it will go thirty minutes and

that’s not a wise use of the time.” Malaya did not take up this self-work; she distanced

herself from it and viewed it as an inappropriate activity in the workplace, one which she

would not take part in.

Secondly, Malaya points to small talk as an exclusionary practise; Canadians do small

talk about experiences that she does not share, or they discuss topics that are very specific

to Canadians, as she viewed it. She voiced her feeling of being incapable of taking up small

talk in order to fit in during a class discussion. She said that it was difficult to join in the

conversation if everyone in the office was discussing the hockey game from the night

before and she did not understand hockey or care to watch it. She was told that she needed

to make the effort to fit in, engage in small talk and try to get to know her co-workers, yet

she had already experienced her co-workers engaging in purposefully exclusionary small

talk that did not invite her to make an effort to engage them.

Resistance to the discourse of positivity, which was a focus in the program, was shown

when some of the more outspoken students began to request more critical feedback on their

class presentations from both peers and staff. It happened during a class presentation given

in one of the last weeks of class before the work placements began; the students seemed to

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be anxious about making the necessary changes to their self-presentation and

communication styles specifically. Some of the students were more hesitant to be honest

about what needed to change in the presentations and others more willingly gave the

critical feedback requested. The staff gave more critical feedback when specifically

requested, but for those groups of students who did not request critical feedback, the staff

and students remained positive in their feedback. The issue of receiving critical feedback

was brought up again when Esther did some follow up with the students before their work

placements:

Esther asks the class if the feedback they got throughout the course was useful. Women

in the class are nodding their heads yes. Lilliana replies yes, all feedback is useful...Sara

replies yes. Esther asks the class, what about your journaling, assignments, everything?

Alejandra answers yes, it is helpful because sometimes we do things in a pattern and it’s

hard to see that for yourself, so it’s good to get the feedback from someone else who can

see it. Esther and Julie both nod at this response and Esther says that a lot of the course

is raising your awareness. And we’d be setting you up for failure if we didn’t tell you,

she adds. Esther asks Dipika, “What about you?” Dipika says it’s good to learn our

weaknesses here so next time I can prepare (for the interview, I think she is referring to.)

Lilliana says: and here [in Canada] people are so polite; they won’t tell you! She laughs

as do others in the room. Esther asks Malaya what she thinks. Malaya answers, it’s good

to also get the negative feedback because it is useful for us to improve ourselves and get

better. Esther says, yes, constructive feedback, we call it; we don’t like to use the “N”

word. Esther says Priya? Priya gives her little laugh and says that it’s very useful; I

improve. It’s good to know.

Despite the resistance the staff showed to allowing talk that contravened the discourse of

positivity, the students expressed appreciation for feedback that addressed some of their

weaknesses and areas that they could work on to improve.

The emphasis of the positivity discourse used in the program became visible as the

students started to take up the language and used it in their class presentations. For one of

the major presentations, the participants had several topics they could choose to present on.

Malaya, who had many years of work experience in the Philippines, demonstrated that she

had taken up the message of positivity in her presentation on “important lessons learned

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from work.” Her presentation had four points: accept feedback/criticism, develop positive

communication among employees and supervisors, do not procrastinate, and put yourself in

others’ shoes. Dipika, who was an outgoing participant, and one whose English improved

greatly over the program, presented on the same topic. Her presentation included “think

positively” and the importance of showing enthusiasm and initiative. After being asked by

one of the other students how to fit into a new organization, Dipika replied that the key was

to research the company and then have confidence in oneself.

Although the women started to incorporate the discourse of positivity in their classroom

activities, taking on positivity, whether in attitude or a way of internalized thinking, was

often shown to be a difficult aspect of the self to mould. The participants expressed that

they were unsure about their abilities, nervous about the work placements and felt stress

about their upcoming job search after the program. Lynn had worked for the same company

in China for eighteen years and was the chief financial officer before immigrating to

Canada. She was a natural leader, which was evident in class, as she often took up

leadership positions during group activities. Part of encouraging the students in the self-

formation work was to require them to exhibit the behaviours and attitudes discussed as

required in a Canadian employee. For example, they needed to be assertive and confident

during class presentations; Lynn excelled at such tasks, as they were skills and

characteristics she had developed in the course of her career in management level positions

in China. However, the work in the program was not always easy for her. Lynn still

expressed concern about her ability to fit in to Canadian work culture and in her

communication skills, despite all the training and workplace preparation the program

provided:

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I think that I want to go to my work placement. And I think I just need to fit in. I think I

will know to do everything, I think I will just need some training and to fit in with this

company. Yeah, and I think the main problem for me is the culture?...Still the culture.

The culture I think I still don’t know how to communicate with them [Canadian-borns].

Even now I just chat with my neighbour, with some native person. But still with one

person it’s kind of habit...A habit, yeah. If I work with someone in my company all the

time then we know what kind of topic we need to[talk] about.

She explained that meeting people born in Canada was difficult. She did not feel she had

the capacity to make small talk with Canadians about non-work related, casual topics, just

as Malaya had felt. The staff said the students often experienced the project classroom as a

safe place to ask questions or have the instructor repeat herself, but the students expressed

nervousness about moving into a work placement where it would be embarrassing to have

to ask someone to repeat themselves or slow down. Lynn was concerned that this would

give her co-workers and supervisor the impression that she did not understand how to do

her job, while the reality for Lynn, and many of the women who expressed the same

concern, was that the difficulty was about language, not ability. However, Lynn did not

dismiss this self-formative work as something she would not try to take up. While she felt

nervous about the transition into a workplace environment, she also expressed a hope that

the ability to talk to native Canadians would get easier over time.

This chapter has explored the various ways that the immigrant women were requested to

take up self-work in order to conform to Canadian workplace expectations, and how they

viewed this work and made choices in how to take it up. The staff activated employment

counselling and positivity discourses to teach the participants how to do self-presentation,

and adopt workplace values, “soft skills,” and attitude. Having a positive attitude in

particular was conveyed as the most important aspect of themselves to mould, as it affected

their self-presentation, workplace behaviours, and communication styles.

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In the next chapter, I examine how all of the work to refashion the self is continued as

the participants learn about the labour market and how to access it; the employment

counselling discourse was continuously activated in this work. For example, in reforming

their self-presentation as positive, confident workers they would apply this to how they

wrote their résumés, learned to answer job interview questions and do interpersonal work

relationships with supervisors, co-workers, and with both men and women. I explore the

various ways the participants were taught to access the labour market and their response to

these messages. Finally, I examine how the program provided the context for all of the self-

work, as the labour market as an institution was made visible as the staff covered lessons on

labour laws and regulations and to the organization structure of Canadian workplaces.

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Chapter Six: The Labour Market and Workplace Organization

One of the program’s aims was to have the participants gain understanding of the

various ways the Canadian labour market is organized and to understand how they were to

fit into the labour market as accountants. In this way, the program sought to make visible

the Canadian labour market as an institution to the participants. We can see that this work

on the part of the program staff can be categorized in two ways. First, they instructed the

participants on how to access the labour market from the bottom up in entry-level positions,

through specializing by accessing more education and an accounting designation, and by

learning job search skills. Second, the staff instructed participants on how to understand the

labour market as an institution governed by laws and regulations and specific aspects of

how the workplace is organized. Classroom lessons were used to instruct the participants

on the workplace ruling relations that organize workplace hierarchy and gender relations.

The self-work the participants were to do to conform to Canadian standards of

interpersonal relationships was in order to fit into these normative ruling relations

appropriately, which would allow them to be promoted and move up from entry-level

positions. The classroom training was followed by ten-week work placements, where all of

the classroom training became relevant in their work experiences.

How to Access the Labour Market

From bottom up: start at entry level. One of the first lessons about the Canadian

labour market the program sought to impart to the women was that they would have entry-

level work placements and would need to start their careers in Canada in entry-level

positions after the program, regardless of their credentials, skills and years of experience

prior to immigration. The staff said that the reality was that those with only foreign work

experience and credentials have a difficult time finding any level of work, and the women

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were more likely to be hired for entry-level positions as their first Canadian job.

Unfortunately, this was true, they said, regardless of the immigrant woman’s actual level of

preparedness for, or ability to do, an intermediate or higher position job. However, the staff

gave other reasons why it made sense that a foreign-trained accountant should build her

career in Canada from the beginning: to build her business English skills, learn how to fit

into the Canadian work culture, and learn Canadian accounting laws, processes and basic

work procedures, through both work experience and by taking Canadian accounting

courses. The program was designed to help prepare the participants to gain these

experiences through the classroom teaching and work placement, but the staff explained

that the women also needed to build a working knowledge of these things through actual

work experience.

The staff focused on using the positivity discourse to counteract the message of starting

at entry level, which the participants were likely to perceive as a negative setback in their

careers. A staff member explained that it was difficult for the women who had a lot of

experience to take a step backward in their careers, and retain their self-esteem, positive

attitude and motivation; the staff viewed all of these qualities as required to keep the

women moving forward with the processes of job search and career advancement, as

Lauren, the first project coordinator, explained:

They've come from, like I've said, a lot of them are very experienced and they've come

from higher levelled positions probably, and they're entering an entry-level position,

which is a big step backwards. And how do you, um, for some of them it is just first of

all accepting the reality that that is what it is going to be like. Despite all your

credentials and experience that's not enough in Canada; you have to be able, able to

prove your skills here. You can't just present a résumé that looks great and somebody

will take you. So that is a really big learning experience, you know, 'cause that is really

tough. That's a lot of reality checks going on. And um, it's really, really tough. It can

really hurt your self-esteem in terms of that.

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The program wanted to give women, as Lauren put it, a reality check that they must start

out in entry-level positions. However, they had to balance this with the work of having the

women take up a positive attitude and way of thinking. Positivity was viewed as

instrumental for two reasons: first, the women needed to stay motivated to do the work in

the program, and second, it would allow them to maintain their self-esteem despite the

difficult process of accepting that they would do entry-level work and then finding that

work. It was important that the participants do this to build their careers, and also to

provide good outcomes statistics for the program to send to funders.

Specialize by gaining education and accounting designations. Although the message

to the participants was that they would start at entry level, the program was designed to

give the women the tools and support to feel comfortable in a Canadian workplace

environment and move up in their field, with increased responsibilities and pay. To this

end, staff first provided the participants with the preparation for how to fit in culturally, and

then with information on how the field of accounting was organized in Canada. One of the

ways that the staff saw for the participants to build their accounting careers was to

specialize in a particular accounting area. Charlotte, the department manager, explained:

One of the most common things is that we hear...in a lot of other countries if you’re an

accountant you do everything, or if you’re an engineer you do from planning to

implementation...whereas in Canada we’re more specialized, we have someone who

JUST does accounts receivable, of course this depends on the size of the company. So I

would say that takes an adjustment, but most and I would say a lot of the women do start

out at entry-level positions and they do find that they get bored, BUT where they are

challenged and where they learn the most is workplace culture. So they’re not used to

the water-talk or the gossip, or however the business works here in Canada. And that’s

what, that’s what requires the most finesse and the most learning. And once they’ve

mastered that system, then they start to rise up, provided that they also have the proper

technical knowledge.

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Charlotte explained that Canada’s specialized field of accounting means that in order for

the women to build careers and move up in their field, most of them need more Canadian

education, the “proper technical knowledge” in order to specialize:

The other thing is that sometimes they graduate with a certificate, or they’re operating

within a certificate and it’s not comparable, right, so they’ll have an IQAS, International

Qualification Assessment...[which assesses their education as]...lower than [how it was

viewed in their own country], maybe they had a masters, and I’ve seen that kind of

thing, when it comes [back from assessment] to just be sort of a specialization in their

undergrad degree, right. Um, so then they would need to, before they are able to move

back up into a similar position they’ll have to re-educate as well.

The program provided information on the accounting designations and education options in

Calgary for accountants, which demonstrated how accounting is structured in Canada while

providing the participants with an encouraged path to take in furthering their careers

through specializing.

The staff suggested that gaining more education and a designation was the best way for

the participants to grow their careers. One way that this was done was by inviting

representatives from the three Canadian accounting designations. Each representative from

the Chartered Accountants (CA), Certified General Accountants (CGA), and Certified

Management Accountants (CMA) designations gave a presentation on what they could

offer in terms of a career, how to apply to the program, and what was involved to complete

the program. In addition to learning about the designations, the class took a field trip to tour

the SAIT campus and get information on the accounting certificates, diplomas and degrees

available. They also gained an understanding of accounting in Canada by learning software

and receiving an overview of the general areas of accounting in Canada.

The classes on accounting provided a brief overview of four key areas of accounting:

taxation, business law, financial statements, and auditing. I talked with about six women at

lunch one afternoon about their accounting classes and how they were going; they had been

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excited for them to start and I wanted to know how they felt now that they were taking

them:

I ask if they feel ready to go and do an entry-level accounting job. They say yes, that it is

enough information to do an entry-level job but that it was a lot to learn, as often only

one day was spent on each of the five areas of accounting and only an overview of each

accounting topic is covered. They say these days were quite overwhelming. One woman

explains that the classes on the five areas of accounting was comparable to if you went

through the table of contents of a text book, so they know what information needs to be

learned, but they would never be able to actually learn all the information unless they

went and took a class at SAIT on it. They all agree that they need to take classes at SAIT

to actually learn all the information they would need to do a more specialized accounting

job. I ask them if their past accounting experiences from their countries still helps and if

much of that knowledge has transferred. They assure me that it has and the main

accounting principles transfer, but there are a lot of details, still a lot of information that

they need to learn.

The women told me they most enjoyed the accounting software classes, where they learned

two types of software that are often used in smaller businesses. Many of the women felt

that they needed to improve their computer skills for work in Canada, as they did not often

use computers in their home country to the extent that they are used here. They found these

classes useful as they gave them more computer skills to put on their résumés, and

understanding a Canadian accounting system of software also helped them to understand

how accounting is organized in Canada. Once in their work placements, they realized that

not every workplace in Calgary uses these software programs, which made it likely they

would have to learn another new software program. Nonetheless, they felt that the

experience of learning two programs gave them the practise and knowledge that would

make learning another program easier.

Know and use job search skills. The employment counselling discourse was used to

make job search teachable as a curriculum category and commonly used term in the

program. Job search required many “job search skills” that were under the umbrella of how

to be a professional in Canada. These skills included knowing how to market and sell the

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self in various ways in the process of networking, writing appropriate cover letters and

résumés and getting them to recruiters, and doing “behavioural style” interviews. The

participants learned how to talk about themselves—their skills and accomplishments—in

the context of all of these tasks.

Lessons on how to present themselves as professionals in a Canadian labour market

covered a myriad of specific strategies as well, such as setting up email accounts that were

offered by English language internet service providers and recognizable by employers.

Such a step was taken to expunge traces of their non-Canadian lives and make their contact

with recruiters not stand out for the wrong reasons, as Julie discussed in class:

They need to make sure their email addresses look like their names. Julie says this is

really important so that recruiters can recognize an email from them. She reminds them

to look into what their names look like in the inbox as well, and to make sure that these

come up with their first and last names properly. She says that if their email addresses

are hard to decipher as belonging to them and there is another language sitting at the

bottom of the email then what will a recruiter think if he or she sees this? She says they

will wonder, ‘Are you really ready to work for my company? Are you really willing to

integrate?’ Esther says that this is unfortunate but true.

As the women wrote their résumés and cover letters and prepared for interviews, they

learned how to evaluate and then present the self as marketable and skilled. The

participants’ résumés were edited by three different staff members, including Charlotte, the

department manager; Charlotte said that it was her goal to have the women create perfect

résumés with a strong focus on their accomplishments and skills.

The participants were taught how to find jobs in Canada. Many of them expressed that

they were used to looking in newspapers; learning to use online resources was a new

experience for many of the women. The class made a field trip to the public library and

were given a presentation on how to do online research and how to use the public library as

a tool as well. In addition to finding jobs in newspapers and online, they were taught about

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networking, which was a tool they needed to use to access the hidden job market, or the

jobs that are available because of word of mouth and who you know.

Networking was one of the lessons the women began working on at the beginning of the

project and which carried through right to the end of the class. The participants were taught

that networking was about getting to know people and building relationships in the context

of giving and gaining information about the labour market, and not always focused on an

end result of getting a job. Networking meant they needed to learn to talk about their

professional background and career interests in order to let someone know what kind of

information they were in need of, which was generally about the available job positions

someone might know of, or information on what kind of steps might need to be taken to get

into certain job positions.

The staff instructed the participants in the difference between informal networking,

talking to everyone they know about themselves professionally, and formal networking at

specific events. The participants’ self-presentation was addressed once again, as they were

instructed on the minutiae of how to talk to people at a formal event, such as how to hold a

cup of coffee and a plate with snacks, all while talking to people and possibly handing out a

card or a résumé. The women practised such tasks in the classroom by getting up and

wandering around introducing themselves to each other while holding their water bottles

and papers in hand. The lessons were followed by attending a networking breakfast that the

employment department at WSA organized.

The formal networking breakfast was an event where fifteen to twenty immigrant

women were invited to have breakfast with invited representatives from approximately five

to ten employers. Each woman introduced herself briefly to the group and spoke about her

background experience and what type of job she was interested in finding. The women and

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employer representatives had the opportunity to mingle and talk; the immigrant women

collected business cards and provided their résumés to those who might have jobs that

matched their interests. Networking was a daunting challenge for the women, which was

not made easier by the fact that they were trying to make small talk with strangers in a

second language that many of them did not feel comfortable communicating in.

Behavioural-style interviews were described as a meeting between an interviewer and

interviewee, in order for the interviewer to find out about the interviewee’s background and

skills. The focus, the participants were told, was on the interviewer asking questions of the

interviewee, yet it was an opportunity for the interviewee also to ask questions and make

sure it was a place where they would want to work. The behavioural-style questions asked

by the interviewers were not just in regards to the interviewee’s past work and educational

experience, but about their work style, skills and past performance or accomplishments.

The interviewer would ask questions in order to ascertain how the interviewee had handled

specific situations in the past or how they would in the future. Julie explained that the

students were really fascinated with the “whole job search thing” and motivated by it:

They love to talk about it; they love to hear about it. And uh, behavioural questions are

like way out in left field for a lot of our students. They just don't understand where we're

coming from and why we're looking for things the way we do. One of the big questions

that always generates a lot of confusion is the whole strengths and weaknesses thing.

Because in some cultures, well, certainly some cultures it's harder to express your

weaknesses. It's not seen as something you do. Yet, we use the word weakness but really

we're looking at it as, “What is it that you need to improve on in terms of your

workplace skills?” It's not personal weaknesses so much. So it's trying to first of all

communicate that and get them to understand where the, where the interviewer is going

in that direction. A lot in terms of behavioural questions. “Tell me about yourself”

sounds like a nice question, it's loaded [though] (laughs).

Although the women were told they had to demonstrate that they were self-aware by being

able to list something they needed to improve upon, a weakness, they were instructed to

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always focus on their strengths and accomplishments, as in this sample interview question

and answer:

‘Why do you think you would do well at this job?’ June says that your qualifications and

skills match the responsibilities. Julie says, yes this is the place to sell yourself – your

qualifications and your soft skills. Remember to always, always, always, bring it back to

how you can add value to the company. Don’t just make it about the experience you will

gain – that sounds selfish. Make it about how your skills and qualifications will add to

the company and benefit it (fieldnotes).

Preparing for the behavioural-style interview questions was a unique challenge for the

women. In preparing their résumés and cover letters, they had to focus carefully on word

selection as they presented their accomplishments. However, in an interview, the

participants had to carefully practise the wording of how they would answer questions,

while also being very aware of their physical self-presentation and bodily comportment:

Julie asks what else interviewers are looking at in the interview, aside from asking you

questions. The participants responded with: eye contact, body language, smile and how

friendly you are, your appearance and whether it’s professional, attitude because a

positive attitude is what they are looking for, how you shake hands (fieldnotes).

In the last few weeks of class, the lessons were focused on the how to do interviews, as the

women prepared to do the interviews required before being selected for work placements.

The lessons on Canadian styles of communication and workplace relationships, expected

attitudes and ways of thinking about the self all came together, as demonstrated in the

above examples.

Make a plan to advance career. The program was organized so that the participants

created “career action plans” where they set short-term and long-term career goals. The

participants wrote their action plans at the beginning of the program and then just before

beginning their work placements they edited their action plans and goals. The exercise of

editing their career action plans demonstrated to the women how much they had learned

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about how the labour market is organized and how to access it, and required them to

implement the knowledge into achievable steps to accomplish their goals.

Although the plans began with finding an entry-level accounting job, there was strong

encouragement from staff to add getting a designation to the action plan, or some kind of

further accounting training that would put the participants on a path of upward mobility in

their careers. Achieving long-term career goals required the women to make decisions

immediately about how they might like to specialize so that they chose entry-level positions

in an area that could be beneficial for growing their careers, for example, choosing whether

they might apply for accounts receivable or just accounts payable positions. This strategy

of creating career goals and planning for upward mobility through specialization meant that

some of the participants needed to learn to envision their careers in accounting in Canada

differently from how they had experienced their professional life in their home country. For

other women this was a strategy or way of thinking about career growth they were familiar

with and had already done; this was their second time down the path of building a career.

Almost all of the women in the class listed gaining one of the designations as her goal on

her final action plan. Many of them had already had their credentials examined by IQAS to

find out how many classes they still needed to take towards their designation of interest;

some were already taking classes towards this goal. There were a few women who were

more hesitant about the prospects of gaining a designation, most commonly citing their role

as mothers to small children as more pressing for the time being; they viewed a designation

as a possibility far in the future. All fifteen women wanted to find full-time accounting

work and do any extra schooling they planned to do part time in the evenings or weekends.

The accounting designations required accounting work experience in addition to accounting

classes, and most of the students expressed that financially they needed to be able to

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provide income as well, so pursuing a designation did not hamper their ability to support

their families. Abby and Malaya already had accounting designations before immigrating;

Abby said that she was not interested in getting her designation here, while Malaya said

hesitantly that it was a possibility, but she would start by getting her certificate and see how

long it took her to finish the accounting classes.

Participants’ Responses to the Work of Accessing the Labour Market

Starting at entry-level difficult to accept. Lynn was one of the few women who

expressed to me that it was difficult to accept that her career was to be restarted in an entry-

level position. She was an ambitious woman who had already reached the top in her

company in China, as chief financial officer. After she immigrated to Canada with her

husband, she soon returned to China with their son while her husband started his career in

Canada. She lived in China for four years and got her masters of business administration at

that time. It was difficult for her to accept that she would have to retrain and start her

career over from the beginning. When I asked her about the difficulties in immigrating, she

responded:

Of immigrating? The bad thing is that it almost destroyed my life. Ahh. And first I think

I do not have my career in Canada. It’s so hard for me to begin my study. And I have to

accept everything, but still, it is difficult. (Voice gets quieter). Sometimes, especially,

you know I’m not so young as they here [referring to other students in class]. You

cannot imagine when I was in China always me train everybody else who is younger

student who has just graduated from university. And I taught them everything. Now

yeah...Yeah my feeling not so good. But still you have to, I have to accept everything.

When Lynn returned to Canada, she applied for a lot of mid-level and managerial

accounting positions, sending out over 500 résumés. She thought she would be able to

obtain a job that utilized her past experience and recent masters level education. The

realization that she would start at entry level, after being a leader, one who trained others at

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work, was shocking and it was difficult to accept that it would take years to be back in a

similar position in her career.

Lilliana worked as an accountant for four years before immigrating, first in a junior

position and then promoted to a senior position. She said that when she was promoted it

was difficult to continue with the immigration process because she did not want to give up

her career, which was beginning to improve. She described how difficult the first three

months in Canada were even though she knew she would need to start at entry level:

The lack of job, and the recession, and it was hard. I tried to like, I tried to, to be calm

and to be “Well, I expected all that.” I knew the first three months probably I won’t get

job because that’s why we are asked to bring money with us because probably we won’t

get job from the very beginning. But still it’s hard; it’s all this cultural shock. And you

understand that when you start looking for a job your résumé is not like what they want,

your language is not like uh, and of course you’re not going to get the same level job. So

you, you, you feel you know, like you are level three. And that is hard when you are

level one in your country.

Lilliana was determined to find an accounting job and get into accounting classes to begin

building her career again. She planned to enter the seven-month accelerated program of the

Certified Management Accountant designation and take classes part-time while working

with the hope of moving beyond entry-level accounting quickly.

Starting at entry level makes sense. The women started to reflect upon the other

reasons the program suggested for why they would start at entry level. They were told they

needed to understand work culture, including office dynamics and politics. They needed to

increase their business English communication skills, understand how to do job search, and

learn accounting procedures and practices. While Lynn found it difficult to accept she

would have to start at entry level, she realized this was likely going to be the case before

she entered the program because of her experience looking for jobs, even though she only

had vague ideas about why this was the case:

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Yeah. And also I got a lot of interview. A lot, a lot. And including some big companies,

some private companies. And also I know the reason I failed those interviews. At first, I

don’t know. I just think it’s strange and maybe my language is not so good. But [now I

know] maybe it’s the culture. Some answers [that I gave in the interviews] is not suitable

for those companies.

The program shaped her understanding of why she would likely need to start in an entry-

level accounting position, so that while it was not her first preference and was still difficult

to give up her career in China, she began to view starting at entry level as perhaps helpful

and necessary. She said that in addition to needing to learn how to answer interview

questions in culturally appropriate or expected ways, she had been correct in thinking that

her English skills needed to be higher in order to navigate the responsibilities that a higher

level position would require. As the CFO, she used to do the analysis and reports, liaised

with other departments, created and oversaw management procedures, negotiated with

clients, and had meetings with board members, all of which would require her to be able to

communicate in a higher level of English in Canada than she felt she could at that time. She

said she hoped that in five years she would have already moved up considerably in her

field.

Sara also had not realized she would need to start at entry level when she first moved to

Canada. She was a bookkeeper in China for seven years before immigrating. However, she

had two children after she moved to Canada and had not worked or gone to school yet

despite having lived in Canada for five years already. My interview with Sara took place

only a couple of weeks before the end of class and before the students entered their work

placements. She reflected upon all that she had learned in class and how it had changed her

thinking about how she would begin her career in Canada:

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Yeah, I think I learned a lot in this program especially the most useful part is the work

placement culture. I never learned this information before. Now I think this information

is very useful after we go to the workplace. Because in China and in Canada it is

different...At first I think maybe I can get a job almost the same as in China, but after I

came to Canada I think that my...language and the cultural difference [would make this

difficult]. So I think that I had to learn more about the Canadian culture and the

language; after that I can start with the entry level. Because I think that in the entry level

you can learn more about the culture, more about the accounting skills and taxation

because it’s a different taxation system.

While Sara had not initially thought she would need to restart her at career entry level, she

had heard and accepted the program’s messages about needing to fit in to the culture. She

planned to go back to school to get an accounting certificate in order to move up in the field

of accounting.

Effects of the recession. I do not know how the women in the first two intakes

responded to the message that they would need to start their careers from the beginning, but

it was enough of an issue that Lauren, the first project coordinator, told me that one of the

main messages the program sought to get across to the women was that they would need to

start at entry level positions. However, for intake three, which took place in 2009, in the

midst of a global recession, this message did not seem to take many of the students by

surprise. In my interviews with the participants, several women named the recession as one

of the reasons immigrants had to at start entry level in their careers, and why even entry-

level jobs were difficult to find. They provided me with evidence of why they thought this

was the case and the strategies they had to employ because of it.

For example, although Lynn explained that the program had helped her to write a better

résumé, she had received no calls for interviews, whereas in 2008 with a poorly written

résumé she had received many invitations to do interviews. She thought the recession was

the main factor for the change in response levels. Similarly, June already had two years of

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work experience in a print shop in Calgary, excellent English skills, and an accounting

certificate from SAIT:

[Getting settled in Canada has] quite, like, follow my, um, let’s say schedule. In the first

two years I can only find a survival job and I just practise English and get along with

the native culture and I can...prepared for native, for example, prepare for the native

work experience... Then after four years I can find a professional job; let’s say

accounting job is professional job. So it’s quite follow my schedule, but the most thing I

unexpected was the recession at this time. Even though I have Canadian work

experience and I have a[n accounting] certificate I still cannot find a job; this is not the

standard.

She felt that she would be further along in restarting her accounting career had there not

been a global economic recession.

Upon immigrating, Lilliana had expected to start at entry level in order to learn

Canadian accounting practices and procedures, but also pointed to the recession as the main

factor as to why it was so difficult to find even entry-level work, and why immigrants had

to get more Canadian education and accounting designations:

I think that the problem is, the problem is because of the recession. The problem is that

now it is a hard time to get a job. If we came here, and we had an opportunity to get the

job without any kind of studies, we wouldn’t try to find or try to get in any ways the

designation...I understand that there is such a big um, like uh, so many people are, who

are trying to find job, that I remain at the bottom. So that’s why I try to go up, that’s why

I need a designation and these studies.

Other women repeated this sentiment during class breaks, saying they needed to get more

education now to build their careers than they would if there was no recession.

They are discussing what kind of position one can get as an accountant, whether one

can get a junior or intermediate position and what factors this depended upon. First,

Alina asks June whether having Canadian accounting designations is essential for a

junior position. June replies that you don’t necessarily have to and that it also depends

on how much experience you have, that someone with lots of Canadian experience does

not need to have a designation for a junior or even intermediate position. Alina laughs

and then says, yeah, Canadian experience, but I have lots of experience from my home

country. The other women laugh and then they ask Hua if it was harder or easier to get

a job in the United States. She pauses and then says that it really depends on the

economy. They all laugh and make a noise of agreement at this, something to the effect

of yes, the economy (fieldnotes).

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The recession was an added barrier to employment and the reason many had applied to the

WSA program in the first place. They seemed to have an understanding that Canadian work

experience, which the project work placement provided, was more important now, in the

middle of an economic recession, than ever.

Several women expressed to me that the recession meant that while it was more difficult

for anyone seeking work, immigrants were especially burdened or excluded from the job

market during a recession economy. Alejandra, for example, felt that the recession

economy meant that her foreign-gained, master’s-level credentials and work experience

were not accepted by employers and that she would have to get a Canadian designation.

She compared her experience with friends of hers who had immigrated to Canada several

years previously and had found jobs more easily without gaining Canadian education first:

Alejandra: Um, the hardest thing about immigrating to Canada, besides the weather

(laughs), let me think, it is that I came here during the recession. Because I’ve been here

in the past [three months in 2004], and I have friends that...came here as new immigrants

as myself and they got a first job without any problem. They didn’t have any of this

discrimination, or it wasn’t that difficult for them. So I was with those expectations

when I came to Canada, but my reality is different. I have a recession and I cannot

manage that.

Leah: So you mentioned the word discrimination, that they didn’t experience

discrimination.

A: No, in terms of the qualification, nobody said, “No, I don’t trust in your

qualifications.” Or, “No, you don’t have the Canadian work experience.” No, because

they needed them, because at that time the market was in very favour of the employees

and now they’re in favour of the employers.

L: So do you feel that that’s happening now because of the recession?

A: I don’t think it’s discrimination. Maybe I didn’t use the right term. But I think that in

the past there were many work opportunities and few employees. Now, the recession is a

world-wide situation, it is not the fault of the employers here, it’s not the fault of anyone

really, it’s just an economic cycle.

Alejandra thought her experience would be similar to those who had immigrated to Canada

in the years before she did; she would get an accounting job that was perhaps a lower-level

position than what she had in South America, but her past education and work experience

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would count for more than it seemed to in the midst of a recession. She viewed the situation

pragmatically; employers had many applicants to choose from and it made sense to her that

they would choose those with credentials gained in Canada and who had perfect English:

So now, there are few employment opportunities and many people who look for a job.

So, if I were an employer I would probably do the same. So, I do not think that is

discrimination, I just think that you need to do the best with the money that you have,

and if you have to select from the best and from the people that you know better, um, it

is just a reality. I think that it was just the wrong timing that I came to Canada...if you’re

an employer—I’m just trying to think like an employer—would you hire someone with

perfect English that does not maybe have all of the qualifications, or would you hire

someone that has the potential but doesn’t have that perfect English? It is easier to teach

someone what to do than it is to hire someone who doesn’t have the perfect English. So

that is why employers will give that opportunity to Canadians. And if, if that situation

were in Bolivia, I would do the same.

The ability to communicate was one of the most difficult barriers for the women in the

program. The participants’ English communication ability—speaking, listening and

writing—was one of the most common discussion points in why their experiences in

Canada were difficult: it affected immigrating generally, applying for jobs, doing

retraining, and the work placements experience, to name a few. Alejandra’s point was that

training on the job is easier to do for someone with whom communication is not a barrier.

Employers do not want to have to do extra work in the training process for new employees,

and someone with English as a second language and foreign credentials poses a risk for

that. Alejandra, aware of the risk she posed with foreign credentials and English as her

second language had more work to do to “prove” herself. She felt she had to gain even

more Canadian education and begin her career in an entry-level position.

Difficulty of marketing oneself when over-qualified. Many of the participants had

been looking for accounting jobs in Canada before the program, but with no success. They

prepared their interview answers and résumés with these experiences in the backs of their

mind. Employers had given contradictory reasons as to why they were not going to

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consider the participants for the positions: Some of the participants in the program were

told that they were over-qualified for the entry-level positions for which they had applied.

However, others who had applied for higher-level positions, similar to what they held

before immigrating, were told that they did not yet have Canadian work experience and that

they must start at entry level. The upshot was that even if they were over-qualified they had

to learn to present themselves as willing and able to do entry-level work, both 1) on paper

and 2) in their self-presentation of attitudes and “soft skills.”

Alina expressed the difficulty of being over-qualified as she prepared her résumé, which

was full of extensive work experience, to apply for entry-level positions. She was content

to begin her career in an entry-level position, as she explained that she had not yet taken

any accounting courses in Canada, and she needed to learn Canadian accounting practices

“from the beginning.” This was why, even though she had held the title of “chief

accountant” in her last position in Russia, and had extensive work experience, she had been

looking for entry-level positions before this project. However, she had still met with

resistance, as she explained to the class one day:

I tried to find a job as an accountant and...I sent résumé, I got a few calls, and they asked

me, ‘Why you worked as a chief accountant and now you want to find job as an

accountant entry-level?’ And uh, I replied, ‘Because I am responsible and I don't have

experience, Canadian experience yet, and um, I would like to know basic things [in]

accounting.’ And um, I didn't get job...(small laugh).

The program staff told the women they would need to start at entry level, and Alina

understood the reasons why the program staff had told them this; she agreed, but had met

resistance to trying to start at entry level.

As the women prepared their résumés and practised answering questions for job

interviews, they struggled with how to portray themselves to employers. Their résumés

often presented a highly educated and experienced accountant, yet they were applying for

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entry-level positions. The staff had interesting work to do to help the participants to

properly manage their job search tools—résumés, cover letters, and job interview

answers—with their previous work and educational experiences. Together the staff and

participants worked to craft the message through careful word selection, aware of their

audience and how they might appear to the person who would read the résumé and cover

letter:

Alina: And uh, I understand maybe I am, maybe I shouldn’t put this uh, my position,

like ‘Chief Accountant’ in my résumé. Can I change, like, can I put like ‘Senior

Accountant’ instead ‘Chief Accountant’ because I’s very uh, they are scared to hire me

because I am over-

Esther: --Over qualified. Wouldn’t you say? (to Julie).

Julie: Yeah, like your use of words, might be good. I mean obviously you still want, you

don't want to, you never want to lie on a résumé. But-

Esther: --Senior. Chief. (in a sing song voice as she compares the words).

Julie: I think-

Alina: --It's close, very close, maybe it's not, because it wasn't big company, very big

company, that I worked before, like middle, small company.

Julie: I think ‘Chief’ sounds uh-

Alina: --Very

Julie: (at same time as above) - Very strong, very strong. Yeah, like ‘Senior’ is a little bit

more moderate-

Esther: --Like they're afraid you're gonna come in and take over (laughing).

Julie: Yeah, I know it's hard.

Esther: It really is.

Part of the work involved in preparing written job search material was the work of

translating past work experience and job titles into English. The participants received a lot

of help from all staff members to know what words to use that would provide the nuance

they required, just as this example demonstrates. The women were instructed to always be

truthful in presenting their past work experience, but it took careful work to represent their

work experience and education accurately but still suitably for entry-level positions. They

had to present themselves, despite perhaps a myriad of past work experience, as an

applicant who was eager to start at entry level and would do well in this type of position.

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In this way, the program’s messages to the women were not exactly contradictory, but

still difficult to keep in balance: present yourself as ambitious, capable, experienced,

educated, one who shows initiative; represent yourself as one who is a “life-long learner” in

that you are willing to retrain; take courses; take part in programs that will enhance yourself

as a worker and as a person. Yet be willing to start at entry level, and present yourself as

humble enough to realize you must start at entry level and would be happy and fulfilled in

the position, and willing to do the work for a year or more. Simply put, they had to learn to

express to employers that they were ambitious, and wanted to build careers where they

were moving up, but yes, still willing to start with the entry-level work they were applying

for.

Alejandra showed resistance to the somewhat-contradictory, hard-to-keep-in-balance

messages received in class by pointing out that they did not necessarily fit together so well.

She had excellent English communication skills and a master’s level degree in finance. She

had worked in accounting analysis in South America, which she was told in several job

interviews was a position considered intermediate-level work in Canada. She was told in

these interviews, which were also for intermediate level positions, that it was a problem

that she did not have any entry-level Canadian work experience, and that this was required

first before they would hire her for the higher-level position.

Once in the program, she resisted the message about showing initiative and being a

lifelong learner, not because she did not want to take on these qualities as part of herself or

how she presented herself, but because they seemed to contradict each other:

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Alejandra asks, do you really need to be doing self-learning and showing initiative?

Because I am told that Canadians think I’ll just get bored if I’m going from a CGA or

CMA to doing something like data entry. But if I’ve just been typing my whole life then

I’ll be happy because I will just stay there. So if I am just content to stay where I am in a

job maybe that is viewed as better, because Canadian employers don’t want to think that

you’re going to get bored of a job and leave.

Julie firmly repeated the program message that it was indeed very important to present

oneself to Canadian employers as one who shows initiative, even when applying for an

entry-level position:

Julie listens to what Alejandra says and then says that she disagrees. She says that from

her experience of teaching three of these classes now, and from looking for jobs in

Canada herself, she thinks that initiative is very important. She says that it is part of that

positive attitude that employers are looking for. Julie continues by saying that

continuous learning is very important because if you’re not going to commit to lifelong

learning then what happens if you make a mistake? Will you learn and change? Will you

be an employee who can accept feedback and try to always be learning and getting

better?

Another response to the self-work involved with marketing the self was that it felt

unusual to the women to speak so highly of themselves, as this was very different from how

interviews, in particular, were done where they were from. Julie and I discussed how

difficult this often was for them:

Julie: The résumés have been hard, getting the, like their whole concept of

accomplishments is really difficult for the students to grasp, and that takes a lot of time.

And that's, of course, that's not just a résumé thing, that's all the cover letters and job

interviews too.

Leah: It's that whole marketing of the self thing that I suppose is quite foreign to them.

That's what has been expressed to me as well in some interviews is that it's just such a

foreign concept to get their heads around.

J: Yeah, yeah 'cause for them it's (pause) uh, you know, it sounds like bragging or also,

you know, in a lot of other cultures the most important thing is what university you went

to. If you went to a certain university then you're successful. And that doesn't mean

anything here really (laughs).

The women had mixed responses to the work of doing job search, as they were instructed to

think of themselves and their past experiences in different ways, which often meant being

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more assertive and expressing oneself as confident through self-presentation and verbal

self-marketing in ways they were not used to doing.

Darja was a young woman who had worked as an entry-level accountant for a couple of

years and then moved into doing marketing management, working for a large retail store

ordering inventory. Darja found the work of writing her résumé and learning to answer the

behavioural style interviews very challenging. She felt she must learn how to assert herself

in a different way than she was used to:

It’s new for me to make a résumé. It’s a little bit different in my country. And um,

interview also. It’s very different from my country. [We] need to...praise ourselves here

and bragging. Yes, so it’s difficult to find those accomplishments in yourself. And here

I’m (pause) I’m a little bit shy and here I need to speak up, um, (pause)...it’s a little bit

difficult for me...Especially when it’s not your native language.

Darja was one of the best English speakers in the class, yet she was nervous about her work

placement because of language. She said that she would feel she could fit in better if she

had more confidence in herself, specifically in her English communication skills, which she

related to the assertiveness she felt was required of her to effectively do the Canadian style

of job search.

Mixed responses to job search skills training. In the first week of class the staff and

participants talked about networking and I recorded in my fieldnotes the responses of the

women, as they tried to understand exactly what was expected of them and how to do it:

One woman asks, is networking always beneficial? Or are there disadvantages as well?

One woman answers that it is beneficial when you get a job. Julie then asks her, but do

you always get a job from networking? The woman replies, no but when you do it is

beneficial. A few of the women then speak up and say that there are disadvantages. The

disadvantages are that it can be hard work and time consuming. Julie adds that what if

someone is shy? It is not always easy for the person that is shy. She says that Canadians

do not always find networking easy either, many Canadians do not network and do not

like to network.

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Julie did not try to dissuade them about how difficult it could be, and agreed that it could be

a challenge, but continued to encourage them that it was a necessary aspect of career-

building in Canada. Another woman struggled to understand what networking meant by

comparing it to what was done in China, where she was from:

A student asks, how you know with whom to network in informal settings, because in

China unless you know someone well, they will not help you. Julie says, ahhh, and looks

around the room at everyone. She answers by saying that not all Canadians are helpful,

some are, so look at networking as building relationships, that it is a natural process that

goes two ways, do not look at it just as trying to get something all the time (fieldnotes).

Julie told the class a personal story about how her husband had used networking to find

multiple jobs; she countered the students’ resistance by trying to give them a fuller

understanding of what networking was and how advantageous it could be in building one’s

career.

Many of the participants spoke about the work involved in job search as difficult or

requiring a lot of energy, although they also expressed being very happy to be preparing for

the labour market in tangible ways. Sara, for example, commented on her own uncertainty

about how to do networking in particular, even though she was glad to have the lessons:

I think that networking is good here. Uh because in China we still have the networking

but I think it is in a different way. But I think that the networking I learn a lot from the

networking. Yep. But for me the networking where I meet new people, after that I still

think it’s hard to connect with the new people. Even I got the business card from them, I

have some information from them I ask after that, ‘How can I connect with these people

and keep them in my networking?’ I don’t know.

Another participant, Priya, admitted that at first she questioned why she needed to learn the

job search strategies the project was teaching and did not think of herself as capable to do

it:

At first when I start to write a résumé or to prepare for the networking breakfast, it’s

hard for me specially; I think um, “Why I need this? I am not able to do this.” But right

now it is very useful for me, especially in this um area, in this country. I have to do to

get any job. Networking is very important.

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She told me that at the recent Networking Breakfast event the class attended, she practised

talking to people about possible work opportunities. At first it was difficult, she said, but it

got easier. She found that with practise she was capable of doing the work involved and she

gained confidence in her ability to be assertive, to talk about herself and her career

aspirations and pursue relationships that might enhance her career. As well, she said that

the information on how the labour market is constructed in Canada was very useful, as

there were many differences from where she was from, such as how to find jobs to apply

for:

Yes, it's very different in my country. Especially, there are no job postings on a website,

it’s in the newspaper and we had to apply and we had to prepare for a written exam, for

an interview, like this is a longer process, but here no. If you have a good skills, and if

you have a good résumé and a cover letter then you can apply online and get a chance to

interview there... Yes. Um, before, I think if I'm not able to get this training program it

will be hard for me...to search a job. Some hidden market jobs, some jobs which are,

which um, we will not be able to find. But when I am in this class I am able to learn lots,

I learn lots of things: how to search company, how to get information about this

company, how to prepare for interview, and um, if I um want to know about the labour

market of this area, where to go, how to search this. Yeah, it's good for me.

The process of looking at herself in new ways, such as one who is ambitiously seeking out

jobs, asserting herself in the labour market, and finding ways to present herself as

marketable was not natural for her, but said she came to understand the Canadian process,

and viewed the work suggested to her as interesting.

Making Visible the Labour Market & Workplace

Laws, regulations and work-life balance. The labour market as an institution in

Canada is organized by the laws and regulations that govern the contract between

employers and employees. The students were introduced to Alberta labour laws,

Occupational Health and Safety, the Workers’ Compensation Board, Freedom of

Information and Privacy/Personal Information and Protection of Privacy regulations. I will

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briefly discuss some of the class discussions that highlight the work the participants did in

class to understand the labour market and how to fit in to it appropriately. This work

involved interpretation of all the information they were given, as they strove to understand

their legal rights and the legal expectations of them while working in Canada, and how it

would affect their behaviour in the workplace, specifically in relation to the value of work-

life balance. For example, they discussed the breaks they are legally entitled to in a day:

Julie says that if your lunch break is paid then if they want to have meetings over lunch

while you eat that you have to be okay with eating and having a meeting. She smiles and

gives a little laugh at this, and the women laugh a little and nod their heads (fieldnotes).

As a class, they discuss how to understand the way getting paid works, what to expect for

vacation time and the typical guidelines for working overtime or during statutory holidays.

Julie explains that vacation days are earned at about 1.25 days per month of work, so

that by the end of the year you have earned ten days of vacation. She says that it depends

on the company whether they will let you take more vacation time than what you have

yet earned. She says that some companies are more flexible with this and will allow you

to take the time off even if you haven’t yet earned it, and some companies are stricter

than others about not letting you take time unless you have worked there long enough to

earn it (fieldnotes).

The participants asked questions to understand the differences between what was lawfully

expected from and by them and what required cultural understanding in how to interpret

what were guidelines:

They discuss how much you should get paid if you work a stat holiday and that stat

holidays do not count in your two weeks of paid vacation time. Alejandra points out that

accountants have really busy times and so if you have to work a stat that you should get

paid regular time plus time and a half for working that day. However, Julie explains

about taking time off instead of being paid out for overtime, which is called flex or in

lieu time, which is better for the company than paying overtime. She says that if you

need some time off work for a doctor’s appointment, then you can take that time off and

just make up the time by working extra. Julie stresses the importance of work-life

balance and the importance of taking their vacation days rather than getting paid out for

them (fieldnotes).

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The women had to negotiate the cultural value that says it is important to take time off,

rather than be paid for earned vacation time or for overtime work, as they received the

message that employers were likely to have this expectation regardless of what was allowed

under Alberta labour laws.

Many of the women discussed how important it was to them to have a work-life balance.

However, the reality while they were in this program was that many were also taking

classes, working part-time, or raising small children; many talked to me about how much

stress they were feeling, how busy they were, and how tired they felt. Work-life balance

was something many participants expressed appreciation for in the class and in my

interviews with them, but was an ideal lifestyle they perhaps hoped to attain in the future

once they had more schooling out of the way.

Lynn told me in class one day, about halfway through the fourteen weeks of classroom

training, that she was not sleeping at night and had gone to see a doctor about it. He told her

she was too stressed and she needed to practise ways to be calmer. June was taking two

accounting classes in the evenings while in the program. She had sent her two-year-old son

to stay with her parents in China because she did not have time to care for him while she

did the WSA program and took accounting classes. She told me she regularly got five hours

of sleep a night and worked on schoolwork all weekend, except for Sundays when she went

to church and practised for the church choir she sang in. Lilliana worked 20 to 30 hours a

week at a grocery store in the evenings and weekends and told me she had never been as

busy in her life as she was at that time. She was one of the last participants I interviewed

because she had very little free time.

Abby did not care to gain an accounting designation in Canada; it was part of her

immigration plan to enjoy a less busy life in Canada than she had had in Taiwan. Before

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immigrating, Abby had become a certified public accountant, had gone to graduate school

after that, and then worked doing accounting research development for two years before

immigrating to Canada. I asked her if it was her goal to become a CGA in Canada:

No. (Laughs)...because if I want I can go to do in my country. I don’t need to immigrate

here. Because in here I hope I can just have a job I like. Even accounts payable or

accounts receivable is okay. Because I can make money and support myself. And then I

have my life, I can do another thing beside the accounting, like cooking; I like cooking.

Or like driving, anything. Not focus on accounting because in my country if I work an

accounting position I work over time all day. I go to office in morning at 8 o’clock and I

leave office at 11 pm...So I don’t have a life...Yeah, I want a life. I don’t, I don’t want to

make more money, I just want to support myself, but I need enough to have a life.

Abby ended up leaving the WSA program and did not take a work placement. She said that

she was happy at the grocery store where she worked and would perhaps be able to move

up into a bookkeeping role with the grocery store. She did not have the motivation to focus

on her career in Canada the way she had before immigrating.

Hierarchy. The program curriculum discussed the Canadian workplace as generally

organized in a very egalitarian manner. For example, one afternoon was spent comparing

the structures of large corporations with not-for-profits or smaller companies to examine

the various levels of management in such organization. While Julie pointed out that there

were sometimes differences in the levels of management or the workplace organizational

structure of positions, in any type of Canadian workplace they were to be employees who

contributed their good ideas to their co-workers and supervisors, and not to be afraid to

speak up and contribute in meetings even if they were in entry-level positions. In this way,

the program worked to teach the women what was required of them to gain notice from

their supervisors in order to move up in their careers. They were advised to be assertive and

demonstrate their abilities, and to feel comfortable doing so based on the knowledge that

this is accepted and expected in the Canadian workplace.

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Julie did not ask the participants how the workplace hierarchy operated in their home

country, or what the expected behaviours were of low-level employees, but she suggested

that the everyday practices and relationships between employees in Canada likely did not

operate under as formal a hierarchy as many countries. When Julie stated one day that

perhaps the formal hierarchy of the participants’ native countries would have prevented

those in lower positions from expressing ideas or opinions, several of the students nodded

in emphatic agreement. The classroom lessons were structured to demonstrate to the

women how the Canadian workplace is organized, and to work at adjusting the women’s

previously held notions about how lower-level employees present themselves in the

workplace and how they approach relationships with those in higher-level positions above

them.

Gender relations. The program included specific lessons on the organization and

hierarchy of the Canadian workplace, but the lessons on gender stratification were much

more implicit and came out in class subtly, often in the context of a completely unrelated

lesson. The overall message was that as women, they were to think of themselves as equal

to men, and to treat their relationships with male colleagues no differently than their

relationships with female colleagues. The lessons on the equality of men and women in the

workplace contributed to the women’s understanding of how the labour market was

organized in Canada.

Because the program did not discuss gender relations explicitly, there were no

discussions on whether men and women are treated equitably and are commensurately paid

in the Canadian labour market. Rather, the messages about gender relations were used to

adjust the women’s views on the status of women: most of the participants came from

countries where women still experience a great gender disparity in the workplace compared

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to Canada. The program lessons were to teach them to behave and hold attitudes that

conform to the values held in Canada that men and women are equal, whether or not this is

the reality in every context of the Canadian labour market. The participants were asked to

do self-formative work that would make them more assertive and outgoing, and less

deferential, specifically in their work relationships with men.

A lesson on business communication one day provided a simultaneous lesson on gender

relations in the workplace. The class was asked to take a chain of emails between two

business associates, a man and a woman who have never met, and put their emails to each

other in the correct sequence in which they were sent, by examining how the language that

was used became less formal with the each email that was sent between them:

After the break Julie brings the class's attention to the front by saying they are going

back to the emails. She asks if emails will always become informal in this way. The

class says no, and somebody says that it became informal too quickly. Julie laughs.

Someone suggests that these two people are now becoming romantic. Julie laughs again

and says that the other classes have thought that too because in one email he suggests

they get lunch after the meeting. Julie explains that just because he suggests having

lunch together it does not mean romantic and it is a professional lunch between

colleagues so that they may finally meet in person. Someone else says that if it is just

one man and one woman having lunch together that this is inappropriate. Julie shakes

her head no and says that it is not viewed this way and that it really is just seen as a

professional lunch between two people who have a professional relationship with each

other (fieldnotes).

The lesson demonstrated for the women an example of how professional Canadian men and

women approach work-related relationships, or a version of how this can be done in

Canada, which was clearly different from how many of the women had approached

professional relationships between men and women previously. The message was that

gender relations in Canada are not constrained in the ways they might be in many other

places of the world.

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One of the few times that women’s role in the workplace was addressed specifically as a

gendered issue was in one of the students’ group presentations. The presentation indicated

an interesting division in how the participants viewed women’s roles in the workplace

generally and in Canada specifically:

The next presentation is by Dipika, Darja, and Wendy. Their topic is women in the

workplace. Dipika gives the introduction; she explains that after WWII women started to

go to work, but were often criticized for working, yet now women are more open to

working outside the home. She says that women are now entering fields of work beyond

clerical work, moving into every profession, and are equal with men and earn as much as

they do now. She shows pictures of women in the army as an example. Darja starts by

saying that she disagrees that women are paid as much as men. She explains that there is

a glass ceiling that women hit so that they cannot gain higher-level positions and repeats

that men still earn more than women. She shows a slide where there are ten careers

where women do earn more than men, but says that this isn’t the case for every

profession (fieldnotes).

Darja provided many reasons for the continued inequality between men and women that

she had found while doing her research for the presentation:

She says that some of the reasons for this glass ceiling are that women are stereotyped as

emotional, not committed to their careers, lack necessary skills, have a desire for

flexibility and independence, lack role models, and are unable to re-enter work after

maternity leave. The presentation continues with advice about how to break through the

glass ceiling, which includes finding a mentor to teach you, finding other people to help

you, be yourself and stay positive, be assertive but not aggressive, work smarter and not

harder, and become an expert in one field instead of moving from job to job.

Darja’s presentation reflected research she had prepared but also used the positivity

discourse and “soft skill” self-presentation work advised in the WSA program. The next

presenter in their group, Wendy, agreed that women experience a glass ceiling in terms of

wages and promotion because of their roles as caregivers to the family. Her presentation

constructed a picture of women as the primary caregivers in the home; women work full

time and then do a second shift of work once they get home. After the presentation there

was time for questions and feedback. The group was asked if they felt that women had less

power and were discriminated against in Canada. Dipika, the first presenter who said

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women and men are equal, replied no, that in her home country there was inequality, but in

Canada men and women were equal. The women had their own ideas and understanding

about gender relations developed throughout their lives before immigrating to Canada,

which influenced how they viewed the role of women in the workplace and society in

Canada compared with their own country:

Julie has the women discuss in their groups about their presentation performance and

start doing the self-evaluation. I ask her what she thinks when the women say that men

and women are equal in Canada. She answers that she thinks that some of the women

think, or are under the impression, that they have arrived in the golden land of equality

(fieldnotes).

Some women appeared to have an understanding of gender relations in Canada that was

informed and realistic, whereas others came from countries where the inequality between

men and women was much more pronounced than in Canada. However, it was not an issue

that was addressed explicitly in the class with the participants, even after the group

presentation on the glass ceiling was given. Canada appeared to the participants as the

idealistic egalitarian society in comparison to their home counties, and the staff did not

contradict this view explicitly, as they were more concerned with contradicting the

women’s assumptions about male superiority in the workplace. The staff’s work was to

bring the women’s views of women’s role in the workplace closer in line with Canadian

values or standards.

Just as there were no explicit lessons on gender equality and the labour market, I did not

observe any lessons that covered race, diversity or discrimination in the labour market. The

staff did not discuss whether the Canadian labour market is free of any discrimination

based on race or gender or what the participants could expect to experience based on their

status as women and possibly women of colour. Any talk about discrimination in class

would likely have been viewed as not positive and perhaps as possibly a conversation that

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would have depleted the women’s motivation or contributed to a less positive attitude about

the labour market and their goals for entering the labour market.

Understanding the Labour Market and Workplace through Experience

Importance of culture and communication. The work placements provided the

opportunity for the women to gain entry-level work experience, hopefully a work reference,

and put to practise the self-formative work they had been doing in the classroom by

experiencing the workplace situations they had prepared for. Although some of the women

were initially anxious about the way the curriculum in the class was organized, as they

were eager to get past the culture and language lessons and on to the accounting, when they

entered their work placements, these earlier lessons became more relevant, especially as

they related to communication. Julie explained that often the women did not see this blind

spot or recognize the importance of the cultural lessons until after they were in their work

placements:

This is definitely sort of a common theme with uh, with the previous students too,

where [their] focus is so much on the work placement, and the job...and the accounting

part that everything else is kind of extra. And then ‘til they get to the workplace and

they realize that the most important parts are communication and culture. (Laughs).

And they should’ve paid more attention.

Lauren also discussed this issue with me:

Well, what they, and when you get to the work practicum the reality kind of sets in is

that the accounting knowledge is what they already have. Yes, there are some gaps in

terms of Canadian knowledge, but it's the culture and the communication that are the

most important parts. And so, you know, trying to really emphasize to the students from

the very beginning [the message] ‘If you come in thinking that culture and

communication is just an interesting thing, or kind of a bonus part to this course you are

very wrong. It's actually the most essential part.’

It seemed to be true, that the importance of the cultural training on how to fit in came to the

foreground for the women once they were in their work placements. The work placements

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were entry-level positions, and so the accounting tasks they were doing were rarely the

problematic or challenging aspects of the work.

Types of work placements. The work placements were all entry-level work, but were

done in a variety of different work settings. There were not-for-profit organizations, small

companies that contracted accounting work for other businesses, and large companies with

large accounting departments. The industries represented in the for-profit companies

included, but were not limited to, oil and gas, construction, beer brewing, hotels and

transportation. The type of entry-level work the women did varied as well. In the larger

companies they often had more specialized roles where they focused on only accounts

payable or receivable. In the smaller not-for-profits organizations or companies they did

full-cycle bookkeeping work.

Discussion of the placement experience. The staff held a two-hour session each Friday

afternoon of the ten-week work placements for the participants to attend and talk about

their week together with the staff. The participants talked about what they were learning,

the good and difficult experiences, then asked questions about specific scenarios they felt

unsure of, and received constant reminders to have a good attitude and stay positive. Staff

also provided the women with pertinent information, such as ways to deal with stress or

office politics. The participants reported learning about their environment and duties; often

these included tasks they had gone over in class, such as how to answer the phone and take

messages. These were tasks that were once easy in their home country but presented a

challenge in a second language.

They discussed their good and bad experiences. Good things included improved

communication skills for both listening and speaking, being able to practise small talk,

being taken out for lunch, performing given tasks well, having questions answered,

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increased understanding of workplace culture, gaining Canadian accounting experience,

and meeting new people. While communication was often discussed as something that the

women enjoyed getting better at, many of the challenges they experienced also centred on

communication. They found it difficult to get to know their co-workers, sometimes had

misunderstandings with supervisors, and had difficulty knowing whether English names

referred to male or female people. Another common communication challenge was the use

of formal language in meetings, where everyone talked quickly and the participants did not

have the opportunity to ask for clarification or for something to be repeated.

Often the communication challenge was also a cultural misunderstanding. For example,

Lynn and Sara were at the same placement and could not understand why their supervisor

had not answered an email they sent to him. They had worded the ending of the email,

which informed him about something they did, with “if there is a problem, let us know.”

The participants found his non-reply rude and it left them feeling concerned about the

quality of their work, so they printed out the email and set it on his desk; when he still did

not respond they were extremely concerned they had done something wrong. The other

participants and staff all discussed this scenario with the women. The staff explained that

for a busy supervisor there was no need to answer the email unless there was an issue he

wanted to discuss with them. The two women felt much better about the situation and their

relationship with him.

The women also found it difficult to know how to communicate with their supervisor

about stressful situations they encountered, such as unrealistic deadlines, in terms of having

the right language and vocabulary, knowing the proper or expected boundaries of the

relationship, and how to deal with the situation. Similarly, if the women found a problem

with the accounting work they were doing, they found it difficult to explain concisely and

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clearly what the problem was and how it needed to be corrected. They were encouraged to

prepare these conversations ahead of time by writing what they want to say down and then

practicing it out loud.

The staff often reiterated the discourse of positivity during the work placements, and

reminded the women of the Canadian work values that had been emphasized throughout the

program, such as respecting time, having a work-life balance, and focusing on building

interpersonal relationships with those with whom they worked:

After the women share about their stress Esther tells them that they have to go easy on

themselves and that some have filled their plates very full with jobs, and classes, and this

program and some have kids. She says that maybe it’s a cultural thing, but Canadians

don’t always like to work themselves to death and that if it takes them an extra year to

do everything they want to get accomplished then that won’t be the end of the world.

She says that some of them come from cultures where they are very high achievers and

very driven and stay very busy but that Canadians like to have a life outside of work too.

Esther says she understands that they are new to Canada and they feel like they have to

retrain and educate themselves to get a job and that they have to do so much, but that

one year in the grand scheme of their whole lives isn’t going to make a huge difference

(fieldnotes).

Esther’s parting words for the women one Friday afternoon re-emphasized the main

program messages:

She tells them to keep making small talk and to be friendly and try to get to know their

co-workers. She says that if their co-workers are going for lunch to ask where they are

going and to invite themselves along, as this is an okay thing to do. She says they need

to keep trying to fit in.

Similar words were spoken to the participants each Friday session, and sum up the self-

formation work the program invited the women to understand and take up in their career-

building work.

The program provided information about how the labour market as an institution is

organized in Canada, specific to the field of accounting. An employment counselling

discourse that included a discourse of positivity was used to make teachable the ways the

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women needed to understand and learn to access the labour market. The staff wanted the

participants to not only gain access to the labour market, but to be able to fit into the

workplace, to understand the culture and conform to the expectations of their co-workers in

order to find employment success. Together the information was intended to help the

women get jobs in accounting and to also move up in their careers to receive higher-level

positions and pay.

In the next chapter I discuss all that my research has explored in these last three chapters

in terms of the self-work the program invited the women to do and the ruling relations and

discourses that shaped the work of the staff. I also provide an update on how four of the

women who participated in the program were doing ten months after the program ended. I

then take up the ideas of conformity and neoliberalism that have been evoked in the

research and the concept of assimilation, which I bracketed in doing this study. The

women’s family lives did not enter very much into these last three chapters, but in the next

chapter I provide an overview of the way that they managed their work life and family life

while in the program. Lastly, I provide suggestions for future research.

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Chapter Seven: Discussion and Conclusions

Past research has demonstrated that immigrant women experience barriers as they

attempt to enter the labour market and has pointed to the various strategies used in

overcoming these barriers. Pre-employment programs that aim to prepare immigrant

women for the labour market are becoming one of the preferred strategies for teaching

immigrant women about the labour market and helping them to access it. However, there

has not been any academic research into how these programs go about this work, which this

thesis has explored. Government funded, bridge-to-work programs are sites where the aim

is to mould skilled immigrant women into self-reflective workers who show initiative,

ambition and who will contribute to society by being enterprising citizens. After all, that is

why the government of Canada accepted them as permanent residents—because of their

skill and potential to contribute their human capital to Canadian society. The participants

wanted to be in this program because they had similar goals they sought to achieve; they

wanted to be active in the labour market and practise their profession as accountants.

Funding Relations, Technologies of Governance, Discourses and the Institution

Governmentality theory and institutional ethnography have made visible the ruling

relations that organized the work of the staff and students. Institutional ethnography

allowed me an entry point into the empirical field and gave me a framework for doing this

study. It directed my focus to the activities of my informants and the work they do, which

brought into view the institutional relations and discourses that shaped their work. From the

framework of IE and by applying governmentality theory in discussing my data, the

research has made visible the work of governing the immigrant population of skilled

workers; this is a motivated population, people who want to work but are often viewed as

disgruntled at the difficulties they face entering the labour market and lacking the skills and

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information the employment counselling discourse addresses. Systems of governance are

used in this work of (re)training or re-socializing immigrant women; the government

ministries fund programs to do this training work, wherein they govern the frontline staff

who do the work. The frontline staff operate as an extension of this governing body as they

rely on employment counselling discourses to govern the immigrant women in the

program, teaching them to be the type of people who can operate within these relations of

governance, who know how to be job-seekers and enterprising workers in the Canadian

labour market.

Governmentality theory examines how the governing of people takes place through the

work of government and institutions, but also of people on themselves. It has provided a

theoretical parlance to discuss the strategies and techniques used to ‘conduct the conduct’

of human beings, such as the techniques of governance used by government funders and by

the frontline staff. Importantly, it provides a way to examine and discuss the self-work that

the participants in this study were invited to do in order to take part in these Canadian

social institutions that they seek to interface with, namely in this program, the employment

counselling discourse and the labour market as an institution.

In chapter four, I explored some of the tension that existed in the funding relations, as

the staff were held accountable for outcomes that were dependent upon first, the actions

and choices of people other than themselves, and second, an economy that did not favour

immigrants’ acceptance into work placements and jobs. I explored how the funding

relations as an institution used techniques of governance to organize the work of staff,

primarily through the logic model. The logic model served to coordinate relations of

accountability with the funders and organized the work of the staff as they facilitated

shaping the conduct of participants.

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Through the work of the staff, the technique of surveillance was employed to monitor

how the participants took up the knowledge, ideas and activities in their homework and

class presentations. The class presentations the students did were as much a technique of

governance to monitor how they took up the program information as they were also

techniques of the self through which the women reflected upon what they were learning and

organized these thoughts into public class discussions; through these efforts the program

suggestions for self-work and self-reformation were taken up and incorporated into their

own projects for beginning their careers. Techniques of self-reflection or self-evaluation

were used by the participants as they were asked to keep journals where they reflected upon

what they were learning about themselves and the Canadian workplace.

The dominant employment counselling discourse is made up of ideas about how to

access the labour market and what makes a good employee. It covers the topics of how to

apply for jobs through writing résumés and cover letters and how to do job interviews by

knowing how to answer particular types of questions in the ways employers are expecting.

The discourse also covers how a good employee is to present herself through clothing,

facial expressions and body language, attitudes and “soft skills”. In chapter five, I explored

the staff’s use of the employment counselling discourse as a translation of all of these ideas

into activities that were teachable and encourageable. Through the use of the discourse and

activities, the staff encouraged the participants to conform to the program’s displayed

version of who a good Canadian employee is, and to “fit in” to the Canadian labour market

culturally through their refashioned attitudes, self-presentation, workplace values, “soft

skills” and communication styles.

For this program, the employment counselling discourse was textually organized in

various resources activated by the staff in the classroom, as they taught the material, created

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activities to relay the information to the women, and invited them to do the necessary self-

work in taking up these activities and homework assignments. Aside from the main

curriculum text that was developed out of several texts from other pre-employment

programs that teach job preparedness, a secondary source was Government of Alberta

booklets. The booklets were created to advise job seekers on the types of tools they need to

enter the labour market and the kinds of attitudes, behaviours and values that good

employees are to have once hired. In addition, this institution was present in the work of the

participants as they sought out other government funded organizations in Calgary for help

in entering the labour market, which relied on similar, and in some cases the same texts and

information.

A discourse of positivity was central in the work of staff, used to convey to the

participants the self-work required to refashion their attitudes and self-presentation to

display positivity. The discourses of positivity and “fitting in” are part of the employment

counselling discourse prevalent in the labour market institution and a larger network of

institutions, such as the education system, which is where such discourses are often

encountered. The discourse was also a technique of governance as it was used to motivate

the participants in the work required of them in the program, just as it was a discourse the

staff wished for the participants to take up and employ in their own self-presentation work.

However, I also saw that the positivity discourse perhaps served to shut down any talk

the participants might have wanted to engage in about their experience in Canada or in

response to the work being done in the program. The program did not provide any space

where vocal resistance could take place or allow any expression that could have been

construed as not positive. While the purpose of this has been explained as keeping the

women motivated to do the work and find jobs, it perhaps also had the effect of limiting the

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learning process. If the participants were not able to discuss their experiences fully, it may

be been difficult to process them or to seek out answers to any questions or concerns they

were having about the self-work they were being asked to do.

In addition, by not explicitly addressing issues of gender equality or any racism or

systemic discrimination present in the Canadian labour market, it did not provide the

women with information that would have perhaps better prepared them for what they might

yet face in their job search process. Many of the women perhaps had already experienced

what they would have perceived as systemic discrimination when trying to find jobs.

Alejandra used the word discrimination but then changed her mind about using this word to

describe her experiences in trying to find work when I pressed her to continue this

conversation. While the reality that there is evidence of systemic discrimination in the

Canadian labour market may have been disheartening for the participants to hear about, it

may also have led to discussions about strategies for how to deal with it if they thought they

were encountering it; this could ultimately have bolstered their motivation by being able to

name and understand what they were experiencing, and also may have led to them

receiving better support by being able to talk about it openly with the staff. With that said,

they did have an employment counsellor on staff available for individual counselling. I do

not know what kind of conversations they had in these private meetings, and perhaps this

was a space for this kind of support without the positivity discourse preventing honest and

open talk about these issues.

In chapter six, we saw how the labour market as an institutional realm was made visible

through the information provided to the women in the program in a variety of ways, from

labour laws and regulations, to the regulatory structures of the accounting field and the

educational institutions that may need to be utilized before accessing the labour market.

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The participants were instructed on how to create tools, such as cover letters, résumés and

job interview responses, which they were told were the tools required in order to gain

access to the labour market in the field of accounting. The discourse of employment

counselling was incorporated in the work the participants did to learn to market themselves,

which required their newly refashioned style of self-presentation as confident workers who

showed initiative and had a positive attitude.

The participants were told that as newcomers to Canada, employers expected them to

start in entry-level accounting positions regardless of their previous experience or

education, and that their work placements would be in entry-level positions as well. The

participants were not wholly surprised by this knowledge, as the economic recession was a

ruling relation that had already impeded their entrance to a constricted labour market and

made their acceptance into the WSA program more important. Despite their education and

the work many had already done to prepare for the labour market, the participants

expressed that they needed extra training, or at least that they needed extra training to add

to their résumés, and they needed the Canadian work experience the work placement

provided.

Catching Up Ten Months Later

About ten months after the work placements ended I contacted all of the participants to

enquire how they were doing and invite them to get together to catch up. Four of the

women replied back and set up a time to get together. They had all had different

experiences in the ten months since the program ended. Lian, who had the weakest English

speaking abilities in the program, talked about how grateful she was for the program

because looking back she realized that was the first time in Canada she had been forced to

speak English. She had taken a lot of accounting classes and so had practised writing and

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listening, but never spoke in class and never spoke English at home either. Interestingly,

however, she also brought up an uncomfortable situation she encountered after the

program, which I recorded in the notes I wrote up right after we met together:

Lian says that she was speaking to someone and asked to pay her bank statement; her

friend corrected the way she asked. Lian had said it very straightforwardly and bluntly,

whereas her friend taught her how to say it politely as a question. She says she wished

there had been more training on how to speak nicely. I smile at this because there were

repeated classes on how to phrase things politely in English, although much of the focus

was on written English in emails, for example. I remind Lian that there were lots of

classes on written English and being polite, but then suggest perhaps more focus on

verbal English would have been helpful. She smiles and agrees; she is very polite in her

agreement. In fact, there were many classes on how to make polite small talk and the

importance of this, but I can see that perhaps such classes came and went quickly and

were long enough ago that Lian does not remember them clearly (fieldnotes).

Perhaps Lian was not ready to “hear” the messages; her English skills were perhaps at a

level where she worked very hard to understand the content in the lessons that were

provided without being able to understand the full message and corresponding work she

had been invited to take up. That Lian had not been able to hear and take up the strong

focus on communicating in polite English (including a specific lesson on what being ‘short-

worded’ meant) indicates that the staff were correct in adding workshops after the program

to continue supporting the immigrant women with their integration into the workplace.

However, the WSA staff could only provide the workshops as an opportunity and could not

require attendance from the participants after the program had ended. The staff found that

attendance was low; when women are working full time and perhaps still taking part-time

classes and raising children, it is understandably difficult to add more to their schedules.

Lian was working in a health-care office and said she was glad to be working, but

expressed frustration at how difficult it was to understand her boss and communicate in

English. She did not mention attending any of the WSA workshops offered.

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When June and I had tea together she told me about her work experience since the

program. She was hired by the company she did her work placement for, and had worked

for this same company but in two different locations in Calgary for the last ten months. The

two locations had very different environments, with one being very relaxed and the other

very formal. She felt lonely at the formal location she was presently at, and said that the

staff all knew each other and she found them difficult to talk to. She had had some difficult

experiences with one staff member and had gone to the WSA program staff for advice,

which June said she did not necessarily follow, but it was very helpful because she felt

supported and it was nice to be able to talk to someone about it. When June reflected upon

the WSA program she talked only about the accounting aspect. She said the accounting

classes and learning the accounting software were very helpful in giving an overview of the

general accounting cycle in Canada. She said, however, that one would still need to go and

take more accounting classes:

The accounting classes in the WSA program give the basics, but without previous

accounting classes, June tells me they would be difficult to understand. She says the

theory of accounting is different between countries and so is the application, so it really

is necessary to take some accounting classes from somewhere like SAIT (fieldnotes).

She said that even though the accounting software they learned is rarely used in big

companies because they have their own in-house software, it looked good on her résumé

and would help in getting jobs.

Alina was the only one of the four participants I met with who did not have an

accounting job at the time. She had also been hired by the company she did her program

work placement for, but she had only worked there for four months. It was a small

accounting company that did bookkeeping for other companies. She said that they let her

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go because she could not do the job quickly enough, which she explained was because she

was a very careful accountant:

She said she needed to be able to work more quickly because the company billed out her

hours to their clients and there were expected number of hours to be worked. She also

found the software difficult to use, and what made it worse was the need to use Excel

along with the software. This she could not understand; in Russia they used only

software that did everything, and so she sees it as a weakness that even though the

software is complicated, they still must supplement it with Excel (fieldnotes).

She was working in a part-time retail job and also working part time doing data entry and

management for a not-for-profit organization, which she was hoping would turn into full-

time hours soon. She had also started taking a course on doing taxes through a large

company that does personal taxes, in order to learn Canadian accounting systems because

she had not taken any other accounting courses in Canada. Alina expressed disappointment

in not being able to find another accounting job; she had applied for several jobs but had

not received any interviews.

Alina was one of the most upbeat women in the class; she has confidence in herself, she

was very positive about the future and she did well in her placement. In the end it sounds

like some of her technical skills need work – accounting practices as well as her

computer skills, so that she can work at a quicker pace. Alina tells me that she used to

think she was going to get an accounting designation but now she says she is tired and

she does not need to do this. She tells me she wants to enjoy life and be able to support

herself, but she does not want to go back to school for a designation. Despite some of the

difficulties Alina has had in finding an accounting job, she is still so happy to be here.

She tells me that she loves Canada and loves living here. She is exuberant in her praise

for the country and how happy she is here (fieldnotes).

Alina lost her job because she said she had done the work very slowly. I was left wondering

if she would have had more success in finding accounting work if she had taken accounting

courses at SAIT.

Hua was the fourth participant I talked to about her experiences in the program and in

her new entry-level accounting job ten months after the program. Hua was also hired by the

company where she did her work placement, and she was happy in her role doing accounts

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payable. She had also taken an accounting course in the semester after the program, which

she said made for a stressful four months. She said she would wait for a while before taking

more classes. While June found it difficult to get to know her co-workers, Hua said she

really liked all the women she worked with and enjoyed getting to know them. Her

perspective ten months later was that the program taught her how to interpret Canadians,

understand how they work and why they do what they do, and then taught her and the other

participants how to take on this conduct and way of speaking as well. Without any

prompting from me or questioning how she felt about this, she told me she could not

comment on whether this was a good or bad thing, but it was something she wanted and

sought out by entering the program. She saw that this knowledge expanded her views of the

world, and while doing the work in the program required her to make compromises—as she

put it—and it took hard work, it was also very rewarding. She told me she thought learning

to conform was necessary in order to feel comfortable in the workplace, and that was

something that was very important to her in order to have a good work experience.

Hua tells me about a conversation she had with a woman who worked at the Canadian

Language Benchmark assessment center where all the participants were tested at the end

of the project. Hua and the woman talked about how multicultural Canada really is in

experience rather than the idea of it that they had before immigrating. The woman had

immigrated to Canada about 20 years ago. She asked Hua whether she thought that

Canada would change because of immigrants entering, or whether the expectation was

that immigrants would change to be like Canadians. Hua said she had only been here a

short time, and in this time she felt like she was doing a lot of changing and growing.

The woman said, yes, she was sure this was true, but that after she had been in Canada a

long time, maybe she would be able to look back and see that Canada had changed in

that time. The woman said that she looked back and saw that Calgary had changed; she

gave the example that there used to be restaurants with just mostly western food, but

now there was an abundance of ethnic types of restaurants all over Calgary. Hua and I

joke that maybe in twenty years she and I can look back and talk about all the ways that

Canada has changed; as she laughs, Hua adds that maybe it will be in more ways than

just the diversity in food.

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Diversity in Canada is enforced in multicultural policy but a pattern of integration that

mean cultural change goes two ways—immigrants makes changes to adapt to Canadian

culture and Canadian culture adapts to embrace diversity from high immigration numbers

and policies of multiculturalism—sometimes are difficult to see in practice.

Conformity, Neoliberalism and Assimilation

Conformity. The staff invited the participants to do self-formation in distinctive types of

conformity. While conformity can involve some form of constraint and often has a negative

connotation in a western democracy that values individuality, conformity also meant

empowerment to women who were eager to understand and take up a new culture, or who

perhaps felt they fit in with Canadian culture better than their own. The women were asked

to conform in ways that made them more assertive and more present or active in public

space, as they were invited to make their opinions and ideas heard in the workplace, and

embrace their equality with men. Conformity was sometimes a way for the participants to

stretch themselves and at other times difficult work that they did not feel capable or

desirous of doing.

The program curriculum was designed to present a certain picture of how the Canadian

labour market is organized and the ways that Canadians conduct themselves in the

workplace. The participants were presented with a particular version of the way that

Canadians behave and present themselves, and what they value in the workplace

environment. About halfway through the program I wrote in a research diary I kept during

my fieldwork:

I see that they are moulding these women into being very polite Canadians, but not too

polite – assertive, as well. To be an individual with opinions and a voice, but to be

polite. I feel like I am learning what it is to be the stereotypically ‘perfect’ Canadian.

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The “perfect” Canadian worker, as evoked in the program, values work-life balance, has a

positive attitude, is enterprising, contributes ideas, shows initiative, and has “soft skills”

that mean one is friendly, polite, confident, capable of team-work and doing interpersonal

relations with supervisors and co-workers appropriately. The employment counselling and

positivity discourses were used as techniques of governance to present the picture of the

ideal Canadian worker. The program staff wanted to give the participants a picture that they

could use in their work of refashioning the self, and this ideal Canadian was thought to best

prepare them for employment success.

If immigrants do find employment success by doing self-reformation work to conform to

the ideal Canadian worker, this is a reflection of the specific ways in which individuals are

to conduct themselves to hook into the labour market institution and the organizations and

discourses that coordinate it; it is not a reflection of immigrants’ supposed “deficiencies” of

knowledge or understanding of how to act in a workplace that have been corrected. The

skilled immigrant women in this program had education and professional experiences.

They had a profound understanding of a professional culture and conduct before

immigrating to Canada; it just happened that their knowledge of professional workplace

culture and organization of the labour market held many nuanced differences to the

Canadian versions of the same. Andersson and Guo (2009) applied governmentality theory

to explicate how “prior learning and assessment recognition,” an instrument educators use

to understand adult learning of immigrants, puts under surveillance the knowledge of those

being assessed; they argue that such techniques of governance “work as dividing practices

between acceptable and non-acceptable knowledge and competence, and thus between

accepted and non-accepted professionals” (Andersson & Guo, 2009, p. 429). The

knowledge base of the immigrant women in this study was not explicitly examined; in fact

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the program staff discouraged discussion of how the labour market was organized in their

own country or how they “did things where they were from,” providing the implicit

message that their own vast knowledge of what it meant to be a professional and have a

career was not necessarily to be called upon or found useful in Canada. Instead, they were

to reform aspects of their selves in order to function competently in the Canadian labour

market along the values of the Canadian liberal, enterprising society. They were to accept

the technologies of governance and trust that the encouraged self-formative work was the

way to move forward and find access to the labour market and employment success.

Neoliberalism. Canada operates under neoliberal policies and practices, as evident in

the immigration policies that have led to increased numbers of economic-class, skilled

immigrants entering Canada over other categories of immigrants. As Rose (1998, p. 154)

argued, neoliberalism “constitutes a mentality of government, a conception of how

authorities should use their powers in order to improve national well-being.” David Harvey

(2005, p.3) writes:

Neoliberalism is in the first instance a theory of political economic practices that

proposes that human well-being can best be advanced by liberating individual

entrepreneurial freedoms and skills within an institutional framework characterized by

strong private property rights, free markets, and free trade. The role of the state is to

create and preserve an institutional framework appropriate to such practices.

Canadian workers are to be autonomous and enterprising, striving to change the self, to

improve the self; and the expectation is that everyone do so, for not to conform to such

values is to be weak or failing (Rose, 1998). My research examines one small way that the

state governs through the program, as a technology of governance, to shape skilled

immigrants, and bring them into a space of doing self-formative work so that they can

access the labour market as the ideal, enterprising, life-long learning Canadian worker.

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The Canadian labour market is an institution that is organized through the work

processes and activities of many individuals, organizations and companies; many of these

activities and work processes are textually mediated, as demonstrated in the employment

counselling discourse used in the WSA program. The employment counselling discourse

encouraged the neoliberal conception of the ideal worker, contributing through her place in

society as free and enterprising in order to bolster the national economic well-being. The

immigrant women in the program were governed to do the self-work necessary in order to

operate within the Canadian institutional relations they wanted to interact with, namely the

labour market.

I am left with questions about how the labour market and the employment counselling

and positivity discourses operate. How do all these rules, as evident in the discourses, come

to be and to operate widely in the North American labour market? Who decided what the

“correct” conduct and dispositions were to be in the labour market? Does neoliberalism

provide the single answer as to how people in a capitalist society are to conduct themselves

and how governing of individuals is to take place across government and institutions?

Conformity and assimilation. In returning to the categories of assimilation versus

integration and multiculturalism, the questions remain: did the participants feel that they

were being asked to assimilate? Is eventual assimilation, at least assimilation in terms of

fitting into the labour market, what my thesis demonstrates? Is assimilation inevitable? Can

immigrants compartmentalize their lives, so that they experience the work of conformity

for access to the labour market while retaining their cultural background, identity and

traditions in their personal lives? My research has not addressed these kinds of questions

explicitly, but it has demonstrated that refashioning of the self to do the work of

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conforming to labour market and workplace expectations and norms is what is being

suggested to immigrant women in order to find employment success.

While the women were asked to conform to fit into the Canadian labour market, my

research has not addressed issues of systemic discrimination in the Canadian labour market.

It has not been my aim to demonstrate whether systemic discrimination exists or not, so I

cannot provide answers as to whether these programs are an extension of systemic

discrimination that requires newcomers to Canada to assimilate in order to find

employment success and get past the systemic barriers. My research has not indicated that

the participants in the program felt the self-work they were asked to do to fit in was a

negative experience or that they felt it to be a message of discrimination. Even if systemic

discrimination does exist in the Canadian labour market, it does not mean that this program

is discriminatory by teaching the participants how to find employment success by fitting in.

The women were eager to learn about Canadians and how they behave, think, and believe

as they do; they hoped this information could teach them to fit in and feel comfortable

working in Canada. As already discussed, conformity in this program did not necessarily

mean suppressing themselves or becoming less free, but in many cases meant becoming

more assertive and more present in public spaces. In many cases the women had chosen to

immigrate knowing that it would mean expanding themselves and their views of the world.

Moving to a new country and learning a new culture represented an exciting challenge and

adventure.

As well, the participants employed agency throughout the program, and made choices

about whether they would take part in the refashioning work requested. Of course they had

no choice but to take part in the activities in the program, such as practicing job interview

questions and writing a résumé, but when it came to the techniques of the self that

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addressed their dispositions and self-presentation, they had choice whether to take them up

and incorporate the changes as they moved forward with their careers post-program. They

may not have taken up each strategy they were told to employ in this work of entering the

labour market, and may not have always done the self-work suggested, refashioning aspects

of their disposition, attitudes or behaviours.

Immigrant Women and Family Life

Any study of women and the labour market must include looking at their home life or

family life, and when examining immigrant women this is no exception. Immigrant women

are often the ones responsible for the domestic sphere, including childcare and household

responsibilities. These responsibilities are often discovered to be a constraining factor as

the women seek to enter the labour market. For example, Hu (2005) points to the lack of

affordable childcare in Vancouver as one of the reasons why new immigrant women from

China struggle to re-educate themselves in order to meet labour market requirements.

Creese et al. (2008) points out that families were useful support networks, as husbands and

wives worked together, often taking turns to retrain and seek professional jobs.

The women in my study experienced these constraints and supports from their families.

Several of the women had put restarting their careers on hold for several years to begin

families once they arrived in Canada. Two of the participants had babies soon after the

program ended, which meant that they could not look for or begin accounting jobs after the

program. In preparing for entrance to the labour market one of the women sent her young

son to China to live with her parents so that she could take part-time evening accounting

courses while also taking the WSA program. She worked hard to be able to begin her career

as an accountant and sacrificed having her son with her for many months in order to

expedite the path she was on by taking two programs of study simultaneously. Some of the

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women’s children were already school-age and while there was still work in caring for

them, the women had more freedom to do the work to enter the labour market without

having to access and pay for child care at the same time.

Most of the married participants’ husbands were working at least part-time in order to

help support the family, although many were under-employed, doing different work than

what their careers had been before immigrating. One woman spoke of the difficulty her

husband had with her being in the program and potentially finding work first while he was

still unemployed. He had a difficult time thinking of her as the breadwinner, but being

financially viable as a family trumped his traditional ideas of familial roles. A couple of the

women spoke of the financial stress their husbands were under in Canada to support the

family with fears of being laid off or not having their business be successful, especially as

their wives were not yet working, which caused strain on the family. On the other hand, a

couple of women spoke about their relationships with their husbands changing for the

better because in their home country they were very focused on their careers and rarely saw

each other, but now that they were in Canada they spent more time together and even took

weekends away together. Two of the women were unmarried; one had her adult child living

with her and the other had family living in Calgary. These two women spoke of the support

that their family members provided financially and emotionally.

Suggestions for Further Research

The focus of my research has been on the work that immigrant women and program staff

did and the interface between their work and the institutions and discourses that shape it. It

has not been my approach to examine this program from an evaluative position. However,

my research does demonstrate that the WSA program addresses the issues that government

and academic researchers have pointed to as the barriers immigrant women face, including

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professional language acquisition, labour market knowledge, insight into Canadian

workplace culture, and strategies for accessing the labour market. One of the most common

roadblocks to employment immigrants experience, or rather, hear from employers, is that

they do not have Canadian experience. Bridge-to-work programs offer the elusive Canadian

work experience that immigrants struggle to find when no one will give them a job without

it. The WSA program is especially effective because it focuses on specific information for

accountants. The information the program provided about the labour market ranged from

general information to very specific, which addresses, for example, Hu’s (2005, p. 4)

recommendations:

Job search skills are only one way to find a job. Immigrants must learn a lot of

background knowledge before they can successfully find a professional job. They should

be familiar with the local job market, they should have some knowledge of labour law

and legislations, [sic] and they should have the ability to express their professional skills

in fluent English.

Continued funding of bridge-to-work projects which are specific to a particular industry,

and with incentive for companies to take on students for work placements, is needed.

When I was originally planning out this research I had thought about trying to interview

the companies and organizations who accepted students for unpaid work placements. I did

not end up pursuing this, but I think further insight into the labour market could be gained

by examining what kind of work the partners must do in order to provide work placements

to the program participants. Following this line of investigation, research could examine

how the decision-makers, who are usually those in the human resources department, made

their decision to become involved in the program, why they did it, and from their

perspective what makes an immigrant ready for a job in the Canadian workforce.

It is easier to train immigrants than the general population of Canadian employees. It is

easier to put newcomers to Canada in programs that teach them how to fit in culturally than

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teach employers and employees how to be aware and accepting of cultural differences.

However, with that said, there are companies that do cultural awareness or diversity

training in Calgary, but there has been no academic research to examine them. A research

project investigating the diversity training resources in Calgary and the use of these

resources by private companies could examine what work is done to put such programs in

place and the kind of information offered.

This research would provide further insight into the labour market environment in which

new immigrants find themselves. It may be beneficial for bridge-to-work programs to be

aware of this kind of data as they create programs to help immigrants integrate into the

workplace. In addition, the information used in such diversity training programs could be

passed along to the companies that partner and provide work placements for immigrants, if

they did not have such training already in place.

When the AEI funding representative visited the WSA program, she spoke to the class:

She says that the programs really have evolved over time because they realized that what

was missing was the workplace communication skills and culture...She says that it is one

thing to be in the environment and to do good work and another to be able to relate to

the people. She says employers were telling them ‘yeah, the work is great, but there’s

not interaction with the other employees. They need to be able to relate to others so that

they can work effectively as a team’ (fieldnotes).

I could not find any research on the AEI website regarding employers’ experiences with

hiring immigrants, or employees who work with immigrants; although the funding

representative said they had done this kind of research. Within the context of a research

study on diversity training, it would be informative to inquire into the perspectives of

employees on the utility of the programs, if they perceive cultural awareness programs to

increase their understanding of what immigrants experience as they adjust to the Canadian

workplace, and their experiences of working with immigrants.

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Traditionally, research on immigrant women and the labour market has examined the

barriers that immigrant women face in entering the labour market and the personal

strategies they employ to get past them. The focus has been on the experience of individual

people. My thesis examines one of the strategies immigrant women have employed—an

institutional program—and thereby contextualizes this individual experience and directs the

focus to the institutional work processes that organize their individual activities.

Governmentality theory has been useful in examining the techniques of governance used to

direct the self-formation work of the immigrant women. Institutional ethnography has also

directed my research analysis beyond individual experience to demonstrate how networks

of institutions use various techniques to govern populations.

173

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Appendix A: Interview Topics

Staff Interview Guide

How did the staff come to be in their work position with this program?

Tell me about your role with this program.

How the program was started and funding.

Tell me about the process/relationship with funders.

How it was decided what would be taught/the curriculum.

How did you go about developing this curriculum?

Tell me about how you select participants for the program.

Tell me about the work of organizing work placements for the students.

Tell me about matching students with placements.

How has the change in economy affected the program?

Tell me about any changes made to the program with each intake.

Participant Interview Guide

Tell me about your immigration experiences.

Had to make this more specific, became: The best and hardest parts of immigration

experience, what have you enjoyed, what has been different than you thought it would be.

Tell me about any jobs you have had since arriving in Canada.

What they have been doing to prepare themselves for the labour market (besides this

program, other classes, workshops etc.)?

Tell me about this program, what are you learning? Has anything surprised you?

How has your thinking about what kinds of jobs you might get changed from before

immigrating to now, i.e. how have your expectations changed?

185

It seems to me from observing the class that it is expected that you will all start in entry-

level positions?

Is this always what you thought? Is this your expectation? How did you learn this would be

the case? When were you first aware that this would be expected or that this would be the

case? Why do you think this is the case?

How are you feeling about the upcoming work placement?

What are your plans for after this program? Work plans? Any education plans? Have these

plans been altered since being in the program?

186

Appendix B: Logic Model Table

Logic Model: Activities, Indicators and Outcomes

Activities Indicators/

Tool to measure

outcomes

Outcomes

Initial Intermediate Long Term

Promotion,

Recruitment

and

Orientation

• # of agencies referring

clients

• # of foreign trained

professionals in need

of Enhanced

Language Training

• Clients gain knowledge

about WSA projects

and services

• Immigrant

communities aware of

WSA efforts to support

immigrants

• Immigrant clients

aware of collaboration

among CGA and WSA

• Clients take advantage

of services available to

them in the community

• Community partners

engage in collaborative

project delivery with

WSA

(Not directly

related to any

particular

activity.)

• Foreign

trained

professional

s integrate

into the

Canadian

labour force

in

accounting

positions in

Calgary

• Immigrant

women

effectively

contribute to

their

communitie

s and to

Canadian

society

Assessment,

Selection and

Intake

• 100% of participants

create action plans

• 100% of participants

feel supported

• Participants learn how

to set realistic goals

• Participants learn how

to manage action plans

• Participants generate

their own action plan

• Clients actively utilize

WSA and other support

services in Calgary

Curriculum

Development

• Level of collaboration

between WSA and

CGA (i.e. Resource

sharing, meeting and

collaborative efforts)

• Collaborative

community effort

enhances WSA’s

ability to provide

relevant services

• Effective curriculum for

the project developed

Enhanced

Language

Training

• 90-95% of

participants complete

the project

• 90% of participants

increase CLB by at

least 1

• 95-100% participants

gained increased

knowledge of the

Canadian workplace

• Participant attendance

records

• # of guest speakers

• 20% of participants

pursue further

education toward

professional

accreditation

• Participants learn good

interpersonal skills

• Participants enhance

language skills in all 4

categories

• Participants learn

appropriate

professional etiquette

in work environments

• Participants learn how

to effectively

communicate in oral

and written English

• Participants practise

interpersonal skills

• Participants effectively

communicate in English

• Participants increase

their CLB level by at

least 1 benchmark

187

Activities Indicators/

Tool to measure

outcomes

Outcomes

Initial Intermediate Long Term

Bridge-to-

work

• 90-95% of

participants placed

into work experience

positions

• 80% of businesses

satisfied with

placements

• 100% participants

report receiving

support

• 100% participants

receive information

about CGA program

• 80% of companies

and participants report

benefit of networking

breakfast

• 100% of workshop

participants report

increased knowledge

workplace diversity

• Participants learn about

Canadian business

environments

• Participants learn about

Canadian workplace

expectations

• Participants learn about

the benefits of work

experience for their

future prospects in job

search

• Companies understand

the benefits of having a

diverse workplace

• Companies learn about

the skills and education

immigrant women can

bring to the workplace

• Participants practise

accounting skills in

their workplaces

• Participants gain

Canadian work

experience

• Companies hire

foreign-trained,

professional immigrant

women

Follow-up

• 85-90% of

participants who

complete the project

find employment in

the accounting field

• # of follow-ups

conducted with

participants

• # of follow-ups

conducted with

community partners

• Level of satisfaction

of employers

• 100% of the

participants report

feeling supported in

their job search

• Participants learn about

the ongoing support

available through WSA

• Participants are

working in accounting

positions in Calgary

businesses

Project

Evaluation

• WSA staff feedback

• Client

testimony/teacher case

notes

• Pre & post client

survey

• Follow-up surveys

• Feedback from work

placement businesses

• WSA learns

constructive ways to

improve projects

• AEII and CIC learn

about WSA’s pilot

project

• WSA creates more

effective projects

• Changes are made to

improve quality of

services to clients

• AEII and CIC improve

programming in Alberta