Bonnie Slade

From high skill to high school: illustrating the process of deskilling immigrants through reader's theatre and institutional ethnography

From High Skill to High School details the experiences of immigrant professionals in an adult education employment program. This research reveals that immigrants with graduate degrees and years of international work experience are put through curriculum designed for adolescents with limited work experience, and collectively perform more than 1.92 million hours of unpaid work annually in both community-based organizations and for-profit companies. In this mixed-method research project combining institutional ethnography with Reader’s Theatre, the Reader’s Theatre serves as a powerful medium to detail the process of deskilling. While Reader’s Theatre complements the institutional ethnographic analysis by vividly bringing the data to life, representational issues emerge in combining the two approaches. For the playwright, the Reader’s Theatre may seem overly detailed and less aesthetically pleasing. These details, however, are necessary to the analysis as they are vital clues to the social organization of power for the institutional ethnographer.

Engineering Barriers: An Empirical Investigation into the Mechanics of Downward Mobility.

This paper explores the regulation of professional engineering and how the licensing process itself impacts the labour market position of immigrant engineers. Guided by the social ontology and method of inquiry of institutional ethnography, this paper provides a map of the licensing process for engineering in Ontario and shows how immigrant engineers are constructed as exceptions to the process, despite the fact that immigrant engineers outnumber Ontario engineering graduates. Having to first go though individualized academic and work experience assessments, they also require one year Canadian work experience. Research has shown that it is difficult for immigrant engineers to successfully complete the licensing process. This paper details the administrative work processes that cause delays and difficulties for immigrant engineers, and discusses the labour market implications of not having a professional licence.

Professional Learning in Rural Practice: A Sociomaterial Analysis.

Purpose – This paper aims to examine the professional learning of rural police officers.Design/methodology/approach – This qualitative case study involved interviews and focus groups with 34 police officers in Northern Scotland. The interviews and focus groups were transcribed and analysed, drawing on practice‐based and sociomaterial learning theories, by members of the research team.Findings – The two key skills for effective rural policing were mobilising available human and material resources in the moment, and learning how to police and live in a rural community. The professional learning of rural police is spatial, emergent, embodied and deeply enmeshed in specificities, and is developed through interactions between human and non‐human actors.Practical implications – This paper argues that, in order to understand professional learning, it is imperative to examine how work practices are fully entangled in social and material relations.Originality/value – Applying sociomaterial approaches to issues of ...

An Ethnodrama on Work-Related Learning in Precarious Jobs Racialization and Resistance

This article is based on a research project on the lived experiences of precarious workers in Toronto, Canada. Using interviews with women in part-time, contract, and temporary jobs in three sectors (telemarketing, retail, and garment), the project explores the ways in which racial hierarchies structure jobs as well as forms of resistance that women exercise at work. The authors find that racialized processes stereotype workers and their skill sets, organize their work, determine their access to and exclusion from certain types of jobs, and impose cultural rules that classify and essentialize them in terms of race, language, and ethnicity. In this article, the authors use ethnodrama to represent their findings from this research project. Ethnodrama is a form that is well suited for this work because it allows us to bring the data to life through an embodied performance.

Coproduction without experts: a study of people involved in community health and well-being service delivery

Coproduction (equal professional-public involvement in service delivery) has been widely promoted as a means of revolutionising health and social care. Service providers/professionals are tasked with working more in partnership with service users/clients, recognising their experiences and knowledge as critical to the success of the interaction. Fundamental to the coproduction model is the notion that service providers and service users are separate groups, with different interests, identities, training and work protocols. This paper reports findings from a pilot research project which examined coproductive practices in two different health and social care organisations in the UK in 2012. In both settings we observed a range of initiatives in which most of the facilitators were people who had initially been service recipients, but become service deliverers in the spirit of coproduction. Analysis of fieldwork notes and interview transcripts indicated that though facilitators developed expertise, they were reluctant to call themselves ‘experts’ and their learning was rarely recognised by them as expertise. To progress coproduction practice and research, we suggest that more attention needs to be paid to the ways that knowledge, experience and expertise are distributed across organisations, as well as the significance of context in service change.

What impact can organisations expect from professional doctorates

This paper reports on a case study of the impact of professional doctorate programmes on graduates and their work organisations. Telephone interviews were carried out with graduates and nominated peer and senior colleagues to elucidate the types of change apparent and the impact of those changes. We found that all interviewees reported development of the graduates’ conceptual frameworks, increased personal and professional confidence, and enhanced engagement within and beyond their organisations. New capabilities and forms of interaction reported by colleagues appeared to facilitate the building of improved networks. Simple causal links were difficult to establish although the professional doctors themselves gave accounts of disruption, subversion and challenge that they attributed to their new knowledge and understandings. Such data draw attention to the complexity and messiness of the professional learning process, calling into question the simple input–output model of impact currently used. We suggest that further research is necessary to develop greater understanding of the organisational impact of the professional doctorate, and the ways in which that can be measured. This is especially important where there is increasing demand for a highly qualified workforce at the same time as decreasing professional development budgets.

The experiences of immigrants who volunteer to access the labour market: pushing the boundaries of 'volunteerism'

National surveys such as the Canadian Survey of Giving, Volunteering and Participating (CSGVP), and the Work and Lifelong Learning (WALL) survey reveal that the volunteering patterns and activities of immigrants and Canadian born volunteers are similar, donating time and energy to their communities (Volunteer Canada, 2007). The growing trend of immigrants doing unpaid work in the public, non-profit and private sectors explicitly to increase their employability, however, raises some interesting conceptual questions about the very definition of volunteer work and issues of power and exploitation in the workplace.

The Ideological Practice of “Canadian Work Experience”: Adult Education and the Reproduction of Labor and Difference

While human migration in search of work, safety, and material subsistence is by no means a “new” phenomenon, post-World War II global economic relations have resulted in unprecedented levels of labor migration in the modern era.1 This migration is composed not only of landless, unskilled labor associated with processes of primitive accumulation,2 but also of skilled and highly educated labor in search of higher wages, better working conditions, and improved social opportunities; almost half of these highly educated migrants are women.3 The processes of resettlement and integration associated with the influx of skilled labor pose a significant policy challenge to states across Europe and North America and have compelled the field of adult education to respond to the pressing social, cultural, material, and educational needs of a population of immigrants who arrive in a new country with expectations concerning the value of their labor.

An inquiry into what organised difficult advance care planning conversations in a Scottish Residential Care Home using Institutional Ethnography

Aim This paper provides an institutional ethnographic analysis of how advance care planning discussions, which included advance decisions about serious illness, hospital admission and Do Not Attempt Cardiopulmonary Resuscitation (DNACPR) forms, were systematically placed into the hands of senior social care workers (SSCWs) in a residential care home (RCH). RCHs are care settings where there are no on-site nurses, and access to hospital and/or community doctors and nurses is limited. Methods The paper traces the organising features of day-to-day work gathered from interviews with SSCWs (n = 4) and others (n = 6) whose (well-intentioned) work shaped what happened in the RCH. Results It shows how the experience of SSCWs was socially organised to happen as it did as they (and others) complied with powerful organising texts such as national and local policy documents, care plans and audit forms. The paper concludes that although SSCWs decision-making conversations were out of alignment with the national DNACPR policy, they cannot simply be described as poor practice. This is because they were socially organised by a complex web of institutional practices related to the occupancy rate in the RCH, the inspection process of the care home scrutiny body, the quality assurance process of the RCH company, the funding of palliative care education, and powerful political and fiscal drives to reduce spending on over-75s. These practices had little to do with the actual care needs of RCH residents or the actual support needs of RCH staff. Conclusions The paper points towards necessary policy changes. It also highlights how ‘competent’ work driven by ideological institutional practices can result in ethically troubling situations in day-to-day working life. This emphasises the importance of carefully examining the social organisation of situations typically described as poor practice if we are to understand how they are (re)produced. It also offers a different account of care home deaths than is typically presented in the professional literature.