‘Survival Employment’: Gender and Deskilling among African Immigrants in Canada

Recent research points to a growing gap between immigrant and native‐born outcomes in the Canadian labour market at the same time as selection processes emphasize recruiting highly educated newcomers. Drawing on interviews with well‐educated men and women who migrated from countries in sub‐Saharan Africa, this paper explores the gendered processes that produce weak economic integration in Canada. Three‐quarters of research participants experienced downward occupational mobility, with the majority employed in low‐skilled, low‐wage, insecure forms of “survival employment”. In a gendered labour market, where common demands for “Canadian experience”, “Canadian credentials” and “Canadian accents” were uneven across different sectors of the labour market, women faced particular difficulties finding “survival employment”; in the long run, however, women’s greater investment in additional post‐secondary education within Canada placed them in a somewhat better position than men. The policy implications of this study are fourfold: first, we raise questions about the efficacy of Canadian immigration policies that prioritize the recruitment of well‐educated immigrants without addressing the multiple barriers that result in deskillling; second, we question government policies and settlement practices that undermine more equitable economic integration of immigrants; third, we address the importance of tackling the “everyday racism” that immigrants experience in the Canadian labour market; and finally, we suggest the need to re‐think narrowly defined notions of economic integration in light of the gendered nature of contemporary labour markets, and immigrants’ own definitions of what constitutes meaningful integration.     

The ‘Sociology’ and ‘Anthropology’ of Berthold von Regensburg*

Abstract This article deciphers the views of the German thirteenth century preacher Berthold von Regensburg about ‘social nature’ as they are demonstrated in his sermon ‘Of the five talents’. Berthold von Regensburg interprets the Gospel parable (Matthew, 25: 14–30) quite freely, in accordance with the social realities of his own time. The ‘talents’ given by God to the human being are their personalities, social vocations, or offices, life-time, wealth, and love to their neighbours. Such an interpretation of the sacral text in the sermon read in a big South German town seems to be a kind of reflection of the burghers’ mentality. The hypothesis finds its further confirmation in other sermons in which he enumerates the professional groups of that society; this analysis is clearly town-oriented. A fuller context for this text is provided in the author's own work especially ‘Questions of Philosophy’Voprosi Philosophii (Moskva, 1990)     

Comparing Public Attitudes towards Aid to Developing Countries between ‘Traditional’ and ‘Emerging’ Donors: The Case of Japan and Korea

This article explores public attitudes towards aid to developing countries in ‘traditional’ donors and ‘emerging’ donors, taking Japan as an example of the former and Korea as one of the latter. Analyses of comparative social survey data show differences and similarities between the attitudes harboured by the respondents in the two countries. Although previous cross‐national studies included only traditional donors in their analyses, the results of this study reveal the need to focus on the attitude towards aid in emerging donors, especially given their increasing presence in the international aid community.     

Looking for Rural Idyll ‘Down Under’: International Immigrants in Rural Australia

This article outlines the empirical findings of the first national longitudinal study of almost 1,000 recent immigrants who decided to move to non‐metropolitan Australia. The national survey (2008‐2010) identified that new international immigrants tend to move to rural areas because of the natural beauty, lifestyle and community spirit to be found there, as well as the idyllic image of peacefulness and a relaxing environment associated with these areas. Natural attractors, such as rurality and climate, were important features of the places which, according to the survey, were particularly liked. However, there is tension between the imagined Australian rural ideal and reality, with remoteness, isolation and parochialism being the key features in how the countryside may be misrepresented. The retention of new immigrants in rural places is very strongly related to constructed attractors – the availability and quality of infrastructure, as well as recreational, entertainment and cultural activities.     

The Institutionalisation of ‘TongNian’ and ‘childhood’ in China and Britain: Exploring Cautious Comparisons

This article engages with the question of how theorisation of the social construction of childhood can be applied across cultural contexts, taking China and Britain as examples. The paper draws on collaborative dialogue between scholars from the People's Republic of China and Britain, and literatures from both Anglophone and Mandarin sources. It takes forward emergent work on theorising childhood from diverse global perspectives by focusing on the institutionalisation of childhood in these countries, with particular reference to language, conceptualisation and legal frameworks relating to chronological age.     

‘Doing things with words’: Sociology and ‘Family Policy’ debates

In examining ‘family policy’, previous work on ‘family ideology’ is developed to demonstrate that ‘traditional family sociology’ has been ‘doing things with words’. In this area sociology, far from being innocuous, has had real impact upon society and may well have been oppressive and deeply reactionary.     

Becoming ‘Real’ Entrepreneurs: Women and the Gendered Normalization of ‘Work’

This article focuses on the way in which women entrepreneurs legitimate their place in a gendered economy by reifying a divide between ‘real work’ and ‘not‐real work’. Using ethnographic approaches to follow the everyday lives of several women who own and operate small businesses in the USA, our article documents three gendering practices the women use for ‘becoming real workers:’ embodied, spatial and temporal. The study shows that women entrepreneurs become ‘productive workers’ by recasting reproductive work as non‐productive or not‐real work. At the end, we explore two possible alternative conceptualizations of ‘work’ that could contribute to dissolving this gendered divide.     

Evaluating Area‐based Interventions: The Case of ‘Communities for Children’

Increasingly, governments in wealthy countries are designing early intervention initiatives around principles of ‘community regeneration’ or ‘place management’. Because these initiatives are multi‐site, aimed at long‐term systemic change, and implemented amidst a range of other initiatives, assessing their quality and outcomes demands departure from conventional programme evaluation approaches. This article analyses the challenges of evaluating area‐based interventions in the child welfare field, and shows how the National Evaluation of Australia's ‘Communities for Children’ initiative seeks to overcome these through its mixed method design and the longitudinal Stronger Families in Australia study.     

The hostile environment,Brexit, and ‘reactive‐’ or ‘protective transnationalism’

The ‘reactive transnationalism hypothesis’ posits a relationship between discrimination and transnational practice. The concept has generally been studied using quantitative methods, but a qualitative approach augments our understanding of two context‐specific dimensions: the nature of the discrimination involved, and the types of transnational behaviour that might be affected. Drawing on in‐depth interviews with Bangladesh‐origin Muslims in London, Luton and Birmingham, in the UK, we demonstrate how anti‐Asian and anti‐Muslim racism have been conflated with intensified anti‐migrant racism in the context of ‘hostile environment’ immigration policies and the EU referendum (Brexit), producing an amplification of racist discourses associated with purging the body politic of its non‐white bodies. The insecurity generated is altering some people's relationships to Bangladesh, incentivizing investment in land and property ‘back home'. While this represents an example of ‘reactive transnationalism', we argue that ‘protective transnationalism’ might be a more appropriate way of describing the processes at work.     

Time and Work–Life Balance: The Roles of ‘Temporal Customization’ and ‘Life Temporality’

This article poses a challenge to the orthodox binary, conceptualization of work–life balance only made possible by relying on the widespread ‘clock time’ worldview, which understands employment practices in terms of the basic time = money equation. In particular, it is the balance metaphor which relies on a quantification of both work and life in order to make sense and can therefore be seen to be based on an understanding of time as a measurable and value‐able unit. This article seeks to begin the exercise of examining the concept of work–life balance through a broader concept of the temporal dimension than simply limited quantitative notions. Two temporal themes are reported from a study which identified employees who had customized their working pattern to suit the various and multi‐dimensional facets of their lifestyles and thereby successfully improved their work–life balance. Participants in this study demonstrated that an improved work–life balance is more about a mind‐set that refuses to be dominated by a work temporality and is determined to create ‘me time’ rather than e.g. simply choosing a four day week or a part‐time job. It is argued that the notion of work–life balance is more usefully conceptualized within a broader notion of ‘livingscapes’ which contain both elements of work and life and that as researchers, our challenge must be to reflect the complexity of this weave within our analyses of individuals’ work–life balance.     

Accounting for Exclusion: Giving a ‘Voice’ and producing a ‘subject’

SUMMARY: This article examines a series of accounts of exclusion given by pupils and a teacher in interviews and a group discussion. It is argued that it is important to hear pupils' experiences. However, it is recognised that it is never possible to access an experience directly, since the process of research alway shapes the way an account is constructed. This does not invalidate the research, since it is argued that the way pupils relate to the interviewer and the way they talk about their exclusion seemed indirectly to reflect important differences in the way exclusion is experienced. Specifically, two ways of managing exclusion were identified by pupils: some pupils protested about being excluded and welcomed the invitation to tell their story. Others distanced themselves from the event, by speaking of their exclusion in objective and concrete terms. These styles of accounting are compared to the way in which the head teacher discusses the topic of exclusion.     

The nature of ‘schools’in the sociology of knowledge: The case of the ‘Chicago School’

The nature of 'schools’as a metascientific construct is reviewed. Tiryakian's (1979a) increasingly popular construction of a school of sociology is examined and the case of ‘The Chicago School’is considered in detail. The efficacy of a 'schools’approach to understanding the nature of the growth and development of scientific knowledge is called into question. It is suggested that schools, as used in the literature, tend to be convenient groupings of practitioners rather than metascientific categories and that they fail to adequately engage knowledge transformative processes.     

Small Worlds and the New ‘Social Physics’

Abstract In this article I explore the increasing overlaps between ‘sociology’ and ‘physics’ through analysing recent contributions to the social network literature concerned with exploring and explaining the so‐called ‘small world’ phenomenon. I show that this new social network literature, while very provocative, is insufficiently sociological and insufficiently complex. With regard to the former it is demonstrated that a key issue is that of meetingness and hence of travel in order to effect meetingness. Networks have, in other words, to be performed, and they have to come together from time to time, especially to talk. I further show that the small worlds literature is insufficiently complex. Social networks often involve combinations of mobilities and highly structured material immobilities. I conclude the article with an analysis of how a new ‘social physics’ based around the notion of ‘network’ might be established in an era in which time and space seem increasingly warped, bent and twisted into strikingly new topologies.     

‘Belonging’ and ‘Otherness’: Sex Equality in Banking in Turkey and Britain

The struggle for sex equality at work has largely been achieved in the developed world, it is claimed. The number of well‐qualified young women entering white‐collar employment and achieving promotion to first‐line and middle management positions now matches or exceeds their male peers. Many young women have high career aspirations and argue that sex discrimination no longer exists. However, this perception is over‐optimistic. Major sex inequalities persist at senior management level in the salaries and benefits offered to female and male staff and in access to certain favoured occupations and sectors of employment. Questionnaires, interviews and documentary evidence from three Turkish and six British banks and high street financial organizations showed that their claimed commitment to equal opportunities by sex was not matched by their practices. Members of managerial elites (who were almost exclusively male) held firm views about the characteristics of ‘the ideal worker’, which informed organizational ideologies, including human resource policies and practices concerning recruitment and promotion. They also permeated organizational cultures, which affected employees’ working practices and experiences. The outcome of these internal negotiation processes was to differentiate between a favoured group of staff seen as fully committed to the companies’ values, who were promoted and rewarded, and an ‘out’ group, whose members were denied these privileges. This distinction between ‘belonging’ and ‘otherness’ is gendered not only along the traditional lines of class, age, sexual orientation, religion and physical ability, but also along the new dimensions of marriage, networking, safety, mobility and space. Despite local and cross‐cultural differences in the significance of these factors, the cumulative disadvantage suffered by women staff seeking career development in the industry was remarkably similar.     

Gender and Bureaucracies —A Critique of Ferguson's ‘The Feminist Case Against Bureaucracy’

Within the area of gender and organization studies there is a tendency to generalize about organizations and how they affect people working in them. In feminist analysis, salient in Kathy Ferguson's ‘The Feminist Case Against Bureaucracy’, there is a tendency to have a one-sided view on bureaucracies and to regard these merely as products of ‘maleness’ and as incompatible with (radical) feminism. On the basis of a case-study of three different bureaucracies, this article questions the assumption of incompatibility and argues for a more nuanced assessment of gender and bureaucracies.     

The ‘Feminization’ of Management? Issues of ‘Sameness’ and ‘Difference’ in the Roles and Experiences of Female and Male Retail Managers

Explanations of women’s poor representation in senior management usually emphasize differences between women and men managers’ experiences, circumstances and aspirations, and the gendered character of organizational structures and processes. Whilst these may all disadvantage women, some writers have suggested recently that women managers may differ in style and orientation in ways particularly appropriate for today’s developing organizations. This paper explores issues of ‘sameness’ and ‘difference’ between women and men managers in retailing. Whilst both male and female store managers wanted to downplay gender differences and adopt a ‘gender neutral’ approach, they also associated a number of advantages and disadvantages with being a woman manager in certain contexts. Rapid sectoral change had caused companies to reassess the desired attributes and competences of managers; associated both with an enhanced valuing of ‘feminine’ qualities and with a more ‘objective’ and ‘clinical’ approach to assessment. Despite their equal numbers at entry points women remained poorly represented at senior levels, suggesting that subjective and informal processes were important determinants of women and men’s progress. Given management is inherently a process enacted by individual managers within a social context the extent to which it can be conceived in gender neutral terms is questioned since individuals are inevitably discussed and identified in terms of their gender.     

‘Where are you from?’: Identifying place1

Many social research projects, such as interviews, focus groups, and surveys, take local place as a given: they choose participants from a particular place, take this place as background for what the participants say, ask them about place‐related issues, and correlate responses with different places. But people can identify places in different ways, in geographical or relational terms, and in different levels of scale. This study analyses passages in focus groups in which participants say where they are from, shows that participants generally take the question and answer as routine, and then shows the ways the interaction develops when this routineness is broken, amended, or called into question. When a participant revises their statement of where they are from, they adapt to what they see as the knowledge and stance of their interlocutor, they re‐present themselves, and they create possibilities for further talk, defending, telling stories, or showing entitlement to an opinion. I argue that the ways people answer this question, interactively, can tell us about them, and us, as well as about their map of the world.