Constructing workplace subjectivity: exploring workplace learning of immigrant settlement workers in Canada

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article explores the workplace learning of immigrant settlement workers (ISWs) at immigrant service agencies (ISAs) in Canada. Adopting a combination of governmentality and workplace subjectivity as its theoretical framework and institutional ethnography as its methodology, the study examines three forms of workplace subjectivity. First, constructive subjectivity is formed by incorporating racialized immigrants’ prior professional and linguistic skills into service delivery. However, the initial hiring intention is grounded in institutional governance, which deliberately prepares these workers for the knowledge of outcome measurement evaluation. Second, organisational training naturalises ISWs’ professional subjectivity to fulfil their apparatus role for the institutional regime. Lastly, cultural subjectivity manifests itself in two modes of paradoxes. The promotion of Eurocentric workplace knowledge assimilates ISWs’ behaviour, communication, and bodily comportment to the practices of neoliberal workplace value. Outcome measurement adopts culture-blind criteria, emphasising programme quantification while ignoring ISWs’ cultural identities in service delivery. In light of these findings, we argue that ISWs’ workplace subjectivities are purposefully coordinated by translocal governance ruling power that upholds funders’ requests for outcome measurement. The findings are significant in developing ways of understanding and exploring ISWs’ learning agency in ISA workplaces by capturing and emphasising their voices.