The making of ideal immigrant settlement workers: examining the technologies of ruling power in Canadian immigrant service organisations
Abstract
Underpinned by neoliberal rationalities, the contractual relationship between government funders and immigrant-serving organisations (ISOs) has led these agencies to promote neoliberal values of competition in the business market, prioritising quantity over quality in their services in order to secure government funding. Informed by Foucault’s concept of governmentality as its theoretical framework and institutional ethnography (IE) as its methodology, our study investigates the work experiences of 18 immigrant settlement workers (ISWs) at three ISOs in western Canada. This study identifies how following an outcomes-driven evaluation approach, as required by the federal government, produces a series of textually mediated accountabilities, constructing translocal textual social relations that further coordinate and govern ISWs’ conduct in their local ISO workplaces. This evaluation approach, as analyzed in our study, is exercised as the technologies of ruling power, which is strengthened by the ruling of systems, workplace knowledge, social relations, and the governed-self, producing ideal ISWs who are self-accountable, self-regulated, adaptable, and productive. This process of making ideal ISWs legitimises ISWs’ apparatus role in reinforcing technologies of ruling power from the individual, organisational and institutional perspectives to better serve the agenda of the state.
Notes
Open-access – No
Location
Calgary
Alberta
Key recommendations
Key populations
immigrant service workers who are first generation immigrants
Key findings
IRCC is currently using a “outcomes-driven” program, with the aim of better outcomes for clients currently in the process of resettlement, and is increasing in how much it is used by government funders
Immigrant clients can be placed in differing categories for outcomes-driven evaluation and service provision, but this may result in less attention to specific needs for immigrant clients
Daily data updates, as well as outcomes, and identifying numbers of clients is a challenge that accompanies outcomes-driven evaluation, adding addiitional data collection work for frontline workers
Due to reporting of outcomes-focused evaluation, service workers are sometimes unable to help individuals who are “unmotivated”, due to reduced possible outcome reporting, which can overlook systemic barriers
Immigrant service workers may encourage clients to do work that they do not want to do, such as entry-level employment to increase the outcomes produced for reporting
Integration timeline
Gaps identified
Community organizations