The Making of Ideal Immigrant Settlement Workers: Experiences of Textual Ruling Power in Molding Workplace Subjectivity

• In Event: Quality and Assessment in Workplace Learning

Abstract

This research examines the learning experiences of immigrant settlement workers (ISWs) in immigrant service agencies (ISAs) in Canada. Informed by Foucault’s concept of governmentality as well as institutional ethnography (IE), we unpack how outcomes measurement, as required by the federal government and exercised by a series of technologies of power, constructs the translocal textual ruling relations that coordinate ISWs’ daily work activities. Through three layers of governing—pedagogical training and learning, textual-mediated learning, and social relationships—ISWs foster their own self-governed subjectivities, producing self-caring, self-regulated, self-accountable, adaptable, and productive workers by implementing and operationalizing the objectives of outcomes measurement in the ISA workplace. This process legitimizes ISWs’ apparatus role in reinforcing textual ruling power and better serves the agenda of the state.

Author

• Jingzhou Liu, University of Calgary