This open access book explores the wicked problem of immigrant work integration, with specific examples from Canada. Bringing together a variety of disciplinary perspectives, it discusses immigrant work integration as a process of sensemaking, involving multiple actors (immigrants, organizations, communities, and governments) and multiple scales (individual, interactional, organizational, and institutional). The authors identify key players, issues, practices of support, and avenues for future research. This work contributes to enhancing the social impact of academic research by providing a comprehensive overview of the field of immigrant work integration for researchers in global mobility and organizational studies, as well as practitioners. Luciara Nardon is Professor of International Business at the Sprott School of Business at Carleton University, Canada. Her research explores cultural and cognitive influences on work in multicultural environments. She has published books and academic articles on topics related to migration and cross-cultural management. Amrita Hari is Associate Professor in the Feminist Institute of Social Transformation at Carleton University, Canada. Her research interests lie within global migrations, transnationalism, diaspora, and citizenship. She has published her research in various academic journals on migration and gender.

This open access book explores the wicked problem of immigrant work integration, with specific examples from Canada. Bringing together a variety of disciplinary perspectives, it discusses immigrant work integration as a process of sensemaking, involving multiple actors (immigrants, organizations, communities, and governments) and multiple scales (individual, interactional, organizational, and institutional). The authors identify key players, issues, practices of support, and avenues for future research. This work contributes to enhancing the social impact of academic research by providing a comprehensive overview of the field of immigrant work integration for researchers in global mobility and organizational studies, as well as practitioners.

This book provides a critical voice to immigrants through their subjective workplace experiences. Through a lens of critical sensemaking (CSM), stakeholders can understand the role of sensemaking in immigrants’ decisions and to refocus the debate around immigration policy from structural to discursive approaches.

This practical book offers a guide to finding, choosing, and applying theoretical frameworks to social sciences research, and provides researchers with the scaffolding needed to reflect on their philosophical orientations and better situate their work in the existing landscape of empirical and theoretical knowledge. Using a multifaceted approach, the book provides clear definitions, primary tenets, historical context, highlights of the challenges and contemporary discussion and, perhaps more importantly, concrete and successful examples of studies that have drawn on and incorporated each theoretical framework. The authors define and explain the connections among such concepts as ontology, epistemology, paradigm, theory, theoretical frameworks, conceptual frameworks, and research methodology; describe the process of finding and effectively using theoretical and conceptual frameworks in research; and offer brief overviews of particular theories within the following disciplines: sociology, psychology, education, leadership, public policy, political science, economics, organizational studies, and business. The book also has a dedicated chapter on critical theories, and for each theory, provides a definition, explores how the theory is useful for researchers, discusses the background and foundations, outlines key terms and concepts, presents examples of theoretical applications, and gives an overview of strengths and limitations. This book offers a useful starting point for any researcher interested in better situating their work in existing conceptual and theoretical knowledge, but it will be especially useful for graduate students and early career researchers who are looking for clear definitions of complex terms and concepts, and for an introduction to useful theories across disciplines.

When immigrants leave their home country to live in a host country that has a different culture, the acculturation process begins. There is subtle cultural, social, and political pressure on immigrants to adopt the cultural values of the host nation. The acculturation process occurs over time. Exposure to a new culture is often stressful, as one is exposed to new values, beliefs, and behaviors that may be different from their home culture. Strategies for Cultural Assimilation of Immigrants and Their Children: Social, Economic, and Political Considerations increases awareness of the cultural assimilation process among parents, children, employers, and educators. This book discusses internal conflicts and promotes harmony and understanding. Covering topics such as civic literacy, mental health, and identity formations, this premier reference source is an excellent resource for sociologists, psychologists, government officials, educators and administrators of both K-12 and higher education, students of higher education, librarians, researchers, and academicians.

Through an inter-subjective lens, this open access book investigates the initial labour market integration experiences of these migrants, refugees or asylum seekers, who are characterised by different biographies and migration/asylum trajectories. The book gives voice to the migrants and seeks to highlight their own experiences and understandings of the labour market integration process, in the first years of immigration. It adopts a critical, qualitative perspective but does not remain ethnographic. The book rather refers the migrants’ own voice and experience to their own expert knowledge of the policy and socio-economic context that is navigated. Each chapter brings into dialogue the migrant’s intersubjective experiences with the relevant policies and practices, as well as with the relevant stakeholders, whether local government, national services, civil society or migrant organisations. The book concludes with relevant critical insights as to how labour market integration is lived on the ground and on what migrants ‘do’ with labour market policies rather than on what labour market policies ‘do’ to or for migrants.

There has been a marked rise in global migration with many former countries of emigration becoming immigration destinations. As a result of this, social workers increasingly encounter immigrant clients and are called upon to work in their communities. At the same time, in the field of research, theories, conceptual frames, perspectives and discourse have materialized and evolved to make sense of contemporary events. Social work professionals, researchers and students must, therefore, need to be apprised of current thinking, research and discourse in the field of integration. Valtonen familiarizes the reader with the variation in national policies, institutional arrangements and service responses, which all provide rich contrasts and insights into a breadth of policy possibilities. Since macro-level developments in migration carry direct implications for social work as a discipline and a profession with a central stake and role in immigrant wellbeing, this book provides salient information to help with visioning in the profession, defining appropriate and concerted responses, and building robust standing in the field as well as promoting the linking of disciplinary and multidisciplinary research with practice.

The employer-driven push to systematically replace Black workers with unauthorized immigrants In The Manufacturing of Job Displacement, Laura López-Sanders argues that the walls of American businesses hide a system of illegal practices and behaviors that lead to racial inequality in the labor market. Drawing on extensive research in South Carolina manufacturing facilities, nearly 300 interviews, and her own experience working at both the “bottom” of the labor market (e.g., cleaning toilets and on assembly-line jobs) and in mid-level supervisory positions, López-Sanders provides a behind-the-scenes accounting of daily factory life. She uncovers preferential hiring practices that fly in the face of civil rights legislation barring employment discrimination, including orchestrated actions of employers to systematically replace Black workers with Hispanic unauthorized immigrants. López-Sanders argues against the predominant view that worker displacement occurs primarily because of hiring biases or social networks. Instead, she shows that employers intervene strategically, relying on subcontractors, agencies, use and intermediaries to shift the race and gender in an organization. They also vulnerable and tractable immigrant labor to impose and justify untenable standards that drive native-born workers out of their jobs and create vacancies to be filled by additional immigrant workers. The Manufacturing of Job Displacement sheds new light on a classic question about ethnic succession and segmentation in the labor market and reorients the ongoing debates about the economic impact of immigration.

Integration is a key challenge facing modern society today. Integration and Resistance offers a new theoretical perspective for considering integration. By focusing on international immigrants and their organisations from a wider perspective the author demonstrates that the threat to social integration does not lie with the immigrants themselves but with global capital and the state. By analysis of data collected in Spain and Portugal the book breaks new ground in providing information on processes occurring in intermediate-capitalist countries that share some aspects of economic development, social and migration features with Northern Europe and America whilst also sharing other features such as the economic dependence of more impoverished countries.