The making of an ‘arcane’ infrastructure: immigrant practitioners and the origins of professional engineering regulation in Ontario
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Many immigrant professionals have difficulty securing the appropriate licenses required to practice their professions in Canada. Complex licensing procedures managed by professional regulatory institutions compose what a former federal immigration minister called an ‘arcane infrastructure’. This article draws on a discourse analysis of historical professional periodicals to investigate the origins of these institutions, using the regulated engineering profession in Ontario as a case study. Within a conceptual framework based on institutional cultural capital, cultural regulation of labour and habitat, the article analyzes the justifications employed by Canadian engineering societies to establish institutional qualification standards. We conclude that these standards represented a strategic effort on the part of engineering society members to protect their professional, social and economic interests by excluding non‐members and foreign engineers. Passage of engineering licensing legislation in Canada in the 1920s and 1930s institutionalized these processes of exclusion and established the professional regulatory framework that is still in place today.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.032 | 0.021 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".