Smoke and Mirrors: How an Allegedly Inclusionary Strategy Perpetuates an Exclusionary Discourse
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The purpose of this paper is to critically explore the meaning making theoretical perspectives underlying the creation and development of a public mentoring program, allegedly designed as an inclusionary strategy for facilitating newcomers' labour market integration. Building upon findings outlined in the program's latest Evaluation Report (Bejan 2011) and drawing upon participant-observation as an inductive field-based research strategy, this paper questions the uncontested legitimization of the cited program as a positive inclusionary strategy and claims it perpetuates the very same discriminatory practices and systemic barriers that impede immigrants' ability to fully participate within the Canadian labour market. It further argues that, despite its affirmed inclusionary objective, the program's formation is rooted in theoretical perspectives that justify exclusion, reproducing and maintaining, by extension, an exclusionary status quo. As a result, it rejects the application of social capital and social inclusion/exclusion theories, those hypothetically deemed to be guiding the program's development, and those traditionally used as explanatory for newcomers' inability to successfully participate within the labour market. It then proposes a structural perspective as a theoretical base to direct the program's future design. Its conclusion emerged from the author's interpretative framework, that only a structural approach will draw attention to the power imbalances and discrepancies between Canadian-born individuals and newcomers, as they relate to the issues of labour market participation and subsequent economic gains. L'objectif de cet article est d'analyser sous un angle critique la signification des perspectives théoriques sous-jacentes à la création et au développement d'un programme de mentorat public censé viser une stratégie inclusive qui faciliterait l'intégration des nouveaux arrivants dans le marché du travail. À partir des conclusions exposées dans le dernier Rapport D'Évaluation (Bejan 2011) de ce programme, et selon une méthode de recherche inductive qui s'appuie sur les observations de participants, nous questionnons ici sa légitimation incontestée comme stratégie inclusive et positive, et nous affirmons qu'elle perpétue des pratiques discriminatoires et des obstacles systémiques qui limitent la capacité des immigrants à prendre pleinement part au marché du travail canadien. Nous soutenons en outre que, malgré les objectifs inclusifs visés, l'élaboration de ce programme prend ses racines dans des perspectives théoriques qui justifient la pratique de l'ostracisme, ce qui a pour effet de reproduire et de soutenir un statu quo exclusif. Par conséquent, nous rejetons dans cet article l'application des théories d'un capital social et de l'inclusion / exclusion sociale , aussi bien celles considérées comme propres à guider le développement de ce programme, que celles traditionnellement utilisées pour expliquer l'incapacité des nouveaux arrivants à trouver leur place dans le monde professionnel. Ensuite, nous proposons une perspective structurelle comme base théorique pour diriger les futurs développements du programme en question. En conclusion, ce qui ressort du cadre interprétatif de l'auteur, c'est que seule une approche structurelle attirera l'attention sur les déséquilibres de pouvoir et les écarts entre les personnes nées au Canada et les nouveaux venus, en ce qui a trait à la question de l'accès à l'emploi et des gains économiques.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 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 teacher head, 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".