Using Bourdieu’s Theory of Practice to Investigate the Experiences of Ontario College Graduates from Three Former Soviet Republics
Bibliographic record
Abstract
With an aging population and a looming shortage of skilled labor, the Canadian government wants to attract more international students in the hope that many will stay on after graduation. For most international graduates, the path to citizenship involves securing suitable employment in Canada. This study used a mixed-methods research design to explore the experience of 30 Ontario community college graduates originally from three former Soviet republics – Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus – as they attempted to transition from school to work and to integrate into Canadian society. Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of practice provided the theoretical framework used to analyze their work and integration experience. The study examined the relationship between structure and agency, as well as the interplay of the three elements of Bourdieu’s theory: field, capital, and habitus. The data collected from in-depth interviews and document analysis revealed that each participant belonged to one of three distinct groups: “Teenagers”, or those who arrived in Canada shortly after graduating from high school; “Young Adults”, or those who were in their 20s and had further life experience on arrival; and “Mature Adults”, or those who were over 30 on arrival, leaving behind established lives. Before coming to Canada, many members of the Teenager group already had attitudes and attributes suited to Canada’s career field. They also possessed considerable cultural and economic capital as a result of opportunities provided by their parents. The participants in the Young Adult group could not come to Canada right after high school and therefore spent several years engaged in various activities in their home countries, gaining experience that gave them a career habitus not well aligned with the Canadian labor market. And the salient feature of the Mature Adult Group was that, even though some were still young when the Soviet Union collapsed, socialism had a profound impact on their habitus in general and career habitus in particular. Accordingly, they had the greatest difficulty adjusting to life in Canada. The study also revealed that, even though the participants experienced prejudice and discrimination as a nonvisible minority, their whiteness served as a form of capital in the job market.
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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 | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 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".