Based on a semi-directive interviews and observations survey, this article examines the apprenticeship training system for two specialised education professions, that is, specialised educator and ...monitor educator. After contextualising the special education sector and placing the respondents in a process of professional socialisation in the world of work and the social professions, we will analyse the pathways to professional integration and the construction of professionalism. Here, occupational integration is studied as a long-term process, part of a career path marked by effects of proximity, (to the world of work and to the health and social field).
About 28% of U.S. public administrators profess to be Christians who regularly attend church. Given potential impacts on public policy and services, it is important to understand how these ...administrators integrate faith and work. Following a constructivist grounded theory approach, this study presents a taxonomy of Christian public administrators’ faith–work integration based on analysis of 30 in-depth interviews. The taxonomy’s axes are: (1) purpose—pious versus instrumental, and (2) locus—personal, workplace relationships, or societal. All participants share faith-driven work motivation aligned with public administration values. Their mode of faith–work integration varies based on perceived religious liberty and orientations toward a sacred–secular divide versus a holistic Christian worldview. The model suggests individuals motivated by theonomic and proselytizing goals may self-select out of government service. This research offers implications for public sector leaders, educators, and Christian public administrators seeking insight into how to relate their faith and work.
WISEs encompass a multitude of relations that both fall within – but also exceed – neoliberal capitalist relations. They are often spaces of mutual aid, collectivity and care, and these enterprises ...can – under limited circumstances – give rise to more-than-capitalist relations. In this paper, we examine the types of organizational and spatial structure that can best support the flourishing of non-capitalist relations, arguing that social enterprises that are part of a collective and networked space are more likely to realize the economies of scale and scope necessary to enhance their transformative possibilities. A case study of one non-profit organization in Toronto, Canada is used to support this argument.
To explore the association between sociodemographic, health, functional independence, and environmental variables with engagement in paid work for people with spinal cord injury (SCI).
Self-reported, ...cross-sectional Australian data from a large international SCI survey.
Community-based.
1189 working-age people with SCI (18-67 years) or aged >67 years and engaged in paid employment. Respondents were community based and at least 1 year after injury.
Not applicable.
Employment and work integration variables. Bayesian penalized regression was used to determine associations between 23 predictor variables and engagement in paid work.
Most participants (87%) were employed pre-injury, with 39% in paid employment at the time of the survey. Participants who attained a master's/doctoral degree (odds ratio OR=3.01; 95% credible interval CrI, 1.63, 5.44) and those married (OR=1.68; 95% CrI, 1.13, 2.49) were more likely to be engaged in paid work. Women (OR=0.55; 95% CrI, 0.37, 0.81), people receiving a disability pension (OR=0.17; 95% CrI, 0.13, 0.24), and older participants (OR=0.75; 95% CrI, 0.63, 0.90) were less likely to be in paid work. Working participants identified hardships including problems completing their work (60%) and accessing the workplace (32%), as well as unmet needs relating to assistive devices required for completing their work (50%).
Findings from the current study can assist in directing resources to subgroups within the SCI population who need greater assistance or intervention related to employment outcomes, including through vocational rehabilitation services/programs. Unmet needs and workplace issues expressed by employed individuals identify gaps in work integration and satisfaction that could affect employment sustainability that need to be addressed.
Purpose Educational institutions are investing heavily in the internationalization of their campuses to attract global talent. Yet, highly skilled immigrants face persistent labor market challenges. ...We investigate how immigrant academics experience and mitigate their double precarity (migrant and academic) as they seek employment in higher education in Canada. Design/methodology/approach We take a phenomenological approach and draw on reflective interviews with nine immigrant academics, encouraging participants to elaborate on symbols and metaphors to describe their experiences. Findings We found that immigrant academics constitute a unique highly skilled precariat: a group of professionals with strong professional identities and attachments who face the dilemma of securing highly precarious employment (temporary, part-time and insecure) in a new academic environment or forgoing their professional attachment to seek stable employment in an alternate occupational sector. Long-term, stable and commensurate employment in Canadian higher education is out of reach due to credentialism. Those who stay the course risk deepening their precarity through multiple temporary engagements. Purposeful deskilling toward more stable employment that is disconnected from their previous educational and career accomplishments is a costly alternative in a situation of limited information and high uncertainty. Originality/value We bring into the conversation discussions of migrant precarity and academic precarity and draw on immigrant academics’ unique experiences and strategies to understand how this double precarization shapes their professional identities, mobility and work integration in Canadian higher education.
People with serious and persistent mental illnesses and/or substance use disorders are among the most economically and socially disenfranchised populations in Canada, and often present with long ...histories of labour market detachment and underemployment. Work engagement has the potential to improve social determinants of health while also harnessing productive capacity. This article reports on a five-year study examining the social, economic, and health impacts of Work Integration Social Enterprises (WISEs) in the mental health sector in Ontario, Canada. The findings shed light on the population that works in WISEs, its levels of social and labour market integration, and organizational features that influence worker outcomes. Results highlight both the importance of WISEs as a means of supporting employment, and challenges to organizational sustainability.
Les personnes atteintes de troubles mentaux graves et persistants et/ou de troubles liés à l’usage de substances psychoactives font partie des populations les plus défavorisées économiquement et socialement au Canada et présentent souvent de longs antécédents de sous-emploi et de décrochage par rapport au marché du travail. L’engagement au travail a pourtant le potentiel d’améliorer les déterminants sociaux de la santé tout en augmentant la capacité productive. Cet article rend compte d’une étude de cinq ans examinant les impacts sociaux, économiques et sanitaires des entreprises sociales d’insertion par le travail (ESIT) dans le secteur de la santé mentale en Ontario (Canada). Les résultats jettent de la lumière sur la population qui travaille dans les ESIT, y compris son niveau d’intégration en société et au travail, et sur les caractéristiques organisationnelles influençant le rendement de ces travailleurs. Les résultats soulignent à la fois l’importance des ESIT pour soutenir l’emploi et les défis liés à la durabilité organisationnelle.
This article explores the experiences of 10 educated middle‐class Singaporean women who act in contrast to the state's neoliberal focus on continuous employment, opting‐out of full‐time professional ...work to intensively parent their children. Using the theoretical lens of intensive motherhood and a qualitative longitudinal approach, we explore how these women legitimize their position, highlighting a culturally specific performance of motherhood (“Professional Motherhood”). Professional motherhood enrolls elements of former professional identities and skillsets into everyday motherhood, performed through three strategies: positioning, productive, and practicing motherhood. We contribute to existing literature by demonstrating that culturally informed variations of motherhood exist beyond the (largely Western) dominant lens of intensive motherhood ideology. Professional motherhood is experienced as a radical step by women, proving partially successful in legitimizing opt‐out decisions. However, by incorporating and further emphasizing deeply ingrained ideal worker expectations, women risk further upholding the state's competing logics and their obligations as mothers/workers.
Purpose Studies on the work integration of persons with disabilities (PwD) and the role of social dialogue therein are scarce. The study examines how the different systems of workers’ representation ...and industrial relations in Slovakia and Norway facilitate PwD work integration. Taking a social ecosystem perspective, we acknowledge the role of various stakeholders and their interactions in supporting PwD work integration. The paper’s conceptual contribution lies in including social dialogue actors in this ecosystem. Design/methodology/approach Evidence was collected via desk research, 35 semi-structured in-depth interviews with 51 respondents and stakeholder workshops in 2019–2020. Findings The findings from Norway confirm the expected coordination of unions and employers in PwD work integration. Evidence from Slovakia shows that in decentralised industrial relations systems, institutional constraints beyond the workplace determine employers’ and worker representatives’ approaches in PwD integration. Most policy-level outcomes are contested, as integration occurs predominantly via sheltered workplaces without interest representation. Social implications This paper identifies the primary sources of variation in the work integration of PwD. It also highlights opportunities for social partners across both situations to exercise agency and engagement to improve PwD work integration. Originality/value By integrating two streams of literature – social policy and welfare state and industrial relations – this paper examines PwD work integration from a social ecosystem perspective. Empirically, it offers novel qualitative comparative evidence on trade unions’ and employers’ roles in Slovakia and Norway.
•A comprehensive classification of work-heat integration problems is presented.•A superstructure is proposed to eliminate trivial and combinatorial solutions.•A novel simulation-based metaheuristic ...optimization approach is proposed for WHENS.•The methodology is more accurate and simpler than the previous approaches.
Integrating work synergistically within heat exchange networks can offer considerable energy savings. Several publications have attempted to optimize this integration using a mathematical programming approach. However, the equation-based approach necessitates simplifications, and requires analytical correlations that often fail to reflect thermophysical properties accurately. In this article, the first simulation-based methodology is presented for work-integrated heat exchange network synthesis, which needs no correlations or simplifying assumptions. For this, a generalized superstructure is proposed, which not only accommodates the liquid and vapour-liquid phases, but also reduces the feasible search region for network synthesis. Particle swarm optimization has been used as the more suitable method for the proposed non-convex multi-modal simulation-based optimization problem. The methodology is illustrated using several scenarios of a literature case study on a liquid energy chain.
Summary
Recent research has drawn upon the social determinants of health (SDH) framework to attempt to systematize the relationship between social enterprise and health. In this article, we adopt a ...realist evaluation approach to conceptualize social enterprises, and work integration social enterprises in particular, as ‘complex interventions’ that necessarily produce differential health outcomes for their beneficiaries, communities and staff. Drawing upon the findings from four social enterprises involving a range of methods including 93 semi-structured interviews with employees, managers and enterprise partners, together with participant observation, we demonstrate that these health outcomes are influenced by a limitless mix of complex and dynamic interactions between systems, settings, spaces, relationships and organizational and personal factors that cannot be distilled by questions of causality and attribution found in controlled trial designs. Given the increased policy focus on the potential of social enterprises to affect the SDH, this article seeks to respond to evidence gaps about the mechanisms and contexts through which social enterprises promote or constrain health outcomes, and thereby provide greater clarity about how research evidence can be used to support the social enterprise sector and policy development more broadly.
Lay Summary
Work integration social enterprises (WISEs) are hybrid organizations that operate as businesses with a social purpose. WISEs focus on employment of people excluded from open employment, often as a result of discriminatory attitudes and practices of employers to people from minority groups and those experiencing disability or health-related problems. There is a lack of research on the ways in which a WISE could positively impact on individual health and well-being. We interviewed employees, managers and enterprise partners, together with participant observation, across four social enterprises to understand these dynamics. Through a number of strategies including flexible workplace structures, a culture of acceptance and support, encouragement to take risks and make mistakes and creative use of space, the participants described changes to health and well-being such as decreased symptoms of anxiety and depression, increased social connections, improved physical activity and increased confidence and self-esteem. Results show a mix of strategies combined with individually tailored support; this has implications for the type of research that is appropriate to understand these impacts. We conclude with suggestions on how future research could use complex research designs to understand how WISEs can influence health and well-being.
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