Labour Market Gatekeepers: The Role of Human Resource Management Professionals in Immigrant Labour Market Integration in Alberta, Canada.

Redwood, Chene Royan

Labour Market Gatekeepers: The Role of Human Resource Management Professionals in Immigrant Labour Market Integration in Alberta, Canada.

dc.contributor.advisor	Patterson, Matt
dc.contributor.author	Redwood, Chene Royan
dc.contributor.committeemember	Banerjee, Pallavi
dc.contributor.committeemember	Wallace, Jean Elizabeth
dc.contributor.committeemember	Liu, Qian
dc.contributor.committeemember	Alegria, Sharla
dc.date	2024-11
dc.date.accessioned	2024-09-11T20:04:23Z
dc.date.available	2024-09-11T20:04:23Z
dc.date.issued	2024-09-11
dc.description.abstract	Despite new immigrants having higher educational attainment and an immigrant selection policy that admits “the best and the brightest,” one of Canada’s major social policy concerns is the continued deterioration of immigrants’ economic outcomes. This paradox is illustrated by data showing immigrants suffer from higher unemployment, earn less than similarly educated Canadian-born workers, face skill underutilization, and are relegated to the secondary labour market made up of low-wage, unstable jobs, lacking protections such as unemployment benefits. The underutilization of immigrant skills is economically disastrous; it costs the Canadian economy $50 billion yearly. While many studies discuss immigrants' poor labour market integration, offering explanations such as immigrant human capital factors or macroeconomic condition factors, few explore the role of meso-level organizational social actors who decide which immigrants are recruited, shortlisted, and ultimately hired. This dissertation seeks to fill this gap by exploring the role of Human Resource Management (HRM) professionals in immigrant labour market integration in Alberta. Using interviews and critical discourse analysis of HRM textbooks and course outlines, I examine HRM professional's decision-making policies, processes, considerations and constraints when evaluating immigrant applications for jobs. The study reveals that immigrants, particularly racialized immigrants, face barriers to employment in the primary labour market because of the professional and institutional logic of strategic human resource management (SHRM). SHRM promoted in HRM professional education recommends that HRM professionals prioritize business objectives over equal treatment, consideration, and fairness in hiring. SHRM enables unequal power relations between hiring managers (team supervisors) and HRM professionals, which enables cultural racism to go unchecked in hiring. SHRM justifies organizational discriminatory and social closure practices as well as enables the denial of immigrant claims for employment. This is based on the perception that immigrants pose administrative burdens and financial risks stemming from the misidentification of immigrants as temporary migrants and possessing human capital and cultural deficiencies. Hiring decision-makers often do not rely on objective assessments like work sampling tests when making hiring decisions. Instead, when evaluating immigrant job applicants, they rely on racial cultural stereotypes and signals of White Canadian cultural competency as the basis for callbacks and selection.
dc.identifier.citation	Redwood, C. R. (2024). Labour market gatekeepers: the role of human resource management professionals in immigrant labour market integration in Alberta, Canada (Doctoral thesis, University of Calgary, Calgary, Canada). Retrieved from https://prism.ucalgary.ca.
dc.identifier.uri	https://hdl.handle.net/1880/119694
dc.language.iso	en
dc.publisher.faculty	Graduate Studies
dc.publisher.institution	University of Calgary
dc.rights	University of Calgary graduate students retain copyright ownership and moral rights for their thesis. You may use this material in any way that is permitted by the Copyright Act or through licensing that has been assigned to the document. For uses that are not allowable under copyright legislation or licensing, you are required to seek permission.
dc.subject	hiring
dc.subject	immigrants
dc.subject	cultural racism
dc.subject	inequality
dc.subject	decision-making
dc.subject	human resource management
dc.subject.classification	Sociology
dc.subject.classification	Business Administration--Management
dc.subject.classification	Economics--Labor
dc.subject.classification	Canadian Studies
dc.subject.classification	Education--Curriculum and Instruction
dc.subject.classification	Ethnic and Racial Studies
dc.title	Labour Market Gatekeepers: The Role of Human Resource Management Professionals in Immigrant Labour Market Integration in Alberta, Canada.
dc.type	doctoral thesis
thesis.degree.discipline	Sociology
thesis.degree.grantor	University of Calgary
thesis.degree.name	Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
ucalgary.thesis.accesssetbystudent	I do not require a thesis withhold – my thesis will have open access and can be viewed and downloaded publicly as soon as possible.