Going beyond language: soft skill-ing cultural difference and immigrant integration in Toronto, Canada

Title: Going beyond language: soft skill-ing cultural difference and immigrant integration in Toronto, Canada
Creator: Allan, Kori
Relation: Multilingua Vol. 35, Issue 6, p. 617-647
Publisher Link: http://dx.doi.org/10.1515/multi-2015-0080
Publisher: De Gruyter Mouton
Resource Type: journal article
Date: 2016
Description: This article traces how a language and soft skills training approach to Canadian immigrant integration emerged with Canada's shift towards a postindustrial tertiary economy. In this economy, soft skills index characteristics of ideal workers that fit the needs of Canada's post-Fordist labour regime. It examines how skills' training is not viewed as overly assimilatory, although skills are recognized as culturally specific, because they are understood to be civic and work related rather than ethno-cultural. This paper argues that the value of soft skills, including communication skills, cannot be straightforwardly accumulated in post-Fordist labour regimes; rather, value is contingently and relationally defined in context-specific events. In such an economy, discrimination against immigrants is pervasive and indefinite, affectively woven into the means of production.
Subject: soft skills; immigration; labour; language; value
Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/1959.13/1326373
Identifier: uon:25415
Identifier: ISSN:1613-3684
Language: eng
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