(WPO1c) Professions and Occupations: Continuity, Change, and Challenges

This session broadly explores change and challenges experienced in various professions. Tags: Work And Professions

Organizers: Vivian Shalla, University of Guelph, Tracey Adams, University of Western Ontario, Karen Hughes, University of Alberta

Presentations

Tracey L. Adams, Western University

Dilemmas and Challenges of Professional Practice in a Digital Age

The work of health professionals is changing; the pace of change has been accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic, technological and workplace developments, shifting consumer demands, and workforce shortages. This context creates challenges for healthcare professionals, who can face demands for which their training has not entirely prepared them. Regulatory bodies find it difficult to keep codes of ethics and practice guidance sufficiently up-to-date in order to guide practitioners as they navigate this shifting terrain. Changing technology, including expanding applications of artificial intelligence, the growth of virtual practice, and recent disciplinary decisions highlighting professionals’ (mis)use of social media reveal new ethical considerations for healthcare professionals practising today. The persistence of healthcare shortages have prompted organizational and governmental policy shifts that further alter professionals’ work, not only redrawing who does what, but changing the conditions under which professional work is performed. These changes not only bring challenges for professional workers, but also demand new regulatory solutions. This paper explores the practice challenges and ethical dilemmas experienced by health professionals working in Ontario, Canada in a climate of changing workplace demands and new technology. Study data come from three sources. First, we conducted a content analysis of codes of ethics and practice guidance provided by health profession regulators in the province of Ontario to determine the extent to which regulators can support professional workers as they navigate this shifting terrain. Recent case law in this field was also examined. Second, we conducted interviews with a small sample of Ontario health profession regulators to discuss the extent to which recent technological and workplace change is impacting the regulation of professional work, and to identify emergent trends in practice (mis)conduct. Third, we conducted focus groups with health professionals to understand their experiences in the workplace, and hear first-hand about the challenges workplace change is bringing. We conducted thematic analysis across the datasets to develop an understanding of the nature of changes experienced, their impact on professional workers, and their implications for the regulation of professional work. Findings indicate that many regulators have made changes to their codes of ethics and practice guidance to foster ethical professional conduct in a context of change; however, some provide more support than others. Many feel ill-equipped to stay up-to-date with developments in the professional fields they regulate, and/or believe that it is not their role to support practitioners as they navigate the changing terrain. The impact of technological change is altering many aspects of professional practice – but it impacts professionals differently, depending on their work setting and employment status. The extent to which the implementation and application of technology is controlled by the workers or by others (like their employers), is crucially important. Impacts are also variable depending on region and urban-rural locale. In hospital settings the push to do more, and take on new roles that have the potential to increase safety risks to the public is particularly intense. Technological change creates new challenges for professional regulators too as it opens different avenues for professional misconduct, and may facilitate illegal practice. The implications of some workplace and technological changes -- for example, expanding use of artificial intelligence -- are multiple and difficult to predict. The implications of technological change for professional workers and regulatory bodies are considered.

Francois Lachapelle, University of British Columbia - Okanagan

Don't Publish, Don't Perish: Academic Economists and their unhastened Logic of Knowledge Production

In the realm of twentieth-century academic economics, a peculiar phenomenon emerges, as Randall Collins (1988: 295) aptly observed, marking it as not just an outlier in social sciences, but a curious entity in the intellectual universe. My research delves into this peculiarity, situated at the nexus of knowledge production and labor market dynamics within the discipline of economics, probing what some may dismiss as an "epistemic curiosity." The crux of my investigation is a startling fact: a significant majority (70%) of assistant professor of economics hires in Canada’s leading research-intensive universities between 2007 and 2017 embarked on their professorial journey devoid of any peer-reviewed publications. This scenario starkly contrasts with other social sciences, where epistemic a-productivism is far less prevalent, as evidenced by significantly lower percentages in disciplines like anthropology, political science, sociology, and psychology. This pattern in economics aligns with the findings of Waaijer, Sugimoto, and Larivière (2016), who documented a persistent low publishing rate among doctoral economists across multiple decades, notably lower than in disciplines like psychology, genetics, astrophysics, and chemistry. While other fields have witnessed a shift in the average year of first publication from post- to pre-graduation, economics has remained static, with first publications typically emerging two years post-doctorate. The broader academic landscape has experienced what can be termed "epistemic inflation," where the average number of publications by early-career researchers has surged since the 20th century, a trend particularly pronounced post-1980. This growth in scientific output, following an exponential trajectory, has been influenced by factors such as the increasing number of scientists and government investment in research. Notably, not all countries or disciplines have been equal participants in this trend, as highlighted by extensive bibliometric studies. My paper aims to elucidate the "dont publish, dont perish" pattern in economics vis-à-vis other disciplines. Utilizing data on peer-reviewed publications at the time of first academic appointments of practitioners across 25 disciplines in North American research-intensive universities, the goal is to contrast the publishing behaviors of economics doctorates with their counterparts in other fields. This exploration is structured around three primary objectives: Anomaly Exploration: Building on previous work and my preliminary analysis, I investigate the extent to which economics stands as an anomaly in terms of knowledge production practices among doctoral students. Are other disciplines mirroring this trend of welcoming unpublished scholars into their professorial ranks? Historical Context of Publishing Patterns: By examining the timing of first hires from the late 1970s to the present, I aim to explore the "productivist thesis." This involves a comparative analysis of publication patterns over time across disciplines, adding historical depth to the understanding of why doctoral economists persist in non-publishing even as other fields ramp up knowledge production. External Labor Market Demand Hypothesis: A regression model will test this hypothesis, comparing the average number of peer-reviewed publications by the time of first appointments across disciplines. The inclusion of applied sciences, with their established primary labor market outside academia, is crucial. This facet seeks to determine if the demand for market-ready skills in external professional fields influences doctoral program structures and identity-building processes, possibly shedding light on economics unique publishing pattern. In conclusion, this paper does not merely scrutinize a publishing anomaly in economics; it endeavors to uncover the underlying forces shaping the identity and knowledge production processes within this unique academic discipline.

Patricia Roach, University of Toronto

“Substitute Mothers,” “Rehabilitative Mothers”: Historical Framings of State-Funded Visiting Homemakers in Ontario, 1950-1980

Scholars have traced how definitions/distinctions around “domestic work,” “care work,” and “healthcare work,” reflect and perpetuate racial, gendered, and classed hierarchies in paid social reproductive labour (Armstrong, Armstrong, and Scott-Dixon, 2008; Boris and Klein 2012; Duffy 2011) This literature has illustrated processes of devaluing types of work and invisibilizing workers who perform the work (whether paid or unpaid). Building upon this work, this paper examines the ideological construction of state-funded “visiting homemakers” in the province of Ontario. In 1958, as part of Premier Frost’s initiatives for “social betterment” the province of Ontario passed the Homemakers and Nurses Services Act. This Act introduced a state-funded program for services provided to eligible residents in their own households. Although these programs were already available via charitable organizations such as the Red Cross and the Visiting Homemakers Association, this marks one of the earliest state-funded programs for in-home support services in Canada. Since its inception, this program has been cost-shared by provincial and municipal governments, with the municipality implementing the program often through contracts with existing service providing organizations. The legislation is still in force in 2024, and the City of Toronto continues to provide services through its program. While the definition of what constituted “homemaker” services was not included in the 1958 legislation, the Act laid out who could be eligible for receiving these services. It distinguished between two broad categories of households: households with adults requiring part-time homemaker or nurses services in order to stay in their own home; and households in which a child would be unable to stay in their home without the services of a homemaker due to the temporary absence or illness of their primary caregiver. While the first category may resonate with current conceptualizations of “home care,” this paper focuses on the second category to explore the implications of state-funded in-home “mothering” and the process of devaluing state-funded household support in Ontario. Drawing upon newspaper and archival data, this paper unpacks narratives of this program in its early years (1950-1980), to reveal its ideological functions in post-World War II Ontario. In this paper, I ask how has the discursive definition of paid “homemakers” developed in post-World War II Ontario, and what are the implications of this construction? My preliminary findings suggest initial framing of visiting homemakers as “substitute mothers,” but as the program develops, it comes to incorporate a “rehabilitative mother” framing. In the substitute mother framing, the visiting homemaker’s role is to “maintain” otherwise “functional” heteronormative nuclear family by temporarily replacing mothers who are unavailable due to acute illness. In this framing, the program serves to prevent men from taking on the “feminized” work of childcare. Instead, the “ideal” replacement is an older white woman whose primary qualification is her own experience as a “successful” mother. By contrast, in the “rehabilitative mother” framing, visiting homemakers become disciplinary actors for the state, modeling ideal mothering by “teaching” mothers deemed “dysfunctional” or “problematic” through home visits. In both cases, paid visiting homemakers are framed as “good mothers” whose willingness to work for low pay demonstrates a gendered civic duty of maternal sacrifice. Through this historical analysis, this paper contributes to our understanding of the ideological underpinnings which have justified the devaluation of home support work, and more specifically reproductive labour that does not fit within a medicalized model of care.

Janelle Brady, Toronto Metropolitan University; Georgiana Mathurin, Toronto Metropolitan University; Aruschga Mohantharajah, Toronto Metropolitan University; Rachel Berman, Toronto Metropolitan University

The role of Black Early Childhood Educators in childcare: On the urgency of addressing systemic anti-Black racism in the field of Early Childhood Education and Care

Ontario is the only province in Canada to have a regulatory body for Early Childhood Education (ECE) under the College of ECEs (CECE), established in 2007, where workers are registered (College of Early Childhood Educators, 2023). Further, Canada has created the Canada-Wide Early Learning and Child Care program, which will realize universal $10/day childcare by 2026 (Government of Canada, 2024). ECEs work in a range of early years settings such as licensed and unlicensed childcare, home-based, school settings, and family day programs. Despite these federal changes and professionalization in the field undertaken in 2007, ECEs are underprotected in many scenarios when it comes to wages and working conditions, with few exceptions in fully unionized environments (Association of Early Childhood Educators Ontario, 2017; Powell and Ferns, 2023). Given this, combined with the COVID-19 pandemic, there has been a mass exodus from front-line childcare work, as well as less people entering the field (Powell and Ferns, 2023; Powell et al., 2021). Once in the field, systemic barriers are laid bare for Black ECEs who are given fewer opportunities for advancement and promotions (Vickerson, 2023), and who face microaggressions as a symptom of anti-Black racism. Black ECEs not only face these barriers, but witness such unfair conditions imparted on the Black children and families with whom they work alongside in their practice. There are numerous egregious accounts of Black children being more harshly disciplined than their white peers, which is what has led to what some are calling the pre-school-prison pipeline (Bryan, 2020). As such, Black ECEs often take up the mantle in many cases to protect Black children, going above and beyond their job requirements (Grant, 2023). Anti-black racism in the workplace is well-documented and is coming to light across sectors, such as with the Black Class Action federal lawsuit; however, what sets apart Black ECEs is they not only face systemic racism, but they also navigate such inequities being imparted to the children whom they work with, causing a double level of harm. The field of early childhood education and care (ECEC) has embedded assumptions of childhood innocence - that children are too young to learn about race or racism - which leads to colour-blind approaches (Berman et al., 2017; Boutte et al., 2011), ultimately further disenfranchising Black children. Policies and programs also fail to adequately address anti-Black racism in the field. In a recent scan of guiding documents such as How Does Learning Happen (2014), a pedagogical tool developed by the Ministry of Education along with other leading documents in the field, there is no mention of ‘Black’, ‘Blackness’, or ‘anti-Black racism’; instead Black and racialized experience is often collapsed to ‘culture’ which perpetuates further harm by not explicitly naming race or racism. This presentation is part of a larger study, Honouring Black Refusals, which gathers the lived experiences and counterstories of Black Elders, Black ECEs, and Black Mothers. Based on 10 semi-structured interviews, the presenters employ Black Feminisms and Critical Race Theory to explore the system navigation strategies, working conditions, and commitment to creating pro-Black classrooms of Black ECEs, which not only support Black children and families, but all communities from intersectional identities. In all, the presenters highlight the need to not only address wage inequities, but also to layer these with pro-Black intersectional analyses of power to better support entry and retention in the field.