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No description available.

No description available.

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No description available.

Since the late nineteenth century, clerical work has transformed from a small cluster of respected occupations dominated by men to a rapidly changing group of occupations 90 percent of which are held by women. Due to bureaucratization and the feminization of clerical work, clerical jobs are assumed to be routinized and simple, and clerical workers deemed easily replaceable. With further changes to the occupation caused by technology and globalization, clerical workers today have become increasingly vulnerable to unemployment, precarious employment and underemployment. In this research, an Ontario-wide survey with approximately 1200 respondents (including 120 clerical workers) and in-depth interviews with 23 Toronto clerical workers were combined to explore the employment situation of Ontario clerical workers. It is apparent that clerical workers are underemployed along all measured conventional dimensions of underemployment, including credential, performance and subjective as well as work permanence, salary levels and job opportunities. Relational practice is a largely unexamined aspect of clerical work that is often essentialized as a female trait and seldom recognized as skilled practice. In this dissertation, I argue that relational practice is critical to the successful performance of clerical roles and that relational practices are not innate but rather learned skills. I explore some ways in which clerical workers acquire these skills. I conclude by noting that recognizing and valuing relational skills will make the value of clerical workers more apparent to their employers, potentially reducing for clerical workers both their subjective sense of underemployment and their vulnerability to job loss.

This thesis investigates the citizenship boundary encountered by foreign workers in the global labour market, with a focus on Canada and South Korea. In the past few years, there has been an increase in the number of incoming temporary migrant workers to both these countries. Temporary foreign workers often struggle to exercise their legal rights in the country of residence because they lack the membership that imparts the rights and duties inherent in citizenship. Territory-based citizenship fails to address the potential for access to citizenship of these immigrants in their countries of residence and the notion of “stakeholder principle,” initially introduced by Rainer Bauböck, is suggested to provide a flexible perspective on the criteria for access to the membership. This thesis uses the case of temporary foreign workers in Canada and South Korea as a case study to argue the relationship between this membership and its actual application of providing rights and protections to the resident aliens. Stakeholder citizenship provides a means of access to certain legal rights and protections to newcomers, but the limitations placed on certain migrant workers may result in their ineligibility for stakeholder status. The thesis concludes that, if temporary foreign workers cannot gain full access to social rights and integration, they should not be required to participate fully in the duties that accompany those rights. In all cases, both countries, the host state and the sending state, should cooperate to protect the legal status of TFWs. / Graduate

In today's knowledge intensive society humans and human capital are at the centre of economic progress. While companies focused on achieving succes in the past by concentrating on technological advances and ensuring that their tangible assets are used to the most productive means, in the last few years there has been an understanding that the human capital of an organisation contributes significantly to the economic success of a firm.