The unmaking of citizenship education for adult immigrants in Canada

In recent years there has been a resurgence of interest in citizenship education, particularly in the schools. One area, however, that has remained conspicuously absent from the discussion is citizenship education for adult immigrants. This paper reports on the results of studies examining citizenship education for adult immigrants in Canada from 1947 to the present. We conducted interviews with policy-markers and citizenship applicants, reviewed relevant documents, and surveyed program providers across Canada. We conclude that current trends in Canadian citizenship policy are in keeping with larger trends in globalization and consumerism and propose that the Canadian government increase its civil investment in immigrants if the country is to develop an informed and active citizenry.     

Beyond Appearances: Citizenship Tests in Canada and the UK

Citizenship tests are increasingly used by national governments as part of their naturalization procedures. Several analysts suggest that citizenship tests are indicative of a converging trend toward civic integration, especially in Europe. The reform of the Canadian citizenship test in 2009?C2010 represents an opportunity to examine the mobilization of tests in different national context. Are citizenship tests necessary the central tools of civic integration policies? In order to answer this question, this article first argues that it is crucial to understand citizenship tests as public policy instruments. Using the approach developed by Pierre Lascoumes and Patrick LeGalès, the article compares the emergence and characteristics of the citizenship tests implemented by Canada and the United Kingdom. Stemming from this analysis, this article demonstrates that the two citizenship tests are different instruments despite their similar appearances. The Canadian test remains, despite the reform, an instrument to promote naturalization and integration. In contrast, in addition to promoting civic integration, the British test is also an instrument of immigration control.     

Teachers' self-efficacy and organizational citizenship behaviors

The aim of the study was to investigate the relationship between teachers' instructional efficacy and their organizational citizenship behavior. Questionnaires were sent to a sample of 1,100 French Canadian high school teachers. A response rate of 44.36% was obtained (279 women and 208 men whose mean age was 40.4 yr.) Teachers' instructional efficacy was assessed with a French Canadian version of the Teacher Efficacy Scale and organizational citizenship behavior was assessed with a questionnaire constructed for the study. Analysis yielded positive and significant correlations (rs ranging from .19 and .34, p<.01) between teachers' personal teaching efficacy and organizational citizenship behaviors such as altruism, courtesy, conscientiousness, and civic virtue. General teaching efficacy was only related to sportsmanship (r=.15, p <.01). So the predictions were partially supported by the results.     

Multiple citizenship and naturalization: An evaluation of German and Dutch policies

In many countries the trend has been toward greater acceptance of multiple citizenship and more naturalizations of immigrants. This article analyses and compares developments in Germany and the Netherlands. Central questions are how policies toward dual citizenship have developed and to what extent these policies have influenced naturalization rates. The far-reaching toleration of dual citizenship in the Netherlands in the 1990s resulted in high naturalization rates. However, there were large differences between immigrant groups. Similar differences are found in Germany. Multiple citizenship carries little importance for European Union (EU) citizens, who feel no need to naturalize, and for refugees, who have no desire to retain the citizenship of their country of origin.     

Highly Skilled Migrants’ Strong Ties with Their Home Country: Evidence from Filipinos in New Zealand and Australia

This paper provides empirical evidence of the “embedded connectedness” of highly skilled migrants with their home country through the Philippine case in New Zealand and Australia. This challenges the findings in other studies that show the weak connection between them and the home country which is generally explored more in terms of economic remittances. While the majority of the participants in the study are already citizens of the host country, they remain emotionally tied and culturally connected to the Philippines as evidenced by their information-seeking behaviour, feeling of nostalgia, sending of remittances, taking of dual citizenship, attendance in Philippine-related events and the country they perceived as home. One interesting finding in the study is that most of them have taken citizenship for pragmatic reasons, that is, for the benefits and security that it could bring them. It concludes by emphasising the relevance of capitalising on these strong diasporic ties to entice the skilled diaspora to return to their home country and/or be involved in development activities back home.     

The Case for Markets in Citizenship

A number of countries sell citizenship rights to foreign buyers. Gary Becker makes an economic case for the state's sale of citizenship; more recently, Javier Hidalgo has offered a moral defence. However, the private sale of citizenship on a market remains largely unexplored and undefended. This article argues that under certain conditions states ought to permit their citizens to swap citizenship rights with foreigners in exchange for payment. I begin by offering two defeasible reasons to legalize citizenship markets: they would enable mutually beneficial exchange and increase the labour market opportunities of the global poor. I consider a number of counterarguments and conclude that none are dispositive, leaving the case for citizenship markets undefeated.     

Attitudes toward U.S. immigration policy: the roles of in-group-out-group bias,economic concern,and obedience to law

California's Proposition 187, directed primarily toward Mexican immigrants, deprives illegal immigrants of many benefits associated with U.S. citizenship and facilitates their deportation. The authors hypothesized that the respondents' opinions on this proposition would be determined by in-group-out-group bias (i.e., the tendency to evaluate the ethnic out-group more negatively than the ethnic in-group). In accord with that hypothesis, variations in respondent ethnicity (Studies 1 and 2) and in immigrant ethnicity (Study 3) were systematically related to the respondents' opinion on that issue. Moreover, the effect of in-group-out-group bias was independent of perceived reasoned economic and legal considerations that underlay the respondents' opinion.     

Portuguese-Canadian Emigrant Descendents in Multicultural Canada: Ambiguous Identity in a Sure-Footed Nation or Cultural Awareness in an Uncertain Country?

This paper examines the ways the descendents of Portuguese-Canadian immigrants contemplate and formulate their identities. Through qualitative, open-ended interviews, the research demonstrates how these individuals contest ideas of ‘being Portuguese’ and ‘being Canadian’ within the frameworks of the Canadian multicultural policy. Refusing to be positioned outside the nation and Anglo/Francophone conformity, these individuals produce their own meanings of identity by working through their own personally identified multiethnic bodies to the national body politic, where some of them see their own selves as intrinsically ‘multicultural’ and contributors to the very definition of a Canadian identity. Challenging the tropes of the Canadian multicultural narrative, these descendents, thus, develop nuanced models of cultural citizenship, illustrating that national identities are formed and transformed in relation to representation. Through the process of narrative analysis, my endeavour of this article are twofold: on one hand, to illuminate the role of these individuals who, as active actors, are shaped by the social worlds they delve in and, on the other, to explicate how the roles played out by these actors can contribute to the construction of ‘a Canadian identity’.     

Citizenship’s tangled web: Associations,gaps and tensions in formulations of European youth active citizenship across disciplines

Abstract

How does academic literature across various disciplines conceptualize and empirically address active citizenship? What are the potential benefits and dangers of dominant epistemological and ideological perspectives on ‘good citizenship’? Our paper engages with these questions by drawing on literature across 12 disciplines. We used textual analysis software T-LAB to quantify and visualize co-occurrences, word associations and thematic clusters in the abstracts of 770 texts gathered by eight country teams and original in-depth qualitative analyses of ideological positions and discourses taken up in a selection of key texts across the corpus. Our paper elaborates the findings: that many of the key themes surrounding young people and citizenship in the literature share little or no connection with European citizenship; that there is a significant gap in the literature on young European citizens; and that studies connected to internal, status-based factors connected to citizenship are far more prevalent than those examining external, practice-based factors or dissidence and dissent. Our conclusions examine the potential normative implications of the disjuncture between dominant conceptions and critical accounts of youth active citizenship.     

Spotlight on the Followers: An Examination of Moderators of Relationships Between Transformational Leadership and Subordinates’ Citizenship and Taking Charge

Drawing on substitutes for leadership theory, we revisit an often taken‐for‐granted assumption that transformational leadership is a universally positive management practice by examining subordinate‐based aspects attenuating the relationship between transformational leadership and followers’ citizenship and taking charge. Using data collected from 196 followers and their leaders situated in 55 workgroups in 2 Chinese organizations, we found that followers’ citizenship and taking charge were not influenced by transformational leadership when followers perceived leaders as prototypical and were highly identified with their workgroups. Furthermore, following a differential pattern for citizenship and taking charge, followers’ traditionality weakened the relationship with citizenship, whereas followers’ learning goal orientation attenuated the relationship with taking charge. Introducing contingencies and specifying their underlying logic broadens the current theoretical spectrum for both substitutes for leadership and transformational leadership.     

Predicting Immigrants' Attitudes Toward Multiculturalism Using a Measure of Its Perceived Benefits

We examined the predictors of attitudes toward multiculturalism in a sample of Asian and African immigrants. Multiculturalism was measured in terms of its perceived benefits as realized through Canadian government policy. As well as replicating past findings, two hypotheses derived from social identity theory are supported: Canadian identity and acculturation into Canadian society were significant predictors of attitudes toward multiculturalism. Counter to previous research findings, perceived discrimination was a negative predictor of these attitudes. The distinction between predicting support for attitudes toward multiculturalism measured as an ideology versus attitudes toward multiculturalism measured in terms of its perceived benefits is discussed.     

Branding ‘Canadian Experience’ in Immigration Policy: Nation Building in a Neoliberal Era

This paper examines the branding of ‘Canadian experience’ in Canadian immigration policy as a rhetorical strategy for neoliberal nation-building. Since 2008, the Canadian government has introduced an unprecedented number of changes to immigration policy. While the bulk of these policies produce more temporary and precarious forms of migration, the Canadian government has mobilized the rhetoric of ‘Canadian experience’ as a means to identify immigrants who carry the promise of economic and social integration. Through a critical discourse analysis of Canadian print media and political discourse, we trace how the brand of Canadian experience taps into the affective value of national identity in an era of global economic insecurity. We also illustrate how the discourse of Canadian experience (CE) remains ideologically deracialized, such that the government’s embrace of CE as an immigrant selection criterion dismisses the discriminatory effects that this discourse is shown to have for racialized immigrants in Canada.     

Beyond Inclusion: Non-monogamies and the Borders of Citizenship

This paper aims to understand the extent to which monogamy operates not only as a constitutive element of marriage-like institutions but also as a meta-judicial source of frequently overlooked forms of state violence. Drawing on the case of the Spanish law, it explores the privilege-driven logic that regulates the access to a complex set of economic benefits and legal protections, including immigration related rights, in order to show the extent to which monogamy is part of the grounding structure of an exclusionary constitutional citizenship. In addition, drawing on semi-structured interviews held with Spanish poly activists and biographical interviews held with LGBTQ non-monogamous people, it offers a view of non-monogamous communities as paramount spaces of resistance when it comes to re-imagining the relationship between the state and the intimate realm, beyond the mere inclusion of poly and other non-monogamous intimate relationships in certain pieces of legislation.     

The Impact of Perceived Corporate Citizenship on Organizational Cynicism,OCB, and Employee Deviance

This study examines the effects of corporate citizenship at the individual employee level. Four distinct contributions beyond the existing literature are offered. First, the relationship between perceived corporate citizenship (PCC) and employee organizational citizenship behavior (OCB) is further clarified. Second, the negative job behavior of employee deviance is considered as an outcome. Third, the attitude of organizational cynicism is positioned as a mediator of the relationships between PCC and the job related behaviors of OCB and employee deviance. Fourth, we disaggregate the PCC measure and explore its relationships with organizational cynicism, OCB and employee deviance. Findings illustrate that the four separate dimensions of PCC have differential relationships with the outcome variables.     

Timing of Naturalization Among US Immigrants

When do foreign-born individuals acquire US citizenship? Previous studies hypothesized that those eligible for citizenship would choose to pursue naturalization early on in order to enjoy the benefits. I test this hypothesis using newly available information on the timing of naturalization from the American Community Survey (ACS) and I find supporting evidence. Controlling for observable characteristics in a hazard model reveals an interesting, nonlinear pattern of importance for the time spent in the USA. While the duration of stay is positively associated with naturalization, it is increasing at a decreasing rate. The likelihood of naturalization increases for approximately the first 20 years and then starts to decline.     

THE TEAR IN THE FABRIC OF MULTICULTURALISM

Since 1984, there have been recurring images of Sikhs in Canada, as ‘extremists’, ‘militants’ and ‘terrorists'. As a result, when Sikhs are viewed as participating in ‘un-Canadian’ beliefs or practices, the general public often responds with discourses that state Sikhs need to return ‘home’, despite their citizenship status. These images produce conversations among Canadians about the extent Sikhs are compatible with Canadian society. I will use the aftermath of the Kamal Nath Protest (23 March 2010), organized by Sikh-Canadians (mostly born in Canada), to unpack the discourse of the Sikh ‘extremist’ in the media. I will explore how the idyllic discourse of Canadian multiculturalism has denied the political identities and histories of communities that have migrated to Canada. Despite discourses of universal tolerance and individual rights, it becomes apparent that any protest is not an appropriate form of dissent for the racialized immigrant within Canada.     

Identity as a Determinant of the Overreporting of Church Attendance in Canada

Recent work has demonstrated that Canadians overreport church attendance at rates similar to respondents in the United States. Overreporting in the United States has been attributed to the importance of religious identity; causes of Canadian overreporting have not been examined. This article draws upon Stryker's identity theory to explain why Canadian survey respondents overreport church attendance. The 2005 Canadian General Social Survey contains observed measures of attendance from both a conventional survey question and a time diary, allowing a direct and rigorous test of the identity explanation. Findings suggest that rates of Canadian overreporting, at about 50 percent, rival rates of overreporting in the United States. Moreover, like overreporting in the United States, Canadian overreporting may be affected by an identity process during the survey interview. Finally, implications for measuring religiosity in both countries are discussed.     

Contexts of the commitment–citizenship link: A test of economic volatility in a dual organization setting

Research interest on the commitment–performance link persists, and recent efforts have focused on investigating the contextual factors due to the mixed outcome of the empirical studies. However, very limited study has examined the influence of economic factors including economic volatility, and none in the dual setting of the organization and the union. This study investigated the contextual influence of perceived inflation—an economic volatility construct—on commitment and extra-role performance. Exchange theory, with support from psychological contract and equity theories, was used to postulate two parallel, but competing models of the organization and the union. Using a sample of 247 unionized employees in southern U.S.A., the study tested the moderating effect of perceived inflation on the relation between commitment and citizenship intent. The results revealed three-way interactive effects in both models, in a dual commitment setting. Thus, the economic volatility construct acts as a situational constraint on the link between the attitudinal-based commitments and citizenship intent, but in the contexts of obligation and cost-based commitments to the organization and the union respectively. The implications of these mitigated effects are discussed.     

When Theory and Research Collide: Examining Correlates of Signature Strengths Use at Work

Signature strengths are individuals’ highest-ranked strengths, those that they own, celebrate, and frequently exercise. Their use has been theorized to elicit positive affect, and contribute significantly to individuals’ functioning and well-being. The present study examined two elements of these ideas in the work arena: (a) Associations of strengths use at work with work outcomes (work meaningfulness, engagement, job satisfaction, performance, organizational citizenship behavior, and counterproductive work behaviors), focusing on differences in the associations of signature-strengths use, lowest-strengths use, and happiness strengths-use at work; (b) The role of positive affect in mediating these associations. The results, based on self-reports of an international sample of 1031 working individuals, generally indicated that the use of all kinds of strengths had positive correlates. As expected, using signature strengths had the highest, robust unique contribution to behavioral outcomes (performance, organizational citizenship behavior, and lower counterproductive work behavior). But unexpectedly, using happiness strengths (and not signature strengths) had the highest, robust unique contribution to psycho-emotional work-related outcomes (work meaningfulness, engagement, and job satisfaction). Positive affect mediated the association between strengths use and all work-related outcomes for the three kinds of strengths, when each was examined separately. However, when uses of the three kinds of strengths were examined together, positive affect mediated the effects of lowest strengths use and those of happiness strengths use, but not the effects of signature strengths use. These findings highlight the differential benefits of using different kinds of strengths, and suggest that additional (and different) mechanisms may underlie these effects.     

Perceived Investment in Permanent Employee Development and Social and Economic Exchange Perceptions Among Temporary Employees

This study investigated the mediating roles of social and economic exchange perceptions on the relationship between perceived investment in permanent employee development in the client organization and exchange outcomes among 375 temporary employees. The results support full mediation by exchange perceptions, where social exchange perception is positively related to both task performance and organizational citizenship behavior, and economic exchange perception is negatively related to task performance. Implications for practice and directions for future research are discussed.