The study of occupations and professions has a lengthy and prominent tradition in sociology. Occupations vary greatly in the degree to which they become the master determinants of the social identity, self-conception, and social status of the people in them and in society (Visano, 1987). Occupation culture also guides and interprets the tasks and social relations of work and how they are perceived in society.
This research began in 1994 and was designed to have input from staff nurses working in hospitals within Metro Toronto who provided me with narrative experiences relating to their work life. Nursing scholarly publications in Canada were limited in the area of the production of non-supportive behaviours in nurses’ work lives, and racist discourses in particular.
My research from 1994-1999 looked at the structure of Nursing that produced a culture that had non-supportive behaviours. As nursing is about caring, I have not only reviewed positive aspects of nursing culture but also the abuse, harassment, and racism that nurses experience, as well as the culture that supports these actions. What I saw paralleled behaviours that occurred in our Multicultural society that was supposed to promote equity.
“Is there Equity in Multiculturalism?”. I argue that the idea of multiculturalism in contemporary political and legal discourses is about how to respond to the challenges associated with ethnic, cultural, and religious diversity. But in the context of Western liberal democratic societies, the term has come to encompass a variety of prescriptive claims, including the recognition that ethnic, religious, or cultural differences will be acknowledged and respected. The Vertical Mosaic: An Analysis of Social Class and Power in Canada by John Porter (1965,) Its elites have been drawn largely from middle and upper-class “British charter groups.”
Understanding social action rather than a law on multiculturalism provides an awareness of how actors in Canada have and will evaluate and charge, create, and defeat various inequitable social relationships (Jacobs, 2000. p. 26). Social justice and equity in Canada I state cannot be met within our Multicultural Act but only through advocacy with like-minded individuals from all groups working together.