This ship has had many moving parts, including several organisations and many individuals, as well as three navigators. First and foremost, we are grateful to the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. The SSHRC awarded the funds to conduct the project, “Changing Workplaces in a Knowledge Economy: Occupational Class Structure, Skill Use and the Place of Professions in Canada” (CWKE) from 2015 to 2020 under grant number 435-2015-0732, including both the 2016 national survey and the engineering and nursing case studies. The SSHRC also funded earlier research networks and projects that included national surveys in 1982, 1998, 2004 and 2010 that enabled the trend analyses of both the general class structure and the class structure of professionals.
Secondly, our research partners, the Ontario Society of Professional Engineers (OSPE) and the Registered Nurses Association of Ontario (RNAO), came on board early, provided insightful design advice, allowed access to their engineering and nursing members for key informant interviews, representative sample surveys of their entire memberships and in-depth follow-up interviews with cross-sections of respondents, as well as aiding dissemination of findings. We are especially indebted to Lee Weissling, Sandro Perruzza and Catrina Kronfli at OSPE and Irmajean Bajnok, Valerie Grdisa and Kim Jarvi of RNAO for their support throughout the project.
Our research crew at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE) at the University of Toronto and the Department of Sociology at the University of Western Ontario included a number of very able graduate students. Brendan Watts not only completed his doctorate based on 2016 survey data but served as the primary statistical research officer throughout the project. Edward Cruz has been centrally involved in the nursing case study, is completing a related dissertation and co-wrote the nursing case study chapter. Awish Aslam was integral in preparing the case study surveys, and Eugene Kwon assisted with conducting interviews with engineers, and preliminary qualitative data analysis. Elise McClenahan and Jayzer Flores analysed data and completed related theses and papers. Support staff at both universities were helpful through both the proposal and administration stages of the project.
The 2016 national survey was conducted by Leger, now the largest Canadian-owned market research and analytics company. The hybrid design of this survey, including both random selection by telephone calls and online completion by a random selection from a large, continually refreshed panel, is probably an optimal option for representativeness at this point. Thank you in particular to Lisa Covens and Jesse Robertson as survey ‘experts’ who provided
We are also thankful to the collegial reviewers of the various conference papers and published articles that have preceded the production of this book. Some of these are: Fab Antonelli, Anne Bird, Anders Blok, Raewyn Connell, David Guile, Daniela Lup, Matías Scaglione, Wally Seccombe, Kim Shuey, Sabina Siebert and Milosh Raykov. There is also the inspiration of the late Terence Johnson.
A few chapters draw on previously published articles. These include: Chapter 1: The changing class structure and pivotal role of professional employees in an advanced capitalist knowledge economy: Canada, 1982–2016, Studies in Political Economy (2018); Chapter 2: Proletarianization of Professional Employees in a ‘Knowledge Economy.’ Labour/le travail (2019); and Chapter 4: Underemployment of Highly Qualified Labour in Advanced Capitalism: Trends and Prospects. Journal of Education & Work (2019).
Finally, we thank our families for tolerating absences at critical points in this voyage.