The Infrastructure and Integration Lab

Presentation held at 2025 The Annual Canadian Sociological Association (CSA) Conference

Presenter(s): Gabrielle Abando & Frankie Cabahug

Non-Presenter(s): Dr Sean Lauer, University of British Columbia

How do place-based cosmopolitan organizations with diverse staff and clientele contribute to unique processes of newcomer integration? Immigrant settlement and integration experiences regularly include encounters with organizations and organizational settings. Canada’s government-funded settlement services are crucial to newcomers’ integration experience. Many other immigrant experiences take place within intracultural organizational settings. However, non-immigrant-focused social service organizations play an equally important role in immigrant experience. Responding to recent calls to bring organizations back into the sociology of migration (Bloemraad, Choudhary & Gleeson, 2022) and community sociology (Marwell and McQuarrie 2013), this paper explores organizational practices of staff working in place-based community organizations which serve local communities. We call these organizations cosmopolitan because they are universally accessible to local residents, while also providing settlement services for newcomers.

Through interviews with ten service providers across Vancouver who work in such organizations, we examine how these respondents describe their work, organizational practices, and their work with newcomers. We identify two distinct repertoires, those addressing the value of intracultural interactions and service provision, and those that address the value of intercultural interactions and service provision. We argue that cosmopolitan organizations offer unique integration opportunities by providing spaces for intracultural and intercultural exchanges and rooting these diverse relationships in their immediate neighbourhood environment. We highlight how diversifying how we define organizations can prompt new directions for organizational research in the context of immigration.