Bamboo Ceiling Reframed

The Impact of Social Practices in Management on Asian Library Managers

Date: Thursday, April 20, 2023; 11am-12.30pm (PST) / 2pm-3.30pm EST)

Join us for our upcoming 2023 ViMLoC webinar series event with Silvia Vong, Associate Chief Librarian, Scholarly, Research and Creative Activities.

In 2005, Jane Hyun, a management consultant, wrote a book titled Breaking the Bamboo Ceiling: Career Strategies for Asians. Though the text was intended to “introduce” Asians to dominant management practices and workplace culture, the text was problematic in that it essentialized Asians, reiterated deficit narratives, and narratives of the “other.” In an effort to add another perspective to the issue around the lack of representation, the research study was designed with a structuralist approach. Rather than blame or point to a group, the study focused on examining social and organizational barriers through a Bourdieusian and Critical Race Theory lens to identify how dominant structures exclude, reward assimilation, and build into a system, invisible or taken-for-granted rules.

Speaker

Silvia Vong is the ACL for Scholarly, Research and Creative Activities at Toronto Metropolitan University in Toronto, Ontario Canada. She has been working in universities for over a decade and her Ph.D. research focuses on the impact of neoliberal conventions and managerialism on equity and anti-racism work in Canadian universities. Silvia draws on the works of Critical Race Theory scholars, Postcolonial Theory, and Bourdieu to examine issues in librarianship. She identifies as a cis-gendered Chinese-Canadian woman.