Labour force exclusion can result from many different disadvantages, for example, limited formal education, work skills and experience, different disabilities, poor health, addiction challenges, insecure housing, citizenship status, lack of transportation, language barrier, unaffordable childcare and systemic discrimination (Danziger et al. , 2000; Lightman et al. , 2010). For those in the most precarious circumstances, these barriers are rarely singularly experienced, with research showing that the number of disadvantages faced is strongly and inversely related to a person's employment status (Danziger et al. , 2000). As a response to exclusion, social purpose enterprises have been initiated to create direct employment and job training opportunities. Even among the wider social enterprise sector - comprising not only of enterprises with employment and job training as their main focus but also those with broader social or environmental missions, recent surveys in 2011 and 2012 found that between19 and 31 per cent of these social enterprises across select Canadian provinces provided employment, training and/or services to people with employment barriers. Provincial comparisons also indicate that, on average, these more-generalized social enterprises employed between 16 (Ontario) and 132 (Alberta) individuals of designated social groups which, although consisted of community members at large, also included low-income individuals, women, youth and individuals living with disabilities and/or other employment barriers in the year of the survey (Elson and Hall, 2013).
But more specifically to Ontario, Canada, the importance of social purpose enterprises to employment integration has been emphasized in Ontario social assistance program reviews undertaken in the past decade (Lankin and Sheikh, 2012; Matthews, 2004). One reason that social purpose enterprises are highlighted is that they are perceived as having supportive environments to "be useful models for all social assistance recipients [...] particularly important for people who are socially excluded and have little or no work experience" (Lankin and Shiekh, 2012, p. 43).
Even though there is general confidence in social supports as being important to employment participation for those experiencing high barriers to employment, the concept warrants further investigation and some theoretical anchoring because existing research has demonstrated that social supports can result in outcomes opposite to those anticipated. Not only can misdirected or otherwise ineffective social support attempts be considered unhelpful by recipients (Lehman and Hemphill, 1990), they may, in some circumstances, bring no beneficial effects, or worse, they can be a detriment to the recipients, resulting in feelings of indebtedness and dependence, threat to self-esteem and self-efficacy and heightened experience of distress and emotional reactivity (Bolger and Amarel, 2007, Deelstra et al. , 2003). Only by bringing a theoretical understanding to work-based social supports can organizations and employment programs effectively and reliably promote enduring attachment to work and training where other interventions have failed.
Social support: functions, process and effects
Social support is the assistance realized specifically through interpersonal relationships (Turner, 1983). Social support has a direct "main effect" on well-being; evidence shows that social integration and network embeddedness is beneficial to a person's health and affect, even where a person is not exposed to challenges or threats (Cohen and Wills, 1985).
But extensive research interests centres on the way social support can assist in the presence of event-based stressors or chronic life-strain (Turner and Turner, 2013). One way social support can assist is to directly diminish the stressor, attenuating its negative impact, or it can prevent harm altogether by eliminating the stressor from the start. Another way is for social support to "buffer" the adverse effects of stressors on a person's physical and mental health. According to the buffering hypothesis, social support dampens the positive association between stressors (e.g. work-difficulties) and stress outcomes (e.g. anxiety, depression, job satisfaction), by assisting coping efforts that can minimize emotional upset and negative behavioural responses, and by bolstering other personal resources such as self-esteem, personal control, self-efficacy and optimism.
Like social support, personal resources are also stress-buffers or moderators. But while personal resources can protect from stress, they are also subject to depletion from stress exposure (e.g. high self-esteem that can help to protect a person from job loss may wear under prolonged unemployment) (Aneshensel et al. , 2013). Because low self-esteem, self-efficacy and personal control are associated with increased symptomology on depression (Maciejewski et al. , 2000; Pearlin et al. , 1981; Ro