Renowned as a theater of the Cold War, the Korean peninsula has been divided between North Korea and South Korea over the past 70 years, with each country developing its distinctive political, economic, and cultural systems. Over the past 30 years, approximately, 33,000 North Koreans have entered South Korea, where they experience part-time and precarious employment, as well as unemployment. Through collaboration with corporations and non-governmental organizations, the South Korea government seeks to support North Korean migrants' employment by providing training programs and job opportunities, particularly through social enterprises. These work sites are intended to be a primary avenue for North Koreans' sociocultural and economic integration into South Korean society, yet there is no empirical literature on how North Korean migrants learn in their everyday workplaces. In particular, policy makers, scholars, and practitioners have neglected to examine how North Korean migrants' unique sociocultural backgrounds and characteristics create opportunities and challenges in their workplace interactions. Few studies have demonstrated what fosters or hinders the learning of North Korean migrants in customer service jobs in general, and at social enterprise settings in particular, places where employees' ethnic identities are on display. This dissertation seeks to interpret and understand (a) how North Korean migrants learn to interact with co-workers, customers, and supervisors at social enterprises in South Korea, (b) how they develop ways to manage their feelings to fulfill the emotional requirements of the service jobs, and (c) how social enterprise organizational settings shape their coping strategies. I used ethnographic methods (participant-observation, informal and semi-structured interviews, and field notes) to conduct research with 25 participants over nine months at social enterprise restaurants and cafes in a major South Korean city. The study's theoretical framework integrates a social constructivist approach to learning (Illeris, 2004) and emotional labor (Hochschild, 1979, 2012) to explore what and how participants learn in their workplace environment. The narrative and discourse analyses of the multiple sources revealed several key findings. First, the participants' experiences of strong tensions in communication and interpersonal relationships were rooted in linguistic and cultural gaps between North and South Korea. To integrate themselves into demanding business environments, participants drew on the cultural practices (Gutierrez & Rogoff, 2003; Swidler, 2001) of memorization and "nunchi" (an ability to read implicit social cues and understand intentions) to avoid anxiety, confusion, and humiliation. Second, some South Korean customers labeled and treated participants as their enemies and as uneducated, sexual objects from a lower social class. These perceptions evoked ambivalent responses toward North Korean migrants: hostility and contempt, but also sympathy for their plight. Third, at the group level participants developed interactive coping strategies, appraising (accessing and evaluating external challenges), storytelling, and collective criticism, to access information, release intense feelings, and correct each other's attitudes, respectively. At the individual level, participants managed the emotional requirements of the workplace by embracing, avoiding, and/or resisting social bias toward North Koreans. Finally, social enterprises' organizational identities, artifacts, and environments induced participants' sense of exclusion and otherness, which served to undermine the championed social mission of integration. This study contests the deficit discourse on North Korean migrants as incompetent workers and social burdens. It underscores how the contradictions and complications encountered by these migrants catalyzed their self-directed learning and efforts to fit in. This research calls for careful integration of adjustment supports and training programs for social enterprises that hire the socially marginalized populations within sociocultural and historical contexts. The findings can be used to foster dialogue among inter-sector stakeholders regarding the complexities of social enterprises and to improve opportunities, adult education, and professional development to support North Koreans' workforce integration. [The dissertation citations contained here are published with the permission of ProQuest LLC. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission. Copies of dissertations may be obtained by Telephone (800) 1-800-521-0600. Web page: http://www.proquest.com/en-US/products/dissertations/individuals.shtml.]