Career decisions of immigrants: Role of identity and social embeddedness

Transnational sensemaking narratives of highly skilled Canadian immigrants' career change

Purpose

The authors answer calls for research on the experiences of international professionals' career transitions by investigating how highly skilled immigrants make sense of their career changes in the host country's labor market.

Design/methodology/approach

The authors report on a qualitative, inductive and elaborative study, drawing on sensemaking theories and career transitions literature and nine semi-structured reflective interviews with highly skilled Canadian immigrants.

Findings

The authors identified four career change narratives: mourning the past, accepting the present, recreating the past and starting fresh. These narratives are made sense of in a transnational context: participants contended with tensions between past, present and future careers and between relevant home and host country factors affecting their career decisions. Participants who were mourning the past or recreating the past identified more strongly with their home country professions and struggled to find resources in Canada. In accepting the present and starting fresh, participants leveraged host country networks to find career opportunities and establish themselves and their families in the new environment.

Originality/value

A transnational ontology emphasizes that immigrants' lives are multifaceted and span multiple national contexts. The authors highlight how the tensions between the home and host country career contexts shape immigrants' sensemaking narratives of their international career change. The authors encourage scholars and practitioners to take a transnational contextual approach (spatial and temporal) to guide immigrants' career transitions and integration into the new social environment.

How Does Person-Environment Fit Relate to Career Calling? The Role of Psychological Contracts and Organizational Career Management

Purpose

The formation of one's career calling involves endowing work with meaning and realizing oneself in work, and it has become a focus of organizational behavior research in the past decade. Although there are many studies on the outcome variables of career calling, research on the antecedents of career calling formation is relatively scarce, and its mechanisms are unclear. Based on fit theory and social exchange theory, we analyzed the data of 373 employees and explored the relationship between person-environment fit (focusing on person-organization fit and person-job fit), psychological contract, career calling and organizational career management.

Methods

We adopted a multi-timepoint data collection method to analyze data from 373 employees from an internet technology company. A mediated moderation model and hypotheses were tested using Mplus 8.3 software.

Results

The results showed that person-organization fit and person-job fit were positively related to career calling, and the psychological contract played a partial mediating role. The moderating effect of organizational career management on person-organization fit, person-job fit and the psychological contract was also confirmed. Moreover, the mediating effect of the psychological contract was stronger when organizational career management was higher.

Conclusion

We examined the important influence of individual-level and organizational-level factors on the formation of career calling. The findings highlight the important role and mechanism of person-environment fit in the formation of career calling through psychological factors, which has managerial implications for how to develop employees' career calling.

Ecological migrants' socio-spatial integration in Yinchuan City, China

Promoting the social integration of ecological migrants and identifying the key constraints to their integration are significant issues for social governance and transformation. Most previous studies have not systematically analyzed the level of social integration of migrants from the perspective of spatial ternary dialectics or systematically analyzed physical, social, and spiritual spaces. Based on space production theory, this study used principal component analyses to evaluate the ternary spatial integration level of physical, social, and spiritual spaces of ecological migrants in a specific resettlement area in Yinchuan City, China, and the Tobit regression model was used to identify the key constraint factors. The results demonstrate that the overall socio-spatial integration levels of ecological migrants in Yinchuan City are lower than that of the overall migrant population nationwide, and the levels of their spatial adaptation and spatial practice integration lag behind that of spatial belonging and spatial identity integration. Meanwhile, length of residency, occupation type, monthly income, and household type have facilitating effects on the ecological migrants’ social integration, while gender, age, ethnicity, and education levels have insignificant effects. In particular, occupation type is a key factor in promoting social integration and improving employment among ecological migrants. It is concluded that upgrading production skills and raising employment for ecological migrants can foster sustainable social space production patterns, facilitate virtuous cycles, and eliminate inhibiting factors such as lagging spatial practices, regional cultural differences, and socio-spatial deprivation.

#Trending topics in careers: a review and future research agenda

Purpose

Virtually all contemporary scientific papers studying careers emphasize its changing nature. Indeed, careers have been changing during recent decades, for example becoming more complex and unpredictable. Furthermore, hallmarks of the new career – such as individual agency – are clearly increasing in importance in today’s labor market. This led the authors to ask the question of whether these changes are actually visible in the topics that career scholars research. In other words, the purpose of this paper is to discover the trending topics in careers.

Design/methodology/approach

To achieve this goal, the authors analyzed all published papers from four core career journals (i.e. Career Development International, Career Development Quarterly, Journal of Career Assessment, and Journal of Career Development) between 2012 and 2016. Using a five-step procedure involving three researchers, the authors formulated the 16 most trending topics.

Findings

Some traditional career topics are still quite popular today (e.g. career success as the #1 trending topic), whereas other topics have emerged during recent years (e.g. employability as the #3 trending topic). In addition, some topics that are closely related to career research – such as unemployment and job search – surprisingly turned out not to be a trending topic.

Originality/value

In reviewing all published papers in CDI, CDQ, JCA, and JCD between 2012 and 2016, the authors provide a unique overview of currently trending topics, and the authors compare this to the overall discourse on careers. In addition, the authors formulate key questions for future research.