Outlanders at work: An interpretative phenomenological analysis of foreign IT professionals’ work experiences in Germany

IF 4.5 2区管理学 Q1 MANAGEMENT

Human Relations Pub Date : 2023-07-13 DOI:10.1177/00187267231182774

Aykut Berber, Mustafa Bilgehan Ozturk, A. Gökhan Acar

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引用次数: 0

Abstract

The information technology (IT) industry is becoming more widely renowned for its professionals seeking global career opportunities. These individuals independently build careers abroad, often receiving limited economic benefits while facing socially conditioned perceptions from their employers, peers, managers and clients. However, there is little research on how they perceive their personal and social worlds, and use their knowledge, skills and other personal resources to shape their careers in these circumstances. This study explores the meaning of being a foreign professional as understood by the IT professionals themselves by reflecting on their expectations, emotions and interactions with others. In-depth interviews were conducted with 11 non-national professionals working in domestic IT companies in Germany. We used interpretative phenomenological analysis to gain insight through their individual perspectives into their agentic work behaviours and the injustices they perceived. We identified three major themes that explained how participants interpreted their roles in their organisations (reinterpretation), resituated themselves in their interactions with clients (recontextualisation) and changed the way they made sense of their status in their current circumstances (reframing). The experiential themes were discussed in light of literature, while individual nuances led us to identify unexplored features of the studied phenomenon.

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外乡人在工作:外国IT专业人士在德国工作经历的解释性现象学分析

信息技术（IT）行业因其寻求全球职业机会的专业人士而越来越广为人知。这些人在国外独立创业，通常获得有限的经济利益，同时面临来自雇主、同行、经理和客户的社会条件认知。然而，很少有研究表明，在这种情况下，他们如何看待自己的个人和社会世界，并利用自己的知识、技能和其他个人资源来塑造自己的职业生涯。本研究通过反思IT专业人员的期望、情绪和与他人的互动，探讨了IT专业人员自己所理解的作为外国专业人员的意义。对在德国国内IT公司工作的11名非本国专业人员进行了深入访谈。我们使用解释性现象学分析，通过他们的个人视角深入了解他们的代理工作行为和他们所感知的不公正。我们确定了三个主要主题，解释了参与者如何解释他们在组织中的角色（重新解释），在与客户的互动中调整自己（重新文本化），以及改变他们在当前环境中理解自己地位的方式（重新定义）。经验主题是根据文献进行讨论的，而个体的细微差别使我们能够识别所研究现象的未探索特征。

本文章由计算机程序翻译，如有差异，请以英文原文为准。

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来源期刊

Human Relations Multiple-

CiteScore

12.60

自引率

7.00%

发文量

期刊介绍： Human Relations is an international peer reviewed journal, which publishes the highest quality original research to advance our understanding of social relationships at and around work through theoretical development and empirical investigation. Scope Human Relations seeks high quality research papers that extend our knowledge of social relationships at work and organizational forms, practices and processes that affect the nature, structure and conditions of work and work organizations. Human Relations welcomes manuscripts that seek to cross disciplinary boundaries in order to develop new perspectives and insights into social relationships and relationships between people and organizations. Human Relations encourages strong empirical contributions that develop and extend theory as well as more conceptual papers that integrate, critique and expand existing theory. Human Relations welcomes critical reviews and essays: - Critical reviews advance a field through new theory, new methods, a novel synthesis of extant evidence, or a combination of two or three of these elements. Reviews that identify new research questions and that make links between management and organizations and the wider social sciences are particularly welcome. Surveys or overviews of a field are unlikely to meet these criteria. - Critical essays address contemporary scholarly issues and debates within the journal''s scope. They are more controversial than conventional papers or reviews, and can be shorter. They argue a point of view, but must meet standards of academic rigour. Anyone with an idea for a critical essay is particularly encouraged to discuss it at an early stage with the Editor-in-Chief. Human Relations encourages research that relates social theory to social practice and translates knowledge about human relations into prospects for social action and policy-making that aims to improve working lives.