EKONOMI OCH SAMHÄLLE ECONOMICS AND SOCIETY

ON BECOMING BICULTURALLANGUAGE COMPETENCE, ACCULTURATION AND CROSS-CULTURAL ADJUSTMENT OF EXPATRIATES IN CHINA

LING ELEANOR ZHANG

Ekonomi och samhälle Economics and Society

Skrifter utgivna vid Svenska handelshögskolan Publications of the Hanken School of Economics

Nr 290

Ling Eleanor Zhang

On Becoming Bicultural

Language Competence, Acculturation and Cross-cultural Adjustment of Expatriates in China

Helsinki 2015 <

On Becoming Bicultural: Language Competence, Acculturation and Cross-cultural Adjustment of Expatriates in China

Key words: Expatriate, biculturalism, language, adjustment, acculturation, China

© Hanken School of Economics & Ling Eleanor Zhang, 2015

Ling Eleanor Zhang Hanken School of Economics Department of Management and Organisation P.O.Box 479, 00101 Helsinki, Finland

Hanken School of Economics ISBN 978-952-232-285-2 (printed) ISBN 978-952-232-286-9 (PDF) ISSN-L 0424-7256 ISSN 0424-7256 (printed) ISSN 2242-699X (PDF)

Edita Prima Ltd, Helsinki 2015

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To my families in China and Finland,

and to my friends and colleagues around the world,

who supported me during this very meandering journey

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

Writing this thesis – a veritable journey, both literally and figuratively – started out from my curiosity about my own life. I am perhaps one of those “me-searchers”, who is inspired by issues which, in some way, may bring about a deeper understanding of oneself. The complexities of working and living in foreign lands are most certainly among these issues. Thus, my interest in expatriate management stems from my own expatriation experiences, as well as from my personal experiences of working with expatriates in China and Finland.

The pursuit of this Ph.D. thesis would not have been possible without the support of many people. First and foremost, I would like to thank my supervisors, Professor Jeff Hearn and Professor Ingmar Björkman, who have provided me with an enormous amount of support during this journey. Jeff, thank you for having always been genuinely interested in my work and encouraging me to explore wherever my heart takes me. I never feared the uncertainties created by my choice of a relatively unexplored research topic, knowing that I could always turn to you, and you would guide me in solving the puzzles one by one. Every time I walked into your room and sat in the chair across your desk, a certain sense of tranquillity settled in my mind, and all the anxieties would vanish in time. You always had the knowledge, patience and wisdom to lead me through the various phases. Ingmar, you have been my employer, degree supervisor and thesis supervisor at different times of my study and work life. I am profoundly grateful that I could always reach out to you. Thank you for having directed me not only to acquiring a Ph.D. degree, but also to an exciting academic career which I had no idea before that I would enjoy so much. The high standards you have set for my work have not only improved this thesis, but will be with me for the rest of my academic career.

I would also like to gratefully acknowledge Professor Zhixue Zhang from Guanghua School of Management, Peking University, who was part of the supervising team during my fieldwork period in China. Zhixue Laoshi, thank you for your unfaltering support and the extremely valuable opportunities to learn and grow together with your PhD students, despite my chosen research topic and methodology being somewhat unconventional in the field of management research in China.

I also gratefully acknowledge the enormous support from Professor Anne-Wil Harzing during my visitorships in London. I have been fortunate to be able to pursue this thesis not only at Hanken School of Economics and Peking University, but also at Department of Management, King’s College London, and Department of Management, Birkbeck, University of London. Anne-Wil, it has been truly a privilege to work with, and for you. You have opened my eyes and mind in so many senses. I am most thankful for the excellent example you have provided as a successful woman scholar and professor. Thank you for being such a caring and inspiring mentor to me, and for keeping me grounded in my academic life.

I am honoured in having had Professor Rebecca Piekkari and Associate Professor Yih-teen Lee, as my pre-examiners. I am deeply grateful for their highly valuable and extremely encouraging comments to this manuscript. A special thank you to Associate Professor Y ih-teen Lee for agreeing to be my opponent. I would also like to thank my co-authors of three (out of five) essays that form parts of this thesis: Dr. David Guttormsen, Professor Anne-Wil Harzing, and Dr. Vesa Peltokorpi. Thank you all for having faith in me.

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My deep gratitude also goes to members of the TEKES (the Finnish Funding Agency for Innovation) Project Team “Cross Border Competence Management”: Dr. Wilhelm Barner-Rasmussen, Dr. Alexei Koveshnikov, Dr. Kristiina Mäkelä, and in particular Dr. Mats Ehrhrooth. Thank you for the very helpful opportunity to learn from you all. I owe a further special thank you to Professor Eero Vaara, from whom I have learnt a great deal about devotion and dedication to research. Eero, I have fond memories of our work trip together to China in 2006, which opened my eyes to the realities of fieldwork. I am also very grateful for your insightful and valuable comments on the essays of this thesis at different stages.

I will forever be thankful to the eminent scholars, who have greatly enlightened me: Professor Mark Peterson, who has guided me towards the topic I became passionate about and helped me discover my own strength in research; and Professor Mary Yoko Brannen, whose pioneering work on biculturalism in management has made it possible for me to embark on my doctoral research in this fascinating area. Thank you both very much for all the extremely helpful conversations throughout my PhD journey. The very same thanks also go to Professor Rodney Jones, Professor Liisa Salo-Lee and especially the late Professor Ron Scollon, who have nurtured my interest in language and culture since my very first contact with academic research. I also gratefully acknowledge the extremely helpful and inspiring mentoring from Professor Davide Ravasi and Dr. Vesa Peltokorpi. Davide, thank you for all the insightful mentoring on publishing qualitative work, and for having supported me at times of uncertainty. Vesa senpai, thank you for believing in me and coaching me in producing quality journal articles.

This PhD journey is not only an individual venture in terms of writing the thesis, but also an introduction to the professional academic realm. I would like to thank everyone I have met and kept in touch with during various conferences, research and network seminars, in particular the Biculturalism Symposia, Language in International Business Workshops and Symposia, Expatriate Management Tracks, London Female Human Resource Management and Organisational Behaviour Research Network, Organisation Theory Research Group, and the Hanken Research Group on Gender Relations in Organisations, Management and Society. A special thank you goes to Dr. Andy Chiou, Dr. Stacey Fitzsimmons, Dr. Angela-MinhTu D. Nguyen, and Dr. Helene Tenzer for all the inspiring discussions about biculturalism and language research. I also keep fond memories of conversations with Professor Jean-Luc Cerdin, Dr. Chris Chu, Professor Kevin Corley, Professor Tony Fang, Dr. Wendy Hein, Dr. Fanmin Kong, Professor Peter Li, Dr. Li Ma, Dr. Reuben Mondejar, Professor Riccardo Perccei, Dr. Ren Run, Professor Jan Selmer, and Dr. Ying Ying Zhang. Thank you all for having shared with me your wisdom about research and academia. I would also like to thank Professor Samuel Aryee and Professor Nelson Phillips for the privilege of learning and buliding research networks at King’s College London and Imperial College Business School.

This research is about individuals’ work lives and it was only made possible by the help of expatriates and host country employees, who cannot be named here due to the assurances of anonymity given. I am deeply indebted to the interviewees and companies who participated in this study. I am also most grateful to the various business and governmental networks of expatriates and host country employees in China, without the cooperation of which the observations of this study would not have been possible to carry out.

The completion of my thesis would not have been possible without the funding I received during my time as a Ph.D. student at the Department of Management and Organisation, Hanken School of Economics. I am most grateful to the Finnish

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Foundation for Economic Education, Marcus Wallenberg Foundation, Hanken Foundation, and Department of Management and Organisation (Institutionen för företagsledning och organisation/FLO), Hanken, for having provided me with funding that not only made it possible for me to complete my thesis but also to be active in attending conferences internationally and to benefit from academic visitorships outside Finland. A special thank you goes to Mathias Björklund for the professional advices on writing up funding applications.

I have been extremely lucky to have had wonderful colleagues at Hanken School of Economics. I would like to thank all FLOsters, whom I have met over all these years, no matter where you are now. Thank you all very much for having made the department a special place for me, and for having always accepted me no matter how long I was away. There are so many memorable moments that I shall cherish forever – inspiring seminars, relaxing lunches, joyful Thursday coffee with cakes (torsdagsfika), festive Friday cheese and wine, and all those indelible PhD graduation celebrations (karonka). FLO has and will forever have a special place in my heart, no matter where my academic career might take me in the future. Please do forgive me for not mentioning all your names in this acknowledgement, as it terrifies me to even think that I might have left out any of you either by negligence or by the formal rules. If I may, let me just especially thank Annamari and Mikko, for your friendship and support during all the various stages of my work and life. I would also like to thank colleagues working on expatriate issues at University of Vaasa. It has been truly joyful to see you at various conferences every year. A warm thank you also goes to my cohortians at Peking University and King’s College London, and the wonderful writing retreat group at Birkbeck, University of London. I would like to especially thank David, Nathalie and Raija. It has been a delightful journey to pursue a Ph.D. at the same time with you. You have provided me with enormous support despite the physical distances between us over the years. I am also deeply grateful to my friends outside academia. Anthi, Flora, Nancy, Saana, Xiaona and Weiwei, thank you for always being there for me.

Finally, I would like to thank my deeply loved Chinese and Finnish families, for having inspired me to pursue this research and for having made me who I am. A special mention goes to my Mom: thank you for having insisted that I write a diary every day since the age of seven. I am sorry that it took me so long to realise what it was for. Also, my lovely cats, Jellis and Dangdang: you both have made all the sleepless writing nights so much more enjoyable in Beijing, Helsinki and London. And finally: Juho, you are behind each word that I have written on these pages. This thesis would not have come into being without the learnings and inspirations that have come from sharing my life with you around the world. From Pohjoisranta to Guanghualu to Fernshaw Road, thank you for accompanying me on this transnational journey, and for being my soul mate and anchor in life.

Helsinki, 15 June 2015

Ling Eleanor Zhang

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CONTENTS

1 INTRODUCTION ............................................................................... 11

1.1 Rationale and research questions ..................................................................... 11

1.2 Structure of the thesis .......................................................................................14

1.3 Context of the thesis .......................................................................................... 16

1.3.1 China as the host country...................................................................... 16

1.3.2 Expatriates ............................................................................................ 18

1.3.2.1 Dynamics and diversities of expatriates ................................ 18

1.3.2.2 Self-initiated expatriates, skilled migrants and transnational workers ................................................................................... 19

2 THEORIES AND CONCEPTS ............................................................ 21

2.1 Culture ............................................................................................................... 21

2.1.1 Culture as a shared symbolic meaning system ..................................... 21

2.1.2 Culture as a multi-layered concept .......................................................22

2.1.3 Culture as a dynamic entity...................................................................23

2.1.4 Summary on the conceptualisation of culture ..................................... 24

2.1.5 Further problematisation of the concept of culture..............................25

2.2 Cultural identity and cultural schema ...............................................................26

2.3 Biculturals and multiculturals: a clarification of terms ....................................27

2.4 Biculturalism and multiculturalism ..................................................................29

2.4.1 Acculturation-based biculturalism research .........................................29

2.4.2 Definition of biculturalism: various approaches ..................................32

2.4.3 Understanding biculturalism in the context of expatriates: a contextual approach ..............................................................................37

2.5 Language ...........................................................................................................37

2.6 Cross-cultural adjustment .................................................................................38

3 METHODOLOGY..............................................................................40

3.1 Research philosophy: ontological, epistemological and methodological assumptions...................................................................................................... 40

3.1.1 Epistemological assumptions and development.................................. 40

3.1.2 Methodological assumptions ............................................................... 42

3.1.3 Summary .............................................................................................. 43

3.2 Research design ................................................................................................ 45

3.3 Initial study: 2006-2007 .................................................................................. 47

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3.4 Main Study: 2012-2013 .................................................................................... 47

3.4.1 Grounded Theory methodology ........................................................... 47

3.4.2 Method justification ............................................................................. 48

3.4.3 Research context ................................................................................... 51

3.4.4 Data collection.......................................................................................52

3.4.5 Data analysis .........................................................................................57

3.4.5.1 Starting with pen and paper during the data collection ........57

3.4.5.2 Continuing with NVivo Software ...........................................58

3.4.5.3 Finishing the ‘clustered’ analysis using Microsoft Word .......59

3.4.5.4 Complementing the interview data with observation and questionnaire data................................................................. 60

3.5 Research ethics ................................................................................................. 60

3.5.1 Before and during the data collection .................................................. 60

3.5.1.1 Regarding the interviews ...................................................... 60

3.5.1.2 Regarding the observations....................................................62

3.5.2 After the data collection ........................................................................62

3.5.3 Summary ...............................................................................................62

3.6 Limitations ........................................................................................................63

3.7 Reflection on gender..........................................................................................63

3.8 Reflection on the researcher’s role ................................................................... 64

4 FINDINGS ........................................................................................ 65

4.1 An overview .......................................................................................................65

4.2 Summary of the main findings ..........................................................................65

5 DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSION .................................................... 76

5.1 Implications on theorising biculturalism ..........................................................76

5.1.1 Multi-faceted-ness ................................................................................76

5.1.2 Multi-layered-ness ................................................................................76

5.1.3 Context-embedded-ness .......................................................................77

5.1.3.1 Influences of others and the group ........................................77

5.1.3.2 Interplay of work and non-work elements.............................78

5.1.3.3 Home and host country contexts ...........................................78

5.1.4 A dynamic process.................................................................................79

5.1.5 Different types of biculturalism ........................................................... 80

5.1.5.1 Marginal biculturalism.......................................................... 80

5.1.5.2 Multiculturalism and cosmopolitanism ................................. 81

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5.1.6 Summary on the theorisation of biculturalism .....................................82

5.1.7 Further problematisation of Anglocentrism and Eurocentrism in current biculturalism research..............................................................83

5.2 Language and biculturalism ............................................................................. 84

5.3 Cross-cultural adjustment and biculturalism ...................................................85

5.4 Contributions of the thesis ................................................................................87

5.4.1 Empirical contributions ........................................................................87

5.4.2 Theoretical contributions ......................................................................88

5.4.3 Policy and organisational contributions ...............................................88

5.5 Suggestions for future research.........................................................................89

5.6 Concluding remarks ..........................................................................................89

REFERENCES ...................................................................................... 91

APPENDICES

Appendix 1 Essays 1-5 ............................................................................................ 116

Appendix 2 Main guiding interview questions....................................................... 117

Appendix 3 Main questionnaires used during the interviews................................ 119

TABLES

Table 1 Acculturation model (Berry, 1990)................................................................ 30

Table 2 Published definitions of biculturalism in management and psychology literature ........................................................................................................ 34

Table 3 Facets of adjustment.......................................................................................39

Table 4 Summary of epistemological and methodological assumptions in this thesis .............................................................................................................. 44

Table 5 Conceptual phase........................................................................................... 45

Table 6 The use of data in two phases ........................................................................ 46

Table 7 Time frame of data collection in 2012-2013 ...................................................52

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Table 8 Summary of different types of observations...................................................55

Table 9 Examples of detailed descriptions of the observations made during one-off events.........................................................................................................56

Table 10 Overview of the essays ....................................................................................65

FIGURES

Figure 1 Thesis structure .............................................................................................. 15

Figure 2 The multi-layered-ness of culture ..................................................................23

Figure 3 My view on culture in this thesis ................................................................... 24

Figure 4 Illustration of culture in relation to expatriates .............................................25

Figure 5 A simplified illustration of bicultural and multicultural individuals in this thesis ...............................................................................................................29

Figure 6 The multidimensionality of acculturation. ..................................................... 31

Figure 7 Illustration of biculturalism in relation to acculturation ...............................32

Figure 8 The continuum of epistemological development in the five essays .............. 43

Figure 9 Snapshot of codes organised in NVivo ...........................................................59

Figure 10 Theoretical framework of essay 1 ...................................................................67

Figure 11 Theoretical framework of essay 2 ...................................................................69

Figure 12 Conceptual framework of essay 3 ................................................................... 71

Figure 13 Theoretical framework of essay 4 ...................................................................73

Figure 14 Theoretical framework of essay 5 ...................................................................75

Figure 15 Theorisation of biculturalism based on the empirical results ........................83

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1 INTRODUCTION1

Death and taxes. You know how the saying goes. I’d like to add a third certainty: you’ll never become Chinese, no matter how hard you try, or want to, or think you ought to. I wanted to be Chinese, once. I don’t mean I wanted to wear a silk jacket and cotton slippers, or a Mao suit and cap and dye my hair black and proclaim that blowing your nose in a handkerchief is disgusting. I wanted China to be the place where I made a career and lived my life. I won’t be rushing back either. I have fallen out of love, woken from my China Dream.

Mark Kitto “You’ll never be Chinese”, Prospect

This is a thesis about the processes of internalising new cultural practices and reflecting on cultural belongingness as a result of expatriation among adult individuals. It studies the different responses of expatriates in China in terms of their language competence, acculturation and cross-cultural adjustment. It offers a snapshot of expatriates’ work life in China, yet it also explores both retrospectively expatriates’ previous experiences outside their home country and prospectively their plans for a future career. In essence, this thesis attempts to develop a framework for analysing collective individuals in relationship to different cultural reference points. It explains how this framework builds upon, yet is different from those already existing, such as acculturation (e.g. Berry, 1980; Berry, 1997), bicultural identity integration (e.g. Benet-Martinez and Haritatos, 2005) and identity plurality (e.g. Fitzsimmons, 2013). Such a framework is deeply grounded in the phenomenon of expatriation itself. By analysing the working and living realities of the expatriates, this study also provides a holistic understanding of expatriates’ responses and coping mechanisms to the changing environment. It reveals the various dilemmatic situations expatriates face in their relationships with host country nationals (HCN), the multinational corporation (MNC) headquarters and subsidiaries. Expatriates’ language competence and cross-cultural adjustment are both theoretically and empirically intertwined with the main theme of this thesis, i.e. biculturalism. This thesis therefore also analyses the challenges and complexities expatriates face in terms of learning the host country language and adjusting in the host country.

1.1 Rationale and research questions

Biculturals are individuals who identify with more than one culture and have (either been ascribed by birth or who have acquired) more than one cultural schema (Brannen and Lee, 2014; Brannen and Thomas, 2010). Technically, individuals who have internalised two cultures are bicultural, while those who have internalised three cultures are multicultural. In this thesis, I refer to them all as bicultural, i.e. bicultural is used as the proxy for multicultural, with two exceptions: first, when the third culture becomes theoretically and empirically relevant; second, published work is referred to using the manner in which these two terms have been used by the authors in question2.

Research in social psychology has emphasised that bicultural individuals are sensitive to cultural signals and they adjust fast to a new country (Briley et al., 2005; Fu et al., 2007; Ross et al., 2002; Trafimow et al., 1997). Bicultural individuals are proposed to be better adjusted than monocultural individuals in a new environment, for example, biculturals tend

1 When referring to this book, please kindly cite: Zhang, L. E. (2015) On becoming bicultural: Language competence, acculturation and cross-cultural adjustment of expatriates in China. Economics and Society Series, No. 290, Hanken School of Economics, Helsinki: Hanken Publishing. 2 Chapter 2.3 discusses this issue in detail.

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to show higher self-esteem, experience lower depression, and have more prosocial behaviour (Chen et al., 2008; Schwartz et al., 2007; Szapocznik et al., 1980) as a result of their ability to behave differently and communicate effectively in various cultures (LaFromboise et al., 1993). Biculturalism is often associated with the most favourable psychosocial outcomes, especially among young immigrants (e.g. Coatsworth et al., 2005; David et al., 2009).

Bicultural individuals at workplaces are therefore considered to have different skills and capabilities which bring positive work-related outcomes, such as awareness of and ability to respond to cultural cues (Brannen et al., 2009); creativity (Cheng et al., 2008); and effectiveness at facilitating international assignments (Bell, 1990; Bell and Harrison, 1996; Garza et al., 1982). Biculturals are also portrayed frequently as the ‘ideal’ boundary-spanners and conflict mediators in multinational corporations (Dörrenbächer and Geppert, 2006; Morgan and Kristensen, 2006). The way that bicultural individuals resolve cultural differences within themselves is proposed to be applicable in solving interpersonal cultural conflict and achieving better adjustment (Ting-Toomey et al., 1991). Furthermore, bicultural expatriates’ openness, social and cognitive flexibility and competences might also increase their intercultural sensitivity and ethno-relativism, which makes them ideal cultural mediators for intercultural negotiations and suitable candidates as boundary-spanners for multinational corporations (Boski, 2008). Bicultural managers are considered to be able to shift between attributional styles when appraising subordinates’ performances: for example, Asian Americans with high bicultural identity integration pay less attention to situational conditions in the American setting (Mok et al., 2010). A recent stream of research in International Business (IB) has also particularly focused on biculturals’ capabilities to be able to better integrate competing tenets from the different cultures to which they are exposed (Benet-Martínez & Haritatos, 2005; Tadmor et al., 2009). Brannen and Thomas (2010) proposed that biculturals experiencing difficulty integrating their cultural identities may develop certain skills and become effective in a variety of cross-cultural contexts.

Interestingly, other earlier conceptualisations of bicultural experiences emphasising the negative aspects seem to have been forgotten. Earlier research in psychology has extensively examined the negative consequences of biculturalism, such as stress and role ambiguities (e.g. Fordham, 1988; Sung, 1985). Marginal biculturals are constantly described as poorly adapted to the environment, psychologically overwhelmed and socially weak (Berry et al., 2006). In contrast, current research tends to focus on the positive outcomes of biculturalism, to such an extent that it is perhaps “no longer socially acceptable to suggest that multicultural3 individuals suffer as a result of their multiple cultural identities” (Fitzsimmons, 2013:526).

Meanwhile there is a discrepancy between the definition of bicultural individuals that originated from social psychology and the operationalisation of bicultural employees in management studies. While it has been established in the current literature to define biculturals as individuals who have deeply internalised and identify with more than one culture (Brannen and Lee, 2014; Brannen and Thomas, 2010; Fitzsimmons, 2013), such a general definition tends to lead to the outcome that bicultural individuals are treated as a homogenous group during empirical operationalisation. Recently, scholars have started to call for a more contextualised conceptualisation of biculturalism in order to capture the varieties and differences among biculturals. For example, how do bicultural individuals develop and manage the various cultural elements? How are “born” biculturals different from “learnt” biculturals?

Furthermore, there is a lack of understanding of biculturals at workplaces. Existing theorisation about bicultural individuals is mainly based on empirical studies with international students and immigrants, who are to be distinguished from bicultural employees within organisations. With the increasingly blurring boundaries between 3 ‘Multicultural’ is used in this publication (Fitzsimmons, 2013) as a proxy for both ‘bicultural’ and ‘multicultural’.

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expatriates (for example, self-initiated expatriates (Lee, 2005)), new types of migrants (for example, qualified migrants (Zikic et al., 2010)) and transnational knowledge workers (Colic-Peisker, 2010), it is increasingly important to examine who the bicultural expatriates are in global workplaces and how monocultural expatriates learn to become bicultural based on their experiences of working and living in the new culture, so that there is a more rigorous scholarly understanding on how bicultural employees can contribute to organisations.

Aiming to address the research gaps identified above, this thesis attempts to answer the following overall research questions:

What characterises the bicultural expatriates in terms of acculturation, language competence and cross-cultural adjustment?

This main overall research question is then specified in more detail in terms of several sub-questions examining acculturation, language competence and cross-cultural adjustment respectively.

Can expatriates become bicultural? What characterises the different types of biculturalism developed among expatriates? [Essay 1]

What are the dilemmas expatriates face in acculturation? What are the coping strategies they employ? [Essay 2]

Do expatriates need to learn the host country language, and, if so, why? What are the motivations and impediments for them to learn the host country language? [Essay 3]

How does expatriates’ host country language competence influence their work -related and non-work-related cross-cultural adjustment? [Essay 4]

Specifically, Essay 1 examines what the different bicultural experiences among expatriates are. A taxonomy of biculturalism is abductively built based on the grounded interviews and observations about expatriates’ work and life in the host country. It describes the change in expatriates in cultural knowledge and belongingness, and offers a snapshot of expatriates’ cultural status-quo during the data collection year. Furthermore, it also attempts to describe the processes expatriates’ experience from being monocultural to bicultural based on individuals’ retrospective narratives. Some expatriates might be more affected by the processes than others, with many of them remaining monocultural. Such influences are also subjected to changes as expatriates continue to experience different situations in their work and life. The second essay on acculturation, Essay 2, then examines the dilemmas faced by bicultural expatriates and their coping strategies for the stress and anxiety in a changing and uncertain environment.

As an integral part of culture, language plays an indispensable role in expatriates’ internalisation of new cultural practices and their work and life in general in the host country. Accordingly, Essay 3 examines the language realities that expatriates face in MNC subsidiaries by exploring whether expatriates could cope with work in the MNC corporate language as seen from both expatriates’ and their HCN colleagues’ perspectives. Furthermore, as cross-cultural adjustment and acculturation are intertwined social processes for expatriates, Essay 4 examines the multi-faceted impacts that expatriates’ host country language proficiency has on their cross-cultural adjustment. Essays 3 and 4 together provide different aspects of the language challenges that expatriates face during their work life abroad.

Essay 5 is a reflexive analysis on the challenges multicultural researchers experience during in-depth interviewing with culturally diverse interviewees. It aims to answer the following research question:

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How does the researcher’s multicultural background influence in-depth interviewing with expatriates? [Essay 5]

As a methodological piece, this final essay of this thesis analyses the power relationships between interviewer and interviewee through the lens of language and social categorisation. It suggests various strategies to overcome such challenges in order for multicultural researchers to conduct responsible, meaningful and successful fieldwork.

1.2 Structure of the thesis

The structure of this article-based thesis is presented in Figure 1 below. The introduction provides an overview of the thesis followed by a rationale of why such a study is warranted. Subsequently, it introduces the research questions, structure and the empirical research context of the thesis – who are the researched, where do they come from and where do they live at the time of the field work?

The second section, on theories and concepts, begins with a review of the conceptualisation of culture, cultural schema and cultural identity, bicultural and multicultural individuals, and biculturalism and multiculturalism, followed by a brief summary of the other two concepts used in this thesis – language and cross-cultural adjustment.

The third section, on methodology, begins with the research philosophy underlying the thesis, followed by the research design of the initial and main study. Emphasis has been placed on the second phase of data collection, which is the main data collection for this thesis. Justifications for the methodology, data collection techniques and data analysis are discussed in detail in Chapter 3.4. Chapter 3 then concludes with research ethics, limitations of the research design, and reflections on gender and the researcher’s role.

The fourth section of this thesis, i.e. the findings, consists of five essays, which are attached as Appendix 1. Summaries of the main findings in these essays as well as the linkages between essays are provided in Chapter 4.2.

As each separate article has already discussed the theoretical concepts in detail in the separate sub-field that each article is concerned with, this thesis ends with a meta-discussion in Chapter 5 on the overall concepts used in the whole study. The discussion and conclusion section begins with a summary of the main findings of this thesis, followed by an explanation of the theoretical linkages between the five articles. It then discusses the implications that this thesis has in terms of theorising biculturalism. It also provides a conceptual discussion of the relationship between language and biculturalism on the one hand and cross-cultural adjustment and biculturalism on the other. It ends with suggestions for future research and a brief conclusion for the thesis as a whole.

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Culture Language Culture and Language

INTRODUCTION Rationale and research question Structure of the thesis Context of the thesis

THEORY AND CONCEPTS Culture, cultural schema, cultural identity Biculturals and multiculturals Biculturalism and multiculturalism Language Cross-cultural adjustment

METHODOLOGY Research philosophy Research design: method, data and analysis Research ethics and limitations

Essay 1

Expatriate Acculturation Taxonomy Revisited: An Empirical Study with Nordic Expatriates in China

FINDINGS

Essay 2

Coping with Dilemmas: An Analysis of Bicultural Expatriates

Essay3 Do I Really Need to Learn It? We Think You Do! Individual, Organizational and National Perspectives on the Rationale, Willingness and Ambivalence of Nordic Expatriates to Learn Chinese

Essay 4 Multifaceted Effects of Host Country Language Proficiency in Expatriate Cross-Cultural Adjustments: A Qualitative Study in China

Essay 5 ‘Multiculturality’ as a Key Methodological Challenge during In-depth Interviewing: Knowledge Transfer across Cultural Boundaries

DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSION Implications for theorising biculturalism Language and biculturalism Cross-cultural adjustment and biculturalism Contributions and conclusions

Figure 1 Thesis structure

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1.3 Context of the thesis

In this section, I introduce the two main contexts of the thesis – the domestic and international migration context of the host country, and the demographic context of the type of acculturation studied, i.e., expatriate. In order to understand the acculturation process which expatriates experience, it is important to relate their experiences to the societal responsiveness of the host country and the characteristics of the particular acculturating group itself (Schwartz et al., 2010). Furthermore, a country’s socio-political environment influences its multicultural level and consequentially how foreign populations are treated by the dominant ethnic group (Leong and Liu, 2013).

1.3.1 China as the host country

China is referred to in this thesis in the contexts of domestic and international migration and acculturation both currently and historically, as it is important to understand the host country’s responsiveness towards foreign populations such as expatriates. I will first explain why China is an important expatriation destination from the policy and societal perspective as this fact is in contrast to the widely-established understanding that China is best known for its own people emigrating overseas.

In 2014 China was estimated to be the second largest recipient of migrant remittances in the world by the World Bank (IOM, 2014), and there are about 35 million overseas Chinese according to the Chinese Academy of Social Science (CASS, 2012). However, China has also increasingly attracted migrants from all over the world, such as the neighbouring countries of Vietnam, Korea, Japan and India, as well as from African countries and the US and Europe. About 600,000 foreigners – mainly from the Republic of Korea, the United States and Japan – reside in China (IOM, 2014). This number has increased dramatically in recent years; ten years ago, only about 60,000 registered foreigners worked in China (HCC, 2004). International immigrants have come to comprise an important section of China’s population quite apart from rural farmers, urban residents and the internal migrants (Shen, 2011).

A new trend of immigration to the rapidly-developing China is emerging, mostly as a result of the country’s economic growth and increased demand for labour due to the country’s aging population (Skeldon, 2011). Approximately 2.85 million of the 26.11 million foreigners entering China in 2007 were seeking employment, with more than half a million of them working in joint ventures or wholly-owned firms. The majority of these workers are skilled migrants from the developed world, including overseas Chinese from Europe, North American and Australia. Apart from these foreign-born workers, China is also experiencing an increased amount of migrants entering the country for studying purposes. There were an estimated 238,184 foreign students in China in 2009, which was greater than in Australia and Canada. Although 60 percent of the international students were not in a degree programme, about 75,000 foreign students were studying at the undergraduate level and about 20,000 were studying at the postgraduate level (Skeldon, 2011).

China is in urgent need of systematic and updated laws and regulations on managing international mobile populations in order to assist the rapidly increasing foreign students and expatriates in settling down in China more smoothly and also to possibly stay for a longer period in China. However, there is no special law regulating international migrants in China as a result of the country’s limited experience with immigration. The Rules of Foreigner Administration has long focused only on entry and exit procedures for short-term visitors, and as such it is not effective for addressing the increasing long-term or even permanent immigrants (Shen, 2011): for example, foreigners residing in China for over six months but under one year are issued a “temporary residence permit” by the public security department, and those residing more than one year are given a “foreign residence permit”

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that needs to be renewed each year. Very few are granted a five year residence permit, although foreigners can apply for the “1-5 year foreigner residence permit”. Although China introduced the “Green Card” system in 2004, only 4,700 foreigners were granted one between 2004 and the end of 2011 (MPSC, 2014). Furthermore, the “China Green Card” cannot be used as a Chinese passport, nor does it mean Chinese citizenship. It is officially the D-visa, which acknowledges the foreign passport holder’s right to enter and leave China freely, unlimited duration of stay and the right to work. In 2012, more than 148,000 Chinese obtained overseas citizenship while only 1202 expatriates were granted permanent residency in China (CCG, 2014).

Unlike settler societies with a history of cultural plurality, such as Canada and New Zealand (Sibley and Ward, 2013) China is still developing its policy regarding how international immigrants should be treated and what their rights are. The Chinese government has been modifying the rules regarding foreigners’ rights at a gradual speed; for example, until 2003 foreigners need to reside in designated hotels and ‘foreign apartments’ with a ‘temporary residence permit’. After 2003, foreigners could purchase properties for their own residence purposes under numerous conditions (News, 2007). Multiculturalism at a societal level has not become a political discourse in China yet, although the phenomenon as such is not easy to track from policy to implementation in the cases of other countries such as Canada and Finland (Valtonen, 1999). The general public in China tends to associate ‘foreignness’ strongly with appearance, such as skin colour, and to exclude foreigners socially can sometimes be considered to be patriotic (Barme, 1995). There are negatively connoted phrases in Chinese referring to foreigners, such as ‘laowai’ and ‘guilao4’. Despite the general friendliness and admiration of foreigners in Asia, including China (Froese, 2010), Chinese nationalism has garnered much attention in recent years (Zheng, 1999). Recent events, such as the pro-China demonstrations in 2008 during the Olympic torch relay and anti-Japanese demonstrations in 2005, 2010 and 2012, have raised concerns about the nature of Chinese nationalism and Chinese’s attitudes towards foreigners (Sinkkonen, 2013).

The lack of compatible immigration regulations has caused frustrations for foreign populations who intend to remain in China on a more permanent basis. The government is considering revising the regulations for applying for permanent residency after President Xi Jinping called for a more open policy in order to attract foreign talent (Ng, 2014), but it will take time before China can have an established Green Card system, as China faces tw o further major domestic issues with respect to migration and acculturation.

Internally, China is experiencing the largest migration movement in the world with about 230 million migrants from rural areas to cities (Bao, 2012). Migrant workers already comprised 40% of the total urban labour force by 2006 (IILS, 2006). In 2009, nearly 39.1 percent of the migrant workers worked in manufacturing and about 17.3 percent worked in construction and more than 7.8 percent in wholesale and retail (NBSC, 2010). Furthermore, the number of migrants working in the service industry has also been increasing in recent years, which is a new development (Zhan, 2012). There is a sharp occupational segregation between migrants and the urban-born populations; for example, in 2005 only 12% of migrant workers were employed in the public sector, compared with 68% of the urban-born workforce (Tunon, 2006).

The ethnic diversity of China has also contributed to challenges in managing the various population groups. China is a multi-ethnic country with 55 minority groups, representing around 110 million people (State Council, 2000). Almost half of China is occupied geographically by minority nationalities (Dessaint, 1980). Han is the dominant group, comprising about 92 percent of the entire population (OECD, 2005). Mandarin Chinese has been promoted as the national language since 1956 (Rohsenow, 2004; Zhou, 1999). In 4 ‘laowai’ means ‘old foreign’ literally in Mandarin Chinese. ‘guilao’ means ‘ghost old’ literally in Mandarin Chinese.

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education, Mandarin is also provided from in primary school for minority regions (Hu and Seifman, 1987; Zhou, 2004), although most minority groups have their own language. The Chinese government adopts a ‘Ronghe’ policy, meaning fusion or amalgamation referring to the historical process of mutual cultural exchange between Han and the other minorities and resulting in the gradual disappearance of minority language and culture (Mackerras, 1994). ‘Ronghe’, is not a policy which promotes multiculturalism (Wang and Phillion, 2009), although the Chinese government officially states that minority groups have the right to use their languages and practice their religions (Zuo, 2007).

To summarise, factors such as the historical, socio-economic and political policy challenges China is facing currently provide important contextual knowledge for this thesis as individual-level analyses of expatriates’ acculturation and cross-cultural adjustment experiences are not independent of the society in which they live.

1.3.2 Expatriates

In this section, I will first present the concept of expatriates as being a dynamic and diverse entity instead of a homogeneous group, followed by the characteristics of each expatriate group. Second I will compare the term ‘self-initiated expatriate’ used in IB with terms such as ‘skilled migrant’ and ‘transnational workers’ in migration studies.

1.3.2.1 Dynamics and diversities of expatriates

Globalisation and internationalisation of business has resulted in international assignments being increasingly frequent and increasingly complicated (Mayerhofer et al., 2004). Consequently, there is a new range of roles and career paths for expatriates (Collings et al., 2007). New terms such as “international itinerants” (Banai and Harry, 2004), and ‘independent internationally mobile professionals’ (McKenna and Richardson, 2007) have been used to describe the new group of mobile population. In addition, the definitions of expatriates are also discussed in the context of migration, which is defined as physical movement from one geographic location to another geographic location (Agozino, 2000), crossing national borders (Boyle et al., 1998). Baruch et al. (2010) discussed the difference between expatriates and immigrants in terms of permanent residency rights, pointing out that an expatriate might become a migrant when he/she gains citizenship or permanent residence status.

Expatriates have been treated as a homogenous group as organisational expatriates (OE) in expatriate literature until recently when researchers began to pay attention to the different kinds of expatriates. Inkson et al., (1997) were among the first to raise the issue of the self-initiated foreign work experience being an alternative to the organisationally-initiated work experience. According to Edström and Galbraith (1977), OEs are sent by their home companies to international posts. Self-initiated expatriates (SE) are those who are hired on a contractual basis without experiencing the transferal from parent organisation to subsidiary (Lee, 2005). Traditional OEs are usually assigned the overseas assignment by the organisation.

It is important to separate SEs and OEs, since they differ significantly from each other in several work-related dimensions (Inkson et al., 1997; Peltokorpi and Fabian, 2009; Suutari and Brewster, 2000). Firstly, SEs decide themselves that they would like to move and work abroad. There is usually no fixed period of stay in the foreign country. OEs, on the other hand, are dispatched by multinational companies to achieve a specific job or organisation related goals with a pre-decided period ranging from six months to five years. Secondly, SEs do not usually have a structured career path in the manner of OEs. They often perceive their

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overseas working experience to be part of their self-development or part of another personal agenda. OEs are usually motivated to work abroad because of the financial benefits or increased opportunities for career progression (Miller and Cheng, 1978). Thirdly, SEs receive no relocation package and no HRM support from employers, while OEs are equipped with generous relocation packages (Peltokorpi and Fabian, 2009).

Expatriates are not only heterogeneous, but also dynamic. OEs can become SEs after some time. For example, some OEs may choose to remain in the host country after their organisation can no longer offer them the original expatriation package. This group of expatriates further diverges depending upon their next career direction – staying in the same organisation under a local contract; seeking employment elsewhere probably also under a local contract and becoming an entrepreneur in the host country. Furthermore, the boundaries between these different forms of expatriation can be blurry. Many expatriates travel back and forth between home country and host country – studying and working as an intern in the host country; working in the same company back in the home country; continuing working in the host country as an OE or SE. A further complication to the distinction between OE and SE is created by the group of expatriates who initiate their own assignments outside of their home country while being employed by an organisation, known as organisational self-initiated expatriates (OSIE) (Altman and Baruch, 2012; McKenna et al., 2012).

1.3.2.2 Self-initiated expatriates, skilled migrants and transnational workers

A migrant is “any person who changes his or her country of usual residence” (UN, 1998:17), while immigrants are “non-residents who enter the country with a view of establishing residence” (UN, 2002:10). These two terms are sometimes used interchangeably in the management literature although the basic definition points out that immigrants’ residence in the host country has a more permanent nature.

In the current literature, “self-initiated expatriate” and “skilled migrant/immigrant” are also used interchangeably as a result of the increasingly blurry boundaries between them. In an attempt to make a distinction, Al Ariss (2010) highlighted three criteria which separate expatriates from migrants: the geographical origin and destination of the international mobility, the forced/chosen nature of this movement, the period of stay abroad, and the symbolic status of a “migrant” as compared to an SE in a host country. Migrants tend to move from developing countries into developed countries, most notably from Asia to North America and Europe (Baruch et al., 2007), while SEs tend to relocate from developed countries (Doherty and Dickmann, 2008). The term “migrant” seems to suggest necessity rather than choice (Baruch et al., 2007). Furthermore, “migrant” seems to imply negative connotations, such as that of being an unwelcomed social product (Sayad, 2004). However, many other studies in the management field refer without distinction to individuals moving from developing and developed countries as SEs (e.g. Fitzgerald and Howe-Walsh, 2009). Many SEs also remain in the new home country on a permanent basis and thus become permanent migrant workers (Al Ariss and Özbilgin, 2010). The differences between new types of migrants, such as qualified migrants/immigrants (Zikic et al., 2010), transnational workers (Colic-Peisker, 2010) and self-initiated expatriates are even more subtle and challenging to pinpoint in empirical work, although the term “transnational workers” has been used to refer to migrating individuals who have spent extended periods of time in at least three countries (Colic-Peisker, 2010) and thus entails the ‘three-countries’ rule in the definition.

It is important to understand the differences and similarities between different terms referring to these groups of individuals moving across borders because of work. Recently, scholars have called for attention to be directed towards another important nuance to be

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considered when studying acculturation – the type of migrants under consideration (Schwartz et al., 2010), as the circumstances surrounding a migrant influences the acculturation options available to him or her (Steiner, 2009). This thesis uses the term “expatriates” as an umbrella term referring to all migrants/immigrants who are in the current host country for work purpose. The specific types of expatriates and the dynamic nature of expatriation are taken into consideration when interpreting these individuals’ bicultural experiences.

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2 THEORIES AND CONCEPTS

This thesis draws on a number of literatures grouped into three main categories: language, culture and acculturation-related theories, which are then further specified as biculturals and multiculturals, biculturalism and multiculturalism and cross-cultural adjustment.

2.1 Culture

Culture is a widely-researched and debated concept across different disciplines. Scholars in various disciplines, such as anthropology, sociology, psychology and linguistics, have long sought to understand what culture is and how culture is relevant to human activities. In the classical work on defining culture, anthropologists Kroeber, Kluckhohn and Untereiner (1952) critically reviewed and compiled 164 different definitions into seven groups – descriptive and broad definitions with emphasis on enumeration of content; historical definitions with emphasis on social heritage or tradition; normative definitions with emphasis on rule, way, or ideals, values plus behaviours; psychological definitions with emphasis on adjustment, culture as a problem-solving device, or learning, or habit; structural definitions with emphasis on the patterning or organisation of culture; genetic definitions with emphasis on culture as product, artefact, or ideas, or symbols and the other incomplete definitions.

The conceptualisation of culture in this thesis is predominantly grounded in the discipline of psychology, which has received significant influence from anthropology. Below, I will first review the historical debates over the concept of culture in psychology and anthropology and then introduce my definition of culture in this thesis.

The definition of culture by the anthropologist Taylor (1871:1:1) as the “complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man[sic] as a member of society” has created a cornerstone not only for anthropologists, but also for sociologists and psychologists who have cited this definition numberless times (for example, Klineberg, 1940; Murphy, 1947). Since then, there have been long debates within anthropology regarding two opposing views on culture, which are ‘culture as behaviour: the regularly occurring, organised modes of behaviour in technological, economic, religious, political, familiar and other institutional domains within a population’ contrasting with ‘culture as systems of meanings in the heads of multiple individuals within a population: a symbol system, an ideational system, a rule system, a cognitive system’ (Rohner, 1984). Although the boundaries between behaviour and meaning systems are often blurry (Rohner, 1984), such distinction is related to the debate on the ontological reality of culture in the history of behavioural science – cultural realists who believe that culture has a concrete reality of its own (e.g. White, 1949) versus cultural nominalists who believe that culture has no concrete reality, existing solely as an inference or abstraction in the mind of the researcher (e.g. Spiro, 1951). It is nevertheless accepted by most behavioural scientists today that it is impossible to separate culture empirically and analytically from its ultimate locus, i.e. the plurality of individuals (Rohner, 1984).

Next, I present more specific approaches to culture, which formulate the foundations of my conceptualisation of biculturalism in this thesis.

2.1.1 Culture as a shared symbolic meaning system

I view culture as a shared symbolic meaning system; specifically, I draw on the following established definition in cross-cultural psychology:

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Culture is “the totality of equivalent and complementary learned meanings maintained by a human population, or by identifiable segments of a population, and transmitted from one generation to the next”. (Rohner, 1984:119)

Culture is thus treated as a system of shared symbols and meanings. Such an approach shares similar roots with Geertz’s (1973) and Schneider’s (1968) view of culture – “shared symbols transcending the minds of individuals”. It is also in line with Parsons’ (1951, 1973)’ notion on culture: for example, Parsons (1973: 35) believed that “cultural systems or subsystems may vary from being quite integrated to being a nearly random assortment of meaning components”.

The degree of sharedness varies depending on the chosen research context, and cultural meanings are not usually shared uniformly by the entire society in a precise manner. There are also variations of cultural meanings during the transmission from generation to generation. It is probable that no single individual ever knows the totality of equivalent and complementary learned meanings which define the ‘culture’ of a population, and it is unlikely that any individual is able to activate, at any given moment, the full range of meanings of the particular culture (Rohner, 1984).

2.1.2 Culture as a multi-layered concept

Linking to the International Business (IB) context in which this dissertation situates, culture, as one of the most ubiquitous constructs in international business (Birkinshaw et al., 2011b), is also treated here as a multi-layered and multi-faceted concept, responding to the recent scholarly call on this issue (e.g. Tung, 2008). Mostly as a result of the classic work by Hofstede (1980), in the past two decades (Leung et al., 2005) IB scholars have been predominantly concerned with the importance of national culture, which is broadly defined as the values, beliefs, norms and behavioural patterns of a national group. National culture has been demonstrated to impact on a wide range of business activities (see Boyacigiller and Adler, 1991for a review), especially as business and economic transactions across national and geographic boundaries became more frequent. However, as pointed out by Schwartz et al. (2010), culture is not always synonymous with nations and national boundaries.

Leung et al. (2005) proposed that culture is a multi-layer construct existing at all levels – from the global to the individual, as shown in Figure 2 below. The most macro-level is global, the culture of which is created by global institutions which cut across national borders. There are both top-down from global to individual level and bottom-up from individual to global level processes of cultural change. Such a proposition has been built upon Schein’s (1992) multi-layered model that views culture as a multi-layer construct consisting of the most external layer of observed artefacts and behaviours; the deeper level as values testable by social consensus; and the deepest level as the basic assumption, which is invisible and taken for granted.

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(Leung et al., 2005: 363)

Figure 2 The multi-layered-ness of culture

Drawing upon Leung et al. (2005), I view culture as multi-layered shared symbolic meaning systems ranging from the individual level to the global level. The boundaries of these various levels can be overlapping: for example, in the context of an MNC’s subsidiary the organisational culture is a combination of individual assumptions (including the assumptions of both the expatriates and the host country employees), organisational culture and the global culture of the MNC.

2.1.3 Culture as a dynamic entity

Furthermore, culture is viewed from a dynamic, rather than static perspective in this thesis. There are contrasting views on the nature of culture regarding whether it can change or not in the IB literature. A plethora of research has treated culture as a stable construct and tends to examine the static influence of segregated cultural elements separated from specific contexts (Leung et al., 2005). For example, Hofstede (2001) claimed that culture changes very slowly; Erez and Earley (1993) pointed out that most existing models of culture and work behaviour assume cultural stability and emphasise the fit between a given culture and certain managerial and motivational practices. Furthermore, some research has argued that cultural stability helps to reduce ambiguity and therefore can lead to more control in order to achieve expected behavioural outcomes (Leana and Barry, 2000; Weick and Quinn, 1999). Contrasting the static perspective on culture, a recent stream of research has begun to note that ‘culture is not static; rather it evolves over time’ (Tung, 1996:244). An ‘ocean’ metaphor instead of ‘onion’ metaphor was proposed to capture the dynamics and paradoxes in a national culture (Fang, 2005). Such evolutionary changes were attributed to increased interaction among people from different national cultures formulating a ‘negotiated culture’ (Brannen and Salk, 2000).

Current research in cognitive psychology has demonstrated that the human mind is fluid and adaptive, and engages in active, dynamic interaction with the environment (Leung et al., 2005). Such a conceptualisation of the human mind is compatible with a dynamic view of culture. There are several theories of culture that pertain to the dynamic aspect of culture (Leung et al., 2005). For example, the ecocultural model by Berry et al. (2002) which views culture as evolving adaptations to socio-political influences and ecological conditions, and treats individual psychological characteristics as adaptive to cultural contexts in addition to the broader ecological and socio-political influences. Another is the system view (opposing

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the entity view which treats culture as a static entity) proposed by Kitayama (2002), which suggests that each individual’s psychological processes are organised through an active effort to co-ordinate one’s behaviours within the relevant cultural systems.

Furthermore, cultural changes and the dynamics of cultural influences occur more frequently than the traditional assumption (Leung et al., 2005), which can be demonstrated and explained by the priming techniques (e.g. Hong et al., 2000; Oyserman et al., 2002b; Peng and Knowles, 2003). For example, Hong et al. (2000) argued that a priming technique should be able to alter the mind-set of people, as a result of the change in their attributional style. In their experiment, Hong Kong Chinese, who were considered to be collectivistic and were supposed to make external attributions for others’ behaviour, were able to make internal attributions under the exposure and experimental stimuli of US American icons such as Superman. Although the above-mentioned studies were conducted in a behavioural laboratory, they provided important insights on the changeable nature of culture, i.e. the shared meaning systems tend to guide cognition only when they come to an individual’s mind (Hong et al., 2000).

2.1.4 Summary on the conceptualisation of culture

To summarize, I define culture as dynamic multi-layered shared symbolic meaning systems, as illustrated in Figure 3 below.

Figure 3 My view on culture in this thesis

My conceptualisation of culture is consistent with the basic assumptions about culture which most anthropologists agree upon regardless of other ideological differences, i.e. culture refers to a learned phenomenon, which varies greatly from one population to another; culture refers to ways of life of people; and culture is shared (Rohner, 1984). By building my work upon the established work in psychology, I also acknowledge the conceptualisations by Geertz (1973) and Schneider (1968) and consequentially Parsons (1951, 1973) on culture as “shared symbols transcending the minds of individuals”.

In the context of the main research target of this thesis, culture is viewed from three different levels – individual, organisational and national, as presented in Figure 4 below. The individual level is referred to in the context of multiple systems of shared symbols and meanings: for example, an individual can belong to more than one culture. Culture as such is a dynamic system as a result of expatriates’ various living experiences in different geographical locations. ‘Organisational level culture’ is the culture of the MNC where

Shared Meaning System y

Multi-layered

y

Dynamic

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expatriates are employed. Within this level, there are two main sub-levels – the culture of the MNC’s headquarters in the home country, and the culture of the MNC’s subsidiary in the host country as expatriates are influenced by both during their expatriation. ‘National level culture’ refers to the culture of the countries in which expatriates have lived at different points during their lives. The influences an expatriate receives from the various levels contribute to and lead to further changes.

“HQ” stands for headquarters and “Sub” stands for subsidiary. Arrows with dotted lines refer to the dynamic influence and change of culture across different layers. “Country A” refers to home country; “Country B” refers to host country; “Country X, Y , Z…” refers to the third, fourth, fifth … country an individual has lived in and/or the other countries MNCs operate in.

Figure 4 Illustration of culture in relation to expatriates

2.1.5 Further problematisation of the concept of culture

In Wright’s (1998) work on “The Politicization of ‘Culture’”, she distinguished between the ‘old’ and ‘new’ anthropological approaches to ‘culture’. The main features of the ‘old idea of culture’ are: bounded, small scale entity; defined characteristics; unchanging, in balanced equilibrium or self-reproducing; underlying system of shared meanings being the ‘authentic culture’ and identical, homogeneous individuals. The characteristics of the new ideas of culture are:

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“Culture is an active process of meaning-making and contestation over definition, including of itself' (Street, 1993: 2) People, differently positioned in social relations and processes of domination, use economic and institutional resources available to them to try and make their definition of a situation 'stick', to prev ent others' definitions from being heard, and t o garner the material outcome Sites are not bounded – people draw on local, national, global links the way clusters of concepts form is historically specific, and ideas never for m a closed or coherent whole In its hegemonic form, culture appears coherent, systematic, consensual, like l an object, beyond human agency, not ideological – like the old idea of culture.” (Wright, 1998: 10)

In contrast to the “older set of ideas which equates ‘a culture’ with ‘a people’ which can be delineated with a boundary and a checklist of characteristics; the new meaning of ‘culture’ is therefore not a ‘thing’ but a political process of contestation over the power to define what ‘culture’ is (Wright, 1998: 14).

While this perspective on culture might seem radically different from the previous three perspectives, it is nevertheless an important part of my view on culture in the context of this thesis. Specifically such ‘politicization’ of culture is closely related to the bicultural concept that will be introduced in Chapter 2.3. I will elaborate on the relevance of this particular take on culture towards the end of this thesis in Chapter 5.1.6.

2.2 Cultural identity and cultural schema

The concept of “identity” has been defined in many different ways across disciplines and from different epistemological perspectives (Gleason, 1983; Wetherell, 2010). Within management studies, issues centred on identity at both the individual and organisational level have also been a major theme under the influence of a broadly postmodern agenda and the increasingly pivotal role of identity construction (Brown, 2001).

One of the key terms of this thesis, “cultural identity” has a strong root in psychology literature, and this study hence draws upon the definitions of identity in the psychology discipline, which views identity as part of one’s self-concept which is related to group membership (Nguyen et al., 2009). Such a central theme can be reflected in a number of dominant definitions of identity in psychology; for example, Erikson (1959) defined identity as a striving for continuity of personal character and maintenance of solidarity with the group’s ideals and identity; Grotevant (1992) defined it as a core sense of self, a coherence of personality, a continuity of self over time, and a self in social context; Josselson (1994) viewed identity as the intersection of individual and society; McAdams (2001) explained identity as a life story which has both biographical and social elements which can be used in making identity by emerging adulthood.

The identity concept of this thesis is hence mainly concerned with the issue of how individuals relate to groups. Cultural identity is defined as the identity which describes the cultural self in content, evaluation and structure (Sussman, 2000). Cultural identity has often been conceptualised as coterminous with national identity; for example, an individual might think of oneself as Finnish or Swedish. An individual’s self-defined cultural identity may be different from the perception of others; for example, immigrants to New York from Korea and the Philippines are referred to collectively as Asian Americans5 although neither group consider themselves “Asian American”, and they are also uncertain what “Asian American” refers to (Sussman, 2000). Both the wider US public and these groups of immigrants adopt this nomenclature for political expedience. The self-defined identity in this case can be for example, “Filipinos living in the US” or “American Filipinos” instead.

5 “American” in this context refers to United States.

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This thesis uses the term “cultural identity” instead of “social identity” regardless of the prominent position of the Social Identity Theory (SIT) (Tajfel, 1978) in management studies in which this thesis is mainly situated. Indeed, cultural identity can be viewed as one type of social identity, which is an individual’s self-concept derived from perceived membership in a relevant social group (Turner and Oakes, 1986). In distinguishing the concept of “social identity” from “cultural identity”, Tajfel (1982) and Deaux (1993) pointed out that the awareness of membership is not essential in a particular social group. Culture may shape self-beliefs and self-motivated social behaviours, but culture’s consequences, i.e. the cultural identity itself, may not be recognised by its members. The concept of “cultural identity” is more suitable in studying the subtle individual change as a result of sustained cultural contact, in the case of expatriates living several years in another country for example, because SIT does not address the identity effects of sustained contacts (Sussman, 2000). As an example, a Finnish expatriate living in China for five years might not change his or her identity completely and become Chinese.

The other concept which is central to the conceptualisation of biculturalism is “cultural schema”. The concept of cultural schema used in this thesis follows the established definitions in psychology, which define it as a socially constructed cognitive system that represents one’s knowledge about values, attitudes, beliefs and behavioural assumptions of a culture, in addition to the relations among these attributes (Fiske, 1998; Fiske and Taylor, 1984, 2013). Similarly, the concept of schema is defined as a cognitive structure representing an individual’s knowledge (including evaluative beliefs) about an object, person, group, situation or event (Piaget, 1957; Vogel et al., 2014).

2.3 Biculturals and multiculturals: a clarification of terms

The concepts of biculturals and multiculturals are both used in existing literature referring to individuals who have internalised more than one cultural schema and/or identify with more than one culture. Most of the psychological research has focused on biculturals, who are individuals identifying with two cultures, though theoretically the processes could apply to individuals identifying with more than two cultures (Brannen and Lee, 2014). The current field of bicultural research in management studies also uses both the term “biculturals” and ‘multiculturals’. In the special issue on bicultural employees in organisations in International Journal of Cross Cultural Management, Brannen and Thomas (2010:5) explained the difference between ‘bicultural’ and ‘multicultural’:

“We use the term bicultural to mean individuals who have (either been ascribed by birth or who have acquired) more than one cultural schema. This is consistent with how the term is used in the literature and can refer to three or even more cultures. The term multicultural is typically used to refer to the existence of people from “many” distinct cultures and has thus come to be used synonymously with the term “diversity” by academics and practitioners in reference to workforce and social diversity .”

Later, in an influential conceptual paper on multicultural employees published in Academy of Management Review, Fitzsimmons (2013:526) also clarified the use of ‘multicultural’ in a similar manner, but used ‘multicultural’ as an umbrella term over ‘bicultural’:

“Technically, individuals who have internalised two or more cultural schemas are multicultural, while those who have internalised two cultural schemas are bicultural, but I refer to them all as multicultural for the sake of consistency.”

In a more recently published handbook on Multicultural Identity, Brannen and F. Lee (2014: 2) clearly stated that they use both terms interchangeably:

“We will use the terms biculturals and multiculturals interchangeably in this article. Both refer to individuals who identify with more than one culture. Most of the psychological research has focused on biculturals, or people who identify with two cultures, though theoretically the processes could apply to people who identify with more than two cultures.”

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The lack of consistency and clarity in the use of these two terms in the literature is mainly because of the disconnection between theory and practice. Specifically, I refer to the fact that the actual bicultural and multicultural individuals’ cultural identities and schemas are much more complicated than the current definition can entail. In theory, the number of cultures identified and internalised could be counted in number, yet in reality it is challenging to clearly define the number of cultures and especially to determine how distinct the different cultural components are for individuals. To problematise this further, related concepts examining how the different cultural elements interact and integrate with one another, such as bicultural identity integration, multicultural identity integration and identity plurality, have made it yet more challenging to clearly distinguish bicultural and multicultural in writing in absence of the particular context in which these individuals are referred to.

As stated in the introduction, I use bicultural as a proxy for multicultural in this thesis with two exceptions. First, multicultural is used when the third culture becomes theoretically and empirically relevant. For example, when I discuss the empirical results of this study, cosmopolitan expatriates with a distinct influence from the third culture are referred to as multiculturals instead of biculturals. Second, published work is referred to in the manner in which these two terms have been used in the corresponding authors’ own works.

The cultural identities and schemas of expatriates are understood theoretically from a multicultural perspective and empirically from a bicultural perspective. The underlying rationale is that the majority of the interviewees in this thesis are primarily concerned with two cultures, i.e. Finnish and Chinese, although they might have received influences from many other cultures before or during their current expatriation in China. Such a distinction is also consistent with my research journey – I began exploring this phenomenon with ‘bicultural’ in mind, yet discovered other realities, such as individuals who have experienced two distinct host cultures during their expatriation. I refer to other cultural influences apart from the second culture as ‘N-cultures’. Consistent with how these two terms have been used in the literature, ‘bicultural’ in this thesis implies the dominant influences of the two cultures while ‘multicultural’ connotes the more equally allocated influences of many cultures. Therefore, an individual can be either bicultural or multicultural depending on the actual significance of the ‘N-cultures’ influence. In theory, it is possible that a bicultural does not have any ‘N-culture’ influence. Figure 5 below is a simplified illustration of bicultural and multicultural individuals in this thesis. The size of the ‘N-culture’ circle reflects the distinctiveness of the other culture(s).

29

Figure 5 A simplified illustration of bicultural and multicultural individuals in this thesis

Below in Chapter 2.4, I will first review the literature in biculturalism and multiculturalism from the disciplines of psychology and management, followed by my conceptualisation of the concept ‘biculturalism’.

2.4 Biculturalism and multiculturalism6

‘Multiculturalism’ is a broader term referring literally to more than one culture (for example, two cultures, three cultures, and so on) and ‘biculturalism’ is a more specific term referring to two cultures (Nguyen and Benet-Martínez, 2010). However, in a manner similar to the use of ‘biculturals’ and ‘multiculturals’ in management and psychology, the terms ‘biculturalism’ and ‘multiculturalism’ have also been both used in the literature, and sometimes they are used interchangeably. Furthermore biculturalism and multiculturalism can be used at both individual and societal level. In this thesis, both terms are used at the individual level. As mentioned previously, most of the research in psychology has been based on biculturals (Brannen and Lee, 2014). Hence this chapter will mainly use the term biculturalism when reviewing relevant work on biculturalism which mainly builds upon work in psychology. In a manner similar to my use of the terms bicultural and multicultural, I also use biculturalism as a proxy for multiculturalism with two exceptions: first, when the third culture element is particularly relevant for the specific context; second, when directly referring to existing literature.

2.4.1 Acculturation-based biculturalism research7

The concept of biculturalism originated from the notion of double-consciousness as used in sociology to describe the state of being for African-Americans living in the United States (DuBois, 1903). It has also later been used to describe the experience of African-American organisational participants in the white-dominated work culture of the United States (Bell, 1990; Hernandez, 1979; Valentine, 1971). Much of our current understanding of biculturals

6 There is a large body of literature on multiculturalism in sociology, political science, cultural studies, social policy and migration studies which this thesis acknowledges. This thesis however builds mainly on the multiculturalism research in social psy chology. 7 Acculturation and biculturalism do not necessarily problematise the concept of “culture”. Some multicultural approaches do, some do not. (McLaren, 1995)

Finnish

N -Cultures

Chinese

Bicultural Multicultural

N -Cultures

Ch inese Finnish

30

originates from the field of psychology, which has conducted investigations of biculturals from the acculturation perspective.

Acculturation refers to the changes that occur as a result of contact with culturally dissimilar people, groups and social influences (Gibson, 2001). Acculturation theorists have mainly focused on the change in individuals’ cultural behaviour and cultural identity as a result of contact with other cultures (e.g. Berry, 1990). Acculturation research generally focuses on immigrants, refugees, and asylum seekers, who are assumed to be permanently settled in their new home-land (Schwartz et al., 2010). Berry’s (1976, 1990) models are probably the best known acculturation models for management scholars. There are four patters in Berry’s model (as illustrated in table 1 below): assimilation which is identification8 with only the mainstream culture; integration which is identification with both cultures; separation which is identification with only the culture of origin, and marginalisation which is not identifying with either culture. This model assumes that acculturating individuals need to deal with the extent to which they retain identification with their culture of origin and the extent to which they are allowed, or they allow themselves, to identify with the mainstream culture.

Table 1 Acculturation model (Berry, 1990)

Cultural Maintenance= YES

Cultural Maintenance= NO

Contact Participation= YES

Integration Assimilation

Contact Participation= NO

Separation/

Segregation

Marginalisation

Acculturation has been extensively researched in the past decades. However, despite three edited books (e.g. Berry et al., 2006; Chun et al., 2003; Sam and Berry, 2006) on acculturation since 2003 and over 1000 academic articles in the PsycInfo9 literature bases since the 1980s (Schwartz et al., 2010), there are still important challenges with regard to operational definitions, contextual forces and relationships to psychosocial and health outcomes (Rudmin, 2009; Rudmin, 2003). For example, Berry’s (1990) model assumes that the intersection of two cultures is an empty set and that a synergistic effect between the two cultures is not possible. Furthermore, acculturation is but one mechanism through which individuals are confronted with the task of defining themselves in terms of their culture.

The majority of the existing literature on acculturation has taken a limited path in studying only one of the three aspects: cultural practice (language use, media preferences, cultural customers and traditions, social affiliations, etc.), cultural identification (attachments to cultural groups and the positive esteem drawn from these attachments), and cultural value (belief systems associated with a specific context or group, for example the value placed on the individual person versus the value placed on the family or other group). Some 8 “Identification” here is different from both “identity” and “schema”. It refers to the action of “identifying”. 9 Psy cInfo is an expansive abstracting and indexing database with more than three billion records devoted to peer-reviewed literature in the behavioural sciences and mental health.

31

researchers (e.g. Chirkov, 2009) have proposed that these three approaches can be combined under the question of “what changes during the process of acculturation”. Schwartz et al. (2010) further proposed six components of acculturation, including the practices, values, and identifications of the heritage culture and those of the receiving culture. Furthermore Schwartz et al. (2010) proposed that acculturation is simultaneously a larger, higher order process and a set of related but somewhat independent dimensions, given that cultural practices, values and identifications tend to be at least modestly interrelated (e.g. Berry et al., 2006; Raffaelli et al., 2005; Schwartz et al., 2007; Zamboanga et al., 2006).

This expanded conceptualisation of acculturation presents important implications for research on biculturalism. Berry’s (1980) conceptualisation of integration refers to endorsing both the heritage and receiving culture, primarily from the perspective of cultural practices (Berry et al., 2006). Under the new conceptualisation of acculturation, biculturalism can be manifested in terms of practices, values, and/or identifications (Schwartz et al., 2010), as illustrated in Figure 6 below.

(Schwartz et al., 2010: 251)

Figure 6 The multidimensionality of acculturation.

The emerging, and burgeoning, research on biculturals and multiculturals in the management field is mostly built on biculturalism, which is often discussed in conjunction with acculturation and considered to be one of the four ways to acculturate (Nguyen and Benet-Martinez, 2012), being the most adaptive acculturative style (Birman, 1994). As illustrated in Figure 7 below, biculturalism becomes the synonym for the integration pattern in Berry’s (1990) model.

32

(Birman, 1994:270)

Figure 7 Illustration of biculturalism in relation to acculturation

The concept of biculturalism and the various biculturalism models have redefined acculturation as a two-dimensional process consisting of two independent processes of acculturation: one to the culture of origin and one to the new host culture (Berry et al., 1986; Mendoza, 1984; Szapocznik et al., 1980). Earlier acculturation research has generally taken an uni-dimensional approach to acculturation indicating a one-directional, irreversible move towards the new mainstream culture and away from the original culture (Birman, 1994; Nguyen and Benet Martínez, 2007).

In short, biculturalism research builds upon acculturation models by redefining it as a two-dimensional process in which the individual undertakes two separate processes of acculturation to both the culture of origin and the new host culture (Berry et al., 1986; Mendoza, 1984; Szapocznik et al., 1980). Hence, there is a clear distinction between acculturation and biculturalism, although “The use of acculturation as basis for studying biculturalism confuses the processes of becoming bicultural with the way in which people experience or manage their bicultural identities (Brannen and Thomas, 2010:7)”.

2.4.2 Definition of biculturalism: various approaches

Very like the literature on acculturation, the conceptualisation of biculturalism in management and psychology have also taken its separate path, with researchers taking up either identification perspective (individuals identifying with two or more cultures) or schema perspective (individuals having internalised more than one cultural schema), as these two perspectives may not necessarily correspond to each other. Individuals can internalise two or more cultural systems without having strong identifications to both or all of their cultural groups (Berry et al., 1989). Some studies have taken a combined perspective in defining who bicultural individuals are, for example Fitzsimmons (2013:525) defined multicultural employees as “those who identify with two or more cultures and have internalised associated cultural schema”. However a considerable number of scholars have taken an identity perspective (LaFromboise et al., 1993). Biculturalism has been commonly operationalized either through individuals’ attitudes towards or the act of identifying1 0 with two cultures (Berry et al., 1989; Bourhis et al., 1997; Der-Karabetian, 1980; Fernandez and Sanchez, 1992; Phinney, 1990; Phinney, 1992, 2000; Sayegh and Lasry, 1993; Szapocznik et al., 1980; Zak, 1976; Zak, 1973). 10 The term “identifying” here refers to identification at the individual level, which is different from how this term has been used in organisation studies in the context of “firm-level” identification.

33

Scholars also vary in the following three approaches in defining biculturalism. First, whether biculturalism is treated as an individual’s behaviour or ability to behave in a certain manner; second, whether scholars define biculturalism as an experience or define it from the bicultural individual’s perspective; third, whether biculturalism is researcher-defined or self-defined. In Table 2 below, I summarise the various definitions of biculturalism published in the management and psychology fields and group them into the corresponding categories from these three different approaches.

T

able

2

Pu

bli

shed

def

init

ion

s of

bic

ult

ura

lism

in m

anag

emen

t an

d p

sych

olog

y li

tera

ture

Dis

cip

lin

e D

efin

itio

n

Per

spec

tive

1

Iden

tity

/ S

chem

a

Per

spec

tive

2

Beh

avio

ur/

A

bil

ity

Per

spec

tive

3

Exp

erie

nce

/ In

div

idu

al

Per

spec

tive

4

Sel

f-d

efin

ed/

Res

earc

her

-d

efin

ed

Psy

chol

ogy

B

icul

tura

lism

ent

ails

the

synt

hesi

s of

cultu

ral n

orm

s fro

m tw

o gr

oups

into

on

e be

havi

oura

l rep

erto

ire

(Rot

hera

m-B

orus

, 199

3).

1.

B

ehav

iour

E

xper

ienc

e

Res

earc

her-

defin

ed

Psy

chol

ogy

It

refe

rs to

the

abili

ty to

sw

itch

betw

een

cultu

ral s

chem

as, n

orm

s, a

nd

beha

viou

rs in

resp

onse

to c

ultu

ral

cues

(Hon

g et

al.,

200

0).

Sche

ma

A

bilit

y

Exp

erie

nce

Res

earc

her-

defin

ed

Psy

chol

ogy

B

icul

tura

ls a

re th

ose

who

se se

lf-la

bel

or g

roup

self-

cate

gori

zatio

n re

flect

s th

eir

cultu

ral d

ualis

m (N

guye

n an

d B

enet

-Mar

tinez

, 200

7).

-

-

Indi

vidu

al

Self

-def

ined

Psy

chol

ogy

B

icul

tura

ls h

ave

a si

mul

tane

ous

awar

enes

s of b

eing

a m

embe

r,

som

etim

es a

n ou

tsid

er in

two

or m

ore

cultu

res (

LaFr

ombo

ise

et a

l., 1

993)

.

-

Abi

lity

In

divi

dual

R

esea

rche

r-de

fined

Psy

chol

ogy

In

divi

dual

s who

hav

e be

en e

xpos

ed to

an

d in

tern

alis

ed tw

o cu

lture

s (B

enet

-M

artin

ez e

t al.,

200

2).

-

Beh

avio

ur

Indi

vidu

al

Res

earc

her-

defin

ed

Psy

chol

ogy

In

divi

dual

s who

hav

e in

tern

alis

ed tw

o cu

lture

s to

the

exte

nt th

at b

oth

cultu

res a

re a

live

insi

de o

f the

m

(Hon

g et

al.,

200

0:71

0).

-

Beh

avio

ur

Indi

vidu

al

Res

earc

her-

defin

ed

Psy

chol

ogy

M

ultic

ultu

ral i

ndiv

idua

ls a

re th

ose

who

se se

lf-la

bel (

e.g.

“I a

m

mul

ticul

tura

l”) o

r gro

up se

lf-ca

tego

riza

tion

(e.g

. “I

am A

mer

ican

” an

d “I

am

Chi

nese

”; “I

am

Chi

nese

-A

mer

ican

”) re

flect

s the

ir c

ultu

ral

plur

alis

m (N

guye

n an

d B

enet

-M

artin

ez, 2

010:

89)

.

Iden

tity

-

In

divi

dual

Se

lf-de

fined

34

P

sych

olog

y

Mul

ticul

tura

lism

can

be

defin

ed a

s the

ex

peri

ence

of h

avin

g be

en e

xpos

ed to

an

d ha

ving

inte

rnal

ised

two

or m

ore

cultu

res (

Ngu

yen

and

Ben

et-M

artín

ez,

2010

:89)

, whi

ch fu

rthe

r cite

s Hon

g (2

000)

and

Ngu

yen

& B

enet

-Mar

tinez

(2

007)

.

-

-

Exp

erie

nce

R

esea

rche

r-de

fined

Psy

chol

ogy

The

abili

ty to

func

tion

effe

ctiv

ely

and

prod

uctiv

ely

with

in th

e co

ntex

t of

Am

eric

a’s c

ore

inst

itutio

ns w

hile

re

tain

ing

a se

nse

of se

lf an

d A

fric

an

ethn

ic id

entit

y (R

ashi

d, 1

984)

.

Iden

tity

A

bilit

y

Indi

vidu

al

Res

earc

her-

defin

ed

Psy

chol

ogy

Bic

ultu

ralis

m fo

r Am

eric

an In

dian

s as

invo

lvin

g du

al m

odes

of s

ocia

l be

havi

our t

hat a

re a

ppro

pria

tely

use

d in

diff

eren

t situ

atio

ns (

LaFr

ombo

ise

and

Row

e, 1

983)

.

B

ehav

iour

E

xper

ienc

e

Res

earc

her-

defin

ed

Psy

chol

ogy

A

n in

tegr

atio

n of

the

com

pete

nces

an

d se

nsiti

vitie

s as

soci

ated

with

two

cultu

res w

ithin

a si

ngle

indi

vidu

al

(Bur

iel a

nd S

aenz

, 198

0).

-

Abi

lity

In

divi

dual

R

esea

rche

r-de

fined

Man

agem

ent

B

icul

tura

ls id

entif

y w

ith tw

o (o

r mor

e)

dist

inct

cul

ture

s (B

rann

en a

nd

Thom

as, 2

010)

.

Iden

tific

atio

n

Beh

avio

ur

Indi

vidu

al

Self-

defin

ed

Man

agem

ent

B

icul

tura

lism

refe

rs to

the

stat

e in

w

hich

indi

vidu

als m

aint

ain

thei

r di

stin

ctiv

e cu

lture

s whi

le

sim

ulta

neou

sly

inte

ract

ing

with

and

le

arni

ng fr

om th

ose

of o

ther

cul

ture

s (B

ell a

nd H

arri

son,

199

6).

-

Stat

e

Exp

erie

nce

Res

earc

her-

defin

ed

Man

agem

ent

M

ultic

ultu

ral i

ndiv

idua

ls a

re th

ose

who

iden

tify

with

two

or m

ore

cultu

res a

nd h

ave

inte

rnal

ised

as

soci

ated

cul

tura

l sch

ema

(Fitz

sim

mon

s, 2

013)

.

Iden

tific

atio

n an

d sc

hem

a B

ehav

iour

In

divi

dual

R

esea

rche

r-de

fined

35

M

anag

emen

t M

ultic

ultu

ralis

m is

the

inte

rnal

re

pres

enta

tion

of m

ultip

le c

ultu

ral

mea

ning

syst

ems (

Lück

e et

al.,

201

3).

-

-

Exp

erie

nce

R

esea

rche

r-de

fined

Man

agem

ent

Indi

vidu

als w

ho id

entif

y w

ith m

ore

than

one

cul

ture

(Bra

nnen

and

Lee

, 20

14).

Iden

tific

atio

n

-

Indi

vidu

al

Self

-def

ined

36

37

Consistent with the definition for bicultural and multicultural individuals presented in the previous chapter (2.3), I define biculturalism from the perspective of the individual’s behaviour. I did not take an excluding approach (for example, fixating my approach on either identity or schema or either self-defined or researcher-defined) before entering the field. I have only formulated my own approach after the empirical study, which I will discuss in detail in Chapter 5.1. To summarise, the guiding definition on biculturalism for this thesis is:

Biculturalism is the phenomenon that individuals have internalised more than one cultural schema and/or identify with more than one culture.

2.4.3 Understanding biculturalism in the context of expatriates: a contextual approach

Bicultural individuals can be found in different groups: for example, immigrants, expatriates, international students, indigenous peoples, ethnic minorities and mixed-ethnicity individuals and individuals who are in inter-ethnic relationships (see Nguyen and Benet-Martinez, 2007), and also possibly among host-country employees in subsidiaries of multinational corporations (MNCs) (e.g. Caprar, 2011). Expatriates differ from the other groups in several ways. First, their residence in a foreign country is predominantly work-oriented, as described in details in Chapter 1.3.2. Second, expatriates also differ from other communities in terms of socioeconomic status. Third, exposure to the host country culture may have begun before expatriation. The current host country itself might not be completely new to some expatriates, who have already travelled, studied or worked there before the current expatriation, especially among self-initiated expatriates and among organisational expatriates who have had a longer tenure in the MNC.

Hence, in order to understand acculturation and biculturalism among expatriates, it is crucial to understand the interactional context in which it occurs (Crockett and Zamboanga, 2009; Rohmann et al., 2008). Such contexts are, for example, the characteristics of the migrants themselves, the groups or countries from which they originate, their socioeconomic status and resources, the country and local community in which they settle, and their proficiency in the language of the country of settlement (Schwartz et al., 2010). These contextual features all contribute to the theorising of biculturalism among expatriates in this thesis.

The term ‘biculturalism’ is used at the individual level to refer to the state of being and becoming bicultural. Similarly, consistent with the field of biculturalism research in IB and social psychology, the term ‘acculturation’ is used in this study to refer to the process of internalising a new cultural schema. However, this study tends to avoid using the term ‘acculturation’ because of the previously-stated assumptions that this term connotes. Such a process tends to be referred to as the “experience of becoming bicultural and multicultural” without implying that one needs to give up one’s culture of origin and that the acculturation direction is from acculturating group to the dominant group.

2.5 Language11

The term “language” has been widely studied across disciplines, such as linguistics, sociology and psychology. This thesis builds on Language in International Business Research, which is an emerging but yet burgeoning stream of research focusing on various issues of language in the IB context: for example, language and global business expansion, translation issues within MNCs, language’s impact on coordination, networks, knowledge transfer, human

11 More extensive discussions on the language in IB research are in essays 3 and 4.

38

resource management and corporate strategy. Within the context of expatriate research, scholars have examined language’s multi-faceted impacts on a myriad of issues, such as recruitment, training and development and career pathing (Piekkari et al., 2014), control (Björkman and Piekkari, 2009), social identity (Lauring, 2008) and cross-cultural adjustment (Selmer, 2006).

This thesis is concerned with language issues related to expatriates’ work in MNC subsidiaries and their life in the host country. Expatriates constantly face the dilemma of speaking their mother tongue or speaking in the corporate lingua franca in MNC subsidiaries. In Lahtinen’s (2000) study, Finnish expatriates working at the Finnish MNC subsidiaries in Italy were concerned about whether they should only speak English at work, so that their Italian colleagues can improve their English because all employees were expected to communicate with MNC’s other subsidiaries in English. Expatriates also face difficult decisions regarding the host country language. In Marschan-Piekkari’s (1999) study, some of the expatriates selected for assignments in MNC subsidiaries started to learn the host country language in order to enhance their work performance, which in turn benefited their careers in the long term. Peltokorpi (2007) suggest that expatriates’ lack of host country language proficiency and HCNs’ lack of English proficiency reduce the interaction effectiveness and the willingness to engage in rich and effective conversations from both sides. Expatriates’ language proficiency in general is suggested to have a positive impact on expatriates’ adjustment to the host country in various aspects such as work and general interaction with HCNs (Selmer, 2006).

Consistent with the literature on language in IB, language is defined in this thesis as a multi-layered and multi-faceted concept consisting of everyday spoken/written language, company jargon and technical/professional language (Piekkari et al., 2014; Welch et al., 2005). Company jargon is also referred to as ‘company speak’, which is characterised by the use of acronyms, special terms and management process terminology specific to the company; moreover, company jargon tends to evolve over time. Technical/professional language is a coded language shared within and between groups, which can be used to exclude others from a specific group.

As company jargon and technical/professional language tend to be in English for expatriates working in China, the focus of language issues of this thesis is everyday language, which has three components: the expatriates’ mother tongue, the corporate lingua franca and the host country language. Spoken language tends to be the focus since, in contrast to written language for the expatriates’ mother tongue and host country language, MNC subsidiaries in China tend to adopt English as the main written language for communication.

2.6 Cross-cultural adjustment

The concept of adjustment has been referred to as “international adjustment” and “cross-cultural adjustment” interchangeably in the existing psychology and management literature.

The psychology literature has proposed three facets of adjustment: psychological adjustment (Ward and Kennedy, 1994), sociocultural adjustment (Searle and Ward, 1990) and work adjustment (Aycan and Berry, 1996; Hawes and Kealey, 1981). Psychological adjustment refers to psychological well-being, which is feeling reasonably happy considering all things, such as being able to enjoy daily activities and face up to one’s problems (Ward and Kennedy, 1994). Sociocultural adjustment refers to individuals’ progress in becoming effective in the society and engaging in positive interpersonal relations with host country nationals, and the ability to handle problems outside work (Aycan, 1997). Work adjustment refers to behaviours which result in effective completion of one’s required tasks and the expressing of positive attitudes towards the new work role (Aycan and Berry, 1996; Dawis and Lofquist, 1984).

39

Ward and Kennedy (1994) further distinguished psychological adjustment and sociocultural adjustment. These two concepts are interrelated conceptually, but psychological adjustment focuses on subjective well-being or states of mood, such as depression, anxiety, tension and fatigue, while sociocultural adjustment is more related to the individual’s ability to fit into the host culture and is measured by the amount of difficulty experienced in managing everyday situations (Ward and Kennedy, 1994). Selmer (2000) further pointed out that the sociocultural notion of adjustment is based on cultural learning theory, which highlights social behaviour and practical skills instead of attitudinal factors implied in the psychological adjustment. Jun et al. (1997)suggested that behaviour changes may occur under certain circumstances while attitudinal changes are likely to be more voluntary and less dominated by the context. Furnham and Bochner (1986) also suggested that expatriates do not need to undergo a fundamental change in values in order to conform to a new set of cultural norms in a new culture. It is considered to be sufficient for expatriates to learn new social and cultural skills, almost in the same way as one learns a foreign language (Selmer, 2000).

In the expatriation literature, researchers have in general supported a multi-faceted theorising of cross-cultural adjustment (Black, 1988; Black et al., 1991; Mendenhall and Oddou, 1985; Shaffer and Harrison, 1998). Black and Stephens (1989) identified three facets of adjustment: adjustment to work, adjustment to interactions with host nationals and adjustment to the general environment. Work adjustment refers to the degree of feeling psychologically comfortable regarding different work values, expectations and standards (e.g. Black and Stephens, 1989). Interaction (Intercultural) adjustment is the degree of feeling psychologically comfortable regarding different communication and interpersonal styles in the host country (e.g.,(Black and Stephens, 1989). General adjustment refers to one’s degree of psychological comfort with local food, health care, entertainment, shopping, housing and living conditions in general (e.g. Black et al., 1991; Black and Stephens, 1989). These three facets, adjustment to work, adjustment to interactions with host nationals and adjustment to the general environment, are also referred to as work, interaction and general (cultural) adjustment in the literature. These three aspects (adjustment to work, adjustment to interacting with host country nationals and adjustment to general environment) are concept-wise respectively similar to work adjustment, sociocultural adjustment and psychological adjustment in the acculturation literature (Aycan, 1997), as shown as below in Table 3.

Table 3 Facets of adjustment

Acculturation Literature

Work Adjustment

Sociocultural Adjustment

Psychological Adjustment

Expatriation Literature

Adjustment to Work

Adjustment to Interacting with Host Country National (HCN)

Adjustment to General Environment

Expatriation Literature

Work Adjustment

Interaction (Intercultural) Adjustment

General (Sociocultural/cultural) Adjustment

In order to be consistent with most of the literature in expatriation, this study builds on the following definition: Cross-cultural adjustment consists of work adjustment, interaction adjustment and general adjustment, as the degree to which individuals feel psychologically comfort and familiar with different aspects of a foreign culture (Black, 1988; Black et al., 1991; Church, 1982; Mendenhall and Oddou, 1985).

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3 METHODOLOGY

In this chapter, I will first discuss the ontological, epistemological and methodological assumptions that I adopted in this study. Then, the detailed research design of this thesis will be introduced in two sections: the method, data and analysis of the initial study and the main study. I will then discuss the research ethics, limitations and end this chapter with reflections on gender and the researcher’s role.

3.1 Research philosophy: ontological, epistemological and methodological assumptions

3.1.1 Epistemological assumptions and development

This dissertation is situated in the field of cross-cultural management, a field that has been dominated by positivist studies. Positivist cross-cultural management studies investigate the relationship between culture and organisational behaviour with a particular focus on ideational aspects of culture (Romani, 2008). Such studies are in general fundamentally based on a binary logic as a universal truth (Lowe, 2001). Conceptualisations over consciousness, structural knowledge over processes and delimitations over integration and synthesis are usually imposed by positivist cross-cultural management studies (Lowe, 2002).

Although the positivist epistemology has its own value in certain cross-cultural management studies, it is not fully applicable to all studies, and there is no reason to exclude interpretive cultural studies in the management field. For example, when relating to the Chinese empirical context, dimensions of Confucian Dynamism or Long Term versus Short Term Orientation (Hofstede, 2001) should not be understood as poles of opposition (Fang, 2003). The Interpretive paradigm is often characterised by particular or local cultural knowledge in cross-cultural management studies (Romani, 2008). Such characteristics are often associated with emic approaches. An emic approach examines a phenomenon from a local perspective and from within a culture. The other, opposite, approach is the etic approach, which develops understandings of a phenomenon by making comparisons across cultures, for example, a large-scale cross-national survey on the role of openness of personality during acculturation. Scholars have recently proposed combining the emic and etic types of studies (e.g. Harris, 2000; Jun and Sorenson, 2004; Schaffer and Riordan, 2003). It is considered good to integrate local knowledge of a country when applying theories developed in the West in the local context (Tsui et al., 2007).

Instead of viewing the two approaches as irreconcilable, in this thesis I propose the view that there are deep similarities rather than deep differences underlying the positivist and interpretive paradigm (Weber, 2004). The constructive interplay between the positivist and interpretive approach has provided me with a more critical lens when researching the interactions between expatriates and their surroundings. Furthermore, the complex cultural organisations which are characterised by the multi-faceted and contextually-situated interactions are also in need of a more nuanced epistemological approach instead of a predominantly positivist one (Redding, 1994). The overall rationale of this thesis is positivist in the sense that I believe that there are broader and general structures, patterns and probabilities. For example, I believe there are certain ways that a monocultural individual internalises a new culture. I also believe certain antecedents, such as host country language competence and previous cultural exposure, influence expatriates’ cross-cultural adjustment and development of biculturalism. However, I also try to make sense of expatriates’ living and working experiences abroad from an interpretive perspective, paying attention to their meanings and interpretations during their narrations of their experiences. I try to

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understand the multicultural experiences of expatriates from the viewpoint of expatriates and their host country colleagues.

I am also aware that my cultural background and life experiences – being an ethnic Chinese born and raised in Mainland China; moving to Hong Kong at the adolescence age; acculturated into Finland but continued expatriating around the world – have impacted on this research. For example, my own understanding of the Chinese and Finnish people as well as these societies has played an important role when choosing the empirical context of this study. Both Finnish expatriates and Chinese host country employees are rather closed groups. Being able to gain their trust via their mother tongue and obtain a sufficient degree of access was crucial in securing rich data on the research topic. I decided not to shy away from my culture of origin and the new cultures which I have internalised. The IB field is characterized by researchers having deep contextual knowledge of diverse cultural contexts by virtue of their country-of-origin, education and work experiences (Birkinshaw et al., 2011a). Sullivan et al. (2011) also advocated that IB researchers should capitalise on our diverse multicultural backgrounds and bring in our unique perspectives to the IB field. Partially because of my previous research assistance experience prior to the major work undertook for this thesis, I have been aware that my deep understanding of both cultures can also potentially become a hindrance if I let it restrain my understanding of informants’ interpretation. I have constantly reflected upon my role at different stages of this study.

The epistemological assumption of this thesis has experienced its own various development stages, as I have been influenced by both positivist and interpretive approaches. This thesis has been conducted under the influences of both positivist and interpretive approaches as a result of my own development in research interests, the various influences that I have received during the PhD study and my uptake of these influences. Furthermore, as an ethnic Chinese, I have been exposed to dialectical thinking embedded in the Chinese philosophical paradigm, such as Yin Yang (Fang, 2012) and Chinese Dialectical Thought (Peng and Nisbett, 2000), which denies the reality of true contradiction, accepts the unity of opposites, regards the co-existence of opposites as permanent and considers belief in genuine contradiction is a kind of error. Such dialectical thinking is different from the Western dialectical thinking, i.e. the Hegelian and Marxist styles, which believe that contradictions require synthesis rather than acceptance (Peng and Nisbett, 2000). Furthermore, the unity of opposites is considered temporary, transitory and conditional, while conflict, contradiction and the struggle of opposing tendencies are viewed as permanent (Lenin, 1961). Partially as a result of this ‘inbuilt’ dialectical thinking, I was not overly disturbed by my inability to choose one epistemological paradigm and am comfortable with ongoing complexity.

At the beginning of my PhD, I was seeking the answer to “whether adult individuals can develop biculturalism”. Then the question became more process-oriented with more questions of “how” and “why”, such as “How does the process of acculturation occur?”, “How does host country language proficiency influence the multicultural experience” and “Why do expatriates have different experiences in terms of multiculturalism?” I also soon realised that it was challenging to capture the complex acculturation process from one single epistemological stand when I explored the conceptualisation of terms such as ‘culture’. There is more than one way of becoming bicultural1 2, and there are nuances and complexity in the acculturation process as well as results. Simple causal relationships are difficult to make in such a complex social and cultural process. Thus, I repeatedly considered whether I should be a positivist and only record what knowers say or take a more interpretative perspective – questioning what has already been interpreted.

Furthermore, during this PhD journey I found myself constantly pondering on the ‘ultimate truth’ issue. Is the statement produced by a researcher true when it has a one-to-one 12The v arious ways of becoming bicultural as such could also be studied positivistically.

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mapping to the reality which exists beyond the human mind (a correspondence theory of truth) or should a researcher’s initial interpretation of the phenomenon confirm to the meaning given to the phenomenon through the researcher’s lived experience of it (Weber, 2004)? How do I know that my interviewees are telling the ‘truth’? Many of them sounded rather confused about their lives abroad1 3. Some were defensive and only referred to other expatriates’ negative experiences instead of reflecting on their own. Towards the second half of the PhD, I believed that interviewees’ narratives were close to the truth, but they were not the ‘ultimate truth’. I assumed that there were some general patterns of expatriates’ development of biculturalism. For example, being exposed to other cultures might help expatriates to internalise a new cultural system and speaking the host country language is potentially helpful for monocultural expatriates to become bicultural. However, I emphasised the importance and sensitivity of the empirical context in my dissertation in terms of theory development. I did not claim that Nordic expatriates’ development of biculturalism in China applies to the rest of the population and all countries. I questioned how a finite number of observations can ever justify a universal conclusion. Indeed, one cannot generalise with any certainty from events which one has experienced to those which one has not yet experienced (Hume, 1975; Hume and Steinberg, 1993). There is a missing link between what is known and what is unknown. I do not assume that the expatriates interviewed by me and the rest of the expatriates develop biculturalism in the same manner.

However, research findings in one empirical context can be applied to another new empirical context with caution. Empirical contexts with the following characteristics might share similarities with the research findings of this thesis: 1) Both home country and host country are relatively homogenous; 2) Host country language is considered to be difficult or very different from home country language; 3) The skin colour of the majority of the host country nationals and home country nationals differ; 4) The social, economic and political relationship of the home country and host country is complicated in the sense that it is difficult to pinpoint which country is considered the superior and more desirable acculturation destination. The theoretical frameworks that I developed in this thesis are guidelines instead of predictors for other unknown expatriate individuals. Furthermore, being influenced by interpretive epistemology, I did not assume the empirical pre-existence of social structures; instead, I bring them into existence by talking about them. I searched for links between meanings and analysed how expatriates produce a coherent story about their living and working experiences in the host country. By posing the question this way, I was not equating what expatriates tell in the interviews with what they do in their work and life. Importantly, I believed that human mind is not a passive receiver of sense data; instead, it processes the data through reflecting. When my interviewees gave me the story, they had already processed the “original” story.

3.1.2 Methodological assumptions

Data for my dissertation project were primarily collected via interviewing and observation. The main reason for adopting a qualitative method is the complexity of expatriation and biculturalism, which is especially relevant in my chosen empirical context – Nordic expatriates in China. At an earlier stage of my dissertation, I examined various existing scales in social psychology on the measurement of biculturalism. I came to the conclusion that the empirical context of my research is very different from those contexts from which the current scales were developed. Biculturalism is less known for both Finland/Sweden and China, which are relatively more homogeneous societies than, for example, the United States. The issue of significant difference in skin colour is also more prominent in my research context. Compared to Europeans in the United States, Nordics are likely to have more difficulty in integrating into China. Furthermore, the most accepted scales in psychology (e.g. Benet- 13 The phenomenon of being confused as such could also be a structural pattern. Thus, it could also be studied positiv istically.

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Martinez and Haritatos, 2005) focus on how different cultural identities integrate with each other, rather than on the antecedents of biculturalism. Another important reason is that only in-depth interviews could capture the richness of the biculturalism development process. I was dubious about conducting a survey testing causal relationships about a complicated social and cultural process among a group of dynamic and diverse professionals, especially when I did not have a preliminary understanding of the phenomena.

One methodological assumption that I made was the assumption of a neutral observational language. Such an issue is challenging in all cross-cultural research settings. It is difficult to stay neutral when there is more than one language. Translation is unavoidable in my research. I was aware that such a process is hardly unbiased. Early on, Wittgenstein (1922) argued that language gains its meaning from its direct correspondence with the objects of an external reality. A sentence can only be meaningful in two ways: 1) by picturing a fact; 2) by analysis breaking it down into more basic sentences which picture facts. When analysis is conducted based on interpreted/constructed translated versions of words, it is challenging to draw the boundary of language meaning and absolute reality. I analysed the Chinese data in Chinese, Finnish data in Finnish, and only translated the finalised codes into English.

3.1.3 Summary

To summarise, I began working on this thesis with a positivist approach in mind, but became more influenced by interpretive thinking towards the second half of the PhD journey. Taking both positivist and interpretive approaches into consideration in the same study has helped me gain “binocular vision” (Morgan, 1986). Multi-paradigmatic studies combine scope and heterogeneity (Alvesson, 1996; Alvesson and Deetz, 2000) and can also better assess the phenomenon researched and the way in which the study can be carried out (Romani, 2008). While I am against the universal approach on culture, I feel that a certain degree of generalisation is needed when discussing culture. There is the assumption that the host country culture is the dominating national or organisational culture. I contextualised this assumption by specifying that, for example, it falls under the scope of employees from multinational corporations’ subsidiaries in China. I found it difficult to discuss the internalisation of the host country culture system or schema without making this assumption. I analysed expatriates’ accounts and stories in a more interpretative manner while committing to the main positivism tenets. I made interpretations from both expatriates’ and host country employees’ viewpoints and reflected on my influences on their viewpoints. Essays 3 and 4 were written in the first half of my PhD and are therefore more positivist in terms of data analysis and theorising. Essays 1 and 2 were written in the second half of the PhD, and I adopted a more interpretive approach in analysing the data and questioning my interpretations and theorising. Essay 5 is most interpretive in approach, reflecting on the role of a multicultural researcher during the data collection. The epistemological development in the five essays is illustrated in Table 4 below.

Figure 8 The continuum of epistemological development in the five essays

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Overall, I see the interaction between positivism and interpretivism as a fruitful and productive relationship. Table 4 below provides a summary of my epistemological and methodological stand in this thesis.

Table 4 Summary of epistemological and methodological assumptions in this thesis

Metatheoretical assumptions about

Positivism Interpretivism My view in this thesis

Ontology Researcher and reality are separate.

Researcher and reality are inseparable (life-world).

There are certain realities exist beyond researcher. However, it is difficult to separate researcher from the ‘research reality’.

Epistemology Objective reality exists beyond the human mind.

Knowledge of the world is intentionally constituted through researcher’s lived experience.

Biculturalism exists beyond the researcher’s mind. However the biculturalism among expatriates has been constituted through the researcher’s mind.

Research object

Research object has inherent qualities that exist independently of the researcher.

Research object is interpreted in light of meaning structure of researcher’s lived experience.

Expatriates exist independently of the researcher.

Method Statistics, content analysis, etc.

Hermeneutics, phenomenology, etc.

Grounded theory method (Charmaz, 2000)

Theory of Truth

Correspondence theory of truth: one-to-one mapping between research statements and reality

Truth as intentional fulfilment: interpretations of research object match lived experience of object.

Whether expatriates are ‘truly’ bicultural is not the most important question that this thesis is after. There are certain acculturation patterns that the researcher can map out, but this thesis also emphasises the interpretations of the expatriates.

Validity Certainty: data truly measures reality.

Defensible knowledge claims.

Defensible knowledge claims.

Reliability Replicability: research results can be reproduced.

Interpretive awareness: researchers recognise and address implications of their subjectivity.

Researcher recognises and addresses implications of their subjectivity.

(Adapted from Weber, 2004)

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3.2 Research design

The methodology section of this thesis consists of two sections in different time frames. During 2006 and 2007, I was employed as a research assistant in my university for a research project examining various issues during MNC cross-border operation, including the language challenges at MNC subsidiaries. I became employed elsewhere towards the end of this project and returned to my university for PhD study a few years later in 2011. Although this brief sojourn outside academia gave me a new perspective on what I wanted to research, I was nevertheless influenced by the earlier research project. When I identified the importance of language themes during the 2012-2013 data collection, the follow-up questions asked were in line with the earlier interview questions on language. I then combined the language-related data from two phases for Essays 3 and 4. Table 5 below summarises the conceptual phases I experienced during my PhD journey.

Table 5 Conceptual phase

Phase Theme Details 9.2011 Culture I began the research journey with the antecedents of

biculturalism. Although language skill was one of the antecedents, it was not one of the most prominent determining factors in a conceptual paper1 4 I wrote in 2012.

5-12.2012 Language The theme of “language skills” kept occurring in the first few interviews I conducted in May 2012.

I followed the lead of interviewees and asked many follow-up questions about expatriates’ host country language skills.

I remembered the language themes researched in the 2006-2007 project as I participated in the interviews with expatriates in China then.

I read the transcripts related to language and revisited the interview guides.

Finally, I made language one of the three sections in the revised interview guide for the second phase data collection.

12.2012 Culture including language

Language has thus become an important part of this thesis.

The main research design of this thesis (2012-2013) was formulated when I was a visiting PhD student at Peking University. In the IB field, in which this thesis mainly situates, the most widely used measures of cultural differences in IB are all quantitative and value-based, such as Hofstede (1980), GLOBE (House et al., 2004; Tung and Verbeke, 2010) and Schwartz (1992). The acculturation study in social psychology, on which this thesis is based, relies heavily on quantitative methods. Furthermore, I was visiting the Department of Organizational Behavior, which was strongly characterised by experiment and survey-oriented studies. Under all these influences, I began this study by reviewing various scales

14 Zhang, L. E. The Development of Biculturalism among Organisational Expatriates and Self -initiated Expatriates. Paper presented at the 28th European Group for Organizational Studies Colloquium, Helsinki, Finland (July 2012).

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measuring biculturalism and bicultural identity integration, which are the closest available measures in psychology related to the research question of this study.

Scales that I considered using were, for example, the biculturalism measurement developed in the context of Puerto Rican adults in the United States (Cortés et al., 1994), which contained ten questions for each culture, such as “How important is it to you to celebrate holidays in the American way?”, “How much are Puerto Rican values a part of your life?”, “How many days a week would you like to eat American food?”, “Do you think Puerto Ricans are kind and generous?”; and the Bicultural Involvement Scale (Szapocznik et al., 1980) developed in the context of Hispanic-American youths, which contains questions such as “How comfortable do you feel speaking Spanish?” and “How much do you enjoy American music?”.

I also reviewed acculturation- and identification-oriented scales, such as the identification scale developed by Roccas et al. (2008), which includes four dimensions of collective identification: importance, commitment, superiority and deference with questions such as “I feel strongly affiliated with this group”, “It is important to me that others see me as a member of this group” and “This group is better than other groups in all respects”; and the acculturation integration strategy scale (Ryder et al., 2000).

At an early phase of my PhD, I wrote a conceptual paper proposing the antecedents leading to biculturalism that I was planning to test with survey data. I could not find the answers to many questions by applying existing scales developed in a different context to the Nordic expatriates in China. For example, how will the work-related dimensions affect the result of biculturalism? Existing scales have been mostly used with students in psychology. Can these scales be adapted for a population which is not characterised by biculturalism? Unlike a settlers’ society such as Canada (Sibley and Ward, 2013), China has not received a great amount of immigrants in the recent history. As noted in Chapter 1.3.1, China is still in the process of trying to understand how to cope with the increasing foreign population. I was not convinced that I could adapt existing scales to a predominantly monocultural population that was based on established work in psychology about the formulation of cultural schema before adulthood (Muuss, 1968). I was also considering developing biculturalism measurements for expatriates in China. However, when I began reading about grounded theory, I became more convinced that this would be a more suitable methodology to pursue. I explain this method in detail in Chapter 3.4.

Table 6 below illustrates how these two phases of data sets are used in this thesis. I used the data collected in 2006-2007 on language issues in Essay 3 and Essay 4. I also reflected on my interviewing experiences from 2006 – 2007 in Essay 5. As for the first two essays, 1 and 2, I only used the data collected in 2012-2013.

Table 6 The use of data in two phases

Data from the Initial Study in 2006-2007

Data from the Main Study in 2012-2013

Essay 1 -

Essay 2 -

Essay 3 Essay 4 Essay 5

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3.3 Initial study: 2006-2007

Essays 3, 4, and 5 of this thesis have used interview data with 28 expatriates and their host country national colleagues from a two-year research project entitled “Cross Border Competence Management in Russia and China”15, for which I worked as a research assistant from March 2006 to October 2007. The objective of this project was to examine the cross-border competence management of four Finland-based MNCs operating in Russia and China. The methodology adopted for this project was case study, which is an “empirical inquiry that investigates a contemporary phenomenon within its real-life context, especially when the boundaries between phenomenon and context are not clearly evident” (Yin, 2003:13). Two MNCs operating in Russia and two operating in China were selected for the exploration of cross-border competence management. There were in total four phases in that project with varying focuses, such as dynamic capability, language and competence, cultural differences and transfer of human resource management practices. Interview data with 11 expatriates and 17 host country employees conducted in two MNC subsidiaries in China were used for this thesis. Among these 28 interviews, I conducted seven interviews with host country employees independently in Chinese, 20 interviews with expatriates and host country employees in English, together with one or two members of the project team. The remaining interview was conducted by two project members in English 16. These 28 interviews had a clear focus on the language issues faced by expatriates and their host country national colleagues in the MNC subsidiaries. The interview questions asked were, for example, “Could you tell me about the role that language plays in your daily work, in this subsidiary and between the headquarters and this unit? Can you describe the language skills that people have in this unit? In what ways do language and language skills influence your work and the operations in general in this unit? Are there any language barriers? Do you speak Chinese? How does that then influence your work and your relationship with the local staff? In what ways do language and language skills affect one’s position or status in the company?”, all of which are consistent with the language-related questions posed in the data collection during 2012 and 2013.

3.4 Main Study: 2012-2013

3.4.1 Grounded Theory methodology

The Grounded Theory method was developed by the sociologists Barney G. Glaser and Anselm L. Strass (Glaser and Strauss, 1965; Glaser and Strauss, 1967) in their work on the phenomenon of dying in hospitals in the early 1960s in the United States (Charmaz, 2006). This was a time when hospital staffs there seldom talked about, or even acknowledged, dying with seriously ill patients. Glaser and Strauss’s research team developed systematic methodological strategies for social scientists to study other topics. Their book The Discovery of Grounded Theory (1967) first articulated the data collection and analysis strategies and advocated theory-developing instead of deducing testable hypotheses from existing theories. They proposed that systematic analysis could generate abstract theoretical explanations of social processes.

Grounded theory has developed into somewhat divergent directions since then (Charmaz, 2000) since Glaser and Strauss represent two contrasting and competing traditions in sociology, as reflected in the background of the originators: Columbia University positivism and Chicago school pragmatism and field research (Charmaz, 2006). Glaser received

15 The project team consisted of five Finnish- and Swedish-speaking researchers, one Russian-speaking PhD student, and two Chinese-speaking research assistants. 16 The challenge of conducting these interviews in different languages is further elaborated on in Essay 5.

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rigorous quantitative training in Columbia University and advocated rigorous codified methods emphasising emergent discoveries, while Strauss viewed human beings as active agents in their lives instead of passive recipients of larger social forces, as reflected in the pragmatist philosophical tradition at the University of Chicago (Blumer, 1969; Mead, 1932). Pragmatism informed symbolic interactionism, which assumes that society, reality and self are constructed through interaction and such construction relies on language and communication; therefore, interaction is inherently dynamic and interpretive. Symbolic interactionism believes that people do not respond mechanically to stimuli; instead, they can and do think about their actions. While Glaser remained consistent in defining grounded theory as a method of discovery, treating categories as emergent from the data and relying on direct and often narrow empiricism, Strauss and his co-author Corbin (Strauss and Corbin, 1990; Strauss and Corbin, 1998; Strauss, 1987) moved the grounded theory method towards verification, which was contended by Glaser (1992) as forcing data and analysis into preconceived categories.

Grounded theory was to a great extent the result of Glaser and Strauss’s critique of the dominance of positivistic quantitative research in the 1960s, yet it also became known for its positivistic assumptions despite its rigor and usefulness (Charmaz, 2006). A stream of scholars have moved grounded theory away from the positivist assumptions in Glaser, Strauss and Corbin’s work (Bryant, 2002; Charmaz, 2000, 2002a; Clarke, 2003; Clarke, 2005; Seale, 1999). The basic grounded theory guidelines such as coding, memo-writing, data analysis and comparative methods are in many ways neutral in terms of epistemology (Charmaz, 2006).

This thesis views the grounded theory method as a set of systematic yet flexible principles and guidelines for collecting and analysing qualitative data to construct theories ‘grounded’ in the data (Charmaz, 2010) and as a practical method for conducting research focusing on the interpretive process by analysing the meaning production of social actors in real settings (Suddaby, 2006).

3.4.2 Method justification

There are several reasons for adopting the grounded theory method (Charmaz, 2006; Gephart, 2004; Suddaby, 2006) to study the multicultural experiences of expatriates.

First, there is very little empirical work on how individuals become multicultural at workplaces in the current literature. The formulation of biculturalism research has focused predominantly on children, as it is typically assumed that the cultural schema formulates before one reaches adulthood (Muuss, 1968). Adolescence is considered a period of profound changes as it involves a difficult transformation from childhood to adulthood (Newman and Newman, 1997; Nielsen, 1996). For example, past research has discovered that the critical period for forming the bicultural identity for Japanese children who lived abroad is at the age of 9-12 (Kanno, 2000), and it was also during adolescence that Latin American females were shown to proceed steadily towards forming a new cultural identity while maintaining their original cultural profile (Goodenow and Espin, 1993). Based on a sample of 63 respondents living in Hong Kong with a mean age of 14.11 years, Selmer and Lam (2004) discovered that children who had spent a significant part of their childhood or adolescence years in cultures other than the culture of their parents had distinct characteristics in terms of their perceptions of being international as well as their international mobility preferences and consequences, and they also develop a third-culture-ness.

It is only in recent years that scholars have begun to notice that adult individuals can also be exposed to and internalise more than one culture in the increasingly globalised world (Brannen and Thomas, 2010). The world’s workforce has changed rapidly in the past two decades, yet there is a lack of empirical understanding of multiculturalism at workplaces.

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Recent research in cross-cultural management extending biculturalism research to the workplace (Brannen and Thomas, 2010; Fitzsimmons, 2013; Fitzsimmons et al., 2012; Lakshman, 2013) are predominantly conceptual – recognizing the importance of multicultural and multilingual individuals in organisations and emphasising the heterogeneity of the global workforce. The majority of the existing empirical work related to expatriate acculturation has focused predominantly on cross-cultural adjustment (e.g. Selmer and Lauring, 2014) and transitional identity (e.g. Sussman, 2000).

Second, in the history of acculturation research the focus has been on individuals from less-developed places to more-developed places, such as Europeans who escaped from Ellis Island at the beginning of the 20th century, and Cubans and Mexicans to the United States in the 1950s and 1960s. Significant identity and biculturalism models were developed to address the experiences of African (US) Americans (Cross, 1971; Helms, 1984) and Hispanic (US) Americans (Szapocznik et al., 1980). There is barely any empirical study on the acculturation process among individuals from more-developed places to less-developed places, especially when the ‘localness’ of the host country is strongly related to skin colour and ethnicity. Since the empirical contexts of Caucasian Chinese are so different from Hispanic (US) Americans in terms of institutional structure of the home and host country, immigration policies, ethnic hierarchy and so on, I believe a grounded theory approach is advantageous in order to address better the different acculturation experiences individuals have in the chosen research context of this study. As one of the most frequently cited psychologists, also most known to the management scholars, has noted:

“Cross-cultural psychologists take seriously the view that findings from research in one culture area of the world (or even in a few societies) cannot be generalized to others.” (Berry, 2005:700-701)

As Birkinshaw et al. noted in the following quote, the aim of inductive grounded theory study on expatriates’ experiences of becoming bicultural is to theorise on the general phenomenon of biculturalism based on the diverse and dynamic expatriate individuals’ social activities, their own accounts as well as their host country colleagues’ accounts on expatriates’ work-related life aspects –such theorising may be either ‘grand’ or ‘mid-range1 7 ’.

“Instead of a grand theory of acculturation for expatriates that seeks to capture the modes by which members of a minority culture interact with those from the majority culture, a mid-range theory that fine-tunes the categories of members of majority and minority cultures can shed greater insights into that process. Mid-range theories focus on a “unique set of images” (Pinder and Moore, 1979: 100) that characterise observable aspects of separate social phenomena, rather than the more ambitious attempt to build “grand theories” (Merton, 1968) that seek to explain activities and actions across all societies (Ritzer, 1975).” (Birkinshaw et al., 2011a:576)

Third, the expatriation phenomenon has in recent years become much more complicated than that found in the majority of existing expatriate literature since the 1960s, which typically treats expatriates as a relatively homogeneous group. A recent stream of emerging yet burgeoning research has emphasised the diversity of expatriates and the new forms of expatriation, such as self-initiated expatriates. For example, Mayerhofer et al. (2004) pointed out that globalization and internationalization of business have resulted in the increasingly complicated and frequent nature of international assignments. Collings et al. (2007) proposed a new range of roles and career paths for expatriates. New terms such as “international itinerants” (Banai and Harry, 2004) and “independent internationally mobile professionals’’ (McKenna and Richardson, 2007) have been coined to describe this new group within the mobile population. In addition, the definitions of expatriates are also discussed in the context of migration, which is defined as physical movement from one geographic location to another geographic location (Agozino, 2000), crossing national

17 One of the founders of grounded theory method Glaser also advocated building ‘middle-range’ theories, as proposed by Robert K. Merton (1957). This refers to theories consisting of abstract rendering of specific social phenomena grounded in data (Charmaz, 2006).

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borders (Boyle et al., 1998). Baruch et al. (2010) discussed the difference between expatriates and immigrants in terms of permanent residency rights, pointing out that an expatriate might become a migrant when he or she gains citizenship or permanent residence status. The complex nature of expatriation further complicates expatriates’ experiences of being or becoming bicultural. Furthermore, expatriation modes are not only diverse but also dynamic. Expatriates are less inclined to stay in one organisation. Some even become entrepreneurs in the host country. It is increasingly difficult to label only one type of expatriation mode for expatriates. The boundary between expatriates and locals are also becoming blurred. Tung (2008) noted that the taken-for-granted notions of who are “foreign managers”/expatriates and who are “host country employees” are subject to reinterpretation, as a result of the growing movement of talents, such as expatriates, returnees and skilled migrants, across international boundaries.

Fourth, it is essential to understand those contexts which might influence expatriation, such as the host country’s immigration policy, MNC operations in the current host country and the population components of the home and host country in terms of ethnic diversity in order to understand the changes experienced by expatriates during expatriation. The recent literature in psychology also calls for a more ‘contextualised’ approach to study acculturation (Schwartz et al., 2010). It is increasingly common that expatriates have lived in more than one host country and they tend to move between their home and host country. As the different phases of people’s lives can hardly be separated, it is important to obtain a full understanding of expatriates’ life story, such as why expatriates are in the host country, what they think about the host country language and culture, how they have adjusted to their new roles at work, how they have dealt with their culture of origin and what they intend to do in the future. It is challenging to acquire full understanding of this complete cycle via survey methods, as a second round of data collection with the same expatriates is very difficult to achieve. Such a cycle is also characterised by ambiguity and messiness. It is very challenging to capture such richness and depth of data via either a quantitative survey method or structured interview approach.

The grounded theory approach is most appropriate when study of the phenomenon is new and not well understood, particularly when the researcher needs to understand “the process by which actors construct meanings out of their intersubjective experience” (Suddaby, 2006: 634). The process of becoming bicultural for expatriates is a constant meaning-production process, which is characterised by interpretations of expatriates themselves and the researcher. Open-ended questions typical of the grounded theory method allowed me to explore possible interpretations of expatriates’ life stories. Being able to ask the right follow-up questions and follow interviewees’ flow of story-telling was very important for me in gathering rich data. Simultaneous data collection and analysis using the grounded theory approach helped me focus on the most relevant questions for the main interviews. Conducting the literature review at different stages before the first few interviews, half way through the data collection and when data collection was finished, has helped me to think and reflect on how my study will contribute to the existing literature during the data collection journey.

The research questions for this thesis have evolved throughout this journey. The main guiding research questions for different stages are listed below:

First Stage (approximately 1/4 data collected; May – June 2012)

How are expatriates’ lives in the host country? How are they adjusting to the new work situations in the MNC subsidiaries? Whether and how have they changed in terms of culture?

Second Stage (approximately 1/2 data collected; September – December 2012)

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How do cross-cultural adjustment and biculturalism development differ from each other in the context of expatriation diversity?

Why are expatriates willing or unwilling to learn the host country language? How does language competence influence the development of biculturalism?

Third Stage (data collection completed; January, February and June 2013)

What characterises the process of acculturation among expatriates? Why are expatriates willing or unwilling to learn the host country language

and what role does host country language competence play in expatriates’ acculturation process?

3.4.3 Research context

I have already introduced the general context of this thesis in Chapter 1.3. In this chapter, I will discuss it in detail, in particular in relation to the methodology of this study.

I have chosen Nordic expatriates working in China as the specific research context under the influence of postcolonialism, particularly orientalism and hybridity (Prasad, 2005; Saïd, 1979). Postcolonialism is relevant to management and organisation studies in general because it provides an alternative explanation to commonplace business practices which have their origins in colonial structures (Cooke, 2003; Gopal et al., 2003). Postcolonialism believes that “justice and human freedom are invisible and that achieving tree freedom and justice requires a genuine global decolonisation at political, economic and cultural levels” (Prasad, 2003: 7). Postcolonialists advocate that one “decolonize the mind” (Duara, 2004; Fanon, 2004; NgugiwaThiong'O, 1981) and let go of the unquestioned sovereignty of Western categories. Postcolonial theorist and critics advocate “provincializing Europe” (Chakrabarty, 1992, 2000; Prasad, 1997a).

Within the set of political and theoretical positions post-colonialists took, orientalism is one of the most influential. It is the attempt to explore the complicity of power and knowledge and to produce an understanding of colonialism/imperialism at the level of representation (Prasad, 2003) and a Western “style of thought” (Saïd, 1979: 2) which adopts a starkly dichotomous view of “the Orient” and “the Occident” and makes essentialist statements about “the Orient”. The discourse of Orientalism as such linked the West with the superior pole and relegated the non-West to the inferior pole, resulting in colonialism being portrayed as a project designed to civilize, improve and assist those people “lagging behind” in the March of History and Civilization (Prasad, 2003:12 ). Therefore, it is a discourse that morally justifies the West in dominating “the others”, which include people that used to belong to former colonies of the West, as well as other “indigenous populations within their own geographical enclaves” (Prasad, 2005).

Furthermore, within the broadly postcolonial tradition, scholars such as Clifford (1997) and Hannerz (1987) have emphasised the important role of travel and global migrations (initially triggered by colonialism) in intensifying the levels of cultural hybridity. Indeed, many postcolonialist scholars argue that any form of cultural blending or fusion needs to be researched against the backdrop of migration patterns (Prasad, 2005). Hybridity is further viewed as a product of deliberate colonial policy, such as the Hispanicisation of South and Central America (Bhabha, 1992). Cultural fusion and assimilation are contextualised and addressed from the perspective of the colonial dynamics, raising issues such as “Are all groups equally hybridized and in the same way?”, “How is hybridity actually negotiated in everyday practices”, and “Which social and geographic groups benefit most or lose most from hybridity” (Friedman, 1997).

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Early research on acculturation tended to address the impact of “modernisation” on indigenous peoples and traditional societies (Olmedo, 1979). Although the field has focused more recently on immigrants and ethnic minority groups (Rogler et al., 1991), the empirical studies have mostly focused on individuals from “the others” instead of the West, such as Chinese acculturating to the US and Canada, Puerto Ricans acculturating to the US.

Hence, I was inspired to study how individuals from the West acculturated into the Other society. China appears to be a suitable context with the increasing number of Western immigrants in recent years (Shen, 2011). In 1997, the number of expatriates in China exceed 100,000 (Worm, 1997) and by 2012 was already estimated to be 220,000 (Global Economics, 2012). My choice of such a research context also has potential theoretical underpinnings. Although the original definition of acculturation does not assume the direction of cultural change, the term has come to imply the assimilation of an acculturating group into the culture of the dominant group (Berry et al., 1986) and the acculturating groups tend to be from less-developed regions and rank lower in terms of ethnic hierarchy. Given the complicated interplay between Nordic countries and China in terms of economic status, recent economic development and political importance, it is theoretically relevant to take these contextual factors into the theorising of biculturalism. For example, the issue of skin colour is particularly prominent in the chosen research context. In China ‘localness’ is still very much characterised by physical appearance.

3.4.4 Data collection

I collected data using two techniques: in-depth interviews and observation. Interviews are the main source of data on the multicultural experiences, with observation as an important supplementary source for understanding informants’ accounts of various living experiences. I conducted 50 interviews with 27 expatriates and 23 host country employees in 16 organisations, of which 13 are Nordic MNCs, in three phases between May 2012 and May 2013, as described in Table 7 below.

Table 7 Time frame of data collection in 2012-2013

Phase Time I May – June 2012 II September – December 2012 III January, February and June 2013

I followed a purposeful sampling method in choosing my informants (Lincoln and Guba, 1985). The balance between organisational expatriates and self-initiated expatriates has been considered. Among the 26 expatriates, 14 are organisational expatriates, 10 are self-initiated expatriates, and two of them were first organisational expatriates and then became self-initiated expatriates. After I interviewed the expatriate informant or the host country employee informant, I asked him or her to recommend one close host country employee or expatriate colleague for the next interview. In order to obtain as much rich understanding of the working environment of the expatriates as possible, it is important to interview their host country national colleagues, who could comment on the expatriates’ daily interactions at workplace. Since expatriates spend the majority of their time at work, this study chose to interview their colleagues instead of families or friends. Furthermore, host country national colleagues were chosen instead of home country national colleagues because the process of becoming bicultural entails interaction with members from the host culture. Depending upon the number of informants in the organisation, the expatriate and host country employee informants either form a pair or a team. They were asked to reflect directly or indirectly on their experiences of working with each other. I adopted a multilingual approach

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when conducting the interviews (Marschan-Piekkari and Reis, 2004). The majority of the interviews with expatriates were conducted in English, with a few exceptions in Chinese or Finnish1 8. All interviews with host country employees were conducted in Chinese. Unlike the data collected in the initial study in 2006-2007, which needed to be translated immediately into English to ensure that all project members could read the interview transcript, I kept all interviews conducted in the main study in the original interviewing language until the final manuscript-writing phase. In this way, the richness of the data conducted in different languages could be preserved for as long as possible.

As already noted, a grounded theory approach (Charmaz, 2006) has been adopted when conducting and analysing the interviews. I travelled between theory and field and modified my interview guides several times. The interview was very open-ended at the beginning. At the beginning, questions such as “Do you eat Chinese food?” or “Do you celebrate Chinese/Finnish holidays” were asked. Such things were revealed to be superficial elements in the picture as a whole because there are individual differences. I narrowed it down to language and network in the background information questionnaire. As my understanding increased during the journey, I began to conduct semi-structured interviews. The main guiding interview questions are listed in Appendix 2. I analysed the interviews several times during the data collection period, either informally by writing down the key findings or formally by inductively coding parts of the interviews, particularly on host country language competence, as it appeared to be critical to the formulation of biculturalism.

I also asked my interviewees to fill in relevant questionnaires (Appendix 3) on the same topics as the interview, in order to encourage them to talk about the topics and to gain a better understanding of their interaction with the home and host country culture. The questionnaire data acted as a complementary part to the data collection as a whole. For example, the first section of the questionnaire “Background information” contained questions such as “nationality”, “length of employment in the company”, “total length of employment in China” and “involvement with the host country culture”. The questionnaire provided me with a structured format to ensure that all the possible background information about an interviewee was asked about, especially because of the open-ended nature of the interviews in this study. As emphasised earlier, I encouraged interviewees to talk freely about their multicultural experiences related to the host country. Although I had an interview guide throughout the whole data collection year, I tended not to follow it very strictly, but rather tried to follow the interviewees’ accounts and asked follow-up questions throughout the interview. Using this method, I felt more secure in ensuring that I obtained the basic background information in the format of questionnaire. The other questions such as “Please rank how different China and Finland are to you” encouraged the interviewee to think about the specific differences during the interview. The complementary questions were used at different stages of the interview instead of either at the beginning or at the end of the interview.

The purpose of the questionnaire was to gather more information about expatriates’ lives and work experiences in the host country. The intended use for the questionnaires was not to propose generalizable patterns based on statistical analysis for two main reasons. First, I discovered during the interview that even simple questions such as “how good is your English/Chinese skill” can be interpreted in many different ways by interviewees. Interviewees were not sure with whom they should compare themselves, whether it should be with native speakers or other expatriates. Interviewees did not know how to translate the language training they have received and how much they felt that they have learnt the language into the numerical scales provided in the questionnaire. For example, one interviewee said “I would say that I would be number one to number two, but I don’t know what the difference between those is. I have taken some language courses…” When asked to rank his Chinese language skill from 1-7, another respondent insisted on rating it as “0”. 18 The detailed reasons for adopting different interview languages are elaborated on in Essay 5.

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Another interviewee answered “my Chinese language skill is, I am still trying, so I will put a 2 here. My other Swedish colleagues are extremely lazy. They don’t want to learn. I am going twice a week.” When asked “Can you rank how different working in China and in Sweden are to you?”, one interviewee answered “So from my professional experience I would rank that Sweden is 1 and India is 7, then China is 5.5.” Second, the relatively small sample size of the questionnaire would not produce significant statistical analysis.

In addition to the in-depth1 9 interviews, I also conducted observations20 of both expatriates and host country employees during 2012-2013. I engaged deeply in the expatriate community’s social activities, such as Christmas party and Midsummer party21, Finnish Club gatherings, Finns’ musical band performances and gatherings afterwards, etc. At the same time, I became a member of the social group consisting of Chinese employees working mostly in Nordic MNC subsidiaries. I also participated at official receptions organised by the embassy, such as the National Day reception and the Finland-China network receptions. I conducted both observation from afar and participative observing in the form of chatting casually about living and working with expatriates and host country employees. Below, Table 8 provides an overview of the various types of observations I made, and Table 9 explains in detail about the observations I conducted during various social events involving predominantly expatriates and Chinese employees working in MNC subsidiaries.

19 The length of in-depth interview varies in different contexts. The length of interviews in this study might not be considered as ‘in-depth’ in some contexts (see Seidman, 2012). I consider these interviews to be in -depth partially because the length is over an hour, and partially because I seldom felt that I had questions unasked by the end of the interview. The majority of my interviewees were not especially talkativ e, and the questions I asked regarding their life and culture are not the easiest to reflect on. 20 I also observ ed their living environments, such as residences, food shops, kindergartens and restaurants. 21 Midsummer (“Juhannus” in Finnish) and Christmas party (“pikkujoulu” in Finnish) are two important Finnish festiv als in the summer and winter.

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Table 8 Summary of different types of observations

Nature of Observation

Event Details Relevance to Analysis

One-off Situation

Nordic MNC Chinese Employee Network Spring Dinner April 2012

These two networks are work-oriented as both expatriates and local employees gathered together outside working hours hoping to both relax and to also meet useful connections for work. Both networks have a mixed members consisting of expatriates and local employees.

Participative observations conducted at these events have provided this study with knowledge about the general integration of expatriates and local employees.

Finnish Midsummer Party in May 2012 Event Organised by the Finnish Embassy : participants were Chinese who have studied and worked in Finland and Finns who were study ing and working in China, May 2012 Nordic MNC Chinese Employee Network Winter Dinner September, November 2012 Nordic MNC Chinese Employee Network Gathering May 2013

Participative observation conducted at these events organised by official organisations have provided this study with information and knowledge on the integration of expatriates with locals from the organisation perspective.

Independence Day Reception December 2012 Event Organised by the Finnish Business Council, January 2013

Continuous The Finnish Pub Observations conducted at the various venues which expatriates and Westernised locals v isit frequently have provided this study with rich data on how they live their lives in terms of how localised they are.

Expatriates’ residential areas (city centre and suburbs) Imported food stores Popular shopping and dining areas for expatriates

Repeated Company A: part of the office areas at two different locations

Observations conducted at expatriates’ workplace have provided this study with understanding on the interaction between expatriates and their local colleagues at workplaces.

Company B: canteen area where local employees had lunches daily. Expatriates were also present sometimes. Company C: lobby area Company D: office

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Table 9 Examples of detailed descriptions of the observations made during one-off events

Event Information My Role Observation Details Independence Day Reception at the Finnish Ambassador’s Residence in China, 12.2011

This event is organised y early by the embassy of Finland in China for Finns and Chinese who have business or governmental relationships with Finland.

Participant

I observed how the event participants socialized and how the different small groups talk. Sometimes, I observed afar, for example standing next to the table serving drinks at the end of the reception hall. Sometimes, I joined a group, but took a less active role in conversations.

In addition to observations, I also initiated conversations with some expatriates and engaged in general discussion on how their lives were in China. The casual chats with them felt like a mini pilot interview.

Later on, I interv iewed one of them.

The main purpose was to prepare for my field work and get to know the Finnish community, especially the organisational expatriates in China. I did not have much understanding about expatriates at that time.

Nordic MNC Chinese Employee Network Gathering 9.2012, 11.2012; 2.2013;

This network was originally created by a Swedish Chinese professor, who used to train middle/senior managers working in MNC subsidiaries in China. It became a platform where these employees gather outside work. They usually have one theme for each gathering and the common interest of the group is Nordic work-life balance values.

Participant

I actively participated in their activ ities and socialized with them.

Later on, I interv iewed two of them.

The main purpose was to gain more understanding about my potential research targets – Chinese middle/senior managers working in Nordic MNC subsidiaries. I did not have much understanding about expatriates’ local colleagues at that time, as I had never worked in such organisations my self in China.

Finnish-Chinese Networking Event at the Finnish Ambassador’s Residence in China, 5.2012

This event was organised by the embassy for Chinese who have studied or worked in Finland and Finns who are study ing and working in China.

Participant

I actively participated in the discussions with self-initiated expatriates. I also conducted a considerable number of conversations with Chinese groups, many of which work for Western corporations.

I made active observations on how separated these two groups were. It was very obvious that Finns were mostly talking to Finns in Finnish and Chinese were mostly talking to Chinese in Chinese.

I did not interv iew any of them later on, but I began to introduce the Finnish Business Council network for Finnish

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universities’ Chinese alumni, hoping to merge the two separate networks.

Finns’ Midsummer Party, 5.2012

This event was organised by Finns in China for the celebration of summer’s arrival.

Participant

I observed how “Finnish” this event was.

I had difficulty scheduling one meeting with one expatriate, whom I knew would probably attend this event. I managed to interv iew him after this event.

Finns’ Christmas Party 11.2012

This event was organised by Finns in China to celebrate Christmas.

Participant

I observed how “Finnish” this event was.

I realised that this was such a work-free event for Finns that it was impossible to talk about work and research.

Finnish Business Council’s Social Events 1 .2013

This event is more for self-initiated expatriates looking for employment opportunities. I attended their event and talked actively with other participants. The main purpose was to understand the self-initiated expatriates better.

Participant

I listened to the talk and observed the proportion of Chinese and Western participants. I paid attention to the different types of questions different groups of audiences raised.

I started conversations with other participants there about employ ment situations for them in China, and about lives in general. Later on, I scheduled interv iews with three of them.

At that time, I had difficulty scheduling the interv iew with one expatriate. I knew that he was going to give a talk at this event, so partially I attended this event in order to meet him. He responded to my emails afterwards.

3.4.5 Data analysis

Despite the slight variations in the analytical approach taken in the five essays, the general approach for this thesis can be summarised as abductive (Dubois and Gadde, 2002; Eisenhardt and Graebner, 2007; Van Maanen et al., 2007), employing a continuous interplay between theory and data – theoretical frameworks are grounded in and refined by the empirical analysis from the beginning until the end of the research process. Such an approach “assigns primacy to the empirical world, but in the service of theorising” (Van Maanen et al., 2007:1149).

3.4.5.1 Starting with pen and paper during the data collection

During the data collection year, I wrote informal reflections before and after observations, interviews and during transcribing process. Such reflections were most frequent during the first phase of data collection, as I was still searching for the phenomena. In addition to informal reflections, I also inductively analysed the interview data as I collected them, adopting methods of naturalistic inquiry (Lincoln and Guba, 1985) and constant comparison techniques (Glaser and Strauss, 1967). As soon as I had finished transcribing the interviews, I conducted systematic initial/open coding (1st order data) which are terms, concepts and categories originated from the language of the informants or that are adequate at the level of meaning for the informants (Charmaz, 2010; Strauss and Corbin, 1990). Transcriptions were coded with pen and paper, and codes were further grouped into categories such as

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“motivation to expatriate”, “previous experiences related to the host country”, “preferences about local or Western food”, “contact with the host country nationals” and so forth. As I continued with the interviews, I added more initial coding as the interview transcripts began to increase together with the amount of new information added by new interviewees, for example “the frustration of learning Chinese”, “lost in translation”. I also started adding 2nd order data, which are themes and dimensions originating from the researcher’s theoretically-based interpretations of the informants’ words and actions at a higher level of abstraction (Charmaz, 2010). Theoretically-based languages such as “work-related adjustment”, “expatriation motivation” were used in revising the initial coding.

During the first and second phase of data collection, I focused on obtaining a deep understanding and finding the most dominant themes from the observation and interview data. I wanted to be sure that I asked the most suitable follow -up questions that would then lead me to the eventual answer to interviewees’ multicultural experiences during their expatriation. Towards the end of the second phase, I conducted focused coding using the most significant and frequently occurring earlier codes to sort through the large amount of data (Charmaz, 2010). It felt appropriate at that stage to conduct the focused coding as I had already developed an initial understanding of the phenomenon, and I wanted to see whether my preliminary understanding also applied to the new interviews. Specifically, such an initial understanding refers to the important role that host country language skill plays in expatriates’ acculturation processes. I conducted focused coding using frequently occurring codes, such as “language challenge” and “translation” in the new interviews conducted.

I also conducted axial coding, searching for relationships among categories and allowing them to be collapsed into themes (Strauss and Corbin, 1990) both during the data collection and after its completion. However, the extent of axial coding was limited as the number of codes and categories I generated was enormous, and I turned to the computer software NVivo.

3.4.5.2 Continuing with NVivo Software

I then began to enter coded data into the NVivo software. By systematically entering the coded interview data into the software, I ended up reviewing my previous coding. The purpose of reviewing my own coding was not to check the coding accuracy or reliability, but to ensure that I had not omitted any important data, and that I had developed a deep and rich understanding of interviewees’ accounts. In doing so, I was also reviewing my previous understanding of the phenomena that I was researching. Furthermore, I took a more fine-grained approach in coding the “leftover” materials, as I found it possible to be very detailed and to divide the existing general codes into many levels of sub-codes with the assistance of NVivo. I conducted an extensive amount of axial coding, moving the categories around and seeking to see whether different combinations of the categories would enlighten me and allow a better understanding of the phenomenon researched. I sought for relationships between and among these categories and assembled them into higher-order themes forming aggregated dimensions (Strauss and Corbin, 1990).

Figure 9 below is a snapshot of part of the codes and categorises I developed on biculturalism. By separating the open codes into the category of “feeling” versus “doing/acting/behaving”, “towards home country” versus “towards host country”, I disentangled the underlying theoretical connections between “cultural identity” and “cultural schema” “acculturating towards the dominating group” and “maintaining culture of origin”.

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Figure 9 Snapshot of codes organised in NVivo

I also moved constantly and abductively between empirical data and existing research and theories on biculturalism, acculturation, and expatriate adjustment (Corbin and Strauss, 2008; Strauss and Corbin, 1998). The constant comparison of new categories emerging from the data and existing theoretical concepts has ensured that the final theoretical framework of this thesis is produced based on rigorous analysis. The theories inductively built in this study are therefore both grounded in the data and also guided by existing theories. Concepts and theories such as “acculturation” and “cross-cultural adjustment” have been in my mind throughout the entire data collection and analysis process. Instead of attempting to formulate hypotheses based on these theories, which is one of the dangers of having prior knowledge about the field, I was aware of the possibility that I was influenced by a pre-existing conceptualisation on acculturation and questioned what the actual meaning was for concepts such as “acculturation”, “biculturalism” and “becoming a local” in the specific empirical context of this study. The technique of “making the familiar strange” (Spindler, 1982) was used frequently during the reading and analysing of the interview data.

3.4.5.3 Finishing the ‘clustered’ analysis using Microsoft Word

After I had coded all the transcripts in NVivo and formulated in-depth understanding of the phenomena, I began transporting the coded interview transcripts into a Word document according to the different focuses. The aggregated dimensions were finalised only when the corresponding essay had been finalised. As Potter and Wetherell (1987) put it, analysis is a long and iterative process, and there is no unanimity concerning where analysis ends. For example, during the process of writing up Essay 1, I re-read the transcripts in order to identify the similarities and differences between different types of multicultural expatriates. I also grouped the corresponding expatriates’ interviews with those of their host country colleagues and read them holistically. In the coding I conducted during the data collection year and with NVivo, I did not group the codes according to individuals. It was only in this final stage that I first treated each expatriate as an independent “case” in terms of multiculturalism. After I had finished re-coding each expatriate, I then grouped expatriates exhibiting similar characteristics together forming clusters such as “marginal bicultural” and “cosmopolitan”.

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3.4.5.4 Complementing the interview data with observation and questionnaire data

Alongside the previously described three processes of data analysis, I complemented the interview data with the observation and questionnaire data. I did not code the observation notes in the same way, as the main purpose that the extensive number of observations serves in this thesis is to provide a rich contextual understanding of expatriates’ work and living environments: for example, the food they tend to buy, the means of transportation they use to get to work, how much interaction they have with host country nationals, and so forth. The observation notes were not coded word by word or sentence by sentence for any specific expatriate or host country national individual; instead, the observations contribute to a general understanding of how integrated expatriates are at work, in their residential area and during social events for work purposes. When analysing the interview data with expatriates and their local employees, I referred to the notes of the observations involving them for more information and also for triangulation of the claims made by interviewees. For example, one expatriate said that he never attended any events organised by the Finnish community. By the time that I interviewed this expatriate, I had already made a considerable number of observations, and, indeed, I had not seen this expatriate in places and events popular with the Finnish community. Another example of how I used the observation data in the thesis is that the observations on how host country nationals watched expatriates dining in the same employee canteen have provided a richer understanding when I analysed other expatriates’ accounts on how excluded and insecure some foreigners can feel in China.

The questionnaire data were also used as a source of acquiring further information about expatriates’ and host country employees’ experiences during and outside work, such as whether and where they have travelled and lived and how much interaction they have with each other. Information as such was not used for conducting statistical analysis, but as another source of acquiring more information about expatriates’ work life.

3.5 Research ethics

Below, I reflect on research ethics in a chronological order – first before and during the data collection, then after the data collection.

3.5.1 Before and during the data collection

This section is further divided into ethics regarding the interviewing and ethics concerning the observations.

3.5.1.1 Regarding the interviews

During the process of planning the interviews, I followed the research ethics listed by both the Finnish Advisory Board on Research Integrity and the Academy of Finland. The research was planned in an ethically sustainable manner, and I treated my interviewees with respect, confidentiality and provided them with sufficient information about me as a doctoral researcher and about my PhD project. Information that I provided consisted of elements such as the background, purpose and funding sources of my PhD study.

During the process of approaching potential interviewees, I stated in the invitation to participate in my research that all of the information collected during the interview would be kept confidential – “Any information i.e. obtained in connection with this research and that can be identified with you will remain confidential and will be disclosed only with your permission or as required by law.” I wrote the invitation letter in three languages, i.e.,

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English, Finnish and Chinese, in order to ensure that this message would be fully understood by the interviewees.

Before I started the interview, I assured the interviewees that everything they shared in the interview would be kept anonymous and that there would be no real names and company names mentioned in any of the research publications. I also mentioned repeatedly that they could omit any sensitive details and people’s names, during the interview. All of the expatriate interviewees were fine with how I proposed to protect their anonymity, and the majority were not concerned about this issue. They appeared to be happy to be able to help me graduate. Only one expatriate interviewee made it clear to me that he preferred not to talk about certain sensitive things related to work. I ensured him it was absolutely fine and that I would ask nothing sensitive related to his company and he would not need to tell me anything that he was not comfortable with.

Before and after the interviews, I engaged in small talk with my interviewees. Normally, I introduced my PhD research and how I found them. I also let them ask questions about me and my research. Some of them became curious about my background. I talked quite openly about my experiences in a general manner. Depending on how my interviewees perceived the interview, they tended to ask for a different amount of information about me. For the host country employees, some perceived me as a potential connection with their company’s home country and tended to chat more with me about life and work in Finland afterwards. In such cases, I tried to keep the interviews within professional discourse. Some of the host country employees perceived me as a threat to some degree. As many of them were asked by their expatriate colleagues to help me, some considered it a duty to be interviewed. Regardless of the planning and thinking in advance, real interview situations were sometimes difficult to control, particularly in spontaneous and hectic work places in big cities in China. Many local people also did not fully understand what research was in general. The majority of the workforce in China is practice-oriented with relatively little knowledge of research. Company employees tend to think that academic work happens in a separate, and unfortunately also irrelevant, world.

I observed a certain degree of defensiveness during some interviews. Most of the interviewees were careful not to discuss anything confidential business-wise, which was considered to be the key threat of my research to their work life. Although it was clear to them that I did not have any relationship with their employers, occasionally there was insufficient trust in my keeping the discussions confidential. There are several different layers of explanation for this22 . First, most of the interviewees’ work environment is characterised by a high degree of uncertainty and complexity. One of the key challenges found in my interviews with expatriates regarding their work in China is precisely the issue of trusting the locals. They felt that it was difficult to trust the locals to keep their promises. Expatriates were also used to being lied to and treated as naive foreigners who did not understand anything. Expatriates were therefore socialised to be suspicious towards people in general in China. Second, research ethics is an emerging concept in China. While China has the largest scientific workforce in the world with an impressively increasing publication rate, there are many concerns about research ethics, for example in the medical field (Wang and Henderson, 2008). In management and organisation studies, there is a general lack of teaching on research ethics for postgraduate students. Interviews are mostly scheduled based on guanxi 23 and considered as personal favours from the interviewee to the interviewer. Therefore, the openness of my interviews with the host country employees also depended on how obliged they felt to help me, taking their expatriate colleagues into consideration. 22 This issue is reflected upon in detail in Essay 5. 23 Guanxi means relationships in Mandarin Chinese. Specifically it includes relationships such as “being a relative, having the same natal or ancestral origin, being a former neighbour, classmate, colleague, teacher/student, or supervisor/subordinate, having the same hobbies, and so on” (Farh et al., 1998: 473)

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3.5.1.2 Regarding the observations

I made observations of expatriates’ lives in China for the purpose of obtaining a deeper understanding of the researched phenomenon. Both of the social networks (expatriate network and host country employee network) that I became associated with were provided with the information that I was working on my PhD thesis on expatriates. I tried to blend into these events while gaining a deeper understanding of expatriates’ and local employees’ lives outside work. I wrote observation notes afterwards in the context of my research. I observed how different social groups interacted with each other. My experiences of observations gave me more confidence in reading expatriates’ interviews more critically. Despite the fact that I was also looking for more potential interviewees, I nevertheless tried not to disturb the other participants too much. I only scheduled a small number of interviews after these events. The majority of the interviews were scheduled via emails using the snowball sampling method. The main purpose these observations served was to provide me with a richer understanding of expatriates and host country employees and their relationships between them.

3.5.2 After the data collection

The consent between me and my interviewees was only made orally, as I could only start recording the interview after they have given me the consent. Therefore I sent an email to all interviewees afterwards and informed them about the measures that I had taken in order to ensure their anonymity. I assured them that all the information collected about them was being treated in an anonymised manner for research purposes, and that I used and would continue using fictitious names for both people and companies. I also invited them to contact me if they had further questions regarding this issue. There were a few interviewees who I could not make contact with via email.

I was aware that my own multicultural background influenced how I interpreted the interviews. In order to be fair towards my interviewees, I offered them the opportunity to comment on my analysis. No one has put forward any specific comments so far, although some did reply to my emails and expressed the wish to stay in contact and read my thesis later, which led to my maintaining a relationship with some interviewees. Expatriates tend to form a rather closed social network, especially in China, where there are significant differences in language and skin colour. Being able to speak the expatriates’ mother tongue made it easier for me to reach expatriates for my research. This also made me feel obliged to maintain contacts with the expatriate community even after my field work was completed.

3.5.3 Summary

Different epistemological stances have different views on research ethics (Christians, 2008). I found it challenging to define what actually counts as ethical during my PhD journey and tried to make the use of Codes of Ethics, such as respect and openness, and also integrate my own values. To summarise, I sought to maintain a balance in the following issues: treating interviewees with respect while asking for as much information as possible about their work life; being open and honest about my work life; maintaining a professional distance while making observations; letting interviewees ask freely about me and trying to bond with them and making the most out of my own cultural backgrounds for richer interviews; analysing the data and reporting the findings in as contextualised manner as possible – me as a female researcher could possibly represent the standpoints of an expatriate, a host country employee, a Finn and a Chinese.

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3.6 Limitations

This study has several limitations. Although including two data sets collected over different times in China can be both a strength and weakness, the latter nevertheless constitutes some of the limitations of this study. China has changed rapidly in recent years, especially in the context of expatriation, as described in details in Chapter 1.3.1. Expatriates’ living and working environments were not the same in 2006-2007 and in 2012-2013. Furthermore, China is a vast country, and specific geographic locations can potentially cause different influences on expatriates’ living environments. I decided not to analyse the geographical differences in this thesis due to the consideration of better protecting my interviewees’ anonymity. However, this is nevertheless one limitation of this study.

Another justifiable limitation concerns the research topic. Although I did my best to motivate my interviewees to discuss their change in terms of cultural schema and cultural identity, these topics proved difficult for interviewees to share very openly. The quality of the interviews could have been improved further. The interview questions regarding biculturalism could be further improved with more preparation during the data collection. I constantly felt the time pressure during the data collection period. Given more time, the analysis conducted during the data collection could be more thorough, which could potentially lead to a better quality of the remaining interviews.

A third limitation concerns the breadth of scope. Although it was not my intention to study cross-cultural adjustment, acculturation and language competence in one thesis, I ultimately wrote five essays on three major research areas with different disciplinary traditions. I was not able to focus in detail on one major topic regardless of the attempt to bridge research gaps between social psychology, IB and IHRM.

A fourth limitation is the design of the questionnaire used during interviews. Instead of including only the host culture involvement, I should have included questions also for the home culture and the third (+) culture involvement. Although an expatriate’s involvement with other cultures has been discussed during the interviews, it would have been more complete to also include these two other aspects in the questionnaire for better triangulation of data. Another limitation is the lack of female expatriates’ presence. Mounting evidence has suggested that women adapt better than men in cross-cultural business situations (Selmer and Leung, 2003), and women are used to and better at managing diversity at work (Ryan and Haslam, 2007). Future studies need to balance the gender components of participants in order to render theorising on multiculturalism among expatriates less gendered.

3.7 Reflection on gender

Gender and gendered power relationships are major defining features for most organisations and managements, including HRM, IHRM and expatriate management (Hearn et al., 2006; Hearn et al., 2012). Men continue to dominate in management, and a strong gender specialisation persists within management: for example, men’s domination in engineering which is often under-written by gender divisions in education. HR policy and outcome is also gendered, such as the pay gap between men and women.

In the context of this study, male expatriates are also the dominating group among the researched. The majority of the expatriates observed and interviewed in this study are also without exception male. In the data collected in 2006-2007, there were no female expatriates and only five female host country employees. In 2012-2013, three female expatriates and seven female host country employees were interviewed. Given that women are highly underrepresented in this study, the findings and conclusions could be potentially different if

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this study had managed to recruit more female participants24. I would like to bring to the attention of the readers of this thesis that the interviews could have also been different if I were a male researcher interviewing male expatriates about their work and life in a new place. I tried to balance the male and female interviewees during the data collection; however, gender bias remains as global phenomenon in expatriation (Stroh et al., 2005). Although women’s relative participation in international assignments has been increasing, they nevertheless remain underrepresented (Altman and Shortland, 2008). I did not manage to collect the precise demographic data on the gender aspects in the 16 organisations that I visited for this thesis, but each time when I asked for referral to more expatriates as potential interviewees, I was given male expatriates’ names most of the time. During the one year’s observation with the expatriate community in China, I also saw predominantly male expatriates. There are several theoretical as well as empirical reasons explaining this lack of female expatriate presence from different angles, including that of the organisation, the individual and the society, such as the lack of women mentors and role models (Linehan et al., 2001) and the lack of social support (Caligiuri and Lazarova, 2002). It has taken several decades for academia to acknowledge the fact that female expatriates are equally or even more acceptable and competent to a host country as male expatriates (e.g. Chusmir and Frontczak, 1990) and that women are no less interested than men in international assignments subject to location constraints (e.g. Lowe et al., 1999), yet the barriers for undertaking international assignments such as work-family conflict (e.g. Linehan and Walsh, 2000) and the competitive advantages that female expatriates can potentially bring (e.g. Guthrie et al., 2003; Tung, 2004) are yet to be established in expatriation research (Altman and Shortland, 2008).

3.8 Reflection on the researcher’s role

My own cultural background has potentially influenced the knowledge-creation process during in-depth interviewing. I was aware that scientists are not unbiased, neutral individuals, and one can be a highly prejudiced defender of particular theories (especially one’s own). Therefore, any qualitative researcher ought to incorporate reflexivity during their research in order to make knowledge claims (Leander, 2006). Given the nature of my research, it was especially important to reflect on my research design, my research process from data collection to data analysis, and also on the final distilled theorisation of the acculturation process.

I was aware of the language, culture, social categorisation and power issues involved during this PhD journey. I occasionally conducted cultural frame switching (i.e. projecting different cultural cues from Finnish and Chinese culture), depending on the situation, which might have confused some of the interviewees. The combination of my Chinese ethnicity, Eastern Asian skin colour, native Chinese accent, fluent but accented oral Finnish and Finnish nationality make it challenging for interviewees to categorize me into either the Chinese or Finnish group in the stereotypical sense. Such complexity or confusion at a glance has contributed to a richer interviewing process, as both expatriates and host country employees can identify with me to some extent. They also believed that I better understand the other group, i.e. Nordic expatriates for host country employees and vice versa, and were relatively open in sharing their interaction experiences. I believe that my own cultural background has also influenced how I analysed the interview data and theorise expatriates’ acculturation process. Another researcher with different cultural backgrounds might have picked up different patterns and combinations of data for theorising. To conclude, I was aware of my own biases as well as advantages as a researcher.

24 The gender issue has been taken into consideration in Essay 5. When discussing findings in Essays 1 -4, I did not take a gender perspective in order to maintain the coherence of this thesis. I believe that a separate paper is needed in order to systematically analyse the gender issues in expatriate biculturalism.

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4 FINDINGS

This chapter provides an overview and summary of the five essays included in this thesis.

4.1 An overview

These five essays examine the living and working realities of expatriates from the perspectives of language and culture. Essays 1 and 2 are about expatriates’ cultural identities and schemas at work settings – what the different variations are and how expatriates are coping with the uncertainties and ambiguities. Essays 3 and 4 describe the language challenges expatriates face – whether and why they are willing to learn the host country language and how host country language proficiency might influence their cross-cultural adjustment. Essay 5 takes a combined perspective on both language and culture in analysing the key methodological challenges during in-depth interviewing for multicultural researchers. Table 10 below provides an overview regarding the authorship and the current status of these essays.

Table 10 Overview of the essays

Essay Authors Title Perspective 1 Zhang, L. E. Acculturation Taxonomy Revisited: An Empirical

Study with Nordic Expatriates in China Culture

2 Zhang, L. E. Coping with Dilemmas: An Analysis of Multicultural Expatriates

Culture

3 Zhang, L. E. and Harzing, A. W.

Do I Really Need to Learn It? We Think You Do! Individual, Organizational and National Perspectives on the Rationale, Willingness and Ambivalence of Nordic Expatriates to Learn Chinese

Language

4 Zhang, L. E. and Peltokorpi, V.

Multifaceted Effects of Host Country Language Proficiency in Expatriate Cross-Cultural Adjustments: A Qualitative Study in China

Language

5 Zhang, L. E. and Guttormsen, D. A.

‘Multiculturality’ as a Key Methodological Challenge during In-depth Interviewing: Knowledge Transfer across Cultural Boundaries

Language and Culture

4.2 Summary of the main findings

Essay 1 identifies a taxonomy of biculturalism in terms of cultural schema and cultural identity among expatriates by analysing the processes expatriates experience from being monocultural to bicultural. Essay 2 examines the dilemmas faced by bicultural expatriates and their coping strategies for the stress and anxiety in a changing and uncertain environment. As an integral part of culture, language plays a key role in the process of becoming bicultural. This study then examines the language realities expatriates face in MNC subsidiaries and the multi-faceted impacts that expatriates’ host country language proficiency has on their cross-cultural adjustment in Essays 3 and 4. Essay 5 provides methodological reflections on the cultural and language issues in interviewing expatriates.

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Essay 1, Acculturation Taxonomy Revisited: An Empirical Study with Nordic Expatriates in China

Author: Ling Eleanor Zhang

Data: 50 interviews and year-long observations with expatriates and host country nationals in 2012-2013

International migration rates have reached unprecedented levels worldwide (Schwartz et al., 2010) and workforce patterns have changed rapidly in an increasingly diverse and mobile world. Employment relationships are frequently characterized by dynamic boundarylessness across organisational, geographical and occupational domains (Stahl et al., 2002). Scholars have started to realise that more employees and managers are bicultural, especially expatriates who tend to spend a considerable amount of time in other countries (Brannen and Thomas, 2010).

An emerging yet burgeoning conceptual literature in international business (IB) studies has emphasised on how such biculturalism can contribute to organisations (Fitzsimmons, 2013; Lakshman, 2013), the effects of biculturalism on cultural meta-cognitive skills (Earley and Mosakowski, 2004; Thomas et al., 2010; Thomas et al., 2008) and the types of biculturals also in terms of their potential contributions to organisations (Fitzsimmons et al., 2012; Hong, 2010; Hong and Doz, 2013; H. Lee, 2014; Y. Lee, 2010). Meanwhile, a separate stream of research in international human resource management (IHRM) has focused on the antecedents of cross-cultural adjustment and expatriation effectiveness (see Bhaskar-Shrinivas et al., 2005, for a review). The plethora research on expatriates’ cross-cultural adjustment focuses on the psychological comfort and familiarity with the host country culture (e.g. Black et al., 1991), but does not examine expatriates’ cultural involvement with the new culture.

This study seeks to address the identified research gap and aims to contribute to the nascent bicultural literature in IB in three ways. First, it seeks to shift the focus from a limited number of born biculturals25 to a more diverse population of expatriates by abductively building theory on what characterizes expatriates’ process of internalising the new culture. Second, by integrating research on biculturals in cross-cultural psychology and expatriate adjustment research in the management discipline, this study extends our understanding of bicultural individuals in the workplace. Third, this study aims to bring scholarly attention to the importance of empirical context in theorising biculturalism by demonstrating how the specific contextual features of the home and host country influence expatriates’ acculturation process.

Based on a grounded theory study with expatriates and host country employees, this study proposes a taxonomy of expatriate biculturalism consisting of marginal bicultural, cosmopolitan, transitional, monocultural and born bicultural expatriates. Characteristics of each group are discussed in terms of organisational context, host country language and network orientation, and identification with home, host and third culture. It further emphasises the dynamics and fluidity of expatriate biculturalism as illustrated in Figure 10 below.

25 Born biculturals are individuals who have been ascribed two cultures by birth (Brannen & Thomas, 2010).

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Figure 10 Theoretical framework of essay 1

The horizontal axis (from left to right) illustrates the increasing number of cultures that an expatriate is exposed to, ranging from monocultural with only home culture influence to N-cultural/multiple culture influence. The vertical axis (from bottom to top) indicates the degree of cultural schema internalisation and cultural identification. For example, a born bicultural expatriate is located higher than a marginal bicultural in the vertical axis, because a born bicultural expatriate has deeper cultural schema internalisation and stronger cultural identification with both home and host culture, compared with a marginal bicultural, who only starts internalising the host culture schema and identifying with the host culture during adulthood. The dotted arrows refer to the dynamic and fluid nature of transitional identity for expatriates. Transitional expatriates could potentially become marginal bicultural or cosmopolitan as they continue the acculturation process either towards the current host culture or towards their home culture. Marginal biculturals and cosmopolitans were relatively stable, although it is likely that these expatriates’ biculturalism might change given a different time and space in the future.

By abductively building the expatriate biculturalism taxonomy, this study provides fine-grained understanding of expatriate acculturation process and makes potential contribution in several ways. First, this study makes important contributions to acculturation research by bringing in the multi-faceted work contexts. Such contributions are both empirical and theoretical. Second, by bringing in the organisational relevance in studying expatriate acculturation, this study problematizes Mendenhall (1985, 1986)’s three-dimensional approach on expatriate acculturation. The boundaries between self-orientation, other-orientation and perceptual-orientation become blurry in the actual experiences told by expatriates. Third, this study has contributed to acculturation theories by taking the geographical context into the process of theorising. The geographical context of this study also influences whether hyphenated identities (Roccas and Brewer, 2002) consisting of cultural identity at the intersection of the ethnic and societal levels (Birman, 1994; Phinney and Devich-Navarro, 1997), such as Finnish-Chinese or Chinese-Finnish can be associated with ethnic consciousness and nationalist ideology within the political arena (Sellers et al., 1998).

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Essay 2, Coping with Dilemmas: An Analysis of Bicultural Expatriates

Author: Ling Eleanor Zhang

Data: 50 interviews with expatriates and host country nationals in 2012-2013

The accelerating speed of globalisation has led to the changed pattern of global workforce with a significant percentage of them being bicultural (Brannen and Thomas, 2010; Hong et al., 2000; Nguyen and Benet-Martinez, 2012). Biculturals are individuals who identify with more than one culture and have (either been ascribed by birth or have acquired) more than one cultural schema (Brannen and Lee, 2014). The emerging stream of research on bicultural individuals in International Business (IB) has focused on the positive outcomes and significances of biculturalism to global organisations, particularly on the positive impacts bicultural individuals can have on organisations. These can be, for example, by possessing cognitive complexity, biculturals can facilitate conversations across various boundaries (Tadmor et al., 2012), and contribute to the enhancement of creativity at workplace (Leung et al., 2008).

There is a lack of understanding on how adult individuals, in particular employees within organisations manage the development and coexistence of multiple cultures within themselves. Management scholars have pointed out that expatriates face a fundamental dilemma26 in determining how much of one’s identity and values need to be relinquished (Bird et al., 1999). Responding to such a fundamental dilemma during expatriates’ cross-cultural adjustment process can be characterised by stress and anxiety, which would impact negatively on expatriates’ work outcome (Aycan, 1997). Yet the existing body of literature is concerned predominantly with expatriates’ cross-cultural adjustment process (e.g. Black, 1988; Black et al., 1991). A few exceptional conceptual work (e.g. Blazejewski, 2012; Sussman, 2000) has examined the shifts in cultural identity during cultural transition. Hence this study aims to continue the earlier inquiry in psychology on the dark sides of acculturation in the current global organisations by studying how acculturating and acculturated employees are coping with the ambiguities and in-betweenness of various dilemmas. By empirically studying employees such as expatriates in organisations, this study aims to expand the understandings of acculturative stress and coping mechanism to the work place.

Based on a qualitative study with Nordic expatriates and their host country employee colleagues in China, this study presents a theoretical framework (Figure 11 below) on the dilemmas expatriates experience and the coping strategies they employ.

26 The term “dilemma” is defined according to its literal meaning in this paper: “di-” meaning “two” and “ lemma” meaning “a proposition, theme, or a subject” (Oxford Dictionary). “Dilemma” thus means a difficult or perplexing situation, in which a choice needs to be made in choosing two alternatives. However, these two alternatives are not necessarily mutually exclusive. The use of the term “ dilemma” is not to be confused with the term “social dilemma” in social dilemma literature (e.g. Olson, 1965; Hardin, 1968).

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Figure 11 Theoretical framework27 of essay 2

The findings of this study emphasise the importance of groundedness when expatriates cope with their bicultural identities (Adler, 1975). The findings on the marginality and fluidity strategies also suggest that there are various boundaries that expatriates have difficulty in overcoming. These are specific to the empirical context of this study, such as the ethnic hierarchy reflected in the form of skin colour. By making compromises between the ideal and current situation, expatriates’ bicultural identity becomes marginalised and fluid. This study further contributes to the literature on acculturation stress and coping by examining the phenomenon from both the perspective of expatriates’ and the perspective of their HCN colleagues. The various dilemmas in expatriates’ work life make it challenging for them to fully embrace both home and host cultures. The constant feeling of in-betweenness and ambiguity, partially caused by the low receptiveness of the host country and host country nationals, can be a major cause for stress. Social psychologists have proposed that one possible way to resolve the acculturative stress is to become bicultural, that is endorsing both culture of origin and the host culture (Schwartz and Zamboanga, 2008), which explains why a considerable percentage of the expatriates in this study resolve to acculturation despite their unfavourable reception by the host country nationals.

27 The arrows in this figure do not imply a strong causal claim from the dilemmas to ambiguities and further to coping strategies. The direction of the arrows is a form of narration of the discov ery process of this theoretical framework. During the coding process, I identified the dilemmas first, which partially explained why expatriates experienced such a large amount of ambiguity an d confusion. I then gradually discovered their coping strategies by moving back and forth between the empirical data and existing literature on coping strategies.

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Essay 3, Do I Really Need to Learn It? We Think You Do! Individual, Organizational and National Perspectives on the Rationale, Willingness and Ambivalence of Nordic Expatriates to Learn Chinese

Authors: Ling Eleanor Zhang and Anne-Wil Harzing

Data: 70 interviews with expatriates and host country nationals in 2006-2007 and 2012-2013

Based on a fine-grained analysis of 70 interviews with both expatriates and their host country colleagues in China, we address the lack of knowledge on the role of host country language in multinationals, and uncover why expatriates need to learn the host country language. We argue this need both from the angle of the linguistic features of the host country language, as well as from the roles that it plays in foreign subsidiaries. We further explain whether and why expatriates are willing or ambivalent regarding learning the host country language from an individual, organizational and national perspective. Finally, we present recommendations to overcome language barriers in MNC subsidiaries from a host country language perspective.

Our empirical investigation highlighted the need for expatriates to learn the host country language, an area which has not received sufficient scholarly attention in IB (Bordia & Bordia, 2015). Our results show that expatriates and HCEs were all frustrated with the translated and diluted communication in English, which HCEs did not speak very well. It was interesting to note that although Nordic expatriate managers considered their English skills sufficient, their HCE colleagues considered their English to be heavily accented and challenging to understand, largely due to the fact that the HCEs did not have extensive interaction experiences with non-Chinese English speakers in general. Furthermore, the specific characteristics of the host country language investigated in our study, such as the high degree of contextualization, the lack of tenses and the frequent use of the passive voice in Mandarin Chinese, contributed further to the ineffective communication in “translated” English at work. More communication in the host country language could improve the effectiveness of meetings involving both expatriates and HCEs. The use of host country language also contributed to the removal of social segregation and of barriers in networking and the enabling of more efficient trust building between expatriates and HCEs.

By analysing how expatriates and their HCE colleagues responded to the same issue, i.e. whether and why expatriates were motivated to learn the host country language, we uncovered the divergent perspectives of expatriates and HCEs, and the complexity of this phenomenon. We explained such complexity with an inductively built framework (see Figure 12 below) including the individual, organizational and national level.

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Figure 12 Conceptual framework of essay 3

At the individual level, expatriates were demotivated to learn the host country language because of the heavy workload during expatriation, which was considered to be only a convenient excuse by HCEs. HCEs also did not appreciate the fact that expatriates’ motivation to learn the host country language was temporary and only for coping with the practicalities of working in the host country. At the organizational level, while expatriates considered it normal that English was the legitimized language in MNC subsidiaries and that they could use HCEs for translation tasks due to their higher positions, HCEs questioned the rationale of using only English when there was an increasing degree of localization in business operation, and they indicated dissatisfaction toward the extra translation task. Both of these practices demotivated expatriates to learn the host country language. The third organisational practice, i.e. the fixed-term expatriation contract, also reduced the willingness to learn the host country language among expatriates. At the national level, our study revealed that nationalism among HCEs and the different perceived superior-inferior expatriate-HCE relationship were complicated factors in (de)motivating expatriates’ learning of the host country language. On the one hand, expatriates felt worried that host country nationals demonstrated negative emotions toward foreigners in China. Many expressed that perhaps it was time to leave China, and therefore they were not motivated to learn the host country language. On the other hand, expatriates were insensitive toward the power relationship with their HCE colleagues. Such imbalanced power relationship was partially constructed by the use of host country language, i.e. whether expatriates were willing to engage with local colleagues in the HCEs’ mother tongue and in their home country.

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Essay 4, Multifaceted Effects of Host Country Language Proficiency in Expatriate Cross-Cultural Adjustment: A Qualitative Study in China

Authors: Ling Eleanor Zhang and Vesa Matti Peltokorpi

Data: 70 interviews with expatriates and host country nationals in 2006-2007 and 2012-2013

While expatriates often face language barriers in host countries, relatively little research has focused on the influence of host country language proficiency on cross-cultural adjustment. In this paper, we drew from social identity theory and conducted an interview-based study with 70 expatriates and their host country national (HCN) colleagues to provide a contextual account of host country language proficiency’s effects on work and non-work related adjustment in China.

We contribute to expatriate cross-cultural adjustment research in two ways. First, we add to the nascent research of host country language proficiency on expatriate cross-cultural adjustment (Shaffer, Harrison and Gilley 1999; Takeuchi, Yun and Russell 2002; Selmer 2006; Peltokorpi 2008). Drawing on social identity theory (Tajfel 1978; Tajfel and Turner 1979), we describe how language differences can separate expatriates from host country nationals (HCNs) as out-group members in work and non-work related settings. The inductive approach adopted in this study further allows us to shift the focus from the previous, relatively simplistic language proficiency constructs to dimensions inductively built based on interviews with expatriates and their HCN colleagues. In previous research, host country language proficiency has been shown to affect three interrelated facets: general adjustment, work adjustment, and interaction with HCNs (Shaffer et al. 1999; Takeuchi et al. 2002; Selmer 2006; Peltokorpi 2008). Nonetheless, it is not clear whether these facets of adjustment adequately capture the phenomenon of expatriate cross-cultural adjustment because of the lack of inductively derived dimensions.

Second, we provide a contextual account of the expatriate’s host country language proficiency in China, an increasingly important but linguistically challenging destination. The average score for the Test of English as a Foreign Language (TOEFL) in China is consistently below the global average (ETS 2011). In addition, the grammar and syntax of the Chinese language is different from the mother tongues of Western expatriates, and this can thus be seen as a barrier to language learning. Despite the language differences, MNCs continue to rely on expatriates in China. In 1997, the number of expatriates in China exceed 100,000 (Worm 1997) and was estimated to be 220,000 in 2012 (Global Economics 2012). Despite the increasing number of expatriates, little is known about the effects of language proficiency on expatriate adjustment in China. This paper focuses on language-related expatriate adjustment in China, drawing on interviews with 70 expatriates and HCN employees.

Our findings suggest that expatriate host country language proficiency has multifaceted effects on expatriates’ HCN interaction, social support, and network-related work and non-work adjustment, as summarised in Figure 13 below.

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Figure 13 Theoretical framework of essay 4

Specifically, our findings suggest that low host country language proficiency acts as a natural barrier to intercultural communication and information flows in subsidiaries, having negative effects on expatriate work-related adjustment. While HCN language nodes can be used to alleviate language barriers in subsidiaries, our findings and research on language in MNCs (SanAntonio 1987; Marschan-Piekkari et al. 1999; Peltokorpi 2007) suggest that it reduces interaction effectiveness and willingness to engage in more in-depth and productive conversations in both expatriates and HCN employees. Our findings also suggest that expatriates with strong host country language proficiency are able to build wider social networks with and receive more support from HCNs in subsidiaries. Our findings also provide details of expatriate host country language proficiency in non-work related adjustment. In general, our findings suggest that expatriates with insufficient host country language proficiency have difficulties engaging in tasks ranging from efficient and fulfilling interactions to running daily errands. Given HCNs’ reluctance to speak in a non-native corporate language, expatriates without any host country language proficiency suffer from insufficient social support from HCNs.

Furthermore, the findings add to language research, drawing on SIT (Lauring 2008; Peltokorpi 2007, 2010) by taking into account both work- and non-work-related adjustment and emphasising the need to understand adjustment as a social process consisting of in-groups and out-groups distinguishable by their native languages. As one of the most salient social identity markers (Giles and Johnson 1982), our findings suggest that language creates a strong functional and identity-based boundary between expatriates and HCNs in both work and non-work related settings. Furthermore, our findings suggest that host country language proficiency may have a non-linear effect on expatriate adjustment. For example, HCNs were suspicious of expatriates with high host country language proficiency. In a related manner, social identity theory (Tajfel and Turner 1979) and negotiation studies (Francis 1991; George, Jones and Gonzalez 1998) suggest that high levels of adaptive behaviour can have undesirable effects because HCNs react negatively when out-group members threaten their group identity. These schools of thought hold that HCNs may treat expatriates as outsiders, even in cases where the expatriate adopts the language and cultural norms. Thus, attempting to behave like a native may not achieve the same effect as being a true native (Francis 1991). These findings also add to previous research that has assumed a linear effect of host country language proficiency on expatriate cross-cultural adjustment (Shaffer et al. 1999; Takeuchi et al. 2002; Selmer 2006; Peltokorpi 2008).

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Essay 5, ‘Multiculturality’ as a Key Methodological Challenge during In-depth Interviewing

Authors: Ling Eleanor Zhang and David S. A. Guttormsen

Data: 141 interviews with expatriates and host country nationals from 2006 to 2013

Although qualitative methods have gained a stronger foothold in International Business (IB) research, they remain under researched, especially relating to how researchers can overcome obstacles when interviewers and interviewees exhibit ‘multiculturality’ during cross-national and intercultural field studies. This article analyses how such multicultural backgrounds creates challenges in data collection during in-depth interviewing, which thus impact on the imbalance in the power relationship between the interviewer and interviewee. By drawing upon 141 interviews across five separate field research projects on expatriates and their host country colleagues in Mainland China, Hong Kong SAR, South Korea, Finland and the U.S., the authors suggest five strategies to cope with such power imbalance in terms of social categorisation and language. Four distinct methodological contributions are proposed accordingly to the IB literature: placing ‘multiculturality’ as a new concept at the forefront of qualitative IB research; introducing the novel term ‘symbolic boundary-switcher’ which specifically elevates ethnicity as a key factor in terms of securing and conducting interviews; emphasising the relevance of an exploratory, self-reflexive analysis and uncovering how social categorisation and language influence the interviewer-interviewee relationship.

This article aims to investigate how the specific methodological issue of interviewers’ and interviewees’ ‘multiculturality’ (i.e. exhibiting a multicultural background), influence the process of securing and conducting in-depth interviews in qualitative International Business (IB) research. ‘Multiculturality’ is particularly important in terms of researching cultural and linguistic impact on knowledge transfer: the constitution, practice and accumulation of knowledge in corporate organisations is dependent not only on different cultural and linguistic contexts, but also on the multiculturality of researchers and respondents, i.e. how the multicultural backgrounds might influence how knowledge is scrutinised by researchers themselves (see Holden and Michailova, 2014). Figure 14 below summarises the conceptual framework of this article.

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Figure 14 Theoretical framework of essay 5

This paper seeks to make the following contributions. First, ‘multiculturality’ is elevated to a key methodological issue to be considered by qualitative IB researcher during cross-national field research due the impact on securing and conducting in-depth interviews, as evinced by the imparted experiential accounts from the authors. This is achieved by coupling the transdisciplinary inquiry with advanced cultural theories from sociology and social anthropology in the pursuit of ‘unpacking’ the social phenomenon of ‘multiculturality’ and implications for power relations with interviewees. Through a self-reflexive analysis, the authors uncover how social categorisation and language influence the power relationship. The second contribution relates to the self-reflexive approach. The realisation of the importance and the need to advance the new methodological concept of ‘multiculturality’ emerged from the authors interrogating their own interview practices beyond critical reflection. The authors draw upon sociologist Pierre Bourdieu’s ‘epistemic reflexivity’, i.e. turning the applied concepts and theoretical frames through which they had analysed the expatriate interviews towards themselves. Although Bourdieu’s contribution to reflexivity is widely acknowledged to be at the forefront of the social sciences (Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1992), there is a void regarding the deployment of his vast social theory in IB research (Prasad et al., 2008). An augmented focus on methodological challenges in published articles would also assist in improving the internal validity, trustworthiness and credibility of studies undertaken (see Sinkovics et al., 2008) through enhanced transparency and self-reflexive of interview practices. Third, as a result of analysing the aforementioned interview experiences, the ‘symbolic boundary-switcher’ is introduced as a novel methodological concept wherein meaning-attribution related to the boundaries of the authors’ ethnicity and skin-colour become an obstacle or opportunity for securing and conducting in-depth interviews depending upon the context. Fourth, the methodological ‘thinking tool’ of ‘multiculturality’ additionally underscores the inseparable and interconnectedness nature of language and culture, which IB research traditionally treat as detachable from one another (Peltokorpi, 2010).

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5 DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSION

This thesis contributes to the emerging literature on biculturalism in IB and expatriate management in IHRM by addressing the overall research question “What characterises the bicultural expatriates in terms of acculturation, language competence and cross-cultural adjustment?” This chapter will discuss the main findings in the order of acculturation, language competence and cross-cultural adjustment, as well as the interconnectedness between these three concepts.

5.1 Implications on theorising biculturalism

In this chapter, I will discuss my conceptualisation of biculturalism based on the earlier conceptualisations of culture and biculturalism reviewed in Chapters 2.1., 2.3., 2.4 and the empirical findings of this study.

5.1.1 Multi-faceted-ness

Based on the empirical findings of this study, the concept of biculturalism has been revealed as multi-faceted. As I have demonstrated in Essay 1, some expatriates have internalised the host country cultural schemas, but they do not have a strong identification with the host country due to various reasons – be they personal, organisational or societal. Some expatriates identify strongly with the host country culture, but they do not have solid knowledge of the host country. In some cases, expatriates have both internalised the host country cultural schema and developed identification with the host culture. Hence the two components of biculturalism, cultural identity and cultural schema, can, but do not necessarily, coexist within one individual. Instead of a combined approach as reviewed in Chapter 2.3. and 2.4, bicultural individuals in this study are viewed as those who identify with more than one cultures and/or have internalised associated cultural schema.

The empirical results of this study further emphasise the differences between ‘being a bicultural individual’ and ‘having a bicultural identity’. An individual who has been exposed to and has learned more than one culture is a bicultural28 person while this individual can only have a bicultural identity when he or she expresses an attachment to and loyalty to these cultures (Nguyen and Benet-Martínez, 2010). Hence, the dominant identity component is not necessarily the only defining element for bicultural individuals, although the identity component has been viewed as the most important component of the complex and multidimensional notion of biculturalism (Nguyen and Benet-Martínez, 2010),

5.1.2 Multi-layered-ness

Borrowing the logic of Schein’s (1992) organisational culture model, I view that the biculturalism of expatriates, who live in a new host country as a result of their work, is also multi-layered. The surface level of biculturalism is behaviour: for example, expatriates would eat local food, speak the local language and run daily errands like the host country nationals. Going one level deeper, acculturating expatriates are faced with internalising the values of the host country culture: for example, whether to carry out business practices in the local way when it is against expatriates’ original values, such as honesty. The deepest level of biculturalism touches upon the norms and assumptions of the host country society: for

28 ‘Multicultural’ is used instead of ‘bicultural’ in the original text. I use bicultural here for consistency of writing. As discussed in chapter 2.3, there is no fundamental meaning shift in this change of term.

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example, acculturating expatriates need to decide whether they want to challenge the shared assumption among host country nationals, such as ‘Chinese are not supposed to be white’.

Expatriates are distinguishable from other mobile populations, such as international students and refugees, mainly because work is the most important reason for them to live in a new culture. Their acculturation is therefore different in the sense that they might not need to and might not be able to achieve the ultimate integration with the host country nationals in order to achieve expatriation success. As work is generally the most important context for expatriates, they might only need to internalise the host country cultural schema selectively, reaching the basic behaviour level. In other words, they understand the host country nationals’ work philosophy and behave like one of the locals if needed for work purposes. In this way these expatriates’ biculturalism might only stay at the behavioural level serving the function of working in the host country. Among the marginal biculturals identified in Essay 1, a considerable percentage of them could well be ‘functional’ biculturals. Their biculturalism might extend to the second level, i.e. value, but they cannot reach the deepest level given the societal constrain of the host country.

5.1.3 Context-embedded-ness

Biculturalism is also context-dependent. When individuals begin to internalise a new cultural schema and begin to identify with or become distant from a new cultural identity, they constantly need to process their own perceptions of themselves and the perceptions of them by various social and cultural groups surrounding them. They also need to consider their expectations of themselves, those expected of them by other people, and the possibilities of identifying with the host country culture at the societal level.

5.1.3.1 nfluences of others and the group

Biculturalism is not necessarily the choice of an individual; rather, group and intergroup relations also play a role (Nguyen and Benet-Martínez, 2010). According to Berry (1990), acculturating individuals face two main issues. First, how much they retain identification with their culture of origin. Second, to what extent they allow themselves (or are allowed) to identify with the mainstream culture. Acculturating expatriates in this study consider both how much they allow themselves to identify with the mainstream culture and how much the dominate group allows them to identify with it. Such considerations also apply in relation to expatriates’ culture of origin, i.e. how much they allow themselves to retain it. Furthermore, expatriates also need to consider how much the dominate group allows them to maintain their culture of origin, i.e. whether they are expected to remain different or become similar to the host country employees.

Furthermore bicultural individuals need to deal with the implications of different cultural stereotypes and the pressures coming from the different communities surrounding them for loyalties and behaviours (LaFromboise et al., 1993). There are three layers of such expectation for expatriates – that of expatriates themselves, corporate expectation which is further divided into the expectation of the headquarters and that of the subsidiary, and the expectation of expatriates’ colleagues. In addition, there are the expectations of expatriates’ families and home country colleagues, which are not examined in this study. There are complicated interplays between expatriates’ work and non-work environments, the headquarters and subsidiary dimensions of expatriates’ work, as well as various factors at the individual level, such as personal and generational history in terms of other cultural exposure, and personality. Furthermore, expatriates’ home and host country have significant influences on their formulation of biculturalism.

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5.1.3.2 Interplay of work and non-work elements

The fine-grained and grounded analysis of this study suggests that expatriates’ biculturalism is a result of their interactions with the host country in both work and non-work environments. The organisational context plays an important role in expatriates’ acculturation. The expatriates’ job role influences how much expatriates can be exposed to the host country culture at work. A localized work environment provides expatriates with more opportunities to work with host country nationals, be influenced more by the host country’s work values and become more obliged to act like a local employee. Furthermore, the organisations in which expatriates work in the host country also have influences on expatriates’ biculturalism. The more localized the unit expatriates work for in the host country, the greater the exposure they experience of the host country language and cultural elements at work. In some of the empirical cases this study examined, expatriates speak the host country language much better because it is the unofficial work language of the MNC’s subsidiary in the host country.

Apart from their professional lives, how expatriates spend their time outside work naturally also affects their biculturalism. Both expatriates and host country employees emphasised the importance of host country spouses for expatriates’ acculturation and the learning of the host country language. Host country contacts in general, such as study friends or hobby contacts, either before or during the current expatriation, are also crucial in expatriates’ formulation of biculturalism.

5.1.3.3 Home and host country contexts

As discussed in Chapter 2, the context in which acculturation takes place is crucial for the understanding of the acculturation itself. For example, Schwartz et al. (2010) emphasised that it is important to examine how certain contextual features influence acculturation specifically, and how such influence can further predict the psychological, health and performance outcomes of migrants/expatriates, given the importance of reception contexts in the shaping of acculturation process. In the case of expatriates, apart from the work contexts described in the previous paragraphs, the societal context, i.e. the context of their home country and host country is also very important in understanding their bicultural and multicultural experiences as a result of the acculturation. For example, how multicultural the home and host countries are and what the immigration policies (e.g. work and residence permit) of the host country are.

Perceptions of an unfavourable reception context, together with perceptions of discrimination, are hypothesized as one of the major sources of stress for the lives of immigrants (Segal and Mayadas, 2005). The impacts of reception contexts on acculturation may be understood in a similar way to its influence on many other social and developmental processes (e.g. Bronfenbrenner, 1979). Both distal and immediate contexts, i.e. national and local reception contexts, assist in eliciting certain responses from migrants and migrant groups with a certain goodness or poorness of fit (cf. Windle and Lerner, 1986) between the migrant individuals and the context in which they are embedded. Whether migrants’ acculturation orientation (e.g. separated, assimilated or bicultural) and the receiving society members’ expectation match with each other influences how much discrimination, stress and hostility migrants might experience as they acculturate (e.g. Rohmann et al., 2008).

Contexts also vary within a given country, such as in China. More rural or monocultural areas may be more heavily “Chinese”, and therefore cause more pressure for expatriates to adopt the practices of the host culture, but not necessarily values and identification (Schwartz et al., 2010). Big cities with a larger expatriate community in China might have a varying reception context when compared to more rural areas in China. Reception contexts

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might not be necessarily negative. It might also provide support for migrants to acculturate (Schwartz et al., 2010). For example, in China people tend to be curious about Westerners and think positively of them in terms of their socioeconomic status. The similarities between two cultures might make it easier for individuals to acculturate at the first two levels, behaviours and basic values. For example, Finland might share more similar values with Sweden than with China. However, the ‘cultural distance’ between home and host country has little influence on the deepest level of biculturalism, the norms and assumptions of the host society.

Ethnicity is another key component of the host country context. Acculturation scholars (e.g. Birman, 1994; Phinney and Devich-Navarro, 1997) proposed that one form of bicultural adaptation is to locate one’s cultural identity at the intersection of the ethnic and societal levels, which means to define biculturals as those who share both ethnic heritage and residence in the host society. For example in order to be a bicultural Chinese, one needs to have Chinese ethnic heritage. Such a view is considered problematic in host countries such as China, which are beginning to receive more and more non-ethnically Chinese immigrants. While hyphenated identities might work in multicultural societies such as US and Canada, the term ‘Finnish Chinese’ or ‘Chinese Finnish’ connote no more than the combination of two separate group memberships at the moment. Ethnicity remains a key issue in Nordic expatriates’ acculturation in China as, unlike immigrant societies such as Canada and New Zealand (Sibley and Ward, 2013), China is not used to managing foreign populations with a different ethnicity29.

5.1.4 A dynamic process

Consistent with the previously-presented dynamic view on culture in Chapter 2.1.3, biculturalism is also a dynamic process in which individuals change their views about their cultural self in response to the environment as the human mind is fluid and adaptive and is engaged in active and dynamic interaction with the environment (Leung et al., 2005). It is a social and cultural process in which individuals manages the host country, home country and possibly a third or fourth country culture. In Essays 1 and 2, I presented the dynamics and fluidity between the different types of biculturalism among expatriates. For example, a marginal bicultural expatriate might become more cosmopolitan if he or she leaves the current host country or experiences more negative experiences with the current host country nationals. The interview data with expatriates also suggested the dynamic nature of biculturalism during the formulation process. When asked to talk about their life experiences retrospectively, one expatriate recalled:

When I first came here, I would be scared if I acted like a local. For example, it’s true that many things are very flexible in China, such as laws are not strictly carried out. For companies, being flexible also means taking risks. When I first came here, I discovered that some of our employees’ social security fees are not paid by our company. I was scared then, but nowadays I am not so worried. I learnt what can be risked and what cannot be risked. [E10b]

Hence, although the cultural schema might be mostly formulated before adulthood, there are nevertheless critical periods which fundamental change can occur to adult individuals. The critical events expatriates experience can influence their biculturalism since a profound experience can lead to a distinct shift in thinking during expatriation abroad (Osland, 1995). The behaviour of “acting like a local” for the first time in serious regulation-related issues could be the defining experience for this expatriate to develop biculturalism, as he noted that “but nowadays I am not so worried (about acting in this way)”.

29 Please refer back to chapter 1.3.1 for greater detail.

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My view on the dynamic nature of biculturalism is also consistent with recent theorising on the dynamic nature of culture in the IB literature (Leung et al., 2005). Existing priming experiments (e.g. Hong et al., 2000; Peng and Knowles, 2003) have demonstrated that people can change their attributional style when exposed to a different cultural symbolic icon or asked to recall an experience to make one specific cultural identity more salient. Nevertheless, current research has not gone beyond experiments. This study30 has explored such priming results in the work environment in MNC subsidiaries and demonstrated that mental processes associated with national culture are relatively fluid and can be changed and sustained under certain situational influences.

Apart from the individuals, who are the key factor in biculturalism, the empirical context in which biculturalism takes place also contributes to its dynamic nature. Context of reception also changes over time, and global events can influence the local reception contexts (Schwartz et al., 2010). China has been a very homogeneous society. However, in recent decades, there are increasingly greater influences from other ethnicities. For example, interracial families have become increasingly common in big cities such as Shanghai (Xiong, 2010). Drawing upon his own acculturation experiences in Korea, Froese (2010) also noted that a country may also go through major changes which affect the acculturation of foreigners living in that country. Koreans’ attitudes towards foreigners have become more open with an increased inflow of foreign populations.

5.1.5 Different types of biculturalism

As a result of the variances in individuals’ responses to the factors around them, there are different types of biculturalism. It may also take various forms depending on whether the heritage and receiving cultural streams are kept separate or integrated (Schwartz et al., 2010). The management field has not given sufficient attention to the identity change of individuals whose work and life have been affected by globalization compared to the scholarly attention the literature provides regarding corporations in the global business environment (Lee, 2014). A few exceptions have focused on the dynamic nature of cultural identity throughout cultural transitions (Sussman, 2000), the psychology of globalization (Arnett, 2002), the uncertainty of self and identity (Herman and Dimaggio, 2007), and the emerging research on cosmopolitan identity (e.g. Lee, 2013), global identity (e.g. Erez and Gati, 2004) and marginal identity (e.g. Fitzsimmons et al., 2012). However, the majority of the emerging research is conceptual. The findings of this study have provided empirical understanding in particular concerning marginal bicultural and cosmopolitan individuals working in organisations.

5.1.5.1 Marginal biculturalism

The findings of this study have demonstrated that the biculturalism of a group of bicultural expatriates exhibits marginality, i.e. they have weak identification with both home and host culture (Fitzsimmons et al., 2012). According to Park (1928), ‘marginal man’ is a cultural hybrid living and sharing intimately in the cultural life and traditions of two distinct peoples who is not willing to break with his past and not quite accepted in the new society in which he has now sought to find a place – ‘not merely emancipated, but enlightened’ (p. 888). The marginal man is the man on the margin of two societies which never completely interpenetrated and fused (Stonequist, 1935). The marginal man has been depicted as possessing characteristic feelings and attitudes of insecurity, ambivalence, excessive self-consciousness and chronic nervous strain (Goldberg, 1941). The marginal bicultural expatriates identified in this study also expressed weak identifications with both home and

30 Please refer to Essay 1 for greater detail.

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host cultures. In particular, they sensed exclusion from the host culture and the ‘foreignness’ they sensed contributed to their marginality.

There are divergent perspectives in literature on whether such marginality is positive or negative. Marginal biculturals are described as poorly adapted to the environment, socially weak and psychologically overwhelmed (Berry, 1980). Some studies associated marginality with dysfunction (e.g. Berry et al., 1989). In turn, some studies further proposed that marginality will result in poor managerial performance when operationalized as cultural independence (e.g. Tung, 1998). Meanwhile, another stream of research pointed out that a connection between marginality and dysfunction is only true in empirical studies in which dysfunctionality is operationalized as stress and marginalisation is operationalized as difficulty in life, instead of low association with two cultures (Rudmin, 2003), and such empirical findings are therefore tautological rather than empirical (Rudmin and Ahmadzadeh, 2001). Furthermore, Gillespie et al. (2010) pointed out that there is no empirical evidence linking poor performance to low association with two cultures. Marginals may even outperform individuals who identify primarily with one culture on both cultural appropriateness and communication effectiveness during expatriate assignments (Lee, 2010), and on cultural complexity (Tadmor et al., 2009). Fitzsimmons et al. (2012) further proposed a conceptual explanation for the unique nature of marginals succeeding as global leaders. The marginal bicultural expatriates analysed in Essay 1 have demonstrated strong analytical skills and perseverance, as they need to constantly observe their environment and evaluate whether they are expected and allowed to behave like a local or expatriate. They developed perseverance as they fought against the host country society to gain approval to be a local.

5.1.5.2 Multiculturalism and cosmopolitanism

Cosmopolitanism and cosmopolitan identity have been researched extensively in management and in sociology. Scholars have defined cosmopolitans as individuals possessing a distinctive set of attitudes and discernable set of practices of learned cultural competences (Vertovec and Cohen, 2002), an intellectual and aesthetic stance of openness towards divergent cultural experiences and a willingness to engage with the ‘Other’ (Hannerz, 1990). In management H. Lee (2014) defined it as the holding of a social identity of dual allegiance in nature and regard themselves as part of beyond commonly accepted social, cultural, and/or political boundaries (Lee, 2014), such as third-culture kid, cosmopolitan elite (e.g. Calhoun, 2002).

There are many types of cosmopolitanism described in the current literature, as reflected in the variations of definitions reviewed above. One type of cosmopolitanism, which is viewed as one type of biculturalism among expatriates in this study, is that the individual selects from other cultures only those pieces which he or she finds suitable. Such selectivity can operate both in the short term and in the long term, becoming a way a cosmopolitan constructs his or her own unique personal perspectives out of an idiosyncratic collection of experiences (Hannerz, 1990). The cosmopolitan may embrace the local culture, but he or she does not become committed and loyal to it. He or she knows all the time where the exit is. He or she might possess the local culture, but it does not possess him. Among many cultures cosmopolitans have engaged, one culture is presumably of the territorial nature encompassing the round of everyday life in a community (Hannerz, 1990), for example in the cosmopolitan expatriates identified in this study, they tend to root deeply in their cultural of origin, for example they did not interact frequently with other Finnish expatriates. They have internalised some of the cultural schemas of the countries they lived before and that of the countries they currently live in. However they are aware that these other cultural elements are additional elements to their cultures of origin. They do not become loyal to these

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additional cultures and yet they distance themselves away from their culture of origin at the same time.

Drawing upon the empirical findings of this study, when monocultural expatriates internalise a new cultural schema they acquire more knowledge about the host country possibly becoming bicultural individuals for work purposes, i.e. they know how to behave like the host country nationals in order to achieve certain work results. There are several possible changes that expatriates might experience in terms of their cultural identity. They can remain having identification only with their home culture. They can also start to identify with the host culture, but end in having weak identification with both home and host culture for various reasons reviewed in the previous chapter, and become marginal biculturals. The third alternative is to selectively incorporate all the new cultural schemas they have become exposed to and develop a cosmopolitan identity, especially when their language proficiency of the host country language is low.

5.1.6 Summary on the theorisation of biculturalism

To summarise, I view expatriates’ biculturalism as not inherent, bounded or static. Instead, they are dynamic, fluid and constructed situationally, in particular places and times. The nature of culture, as part of “biculturalism”, is “an active process of meaning making and contestation over definition, including of itself (Street, 1993:2)”. Biculturalism of expatriates can be what expatriates do in terms of behaviour and practices, and/or how they feel in terms of belongingness and identifications. It is manifested at the individual level while being situated in the organisational and societal context in both home and host culture, and also possibly a third or fourth culture in which the expatriate has lived before. Depending upon the result of the constant negotiation process between expatriates and the other individuals and environments surrounding them, expatriates have different experiences in developing and maintaining different types of biculturalism. As illustrated in Figure 1531 below, expatriate biculturalism can be a number of different combinations of the internalisation of behaviours, values and assumptions at the individual, organisational and societal level of the home, host and/or third culture.

31 In this figure, the circles refer to the different levels of cultural context. The triangles are the different layers of culture within each level. The division of home, host and third+ culture are marked by the different background colours. With this figure, I attempt to v isualise the complexity of expatriate biculturalism discussed in Chapter 5.1 .

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Figure 15 Theorisation of biculturalism based on the empirical results

5.1.7 Further problematisation of Anglocentrism and Eurocentrism in current biculturalism research

Building upon the problematisation of the concept of culture in Chapter 2.1.5, this chapter continues by discussing how culture is also about the power and right to define what culture is (Wright, 1998) in the context of biculturalism research. By selecting expatriates mainly from the Nordic countries and working in China as the empirical context, this study also problematizes the Anglocentrism and Eurocentrism in the current biculturalism research, which tends to examine acculturating individuals to the US or Western Europe.

A great amount of existing research on biculturalism is related to empirical work conducted in the ‘Western’ world. The original concept of acculturation does not imply the direction of acculturation. It can be acculturating towards either the home or host culture. However, after centuries of operationalisation this concept has become very loaded and tends to imply acculturation towards the host country only (Birman, 1994), in particular for individuals coming from less-developed places to US In the history of acculturation and biculturalism research, the focus has been on individuals from less-developed places to more developed places, such as Europeans who escaped from Ellis Island at the beginning of the 20th century, and Cubans and Mexicans moving to the United States in the 1950s and 1960s. Significant identity and biculturalism models were developed to address the experiences of African US Americans (Cross, 1971; Helms, 1984) and Hispanic US Americans (Szapocznik et al., 1980).

Unsurprisingly the emergent stream of research on biculturals in IB has also focused on bicultural individuals with cultural heritages from developing countries, because their

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bicultural skills and competences can be utilised by MNCs from the US or Europe during business operations in the ‘developing’ world. The research traditions in both disciplines have led to the Anglocentrism, Eurocentrism and US-centredness in the current biculturalism research. Multiculturalism has been linked closely to race and understood as a biracial individual from a multicultural family who has lived in various countries (Bartholet and Stone, 2009), which is not the case in the main home country and the host country of the expatriates examined in this thesis. Specifically, this study examined the acculturation of ‘Westerners’ in China, where a bicultural expatriate is not necessarily a biracial individual. In fact, none of the multicultural expatriates identified in this study are multicultural or multiracial. They have become, or are becoming, bicultural as a result of their expatriation experiences in the current host country and/or in other host countries. As Nordic countries are more developed than China, the findings of this study also bring new contextual knowledge to the theorising of biculturalism. For example, how Nordic expatriates dealt with the ethnic hierarchy between ‘white’ Westerners and ‘Chinese’ locals and how the ‘Chineseness’ is desired in a conflicted manner.

5.2 Language and biculturalism

Language has been argued to be part of the fabric of national identity by both commentators (Huntington, 2004) and empirical studies (Barker et al., 2001; Schildkraut, 2005). Migrants who cannot speak the language of the country or region can be considered a threat to national unity (Schwartz et al., 2010). Many host society members may consider it disrespectful that some migrants are unwilling or unable to speak the language of the host society (Schwartz et al., 2010), such as the “English Only” movement in the United States (Barker et al., 2001). McLaren (1995) proposed critical multiculturalism from the perspective of a resistance poststructuralist approach to meaning, which emphasises that the representation of language plays an important role in the construction of meaning and identity. Language helps to constitute experience of meanings by providing a structure or device through which experiences, or rather ‘experiences of meanings’ can be understood. Language, on the other hand, is a topic under-addressed in the current operationalisation of biculturalism.

However, biculturalism should not be confused with bilingualism (Nguyen and Benet-Martínez, 2010) despite the importance of language in developing biculturalism. Although most of the biculturals are fluent in two languages, especially in psychology research, it is not always the case, as demonstrated by the empirical results of this study. Bicultural expatriates might or might not be bilingual; for example, among the bicultural expatriates identified in this study; several do not speak the host country language fluently. Similarly, a bilingual expatriate might not be bicultural, as some expatriates expressed that “I don’t feel Chinese although I do speak the language” [E21b]. Furthermore, as the language skills were self-defined in this study, it is difficult to determine whether these bicultural expatriates are “truly” bilingual. They might be bilingual in their own perception when they compare themselves with other expatriates who do not have much knowledge of the host country language.

Hence, language proficiency might only provide an efficient proxy for cultural adaptation (Schwartz et al., 2010), despite the fact that the vast majority of studies in the acculturation literature have focused on behavioural acculturation, i.e. using acculturation measures including primarily or only items assessing language use and other cultural practices (e.g. Cuellar et al., 1995; Stephenson, 2000; Szapocznik et al., 1980). Unger et al. (2007) found that language use explained less than 20% of variability in behavioural and value-based indices of acculturation. Research has found that both Asian US American and Hispanic adolescents who speak little or none of the language of their families still identified strongly with their countries of familiar origin (e.g. Portes and Rumbaut, 2001; Schwartz et al., 2007).

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Therefore, measuring only language use and cultural practices may not provide an accurate picture of acculturation (Schwartz et al., 2010).

The majority of expatriates in this study can cope with English at workplaces in the host country, as most Nordic MNCs adopt English as the corporate lingua franca. Expatriates do not need to speak Chinese in order to be selected for their current position. Their technical competences and MNC tenure are valued more than their host country language proficiency. However, their living environment is predominantly Chinese linguistically despite the fact that big cities in China have become more internationalised, particularly in residential areas populated by expatriates. Expatriates need to cope with their daily life issues in the host country language.

How expatriates respond to such a dilemma, i.e. whether they are willing to invest time and effort in learning the host country language and how they respond to their HCN colleagues’ speaking Chinese at work, can influence how they feel towards the host country, which can then further influence whether they feel that they are excluded or included as part of the local community. Some expatriates spend less effort learning Chinese and believe that their HCN colleagues have the full potential to communicate in English and want to practice their English with expatriates instead of speaking Chinese. For example, one expatriate commented:

Some people, they always speak Chinese, but in fact they can speak English … They are happy to learn English … Yeah, well, they all realise that it’s a very important thing to be able to speak English. [E14b]

Meanwhile other expatriates are fully convinced that they must learn to speak the local language, as illustrated by one expatriate’s comment:

Other thing was, Chinese skills are very important, especially reading is very important, and listening too. [E20b]

Another expatriate also explained his determination to learn Chinese:

I need to get over the threshold. Actually, I changed my assistant. She was not good in English actually. But that was one of the reasons… she is excellent at the work, but she is not good in English. So I rather say that please offer a Chinese to me so we can practice [communicating in Chinese]. [E1b]

Building on the existing literature and the empirical findings, this study proposes that the host country language proficiency of expatriates is highly relevant for them to develop biculturalism. Being able to speak the local language would help non-ethnic Chinese expatriates gain the acceptance of HCNs. However, it is difficult to pinpoint a clear causal relationship between expatriates’ host country language proficiency and marginal bicultural identity. Proficiency in the host country language can help expatriates acquire the new cultural repertoire more efficiently. However, mastering the language alone does not guarantee the development of biculturalism. The actual willingness and motivation to learn the host country language is more important than the actual language proficiency. The marginal bicultural and cosmopolitan expatriates researched in this study have varied levels of local language proficiency, but they have all demonstrated the capability to internalise the host country cultural schema.

5.3 Cross-cultural adjustment and biculturalism

As reviewed in Chapters 2.4 and 2.6, cross-cultural adjustment and biculturalism are two separate terms used to refer to different phenomena in two steams of literature. Cross-cultural adjustment has been one of the focuses in expatriate literature under International Human Resource Management (IHRM), while biculturalism originates from social psychology. The fundamental difference between cross-cultural adjustment and

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biculturalism in the context of this study is that cross-cultural adjustment only looks at how expatriates have adjusted. It does not directly address integration with the host country; neither does it have any connotation in terms of change in cultural schema and/or identity. Current bicultural theories have tended to focus upon the cognitive and psychological consequences of being bicultural and have not examined in detail whether or not there is also an adjustment period akin to the sequential stages of acculturation.

During the process of internalising two cultures, bicultural individuals have acquired social and cognitive competences and flexibilities which make them adapt more smoothly and adjust more easily to different people or situations in either of these two cultures and possibly also in other cultures (Benet-Martínez et al., 2006; Gonzales et al., 2004; Leung et al., 2008; Szapocznik et al., 1984). Having only one culture, instead of both original and new cultures, could be the result of being rejected by members of the other culture or feeling a lack of belongingness with the other culture (Roccas et al., 2000; Rogler et al., 1991; Ross et al., 2002). Nguyen and Benet-Martinez (in press) conducted a meta-analysis of 83 studies on immigrants, refuges, sojourners including expatriates, indigenous people and ethnic minorities, and concluded that there is a significant, strong and positive association between biculturalism and the various forms of adjustment. Therefore, in theory, bicultural individuals tend to adjust significantly better than monoculturals. Similarly, acculturating individuals who adjust better are more likely to be biculturals, instead of monoculturals.

Earlier literature on expatriation has described the adjustment process as a “U -curve” (Gullahorn and Gullahorn, 1963). Torbiorn (1982) further proposed that the U-curve hypothesis addresses the progression of adjustment over time. There are four sequential stages: honeymoon, culture shock, adjustment and mastery. The initial honeymoon stage of excitement is followed by a struggle to adjust when cultural disorientation sets in. Afterwards, expatriates learn to cope with the new working and living environment, adjustment increases and expatriates feel adjusted to the host country. Black and Mendenhall (1991) further analysed the curve from the social learning theory perspective (Bandura, 1997). The honeymoon stage is when expatriates first enter a foreign country and are excited by the novelty of the new environment. Trial-and-error learning and ignoring negative feedback on inappropriate behaviour characterise this stage. When negative feedback is eventually recognised by the expatriates, the honeymoon stage ends and culture shock, the lowest point in the curve, follows (Black et al., 1991). During the culture shock stage, expatriates cope with the daily uncertainty and doubt about their capability to live and work in the host country resulting from not understanding and not being able to act according to the host country cultural norms and behaviours. After the culture shock stage, expatriates experience the adjustment stage, when they gradually learn how to behave appropriately in the host country environment. They also start to feel more satisfied and see more value in themselves (Black et al., 1991). The final stage is mastery, which is characterised by greater adjustment and increased ability to perform (Black et al., 1991).

Based on 64 studies with mean assignments of three years, the results of a meta-analysis carried out by Bhaskar-Shrinivas et al. (2005) suggested that expatriate adjustment follows a curve shaped like a sideways “S” with the honeymoon period appearing to end after 12 months. The curve hits the bottom around three years, reaching the end of the cultural disorientation stage, which is characterised by the increasing frustration of not knowing the appropriate ways to do things in the foreign culture. The curve then builds up and stabilizes at the final adjustment stage at a little over four years.

There is relatively little empirical research unfolding the expatriate adjustment process over time (Bhaskar-Shrinivas et al., 2005). Even less research has addressed the adjustment process after the “U/S” shape. Existing expatriate literature predicts that expatriates should be well-adjusted at the point when the second highest point is reached. The “U” shape marks the boundary of adjustment research on expatriates.

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Turning to biculturalism research, many conceptual definitions of biculturalism typically indicate that a certain amount of exposure and experience with second cultures is necessary in order to develop biculturalism (Benet-Martinez et al., 2002; David et al., 2009). Operationalisation of biculturals via participant recruitment procedures in many studies hint towards at least 5 years of exposure to both cultures (Benet-Martinez et al., 2002; Hong et al., 2000). Tsai and Pike’s (2000) study additionally discovered that individuals who scored as poorly acculturated to a second culture have, on average, had 4.95 years of exposure, while those who scored as highly acculturated had, on average, 19.09 years.

Therefore, it seems that an individual continues to develop biculturalism after he or she has reached the final adjustment stage. Although the relationship between cross-cultural adjustment and biculturalism has not been the main focus of this thesis, the empirical evidence of this study does suggest a complex relationship instead of a simple causality between cross-cultural adjustment and biculturalism. Bicultural expatriates tend to express less frustration in terms of adjusting to working and living in the host country. However, all types of expatriates, ranging from monocultural to cosmopolitan, experience uncertainty and confusion regarding their identity, which causes a certain degree of discomfort in terms of cross-cultural adjustment. Both processes are closely intertwined together – when expatriates began experiencing the cross-cultural adjustment process, they also started the process of developing or resisting biculturalism. Both processes are ongoing, and it is difficult to determine when cross-cultural adjustment and the development of multiculturalism end. Although it has been relatively clear to determine when these two processes start with a certain expatriate, repeated expatriation and frequent commuting have blurred the boundaries between an expatriate’s work and life in their home and host culture. It is increasingly challenging for expatriates to separate their experiences received from the current expatriation from their previous experiences, as many have either studied or worked before in the current host country.

To summarise, cross-cultural adjustment and biculturalism are proposed to be closely related to each other in the context of expatriate diversity.

5.4 Contributions of the thesis

This multi-disciplinary study has made several potential contributions to the field of social psychology and management. These are discussed in detail in terms of empirical, theoretical and managerial contributions.

5.4.1 Empirical contributions

This study has provided insights into Nordic expatriates’ work and life in China from a language and culture perspective. The empirical context of Nordic country national and China is important to the theoretical development of bicultural employees in MNCs, yet it has not been touched upon in the current literature of biculturalism in the management and social psychology discipline. This study has therefore extended scholarly understanding of multicultural individuals in societies where there is a lack of history in multiculturalism, such as China. By analysing expatriates’ experiences, this study also brings empirical understanding to organisational individuals, who are different from individuals moving across national boundaries for other reasons than work and career. Most importantly, by presenting multicultural individuals from homogenous societies such as Finland in another homogeneous society China as a result of expatriation, this study blurs the boundaries of ‘us’ and ‘others’ in multiculturalism research in the management field (Vinkenburg, 2014). It brings to attention the fact that many countries are embracing an era of multiculturalism in

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which intergroup contact with members of another ethno-cultural community is the norm rather than the exception (Leong and Liu, 2013).

Methodologically, this dissertation has responded to the scholarly call of shifting from the individual-centred to multiple stakeholder perspective in expatriate research by emphasising the role of expatriates’ host country colleagues (Takeuchi, 2010). The grounded theory method adopted in the main study of this thesis has made it possible for this thesis to provide a rich and contextualised analysis of expatriates’ lives. This thesis has made methodological contributions by creatively integrating observations and paired-up/team-based interviews with complementary questionnaires during the interviews.

5.4.2 Theoretical contributions

The thesis seeks to contribute to the literature on biculturalism in IB and expatriate management in IHRM in the following ways. First, by integrating research on biculturals in cross-cultural psychology and expatriate adjustment research in the management discipline, this study extends our understanding of bicultural individuals in the workplace. Second, it seeks to shift the focus from a limited number of born biculturals to a more diverse population of expatriates by inductively building theory on what characterises expatriates’ process of internalising the new cultural schema and identifying with a new culture. Third, this study aims to bring scholarly attention to the importance of empirical context in theorising biculturalism by demonstrating how the specific contexts of the home and host country influence expatriates’ acculturation process. Fourth, this study contributes to acculturation stress and coping literature by bringing in the host country national’s perspective in explaining why developing and managing a multicultural identity can be stressful and how rootedness in various forms can ease such stress and anxiety. Fifth, this study also contributes to language in IB research by providing a holistic framework for the various language challenges faced by expatriates from both the expatriate’s and host country employee’s perspective. Sixth, this study provides a contextual account of the effect of expatriate host country language proficiency on cross-cultural adjustment and inductively builds an analytical framework on how and why language matters. Finally, this study has defined what biculturalism is in a contextualised and dynamic manner and articulated why it is different from the existing frameworks such as cross-cultural adjustment and acculturation and how it might be applied to future studies in the similar area.

5.4.3 Policy and organisational contributions

By analysing expatriates’ multicultural experiences and language encounters in the host country of the MNC subsidiaries, this study broadens cross-cultural adjustment and provides important implications on whether the way that biculturals learn and internalise a new culture can be applied to developing global managers. It has several practical implications in terms of selecting suitable candidates and developing them into global leaders who can succeed across cultural boundaries. Marginals are described as poorly adapted to the environment, psychologically overwhelmed and socially weak (Berry et al., 2006), yet recently scholars have begun to notice that marginals outperform individuals who identify primarily with one culture, on both cultural appropriateness and communication effectiveness during expatriate assignments (Lee, 2010), and on cultural complexity (Tadmor et al., 2009). Fitzsimmons et al. (2012) proposed a conceptual explanation for the unique nature of marginals as global leaders, theorising marginalisation as both the state and the process from the diversity, complexity and uncertainty perspective. Marginals are proposed to only excel as global leaders when they also exhibit mindfulness and personal agency, which would allow them to overcome their internal tensions between the different cultures and develop global leadership characteristics. This study has demonstrated that when

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expatriates have fully internalised a new cultural schema, they tend to become marginal biculturals exhibiting strong analytical skills and high level of mindfulness. They tend to cope more easily with the complexity and uncertainty of their working and living environment. Such marginal bicultural expatriates tend to stay longer in the host country, and they also tend to be more satisfied with their job. The findings suggest that MNCs could recruit marginal bicultural expatriates for global leadership positions.

Furthermore, the findings on expatriates’ host country language proficiency also have several practical implications. The findings suggest that MNCs could boost expatriate adjustment and thereby decrease assignment failure rates by implementing the following policy changes. MNCs should emphasise host country language proficiency in expatriate selection and/or invest more in expatriate language training. Linking language proficiency development to performance appraisals may motivate expatriates to improve their host country language proficiency and consequently lower assignment failure rates. Despite the importance of host country language proficiency for expatriate adjustment, many MNCs base their expatriate selection on technical expertise (Swaak, 1995). In addition, MNC subsidiaries should recruit host country nationals with sufficient corporate language proficiency to serve as language nodes for the expatriate employees. This approach would lift the extra role burden from host country employees and decrease intentional or unintentional misunderstanding of messages transmitted through intermediaries. As our findings also suggest that host country employees often seek to avoid extra duties as language nodes, host country employees acting as such should be rewarded for their efforts.

5.5 Suggestions for future research

This study has touched upon the relationship between biculturalism and bilingualism (Ringberg et al., 2010). Future studies could further explore the role of host country language in expatriates’ process of becoming bicultural. For example, does speaking the host country language increase expatriates’ identification with the host culture? What role do language competences in general play in expatriates’ identity change? Does speaking more foreign languages lead to biculturalism?

The concept of cultural frame switching is also relevant when biculturalism is operationalised (Benet-Martínez et al., 2002). Future studies could also focus on the ability to switch between home and host culture among expatriates and the relationship between cultural frame switching and the different forms of biculturalism. Future study on biculturalism could also further explore the role of ethnic hierarchy. Permutations of language, ethnicity and cultural similarity, among other factors influence the degree of ease or difficulty associated with the acculturation process (Schwartz et al., 2010).

Furthermore, relating to the discussions on research philosophy in Chapter 3.1, another possible angle to examine the biculturalism of expatriates could be from an identity construction perspective, examining how expatriates talk about their cultural identities. Further studies could consider employing two interviewers with different ethnic background and conducting the interview with the same expatriates. Interesting comparisons could then be drawn from the analysis regarding how the interviewee constructs his or her cultural identity to different audiences; for example, the claim of ‘being a forever foreigner’ might be made differently to a local interviewer and to a ‘foreign’ interviewer.

5.6 Concluding remarks

This study is an attempt to gain a better understanding of acculturating expatriates’ living and working realities in China. Drawing upon research on biculturalism in Social

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Psychology, and research on expatriates and language issues in International Business and International Human Resource Management, this thesis contributes to existing literature by providing scholarly insight into the complex cultural schema and identity formulation process, the challenges and dilemmas expatriates face in such processes, and how they cope with the related uncertainties and anxieties. Linking biculturalism with cross-cultural adjustment, this study calls for more scholarly attention on language and culture issues in expatriate management – the lack of a clear cultural belongingness makes it challenging to discover the individual self, and thus it is critical that the complexities and dynamics of biculturalism are better understood in an increasingly diverse, mobile and dynamic world.

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APPENDIX 1 ESSAYS 1-5

Essay 1 Acculturation Taxonomy Revisited: An Empirical Study with Nordic Expatriates in China (pp. 123-160)

Ling Eleanor Zhang

Essay 2 Coping with Dilemmas: An Analysis of Multicultural Expatriates (pp. 161-188)

Ling Eleanor Zhang

Essay 3 Do I Really Need to Learn It? We Think You Do! Individual, Organizational and National Perspectives on the Rationale, Willingness and Ambivalence of Nordic Expatriates to Learn Chinese (pp. 189-219)

Ling Eleanor Zhang & Anne-Wil Harzing

Essay 4 Multifaceted Effects of Host Country Language Proficiency in Expatriate Cross-Cultural Adjustments: A Qualitative Study in China (pp. 221-249)

Ling Eleanor Zhang & Vesa Matti Peltokorpi

Essay 5 ‘Multiculturality’ as a Key Methodological Challenge during In-depth Interviewing (pp. 251-279)

Ling Eleanor Zhang & David S. A. Guttormsen

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APPENDIX 2 MAIN GUIDING INTERVIEW QUESTIONS

For Expatriates

Tell me about yourself, your background and how come you are in China now? What is your current position and what are your main responsibilities? How long have you been working in China now? Have you lived/studied in other

countries before? What were your motivations/reasons to seek for employment in China? How do you

feel about working in China? How has it been in general? Good or bad? What are the things that you have experienced, but haven’t expected? How have these

affected you at work? Can you tell me things/stories that you find most shocking at work so far? How have

these affected you at work? Can you then tell me the most difficult case that you have handled so far? How has life been in China?32 Do you eat Chinese/Finnish food; watch Chinese/Finnish media; hang out with

Chinese/Finnish/other foreigners; celebrate Chinese/Finnish holidays? What do you think about living in Finland and China? Do you enjoy it? How are you dealing with the differences (similarities) between the two

countries/cities/offices? Did you move here alone or with your family? How do your families like living in

China? Tell me about the Chinese language - do you speak it? Is there a problem with

language at work, living in China, etc.? Recalling yourself few years ago when you were still working in Finland, could you

talk about how similar/different you are now culture-wise? Do you feel that you are integrated at work and here in general? Can you do things both in the Chinese way and the Finnish way, if needed? Is this

important for your work? What’s your plan for the future in terms of leaving or staying in China (work and

life)?

For Host Country Employees

Tell me about yourself, your previous working experience and how you ended up working in this company? (Studying/working abroad, in foreign companies, joint-ventures etc.)

When did you start to work together with foreign colleagues (your Finnish and Swedish colleagues in the current position)?

32 At the beginning of the data collection, I tried to encourage expatriates to talk about their lives in China first, but it was awkward and many interviewees constantly referred to work. I then changed the order of ‘work’ and ‘life’, i.e. I asked about expatriates’ work first, then life in general. The order of the questions listed here also varied considerably in the actual interviews, as I basically let the interviewees talk about their life and work in China and tried to ask follow -up questions based on what they have told.

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?

Think about the following questions in the context of working with these Finnish/Swedish/foreign colleague (expatriate colleague X, Y, Z):

What are the things that you have experienced, but haven’t expected? How have these

affected you at work?

Can you tell me one thing/story that you find most shocking at work so far? How have these affected you at work?

Can you then tell me the most difficult case that you have handled so far?

Do you see differences in terms of Finnish/Swedish/foreign and Chinese

management style? Are there any language barriers? Can they speak Chinese? Do you know whether they are leaning Chinese?

Do you think these Finnish/Swedish/foreign colleagues of yours are used to working

and living in China? Do you spend time with them or other foreigners in general?

Do you think they are well integrated at work/in the Chinese society?

Do you think some of your Finnish/Swedish/foreign colleagues are localised?

Do you think they can ever become one of the locals? Why?

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APPENDIX 3 MAIN QUESTIONNAIRES USED DURING THE INTERVIEWS33

For Expatriates

Background Information

Corporation & Position: Gender: Male Female

Nationality: Age: 20-30 31-40 41-50 51-65

Length of employment in the company:

Total length of employment in China: Total length of living outside Finland/Sweden( traveling and studying):

Country Culture Novelty

Please rank how different China and Finland/Sweden are to you: Similar……………………………………………………………………………………………….Different 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 Please rank how different Chinese and Finnish/Swedish ways of doing business are to you: Similar……………………………………………………………………………………………….Different 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 Language

Please rank how good your Chinese skill is: Poor …………………………………………………………………………………………………Excellent 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 Please rank how good your English skill is: Poor …………………………………………………………………………………………………Excellent 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 Which language do you use most at work? (Please think of interactions with your closest colleagues.) [ ] Chinese [ ] English [ ] Finnish [ ] Swedish [ ] Other

33 There were different versions of questionnaires as I modified the interview guides during the data collection y ear. This version was the last version and was used during the majority of the interviews.

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Which language do you use second-most at work? (Please think of interactions with your closest colleagues.) [ ] Chinese [ ] English [ ] Finnish [ ] Swedish [ ] Other

Involvement with Chinese Language and Culture

How often do you read/watch Chinese language media? Very rare………………………………………………………………………………………..Very often 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 How often do you interact with Chinese colleagues outside work? Very rare………………………………………………………………………………………...Very often 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 How often do you interact with Chinese in your neighbourhood? Very rare…………………………………………………………………………………………Very often 1 2 3 4 5 6 7

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For Host Country Employees34

Background Information

Corporation & Position: Gender: Male Female

Nationality: Age: 20-30 31-40 41-50 51-65

Length of employment in the company: Total length of employment outside China: Total length of living outside China ( traveling and studying):

Country culture novelty Please rank how different China and Finland are to you: Similar…………………………………………………………………………………………….Different 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 Please rank how different Chinese and Finnish/Swedish ways of doing business are to you: Similar……………………………………………………………………………………………..Different 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 Language Please rank how good your English skill is: Poor …………………………………………………………………………………………………Excellent 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 Please rank how good your Finnish skill is: Poor ………………………………………………………………………………………………….Excellent 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 Which language do you use most at work? (Please think of interactions with your closest colleagues.) [ ] Chinese [ ] English [ ] Finnish [ ] Other

Which language do you use second-most at work? (Please think of interactions with your closest colleagues.) [ ] Chinese [ ] English [ ] Finnish [ ] Other

Involvement with Foreign Language and Culture

How often do you read/watch English language media?

34 This questionnaire was not translated into Chinese because I did not hand out the questionnaire for the interviewee to fill in independently during the interview. Instead, I explained these questions to them in Chinese, as the purpose of this questionnaire was to encourage more conversation, as explained in Chapter 3 .4.4.

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Very rare……………………………………………………………………………………..…Very often 1 2 3 4 5 6 7

How often do you interact with foreign colleagues outside work? Very rare………………………………………………………………………………………..Very often 1 2 3 4 5 6 7

How often do you interact with foreigners in your neighbourhood? Very rare…………………………………………………………………………………………Very often 1 2 3 4 5 6 7