Privileged yet marginalised: The career experiences of Asian immigrant academics in New Zealand

Abstract

This study examines the career experiences of Asian immigrant academics through a career experience in context framework. Drawing from the emergent ‘career in context’ literature this research incorporates three components – career context, relationships and networks and self-interpretations. This thesis contributes to career studies, integrating issues of immigration in relation to academic careers. It asks the research question: ‘What are the career experiences of Asian immigrant academics in New Zealand?’ It argues that Asian immigrant academics in New Zealand occupy paradoxical positions: they are privileged yet marginalised in their careers.

The study is set in the context of New Zealand, a country that has recently witnessed a major influx of Asian immigrants into a traditionally European-dominated population. The academic workforce in New Zealand is highly internationalised, with a fast growing number of Asian immigrants. Addressing Asian immigrant academics’ careers, this thesis discusses how the wider social response to Asian skilled immigrants has shaped the experiences of Asian immigrant academics in New Zealand. In particular, it shows that these highly skilled professionals are yet often undervalued due to their immigrant and ethnic status.

A life-history method, under the guiding philosophy of social constructionism, was employed to collect data from a sample of Asian immigrant academics about their career experiences. The life-history interview solicits stories of careers as they unfold over time, within specific contexts, relationships and networks. The core data consists of life-history interviews with forty Asian immigrant academics from a range of disciplines across eight New Zealand universities. Both thematic and metaphorical analyses were used to narrate their individual and collective career experiences. The findings are presented in terms of the three key components of the ‘career experience in context’ framework.

This thesis demonstrates that Asian immigrant academics see themselves as both privileged and marginalised in their careers. It also shows that the degrees of privilege and marginalisation Asian immigrant academics experience vary between individuals’ careers and also within each single career, across different points in time. This relationship between privilege and marginalisation is illustrated in the career stories presented here, in terms of the multiple paradoxes they experience. This is described in terms of feeling both supported and unsupported, and both accepted and discriminated against. The academics included in this research describe their careers as ‘embedded’ and also ‘disrupted’ in terms of specific organisational, professional and national contexts. Furthermore, they describe experiences of both ‘continuity’ and ‘disruption’, and ‘inclusion’ and ‘exclusion’. Their accounts of their relationships and networks across different contexts capture these tensions and paradoxes, along with their experiences of discrimination. Three types of strategies – ‘survival’, ‘adaptation’ and ‘flourishing’ – were identified to explain the ways in which Asian immigrant academics navigate their careers. The strategies emerged from accounts of career experience and were illuminated within the overall meaning of four career metaphors – ‘tree’, ‘struggle’, ‘roller coaster’ and ‘river’, which portray individuals’ career experiences in their entirety.

This thesis contributes to a deeper understanding of skilled immigrants’ career experiences within context. More broadly, it contributes to the ‘career in context’ literature by highlighting why and how the exploration of aspects of context enriches our understandings of career experiences. The exploration of privilege and marginalisation in the thesis as temporal, relative and situated provides a lens for studying the paradoxical nature of career experiences, both across time and at specific moments in time.