This first-of-its-kind book uniquely captures the meanings of work expressed by immigrants. Their stories - from work histories to life transitions and professional journeys - are conscientiously and rigorously mapped by the academic insights of communication scholars, many of whom are immigrants themselves. Immigrant workers' narratives of work and its nuances in an adopted country offer many hitherto muted, invisible, and/or purposely silenced perspectives. A variety of new and familiar terms - concepts such as career inheritance, aphorisms, cultural adaptation, acculturation, and cultural distance - and culture-specific terms such as ganas and consejos are discussed alongside the inherent struggles of identity construction across borders. While the contributors represent diversity in co-cultural affiliations, national origin, and immigration experiences encountered both personally and professionally, the stories of immigrants represent an even larger number of countries and cultures. This volume compels the academic community to acknowledge immigrants as workers whose voices matter and whose sense and processes of meaning-making is nuanced, complex, and multi-dimensional. Immigrant workers' voices can contribute significantly to the rich growth of research in organizational communication, meanings of work, career studies, cross-cultural management, psychology of work, and work and society.

This study investigates Indian working women's sense of the discourses surrounding work and careers. In interviews conducted with seventy-seven women across socioeconomic statuses, castes, classes, and occupational and generational categories in the city of Pune, India, women express how feeling bound by tradition confronts excitement about ongoing changes in the country. The work lives of these women are influenced symbiotically by India's sociocultural practices and the contemporary phenomenon of globalization. Using feminist standpoint theory as a theoretical lens, Suchitra Shenoy-Packer explores how women deconstruct, coconstruct, and reconstruct systems of knowledge about their worlds of work as embedded within and influenced by the intersections of society, socialization, and individual agency. The meanings that Indian women associate with their work as well as their definition of a career in twenty-first-century India will be of interest to students and scholars of feminist theory, women's studies, globalization, Asian studies, and labor studies.

This first-of-its-kind book uniquely captures the meanings of work expressed by immigrants. Their stories - from work histories to life transitions and professional journeys - are conscientiously and rigorously mapped by the academic insights of communication scholars, many of whom are immigrants themselves. Immigrant workers' narratives of work and its nuances in an adopted country offer many hitherto muted, invisible, and/or purposely silenced perspectives. A variety of new and familiar terms - concepts such as career inheritance, aphorisms, cultural adaptation, acculturation, and cultural distance - and culture-specific terms such as ganas and consejos are discussed alongside the inherent struggles of identity construction across borders. While the contributors represent diversity in co-cultural affiliations, national origin, and immigration experiences encountered both personally and professionally, the stories of immigrants represent an even larger number of countries and cultures. This volume compels the academic community to acknowledge immigrants as workers whose voices matter and whose sense and processes of meaning-making is nuanced, complex, and multi-dimensional. Immigrant workers' voices can contribute significantly to the rich growth of research in organizational communication, meanings of work, career studies, cross-cultural management, psychology of work, and work and society.