Sustainability as an Identity Construct: (Re)Crafting Organizational Identification for Organizational Immigrants

Individual Identity and Organizational Identification

Significant research has been conducted to identify the role of communication in contouring, shaping and crafting nuances of identity in organizational contexts (Cheney, 1983; Cheney & Christensen, 2001). In doing so, researchers have successfully catalogued the entry and assimilation processes in organizations that confer ‘native status’ on members who meld in seamlessly and with little effort within organizational boundaries, adopting identities that resonate with the identity of the organization. The resonance between member and organizational identity is essential to identification match, the absence of which might lead to organizational dissonance (Ashcraft, 2001). This dissonance lies at the heart of identity negotiations that members strategically use, knowingly or otherwise, to align the identity blueprints of the self with those of the organization. Research has also shown that individuals who align themselves with the existing social groups in the organization are more likely to persist than individuals who do not (Ashforth, Harrison, & Corley, 2008; Sluss & Ashforth, 2008).

According to Albert and Whetton (1985), organizational identity is a ‘concept that organizations use to characterize aspects of themselves’ (p. 264). These organizational aspects are reflected in mission statements, shared social spaces and other relevant artefacts (Whetten, 2006), depicting what the organization ‘represents’. Similarly, Cheney, Christensen and Dailey (2013) define the concept as an ongoing state of negotiation by claiming that ‘organizations enact their identities through stories that they tell, directly or indirectly, about themselves, their past, their ambitions, and their perceptions of the environment’ (p. 697), thus contextualizing identification as enactment. Entrenched within these perspectives is the notion of narratives, talk, interaction and communication that shapes organizational identity (Browning & Morris, 2012), connecting individual members to the organization.

Research on organizational identification has traditionally sought to uncover the relationship between individual identity and organizational identification (Albert, Ashforth, & Dutton, 2000; Brickson, 2005, 2013; Kuhn & Nelson, 2002), highlighting the role of identity as critical to organizational identification. The studies highlight the role of the social constructions of identity at the heart of meaningful identity work (Cheney, Zorn, Planalp, & Lair, 2008; Kuhn, 2006). According to Dutton, Dukerich and Harquail (1994), ‘when a person’s self-concept contains the same attributes as those in the perceived organizational identity we define this cognitive connection as organizational identification’ (p. 239); this draws attention to the work that connects seemingly different identities that span personal and organizational boundaries (Harquail & King, 2010). Several studies have examined how the individual identity overlaps with the organizational identity (Ashforth & Johnson, 2001; Cole & Bruch, 2006; Hogg & Terry, 2014). In addition, research also describes how personal identity reproduces, integrates, molds and shapes itself to place itself in tandem with the organizational identity, thus crafting spaces of adjustment and alignment for successful integration (Ashforth et al., 2008; Cole & Bruch, 2006; Gonzalez & Chakraborty, 2013; Sluss & Ashforth, 2008). Haslam, Postmes and Ellemers (2003) argue that organizational identification can be conceptualized as a form of social identification that individuals strive to be a part of and align themselves with, shaping their identity within the collective.

On a similar note, Michael (1996) suggests that identities are not stable entities, but are negotiable and amorphous. Wieland (2010) posits that identities are communicatively constructed, actively embedded in organizational landscapes, and subject to ‘normative expectations’ (p. 503) and social acceptance (see also Larson & Pearson, 2012). Similarly organizations also partake in the shared meaning-making processes of inviting and cooperating with the employee to align their identities with that of the organization through messages and artefacts such as mission statements of the workplace (Cheney, 1983a). Moreover, organizational identities operate in multiple, complex layers such as stereotypes (how is the institution perceived by others heuristically), mission statements (what institutions actively communicate through their corporate image and communication), and what organizational members believe about their organization (Cheney et al., 2014). Furthermore, Larson and Pepper (2003) maintain that upon exposure to a complex organizational environment, individuals deploy communicative strategies that aim to construct/promote an identity that assists integration and acceptance in formal systems.

Such assistance by the organizations includes allocation of resources (material, symbolic and discursive) which are biased towards particular members (Kuhn & Nelson, 2002). With these complexities, we should understand what organizational identification means for individuals negotiating differences (gender/race/nationality), and in what ways these individuals shape, resist or integrate their identities with the broader institutional environment. For example, engineering graduate schools function as formal, masculine bureaucratic structures with regard to issues like organizational fit and identification of new members. Research has also shown that these schools report high turnover of organizational members, that is, students (especially females and minorities) (Crede & Borrego, 2014; Wentling & Camacho, 2008). The norms, messages and stories circulated in these institutions invoke images of normative institutional identities (de Pillis & de Pillis, 2008), which non-normative members like women (Faulkner, 2009) and international students (Crede & Borrego, 2012) face difficulties identifying with. Although there have been studies that engaged with the reasons females and other minorities face difficulties gaining organizational membership (Bouville, 2008; Cuny & Aspray, 2002), little if any attention has been paid to the processes through which these members retain themselves in the organization. This study therefore seeks to understand the communicative processes through which non-normative organizational members (in the context of gender and race) negotiate organizational identification (in engineering schools) using the framework of sustainability.

Recruitment

Upon approval by the Institutional Review Board (IRB), the participants were recruited from a large Midwestern university. For the interviews, recruitment took place via an email message sent out to the engineering graduate students. The criteria for participating in the research were that the participants should be females above 18 years of age and international students currently enrolled in an engineering graduate programme. Upon contact with each participant, an interview was scheduled at a convenient location. Pseudonyms were given to mask the identity of the participants prior to the interview. After completion of the interview, each participant was paid US$10 for her participation. For the recruitment for focus groups, a second email invitation was sent to all the international female students enrolled in the graduate programme of the same university. The interview participants were also invited to participate in the focus group.

Data Collection

Each interview lasted between 45 and 60 minutes, and a total of 35 female international engineers were interviewed. The interviews were audiotaped and later transcribed by the researcher. The interview questions were semi-structured, and probes were used throughout to elicit responses that could provide more information to better understand the interviewees’ experiences. Polkinghorn (2005) noted that semi-structured interviews enable the production of unique perspectives and the subsequent use of probes allows one to explore those perspectives more deeply and gain insightful data. After the researcher met the participants, the interview protocol was explained and consent was obtained for the interview. Pseudonyms were agreed upon to protect the identities of the participants. Each interview was audio recorded, and field notes were made at the conclusion of each one.

In addition to interviewing the participants, focus groups were conducted in consonance with Patton’s (2002) position that ‘in a focus group participants get to hear each other’s responses and to make additional comments beyond their own original responses as they hear what other people have to say’ (p. 386). For this research, four focus-group sessions were conducted, with each group consisting of three to four members (N = 14). The focus-group sessions lasted approximately 60–75 minutes. After pseudonyms were provided, the focus-group sessions were initiated by asking each participant about her country of origin, her department and the number of years she had been enrolled in the graduate programme. The questions were semi-structured, and the participants were asked to discuss the challenges and negotiations that international female engineers experience in graduate school when they arrive, and how these negotiations change over time. Each participant was given a US$10 gift card upon completion of the focus-group interview. The interviews were transcribed by the author, and 305 pages of single-spaced text were obtained. Some of the questions of the protocol include: (a) Mention some of the challenges that you faced in the institution. (b) How did you negotiate those challenges? (c) Can you tell me of instances when you were not comfortable with the environment? (d) Why did you feel that way? The questions were semi-structured and probes were used throughout the interview.

Data Analysis

The preliminary data analysis was started at the same time as the data-collection process, with the end goal of editing the questions and the probes while the process was still ongoing (Perlow, Gittell, & Katz, 2004). Therefore, in the early stages of the data analysis, some of the repetitive themes were noted, and a few exploratory open-ended questions were incorporated to elicit information about the participants’ experiences. The transcript was read many times and initial memoing was done to understand the codes that potentially emerged from the data. The transcripts from the interviews and focus groups were coded together. Two iterative stages informed the analysis of the interviews and the focus groups. Following the grounded theory method (Strauss & Corbin, 1998), inductive qualitative analysis was conducted in the initial stages to highlight the textual content for the patterns of the sustainability constructs. First, line-by-line coding was performed on the data for the generation of codes. These codes were organized into categories that reflected adaptation, change, opportunities and understanding, and by constant comparison the relationship between the emerging codes and their clustering in categories was examined. By going back to the field notes and comparing them with the interview and focus-group data, the codes were situated and contrasted (by constant comparison) to provide interpretive depth to the identity-negotiation and sustainability discourses. Axial coding (Strauss & Corbin, 1998) was followed by selective coding to combine these categories into a theoretical framework that spelt out the specific relationships between the categories.

Awareness as a Strategy for Sustainability

Organizational identity entails the preservation of ‘continuity’ in the ways organizational members interpret the organization in relation to the external environment (Gioia, Shultz, & Corley, 2000). As expected, the female engineers interviewed for this study showed an awareness of their minority status in the institution (Tonso, 2007), thus distancing themselves from the dominant institutional norms that define organizational identity. This involved the reporting of ‘awareness, identity, and choice’, as highlighted by Zautra (2009), as sustainability resources. These resources come into focus through meaning-making and interactions with other members of the organization, and help the participants craft their identities. The participants embraced the labels of minorities, outsiders, internationals, outgroups and women in engineering, but were more hesitant when explaining their representation in the institution. When asked about their challenges arising from the labels, they recounted difficult and stressful situations in the programme, differences that potentially threatened their ‘continuity’ with organizational membership. For the participants, who had to metaphorically negotiate liminal boundaries when they first arrived in the US and joined an engineering programme that marginalized them, awareness of what constitutes differences and similarities had become an important issue. Through labelling and cataloguing challenges, the participants had actively sought agentic interventions to mitigate them. Furthermore, they had not only made sense of the challenges that they faced, but had also begun to construct reasons they believed the challenges were debilitating to their membership in the programme, trying to find solutions to address those challenges.

Although the participant narratives allow us to understand the struggles and difficulties they face, in consonance with the wider literature on migration and knowledge organizations (Lee & Rice, 2007), the discursive strategies of morphing identity emerged as an important marker. Reflecting upon their overlapping positionality in relationship with task, contextual and structural cues, the participants engaged in sense making of awareness as a marker of difference. This sense making became an important discursive resource for them to draw upon in negotiating the multiple worlds of belonging, between cultures, organizations, professional expectations and occupational expectations. For instance, Raga, who is from India, noted that her challenge was from another space, requiring her to negotiate identity and gender markers. According to her,

… especially because you have come from a different part of the world, so you are already facing problems, getting used to the situation. You are putting in an extra amount of effort which a local person doesn’t have to… But a person coming from halfway around the world it’s not the same. Already you are facing so many problems; you don’t want this problem that you are a girl in the engineering class.

Raga arranged her understanding of difference from the focal points of gender, nationality and effort. Moreover, for Raga, the experiences of international students are separate from the experiences of domestic students, highlighting the divisions that organizational members like her experience, along with her gendered representation, which she felt are ‘problems’ that need to be addressed, thus complicating her experience identifying with the organization. This also complicated her identity-alignment processes, which were clearly at odds with organizational inclusion (considered a perquisite of organizational identification—see Ashforth & Mael, 1989). Being aware of her position within the institutional structure was a strategy that sustained her by providing an entry-point for engaging and negotiating with institutional structures.

Most of the participants framed awareness as a strategy to uncover and deconstruct their membership in the engineering institution. Ayesha, who comes from Turkey, noted that

… whenever my professor wanted to nominate somebody for a report, he would pick a girl because girls would have higher chances of getting it and I think that is why he got us here. Because in my group, there is a Korean, Turkish and Indian girl so he was trying to keep a diverse girl profile and use it in this kind of situation.

In a focus group with other participants, Ayesha noted that being chosen for a nomination was not recognition of her professional competency, but rather a strategic move on the part of her professor to market his proposal as unique by speaking a language of diversity and inclusion. She inferred that instead of being chosen from the ‘common pool’ of organizational talent, she had been bracketed because of her identity. She further clarified that she did not feel this sense of inclusion from the behaviour of her professor at other times. She also noted how she was uncomfortable with this gesture because it made her stand out. Other participants reported that such differences put them at risk of losing their social capital, as their colleagues branded them inauthentic and opportunity-seeking. Jen, who is from China, stated:

I am an Asian, so it’s a minor in our field so I can be a minor and I am also a female student so it can also be a minor so if I get a good chance like engineering or something the male students around me tell me that you get a good chance because you are a minor [sic].

Therefore, there is a potential double bind situation because being a minority in engineering is disadvantageous in many aspects (Kowtha, 2009), and when institutions provide opportunities for nurturing diversity, reverse discrimination can occur, as elucidated by Meghna: ‘Because in mechanical engineering many teams don’t have women so if any girl… they generally take her.’ This raises questions about the repercussions of such policies on the organizational culture of engineering. Awareness and perceptions of an ‘easy’ entry dislocate the occupational confidence and sense of efficacy that the participants ought to possess for organizational identification. Their feeling of alienation/difference/otherness from the system becomes the focal point of their experiences, rather than the stories of integration, if any. Neha’s response, an Indian in the graduate programme, typified the voices of the 35 female engineers who participated in the interview:

So to some extent where you have to get in somewhere… it’s easier for you being a female international student [getting in]. But probably if you are competing against other people of different caliber, there is a gap that you have to overcome. You have to prove yourself from the beginning; you have to prove every skill that you have.

Awareness of their individual and social identity differences within the broader context of organizational entry makes the process of coalescing individual/organizational/occupational identities, an overlapping one. Dami framed this as a challenge: ‘Sometimes you just want people to accept that you are a girl from another country and you are from engineering.’ It seems that the essence of non-conformity, non-normativeness, and constraint limited the opportunities of the participants to find common ground with the institute.

Aware of their marginal existence, most of the participants agreed that by holding multiple identities, they resided in the ‘borderlands’ of the engineering spaces. Identifying competencies, gender differences and the culture of organizations became important for the participants, and the discourses included awareness of and subsequent settling around those differences. Awareness in its entirety is a sustainability construct, framed by the participants to understand ‘who they were’ in the organization. The discursive practices of these female engineers were fashioned around active modes of persistence and alternative ways of inclusion, rather than identifying the identity templates of the engineering institution to fit in, as they perceived a strong sense of non-belonging. In addition, there was awareness that they needed (and were expected) to adopt a particular identity—as Shen claimed, ‘So I have to act as a male student to compete with them.’ Kami (from Swaziland) declared, ‘You want to do a lot of things than it is humanly possible [sic]’, which speaks to the strategies that the participants craft in order to ‘prove’ themselves in the programme.

The occupation of organizational boundary space and the resultant identity negotiation became a strategy for sustainability, an adoption of the ‘fringe’ identity that helped them sustain, persevere with, maintain and change the multiple identities that they brought to the existing institutional space. Therefore, this theme of awareness captures the reiterations, interpretations and examination of intersectional and interpersonal ties, as the participants reflexively construed their communicative practices of identity reconstruction as a plausible step towards sustaining themselves.

Perseverance in Melding, Parsing and Creating Self

The participants reported various challenges that threatened to disrupt their assimilation into the professional organizational spaces of engineering graduate school. Many participants reported that they felt like quitting and were unable to ‘fit in’ with the existing norms, echoing Harquail and King’s (2010) argument that employees should use ‘organizational identity to interpret actions within and by the organization, to set their expectations about the organization’s behavior in the future, and to set a reference point to guide their individual actions on the organization’s behalf’ (p. 16). This interpretation is subject but not limited to members’ understanding of organizational behaviour and their level of immersion or understanding of how their organization works. For the participants interviewed, the majority reported issues with ‘understanding’, which was both communicatively and symbolically construed. For students who hailed from certain regions of Asia, communicating and understanding everyday language was identified as the primary challenge that threatened organizational interaction and interpretation. The role of language has been identified as crucial to organizational identification (Cheney et al., 2013). Emily, who came from China, explained that ‘language played an important role’ and that she did not know English well enough to communicate in class and with other stakeholders in her immediate professional environment. Similarly, Jen noted that it was important to communicate with others: ‘I didn’t communicate with quite frequently. I speak to some of them but I think I should be more active in the future to improve for myself [sic].’ Emily further noted that her social exclusion and inability to understand the mechanisms of organizational identity were because of her exclusion from the discursive space, which in turn was a result of her limited knowledge of the dominant language, which shapes organizational realities and nurtures identification.

Jing, who was also from China, also understood that her own agency and role in the exclusionary practices was due to her knowing only a few people, and voiced her support for agentic enactments of change, which she thought would help her to survive the challenges she faced. So, rather than being unaware of why she was in the fringes of the social groups, Jen attempted to identify the cause, and offered her solution to the problem. Some of the participants reported taking extensive notes (in their native languages, and relying on technology—for instance recording lectures in their electronic gadgets) to circumvent the organizational norm of ‘engineers deliberating with the professor’. Amanda, another Chinese student, said that in addition to her language barrier she perceived understanding accents as another barrier:

If the professor has an accent of other countries, it will be hard for me to make sense…my professor told me that if you come to a country to study, so it’s your duty to use their language [sic]… And in my country people always say when you come to a new country you will obey the rules of the place there. And I think, the language is a problem which I really want to… I do my best to overcome…

Amanda’s problem of understanding accents is challenging because if language constructs reality and assists professional and personal identity negotiation, it makes sense to concur that Amanda and other participants do not gain access to these spaces because of their perceived sense of detachment and alienation from the organization, which in turn can be attributed to language issues.

For some others, language acted as a surveillance tool in their occupational/organizational identity creation. Sarah, who came from Morocco, stated:

So you don’t burn the bridges, you know not make people feel bad and not have like bad references because it’s not a good thing that your advisor tells other people that this girl is a bad team player, or she is a bad student. And he told me about other grad students being bad person kind of thing. Yeah it’s the gossiping thing that I don’t like…

In this case, the participant articulated her superior’s power over her identity, and realized that the label discursively placed on her might affect her professional identity in engineering teams she might work with. In engineering, being a good team player is considered important, and any negative feedback in this regard can affect how one is perceived as an organizational player; as such, Sarah felt that it was important to watch her interaction. Furthermore, she stated that it was important to be on guard as her interaction and talk might create misunderstandings, and she wanted to avoid such situations because of the consequences mentioned previously. Another participant Mary concurred with Sarah, framing language as a tool to meld, parse and most importantly persevere in the institution. Therefore, language is no longer only nationality-based (for instance, English as second language), but is also a gender-based issue (awareness of interaction, linguistic choices in a particular context) for engineering identities. According to Dami, who is from Nigeria,

you are a woman in engineering… you know once that hits you like oh my goodness… not a lot of people do this. I mean sometimes you stop watching your step what you do, how you say things so that’s definitely interesting…you have to process so that you don’t give women a bad name. You don’t want the department to because you want their women in engineering to increase so you watch your steps.

Dami and Sarah both expressed that it was important to understand that it was easy to be misunderstood, and that being female engineers put them in a separate bracket of having to constantly watch how they interacted so that they did not give female engineers a bad name in the organization. Shamir and Lapidot (2003) state that trust in one’s superior reflects allegiance to the organization—in this case, the participants felt that they could not rely on their superiors (in this case their advisors) as the communicative barrier disrupted their trust-building and interaction processes. Although linguistic struggles are articulated in migration literature, they are also very central to a participant’s crafting of occupational/organization identity, especially in engineering knowledge organizations. Crafting engineering identities essentially emerges from identification with the knowledge organization, which plays a pivotal role in assimilation and membership in these organizations. For some others, linguistic resources are material and symbolic realities manifested through the disruption/maintenance of organizational norms. For instance, most of the participants reported linguistic barriers as constraints when working with engineering teams and on team-based assignments. As team-based problem-solving and learning are considered positive attributes for successful engineering careers, language then functions as a discursive resource to be applied with caution. Shen, from China, shared her experiences with respect to teamwork:

Actually we benefit a lot from the teamwork I think the only difficulty for me is the language, the communication part, sometimes I want to share some experience but it is little difficult for me to find out the accurate word to describe it. But for the engineering student the most important thing is to describe one thing in an accurate word.

Shen regarded teamwork as an essential engineering process challenged by language barriers when she was unable to communicate fruitfully with her teammates. She noted that when erased from these communicative spaces because of language barriers, engineering knowledge exchange remained incomplete, thus pushing these women into the fringes of engineering expertise and potentially affecting their integration into the engineering organizational and occupational spaces. For the participants, not only were linguistic barriers problematic, identification of and reconciliation with their statuses as minorities also amplified the language-representation issues. Another participant, Kriti, affirmed Shen’s contention with her view of women expressing themselves in front of male colleagues:

First of all you are struggling with things that are completely new. You don’t want to look stupid. But all these guys don’t have this problem, the first thing that comes to their head and it absolutely makes no sense but maybe it’s not international its general female you want to make sure you process it in your head and you make sure it’s nice and clean and then you say it out loud but… It’s that fear of looking stupid.

Although Kriti was proficient in English, she expressed her ambivalence about communicating with her research group. Here, the communication barriers seemed to be a result of socialization practices in engineering and social conditioning of the participants, and the intersecting identities of gender and engineer in dissonance with each other (Faulkner, 2009). Therefore, knowing the English language did not offer reconciliatory opportunities to identify with the dominant group; rather, English became an awkward tool to use in team settings. Similarly, Sarah, the Moroccan student, stated:

Ok I mainly worked with other international students engineers and there is a misperception that females are not as good in maths, physics and chemistry and then you are the only girl you are even more self conscious and then when you are working in a group you are even more conscious that you are going to say something and its going to be wrong and she’s a girl, she’s not good.

Sarah echoed what Kriti stated about how being expressive and interacting with others would be held against her, thus parsing her out as a ‘female’ who is not as good as ‘engineers’ should be. Nearly all the participants in this project reported that they had considered quitting graduate school at some point in the programme because of communicative issues and the resulting self-doubt that they faced in the gendered and racial context of their occupation/organization. The alternate solutions reported by the participants included self-tutoring, intensive self-training and talking to peers who were female and international if and when the opportunity arose; each of these solutions could have potentially steered them away from the dominant norms of occupational/organizational identities. Thus, it may be noted that with regard to these themes, the participants were aware of these linguistic discontinuities, and constructed their identities by recombining their personal adaptations with regard to these episodes, to acquire the ‘member deliverables’ required for assimilation.

Alternate Spaces for Support and Endurance

Diya and Lisbeth echoed some of the concerns of the other participants, including the implicit understanding that international women require more social support than international men. The participants justified the need to find some source of emotional anchorage, including making friends, attempting to fit into some types of social groups etc. In general, the participants believed that in graduate school, the social identities of gender and race play an important role in seeking out support resources. It is known that allegiance to and membership in social structures requires investments and resources like time and energy, which help create organizational identification and support and retain members. Social networks provide participants with a support system for sustenance (Butler, 2001) in an organization. The workplace social network is of utmost importance to organizational members as they forge bonds and connections influencing their decision to identify with the institution, thus promoting socialization (Widom & Burke, 1978). The participants reported that they did not seek resources from the organization, which complicated their identification and attachment to the organization. Most of them stated that they would seek out their parents when dealing with professional situations. For instance, Mary, who hails from Turkey, discussed the role of her family in providing support:

I didn’t want to make them upset but they knew that I had some difficulty, it’s something that everybody has, even if you are not in grad school or even if you don’t go for education… So they are supportive by talking every day.

Research has found that women need to turn to their support networks more often than their male counterparts (Day & Livingstone, 2003). For engineering professionals, persistence has been found to be linked to having more social-structure memberships (Jackson, Gardner, & Sullivan, 1993). As organizational membership is considered another strand of social identification (Haslam et al., 2003), it is interesting to note that the majority of the participants did not approach the organization directly, but instead sought alternative spaces of sense-making, thus distancing themselves from the organizational resources and relations. This distance is juxtaposed with the sense of alienation that these members reported experiencing because of multiple reasons like underrepresentation, social and linguistic barriers, and lack of common experiences. For instance, May, a female engineer from Korea, described her possible socialization barriers in the programme as challenging. Unable to identify with the other students because of her unique position as a minority in the programme, May talked about reaching out to others outside her programme in order to experience social inclusion and identification. According to her:

I think it’s very difficult to find some network in the same field here so I have found another solution in the Korean network we have. We sometimes meet there and say they have research difficulties even if we have different major fields but can understand how difficult PhD studies is [sic]. So just do we have time to say my situation and to hear their situation? That is one of my solutions; I resolve my stress and research.

May articulated that it was when the research situation in the programme became very stressful that she needed support and encouragement from other people, preferably friends, who would often be people from her own culture (Misra, Crist, & Burant, 2003); this is congruent with our understanding of social identities. May connected with her Korean friends because, according to her, she faced difficulties connecting with others in her own department. Although she could not explain her research to her friends because they were from different academic backgrounds, by communicating with them about her problems and vice versa, May found anchorage and assurance that she was not alone, and realized there were other people who experienced somewhat similar problems. Maya, from India, corroborated May’s experiences in reaching out to others she identified with socially:

Like I told you in my graduate school in my batch, there are no other females in my specialization…so I don’t get to meet other grad students of civil engineering… it would be nice to have a gathering like that where I would get to see and meet other women engineers.

Similarly, Kiwi, who was from China, expressed her desire and need to talk and reach out to others; her expectations of support from friends, family and mentors were constructed differently. She catalogued her definitions of the different kinds of support on the basis of the relations that she had developed. Her friends shared their experiences with her, and through these processes of sharing, they developed strategies together to address the constraints faced by international, female engineering students. Family is a site for comfort and understanding at an emotional level, whereas friends become co-creators of experiences as they share their narratives with each other, and provide specific problem-solving guidelines which people are unable to obtain from their own institutional space. As social identity seems to be in dissonance with the broader understanding of engineering/organizational identity, as is evident from the themes of awareness and crafting and persevering selves, fringe identity strategies and alternate meaning-making are deployed to help one substitute and adapt to the structural configuration.

These discourses about support reflect the importance of family and peer structures to the participants, in terms of providing sustainability. For example, Barbara, a Taiwanese national, talked about her inability to make friends in the department owing to linguistic barriers and member identification (as all her colleagues and professors were males), and therefore found the informal peer network to be very helpful, as she could be with other international students, find activities to participate in, and find ways to communicate with other people: ‘I have very less experience [sic] of the activities held by the graduate school.’ Barbara and other participants reported the tensions and dialectical relationships, with respect to identification processes, involving their team members and colleagues, due to existing differences. With regard to alternative pathways of recalibrating self and engineering knowledge, the participants stated that although it was difficult to gain access to those organizational spaces that afford member interaction, the pathways chosen provided them with anchorage and inclusion.

These observations and data clips shed further light on the differences in member categories and the criteria delineations that exist in engineering graduate school; as organizational sites, graduate schools risk member disconnect if these members (for instance, international female engineers) fail to seek support in the face of professional difficulties.

These findings suggested the importance of management of expectations from different members of a social circle, and underscored the need of females to be surrounded by people to whom they can reach out if needed. These people, as suggested by the participants’ feedback, are not representatives from the group from which engineering structures draw their identity. Rather, the identities fraught with uncertainty get respite and realignment from support which is far removed from their desired engineering social-identity group, inclusion in which is required for the development of organizational identification. This removal of one’s efforts, voluntarily or otherwise, from the dominant organizational identity in professional organizations like engineering graduate school prevents members from achieving procedural identification with the organization.

For individuals challenged in terms of social inclusion, the structural support systems become an important bridge or scaffold to help them achieve the feeling of inclusion. Therefore, what we observe from these narratives is the seeking of structural resources by participants in an attempt to forge support networks. This search for resources is often, if not always, mediated by the feeling of alienation, barriers (linguistic and cultural), and an individual need for socialization.