Liminalities at Work: Chinese Professionals' Immigrant Identity Negotiations.

Using theories of liminalities in identity constructions and communication processes of resilience, this study of Chinese professionals who had immigrated to the United States shows how these participants live with ongoing tensions in their professional identities that they were able to partly construct in U.S. career systems. By negotiating their intercultural and professional identities in their workplaces, they build strong identity anchors in professionalism, dis-identify with Guanxi, and seek to reconcile their prior beliefs in meritocratic U.S. organizing processes with their understandings that they may never be fully part of the American workplaces because of their lack of native English and popular cultural knowledge. However, their abilities to build and sustain a resilient and new lifestyle provide insights for theoretical and pragmatic applications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]