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The purpose of this paper is to bring to light the double edges faced by individuals who have international and multicultural experiences. The implication is that these individuals encounter acculturation challenges, and also gain from their multiculturality. The authors adopt Berry’s (2011) integration and multiculturalism framework to analyze the experiences and challenges that multi-culturals face. This paper suggests ways to glean the silver lining within organizations to help manage and master multicultural experiences in the workplace to benefit both individuals and organizations.

The authors used empirical materials from expatriates who have worked across multiple cultural contexts. Based on these the authors present three examples to illustrate how expatriates and multicultural individuals place themselves in situations where they experience contact and challenges associated with adopting multiple cultures. The authors then analyze these examples to show how the experiences involve psychological-level integration challenges for Multi- and n-culturals.

The three multicultural expatriate examples suggest that individuals with international and multicultural experiences who are successful at managing their experiences develop cognitive and behavioral complexity. However, these individuals also face continuous acculturation including cognitive and ethno-cultural identity conflicts such as, rejection from multiple cultural perspectives because they continually cross-multiple cultural microcosms. Suggestions are presented to help maintain one’s sense of self-worth and minimizing ethno-cultural conflicts.

Notwithstanding the value of analyzing the examples of expatriate acculturation experiences, the limitation to the examples is that it is limited to the experience of three individuals. However, the examples were effective in raising points to discuss relevant challenges and/or the double-edged reality faced by boundary spanners, multi-, and n-culturals.

The paper presents possible ways multi- and n-culturals navigate through their multiculturalism, including suggestions to help individuals who struggle with their multiculturalism through mentoring.

The paper highlights the challenges of acculturation and suggests ways that individuals can overcome these challenges. It further suggests how organizations can take advantage of such individuals by utilizing existing personnel within the organization.

The paper is one of the few that acknowledge multiculturalism is highly challenging even for successful multi-culturals and n-culturals. Currently the literature is scant concerning how individuals can manage and master multicultural experiences in the workplace. The paper suggests a number of useful strategies for individuals and organizations to manage the challenges.

The internationalization of education introduces notable cross-cultural challenges and benefits for consideration by scholars of comparative and international education. When teachers move overseas to work, they become sojourners, “between-society culture travelers” (Ward et al., 2005, p. 6). Living and working between cultures offers a substantial set of both challenges and opportunities. Acculturation theory (Sam & Berry, 2006) was initially understood as culture shock (Oberg, 1960), an occupational malady. Acculturation theory seeks to explain adaptation processes and has mostly examined sojourners whose intent is to permanently adapt to a new culture. Educators who are sojourners require temporary states of adaptation. This chapter narrates a subset of a qualitative study examining educator acculturation from an asset orientation to explore what benefits acculturation offers to sojourning educators who work in international schools overseas. Findings include that even highly stressful episodes of culture shock can manifest in long-term benefits, such as the development of personal and professional resilience and self-leadership strategies, as well as the reflective curating of one’s personal and professional identity, which may include the development of an interstitial identity. These benefits serve to increase educators’ cultural competencies, to prepare educators for supporting sojourning students who are acculturating, and to prepare educators for smoother acculturation experiences afterwards.

This paper aims to examine ethnographic evidence on the acculturation of non-native English-speaking teachers in accounting (ANNESTs) in an Australian university to understand the process, strategies and outcomes of the acculturation process.

Ethnographies of five ANNESTs representing diverse cultural backgrounds were studied. Data were collected from publicly available sources and informal discussions supplemented by semi-structured interviews.

The findings show that integration – that is, learning and participating in the Australian host culture while maintaining original cultural values – is the most popular acculturation strategy, followed by assimilation, whereby ANNESTs interact primarily with the host culture and retain loose links with their original culture. ANNESTs covered in this study fall into different stages of the acculturation process depending on their English language competency, the extent of contact with native Australians, cultural proximity and length of residence in Australia.

This paper concludes that challenges of acculturation confronting ANNESTs concern broader cultural issues than language proficiency alone. Institutional support directed at enhancing teaching effectiveness of ANNESTs should be devised from this perspective.

Given the cultural relevance of accounting systems and the influence of culture on the learning and teaching styles of ANNEST, the study illuminates that ANNEST’s acculturation strategies could facilitate or hinder the ANNEST’s speed of cultural understanding necessary to productively engage in the learning and teaching.

The purpose is to construct an analytical framework that encapsulates implications for the marketing offering of service firms as a result of observed intra-national ethnic diversity in these firms' markets of operation.

This is a conceptual approach which promotes the idea that acculturation matters for service firms operating in multicultural markets and adopts relevant propositions related to service firms' strategy in such markets.

Integrating fragmented insights from consumer behaviour and multicultural marketing, the study suggests that the various interactions and contacts between ethnic groups in a multicultural country can generate acculturation outcomes that lend themselves to novel avenues for empirical research. These avenues move beyond a research focus on the presence of ethnic groups as stand-alone entities of intra-ethnic uniformity.

Firms with a broader market horizon in a multicultural market can employ acculturation in their marketing strategy since an exclusive focus on ethnicity as a basis of segmenting the market reveals shortcomings. Otherwise, a myopic approach that ignores cross-ethnic interactions may lead to bypassing opportunities for more considerate market responses by a service firm.

To the best of the authors' knowledge, this is the only acculturation study in a services context that offers an analytical framework and propositions that can be used as a guide for multicultural, services marketing researchers and practitioners that see the market in a holistic fashion.

The refugee journey is fraught with challenges before, during and after resettlement. There is a critical need for mental health support upon arrival, and refugees face language, cultural and logistical barriers. Arts-based therapies are a promising approach to mitigating such barriers. The purpose of this study was to elicit professional stakeholder perspectives on mental health challenges among refugees, the value of arts-based programs and future directions.

The authors conducted three 90-min focus groups with 19 professional stakeholders in North Carolina, USA. This included mental health professionals, professors and community services/resettlement workers. Participants were identified from professional networks and snowball sampling. Each group was held by videoconference, audio recorded and transcribed. Data were analyzed through a team-based approach using applied thematic qualitative analysis.

Interviewees described a need for targeted, culturally compatible mental health services for refugee families, including trauma-informed, family-focused services with language interpretation. Arts-based therapies were viewed as highly acceptable and culturally responsive approaches for understanding distress and building resilience and less stigmatizing than traditional mental health services. Services in schools and community settings would further reduce stigma and minimize logistical barriers. Participants identified needing strong, culturally sensitive assessment tools to measure treatment progress as a key future direction.

The study offers novel insights into the value of arts-based approaches and considerations for program development. The next phase of the project will obtain the perspectives of refugee parents and children to understand client preferences for arts-based therapies.

The COVID-19 pandemic has caused severe challenges to ethnic minorities in the UK. While the experiences of migrants are both complex and varied depending on individuals' social class, race, cultural proximity to the host country and acculturation levels, more in-depth studies are necessary to fully understand how COVID-19 affects specific migrant groups and their health. Taiwanese migrants were selected because they are an understudied group. Also, there were widespread differences in pandemic management between the UK and Taiwan, making this group an ideal case for understanding how their acculturation journey can be disrupted by a crisis.

Qualitative data were collected at two different time points, at the start of the UK pandemic (March/April 2020) and six months on (October/November 2020), to explore migrant coping experiences over time. Theoretically, the authors apply acculturation theory through the lens of coping, while discussing health-consumption practices, as empirical evidence.

Before the outbreak of the pandemic, participants worked hard to achieve high levels of integration in the UK. The pandemic changed this; participants faced unexpected changes in the UK’s sociocultural structures. They were forced to exercise the layered and complex “coping with coping” in a hostile host environment that signalled their new marginalised status. They faced impossible choices, from catching a life-threatening disease to being seen as overly cautious. Such experience, over time, challenged their integration to the host country, resulting in a loss of faith in the UK’s health system, consequently increasing separation from the host culture and society.

It is important to note that the Taiwanese sample recruited through Facebook community groups is biased and has a high level of homogeneity. These participants were well-integrated, middle-class migrants who were highly educated, relatively resourceful and active on social media. More studies are needed to fully understand the impact on well-being and acculturation of migrants from different cultural, contextual and social backgrounds. This being the case, the authors can speculate that migrants with less resource are likely to have found the pandemic experience even more challenging. More studies are needed to fully understand migrant experience from different backgrounds.

Public health policymakers are advised to dedicate more resources to understand migrants' experiences in the host country. In particular, this paper has shown how separation, especially if embraced temporarily, is not necessarily a negative outcome to be corrected with specific policies. It can be strategically adopted by migrants as a way of defending their health and well-being from an increasingly hostile environment. Migrants' home country experience provides vicarious learning opportunities to acquire good practices. Their voices should be encouraged rather than in favour of a surprising orthodox and rather singular approach in the discussion of public health management.

The paper has clear public health policy implications. Firstly, public health policymakers are advised to dedicate more resources to understand migrants' experiences in the host country. Acknowledging migrants' voice is a critical first step to contribute to the development of a fair and inclusive society. Secondly, to retain skilful migrants and avoid a future brain-drain, policymakers are advised to advance existing infrastructure to provide more incentives to support and retain migrant talents in the post-pandemic recovery phase.

This paper reveals how a group of previously well-integrated migrants had to exercise “coping with coping” during the COVID crisis. This experience, over time, challenged their integration to the host country, resulting in a loss of faith in the UK’s health system, consequently increasing separation from the host culture and society. It contributes to the understanding of acculturation by showing how a such crisis can significantly disrupt migrants' acculturation journey, challenging them to re-acculturate and reconsider their identity stance. It shows how separation was indeed a good option for migrants for protecting their well-being from a newly hostile host environment.

The purpose of this paper is to critically analyze the discourses on migrant acculturation and migrants’ mobile phone communication, in order to examine the inclusiveness of communication-acculturation research in the recent years.

The paper draws on from 102 qualitative interviews (48 Malayali, 26 Bangla, 17 Tamil and 11 Telugu) for a larger research project that investigated the role of mobile phones in migrant acculturation in Singapore. Respondents were selected using a combination of purposive and snowball sampling methods. The respondents had been in Singapore for varying amount of time: from one month to 19 years.

The analysis of the discourses on migrant acculturation and mobile phone communication revealed that labor migrants were excluded on the basis of their temporary status and apprehensions on work productivity. The mobile usage prohibitions that existed in work sites were hinged on similar discourses that stereotyped the labor migrants. The emancipatory metaphor that has been at the center of research on migrants’ mobile phone usage and acculturation needs to be replaced with a critical discourse perspective.

The data were originally collected for a research project that approached the phenomena of acculturation and mobile phone appropriation from a positivist perspective, whereas this paper analyzed the data to critically examine the discourses that supported the premise of the project itself. Due to this, the findings presented in this paper have limited scope for generalization.

The paper critiques the research trends in migrant acculturation and mobile phone communication and suggests a possible alternative that goes beyond the “transcendental teleology” that underpins discourse and practice.

This paper aims to outline the experience of choosing an appropriate methodology from the potential qualitative methods for studying acculturative experiences amongst a group of non-Chinese young people in Hong Kong. It delineates the reasons for choosing phenomenography for researching their lived acculturative experiences. The paper also briefly explains the advantages of phenomenographic research and advocates it as a potential qualitative method for investigating diverse trajectories of acculturative experiences amongst ethnic minority/immigrant populations in multicultural contexts.

Researchers have investigated the acculturation of immigrant youth across settlement societies using different theoretical frameworks, approaches, scales, surveys and questionnaires. However, little attention has been given to the research methodologies that focus on lived human experiences across acculturating groups. By adopting an integrative literature review approach, this paper examines phenomenography as one of the potential qualitative research methods to explore ethnic minority lives in multicultural contexts.

Given that acculturation is a heterogeneous social phenomenon, phenomenography can help address the issues and limitations inherent to the traditional methodological approaches to studying acculturation amongst youth with ethnic minority and immigrant backgrounds.

Researchers in comparative, intercultural and multicultural education may benefit from phenomenography by exploring the different ways immigrants and ethnic minority populations experience acculturation in multicultural contexts.

This paper outlines the authors' first-hand experiences who sought to identify an appropriate qualitative research method for studying acculturative experiences amongst a group of non-Chinese secondary school students in Hong Kong. Based on their extensive research experiences in the interpretative research tradition, the authors propose phenomenography as a promising method for exploring the diverse trajectories of acculturation amongst ethnic minority and immigrant youth in multicultural contexts.

Social media has transformed communication possibilities for immigrant consumers with their home country in their acculturation efforts. However, the acculturative outcomes of consumer interactions with the home country through social media are largely overlooked in previous research. This study aims to investigate the acculturative processes and outcomes resulting from interacting with the home country through social media.

A netnographic approach is used to collect data from a social media platform that provides an interactive social context in which Iranian immigrants in Australia share their experiences of immigration with non-immigrants who are considering and planning to migrate to Australia.

Findings show how both immigrants and non-immigrant users via social media reflexively contribute to the formation of two competing collective narratives, namely, the dominant, romanticizing narrative and counter, pragmatic narratives. Findings highlight how notions of the home and host countries, and the idea of migrating from home to host, are constructed as the result of the circulation of the dominant and counter narratives. Further findings include how these two collective narratives come into play in the formation of three acculturative outcomes, namely, self-validating, ordinary experts and wellbeing. These insights extend consumer acculturation theory through highlighting the acculturative processes and outcomes of interactions with the home country via a social media platform. This includes, for example, how interacting with the home culture can take on assimilationist properties through the construction of a romanticized representation of the hosting society (i.e. Australia) in the dominant collective narrative.

Implications for ethnic marketing practice, policymakers and non-governmental organisations are advanced, especially regarding using social media as a channel to communicate with current and potential immigrant consumers. Notably, policymakers can use social media to engage with immigrants before and after migration to reduce the potential for cognitive dissonance in recent arrivals. Managerially, brands can advertise on Web-based forums, independent websites and social media platforms to target potential immigrants to sell relevant products immigrants needs after migrating to the host country.

Findings broaden the understanding of the potential acculturative outcomes on social media by moving away from the traditional outcomes, which are restricted to the dichotomy between the home and host cultures.

Scholarly attention is deficient on the role of direct interaction with the home country in immigrant consumer acculturation, especially through social media, which is the focus of this study.