Career decisions of immigrants: Role of identity and social embeddedness

Recent years have witnessed an increase in the number of individuals who leave their nation of origin and immigrate to live in other nations. The acculturation literature has noted several issues immigrants face in their host nation. Amongst these, establishing a career is of considerable importance. However, existing career theories have been criticized for their failure to identify the antecedents and explain the mechanism which underlies immigrants' career decision making. Importantly, these theories ignore the role of social identity in this process. To this end, this paper develops an identity-centric framework to explain the manner in which immigrants' social identity influences their career decisions and provides an understanding of the psychological, sociological and cognitive mechanism that underlies this process.