Purpose This paper aims to explore the experience of self-initiated expatriates (SIEs) moving from the global South to the global North. It considers the relationship between country of origin and host country, the role of non-traditional destinations and the choices made by SIEs. Design/methodology/approach In-depth interviews were conducted with Indian SIEs and key experts to explore the motives, identities and life narratives of skilled expatriate Indians in France. Findings The results shed light on how individuals’ careers are fashioned through the intersection of identities; highlighting the interplay between country of origin and the host country as a catalyst in SIEs’ choice of destination. Furthermore, the authors demonstrate a strategic form of agency exercised through these SIEs’ choice of an unconventional destination. Research limitations/implications The intricate nature of SIE trajectories holds implications for migration theory, diaspora studies and career theory. SIEs from the Global South adopt varying strategies linked to specific host-country career offerings, often in sharp contrast with home-country opportunities. Practical implications The results inform managerial and policy-maker understandings of career motivations for mobile skilled workers moving for career and lifestyle. For countries seeking to attract talent, the findings demonstrate the roles of host-country immigration policy, country reputation and perceived career opportunities. Originality/value This study helps address research gaps in relation self-initiated expatriation from the Global South to the North. At the same time, it identifies the potential for transitional spaces and the relationship between countries, identity-formation factors and career agency. These findings on France as a transitional space – one of intermediacy and in-betweenness, where self-identity and future career projections can be re-imagined and reshaped – shed new light on how SIEs and their movements can be conceptualized.

Recent organizational theorizing has noted the emergence of a new spirit of normative control; implicit, informal, and internalized, “neo-normative” control emphasizes a positive affective disposition toward work, a happy, fun, and inclusive workplace where employees are encouraged to “be themselves”. This emphasis on positivity, however, is often accompanied by diffuse and persistent anxiety, fear, and other forms of subjective suffering often noted in studies of neo-normative control. The relation between purportedly positive neo-normative discourses of engagement and the persistent resurgence of subjective suffering remains under-theorized and holds wider implications for understanding the control regime represented by neo-normative control and its possible modes of contestation. Through a qualitative case study of a changing organizational safety program at a university facilities service, we examine how engagement and fear discourses worked together at different phases of the program to create both ambient anxiety and self-engagement solutions to manage that anxiety. Rather than conceptualizing suffering as the unintended consequence or ignored remainder of neo-normative “positive” messages, we describe how fear appeals explicitly invoke suffering to enrol employees into a self-shifting mode that leads them to be proactive. In our discussion, we theorize the co-constitutive aspects of positive and negative emotional discourses within a control-capturing process, developing the implications of this dual-affective orientation for understanding neo-normative control and its self-fulfilling properties at work in the neoliberal workplace.

Our study examines collective identity development in the early stages of a social movement as it narratively unfolded on Twitter during the 2019 October revolution in Lebanon. Based on a sample extraction of Twitter content from the first month of the revolution and using both thematic and narrative analyses, our study uncovers an entangled temporality where past, present and future strands of narrative time intervene in online identity narratives. Disentangling these digital narratives enabled us to identify three temporal-thematic categories that outline the contours of the emergent online identity: a revisited narrative past evoking collective nostalgia, a disruptive narrative present creating an urgent “presence in the now,” and a prefigurative narrative future that allows online members to collectively re-imagine and co-create their collective selfhood. Taken together, these findings support better understandings of collective identity emergence in digitally-mediated social movements in three different ways. First, building on the organizational literature on temporality in collective identity formation, we highlight how temporal narratives online support and accelerate a nascent collective identity through their immediacy and global reach. Second, by approaching narrated time theoretically and not chronologically, we address recent calls that challenge linear temporal narratives. We highlight how entangled temporality contributes to the emergence of a social movement’s online collective identity. Ultimately, from a methodological perspective, we offer an approach for “disentangling” digital temporality and propose (ante)narrative theory as a useful interpretive lens for better apprehending identity-relevant social media content.

This study contributes to the emerging literature on the interplay between safety committees and employee perceptions of organizational safety culture. Creating, managing and maintaining a safety culture in organizations involves significant investment in the establishment of safety committees. The role of such committees in improving safety culture perceptions has remained underexplored in the safety management and organizational literature. This study addresses that gap and focuses on a safety committee within the facilities management operations of a large American academic institution. The objective is to generate understandings of how a committee can influence organizational cultural change and impact employee perceptions of safety. Using Schein’s organizational culture model as a prism, we unpack the employees’ implicit cultural beliefs. Data from over sixty employee interviews revealed that formation of the Safety Committee resulted in unintended consequences in terms of employee perceptions. Employees attributed most safety-related actions to the committee when, in fact, the managers and supervisors had actually carried them out. This overestimation of committee activities and concomitant underestimation of managerial actions by employees was an unintended consequence of establishing a committee. Employees, in fact, collectively attributed all positive changes in the organizational culture to the committee. The committee ultimately influenced the employees’ basic assumptions, such change being, according to Schein, a prerequisite for organizational cultural change. This study, therefore, contributes to the literature by proposing that unintended consequences can operate in three different ways to support organizational change. First, unintended consequences can promote positive outcomes; second, they can reveal a new understanding of committees, which under certain circumstances can act as a proxy for management and encourage positive perceptions of managerial commitment. Lastly, unintended consequences can provide a means to detect and ‘excavate’ hidden, implicit assumptions that drive organizational culture’s deepest layers.

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