This study shifts expatriate scholarship from “adjustment” to “enactment” by examining how Chinese self-initiated expatriates (SIEs) in Japanese organizations construct workplace legitimacy through identity sensemaking and job crafting.
An interpretivist qualitative design was used. Data comprises in-depth semi-structured interviews with 16 Chinese SIEs who had more than 4 years of professional experience in Japan, paired with a satisfaction-time curve task to elicit temporally anchored narratives. Analysis followed an abductive dual-layer strategy combining functional narrative analysis and thematic analysis to connect turning points to recurring sensemaking and job-crafting practices.
Participants’ satisfaction-time trajectories show a shared temporal architecture – an initial decline, followed by recovery and subsequent divergence – through which thematic analysis identified three identity-filtered configurations: legitimacy seeking, strategic distinctiveness and bounded belonging. These configurations differ in how foreigner identity is read and how job crafting is enacted, from early defensive adaptation to proactive role expansion and, in the longest-tenured cases, stability-oriented habitat construction. The strategic distinctiveness configuration functions as a branching point at which audience response determines whether SIEs become engaged contributors or withdraw.
The paper develops a layered framework that integrates sensemaking and job crafting as the interpretive and behavioral faces of recursive enactment, specifies audience attribution as the central mechanism through which identity-work trajectories diverge in high-context organizational settings and repositions the analytical center of SIE research from adjustment toward sustained presence under shifting legitimacy conditions.
