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2023-Joshua Haist

Should I stay or will I go? Society, organisation, and family: Embeddedness of low-status expatriates

Dr Joshua Haist, Cranfield University - Should I stay or will I go? Society, organisation, and family: Embeddedness of low-status expatriates

Grant Ref: 2023-317-T1

Grant Amount: £3,999

Project Summary: This project will explore the experiences of low-status expatriates (LSEs) working as 24-hour live-in carers abroad. LSEs are often employed in precarious conditions that regularly violate applicable labour laws, resulting in unequal employment opportunities, job insecurity, and social exclusion. Previous embeddedness literature has focussed largely on local workers and expatriates of higher socio-economic status, neglecting (international) low-status workers. Due to the different and often more difficult life and work situation, existing frameworks remain limited in their applicability to LSEs. Thus, there is little evidence about how LSEs experience their situation in the host-country, and what factors (e.g. host/home society, network, employer, family) they consider important in relation to embeddedness, social isolation, and social integration. Therefore, drawing on embeddedness and social exchange theory, this research aims to evaluate hidden inequalities and causes for a lack of wellbeing in the labour market of LSEs. It focuses on the roles of society, the employing organisation, the host family, and the social network in enabling and hindering societal participation, social integration, stress, and embeddedness (social, 3 of 12 community, job) in the host-country. The proposed research will contribute to embeddedness and social exchange theories by extending the current understanding of embeddedness, exploring it across the social, community, and job level in an understudied and marginalised international workforce. It contributes to practice by providing insights that can be used to develop current policies for employing live-in carers with the aim to improve their work-life situation and increase attractiveness and retention of this crucial workforce.