Acculturation of Migrants in Work Sector: Identifying the Facilitative Role of Mobile Phones

1. Acculturation of Migrants in Work Sector: Identifying the Facilitative Role of Mobile Phones - An Outline of Ongoing Research - Rajiv G. Aricat & Dr. Arul Chib

2. Contents • Overview of migration, acculturation & low-end mobile phones. • Research questions • Methodology • A discussion on data collected so far

3. Migration • Low-skilled migrant workers often remain a transient workforce in the host country. • Data from UN: the number of international migrants in Asia by mid-2010 is 61,323, 979, an increase of more than 6 million migrants from the same period in 2005.

4. Migration in Singapore • UNDESA (2010): Migrants constitute 40.7% of the total Singapore population of 4,737,000. Male migrants from South Asia: 30% of total migrants. Differentiate between foreign talent and foreign workers; the latter’s status is “perpetually temporary” (Thompson 2009). • Unskilled workers are employed in the 3D (dirty, dangerous and difficult) jobs. • 53,000 foreigners were added to Singapore’s workforce last year.

5. Acculturation • Overcoming migration stress and integrating/assimilating with the host culture remain essential prerequisites for success. • Studies on acculturation have become bi-directional in recent years, i.e. just as migrant groups show different acculturation orientations, dominant host society also has its own acculturation strategies.

6. The typologyKeep one’s cultural identity?Relate to other cultures?

7. Acculturation in work sector • Differences in work ethos of home culture and host culture (say, India & Singapore) • Multicultural thinking becomes essential in Singapore’s organizational context. • Work commitment is decided by overall well-being of a worker in host society. Opposite is also true. • Can communication technologies mitigate the tension between the learned (home) culture and the to-be-acquired (host) culture?

8. Low-end mobile phones Low-end mobile phones & services help the “information have-less” (Castels & Qiu) at the ‘bottom of the pyramid’ keep themselves abreast with the changing information structures of developing societies. e.g. ‘Little Smart’ in China, Wireless Local Loop in India, pre-paid packages, shared phones, internet cafes, etc.

9. “You choose the country to call to, I give you the cheapest calling card”

10. (A) Place to “call” home?

11. Research Questions • Is a worker’s overall comfort level in the host society decided in some measure by the amount of time s/he spends talking to the members of his own ethnic community? Variables: ‘Duration of calls to members in home culture’ and ‘overall comfort level’. H1: As the amount of time a migrant worker interacts with the members of his own ethnic community increases, his overall comfort level in the new culture decreases.

12. Research Questions • Does the amount of time spent by a migrant worker talking to the members of his own ethnic community (family members, friends in home country and friends from same ethnic community in host country), have an effect on the worker’s level of multicultural thinking in the organizational context? Variables: multicultural thinking in an organizational context, duration of calls bonding the worker with home culture.

13. Research Questions H2: As the amount of time a migrant worker interacts with the members of her own ethnic community increases, her multicultural thinking in organization decreases. H3: As the duration of calls bonding a worker with home culture increases, his work commitment and job satisfaction decreases, keeping multicultural thinking constant. Similarly, as the multicultural thinking of a worker increases, his organizational commitment also increases, when the duration of calls to members from home culture remains constant.

14. Sample Indian workers with either a “work permit” or an “employment pass”; who work in construction, manufacturing, oil refinery, etc. From different states of India, speaking different languages, with diverse rural-urban orientation.

15. Methods • Mixed methods: qualitative & quantitative • In-depth interviews conducted among 10 Indian migrant workers. • Quantitative data collected from 42 Indian workers, using a revised version of Mutual Intercultural Relations In Plural Societies (MIRIPS) questionnaire (Berry, 2002)

16. Sample questions from Questionnaire • While staying in Singapore, how comfortable are you with the following: • Dealing with people in authority. • Obeying traffic rules as a pedestrian. • Obeying rules in public transport while travelling. • To get along with the overall order and discipline in Singapore. • Status given to workers in Singapore. • I prefer social activities which involve Rajasthani/Punjabi/Gujarathi/UP-Bihar members only. • I prefer social activities which involve Indians only. • I think I have become a part of Singaporean society. • I will be happy to adopt Singaporean culture. • I am willing to put in a great deal of effort beyond that normally expected in order to help my organization be successful. • I talk up my organization to my friends as a great organization to work for. • I feel very little loyalty to this organization. • I would accept almost any type of job assignment in order to keep working for this organization. • I find that my values and the organization’s values are very similar, Etc.

17. How comfortable are you with anti-littering law?

18. Qualitative results

19. Qualitative results • Integration appears to be the widely adopted acculturation strategy among workers. • Service providers lure the workers with ‘nostalgia’ appeals with promotional SMS-s like, “Listen to your favorite Bengali, Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam, Hindi & English songs on your mobile phone from as low as $ 1/month. Dial *xxxxx” • Attempts by workers to use mobile phones in a goal-oriented manner to improve their acculturation strategy is absent across the board.

20. How do you use mobile phones at work? • “When we run out of material stock at work site, we call up the store keeper and ask for the load, which saves us a trip to the store – a time saving of half-an-hour.” (Sunil) • “We leave our camps early in the morning. We wake up at 5 in the morning and we normally check whether our fellow passengers, who stay in the other side of the dormitory, have also waken up.” (Sunil, after prompting by the researcher.) • “When we go for work in some remote islands, sometimes we find ourselves caught up at the punching gate, when the machine fails to register our number. We immediately call our supervisor on phone and get the problem sorted out. “ (Hari)

21. Quantitative Result 1. Regressing logMulticultural_Thinking on Duration_of_bonding_calls. N=42 Constant: .877 (p<.001) Slope coefficient: .150; t = 2.666; p=.012 Results show that there is no significant relation between the duration of calls strengthening bonding with home culture and a worker’s multicultural thinking in organization. Hence, hypothesis 2 is rejected. Even though the results are not significant in a statistical sense, we may note the direction of the regression slope.

22. Quantitative Result 2. Regressing Overall_Comfort on Duration_of_bonding_calls. N=42 Constant: 3.158 (p<.001) Slope coefficient: -0.086; t = -.456; p>.05 Results show that there is no significant relationship between the duration of a worker’s call that strengthen bonding with home and the worker’s overall comfort level in the home culture. Hypothesis 1 is rejected.

23. Quantitative Result 3. Regressing Organizational_Commitment on Duration_of_bonding_calls & Multicultural_Thinking N=42 Constant: .660 (p<.001) Multicultural coefficient: .117; t = 2.639; p=.014 Bonding_Call coefficient: .041; t=.791; p>.05 R-square: .262 Results show that neither multicultural thinking nor the calls to home culture has a significant effect on a worker’s organizational commitment. Hence, hypothesis 3 is rejected. In the case of multicultural thinking and organizational commitment, the relationship is very close to statistical significance, and is indeed very significant in a practical sense.

24. Limitations • Illiterates are not sampled; nevertheless, mobile phones are widely used by them. How they use it to acculturate is yet to be explored. • R-square of the model that included multicultural thinking and calls to home culture is .262. Other factors that determine work commitment have a major role to play. • Diversity of cultures in South Asia and the diversity in the languages in these regions pose a challenge in creating standardized questionnaires.

25. Thanks