Socialization as sensemaking: a semiotic analysis of international graduate students' narratives in the USA

Abstract

Drawing on the data from interviews with 32 international students, this qualitative study applies Weick's framework of organizational sensemaking to the analysis of international graduate students' socialization in the academic and student communities in a large US university. Methodologically, the analysis relies on a semiotic chain technique to uncover direct and connotative meanings of academic departments and student communities in the respondents' home and host universities, which in the interviews are presented as oppositions between ‘we’ and ‘they’. Examining the ‘we’ versus ‘they’ dichotomies as conflicts between the students' old and new mental scripts, the author finds that international students are more accepting of the academic ethos of their host departments than of the American peer culture. International students' attitude toward diversity is especially ambivalent, because diversity may clash with their home-grown scripts about hierarchies of nationalities, ethnicities, religions and norms of heterosexuality.