“Little things make big things”. A psycholinguistic analysis of immigrants’ life stories of cultural integration in Italy

Abstract

Within the last decades, the global economical revolution which has invested the labor market has prompted calls for a redefinition of traditional human resource management practices. The rapid growth of ethnic diversity in the workplace has turned managers' attention to the management of difference. Yet, cross cultural management has become a priority for most organizations interested in improving competitiveness and in enhancing their human (multicultural) capital. In view of the above, the present study aimed at investigating the process of cultural integration experienced by a group of 12 immigrants workers employed in different Italian organizations. Moving from an applied psycholinguistics perspective, the study collected narrative interviews as to understand the impact that the new cultural experience may have had on the sense-making procedures used to integrate and reshape their personal and professional identity. The discursive data were processed through Diatextual Analysis as to catch the psychological and linguistic features binding identities to texts and to contexts of experience.