We examine how a group of highly-skilled migrants from Sri Lanka made sense of occupational downgrading associated with their career transition to the UK. Our findings highlight three distinct sensemaking narratives that enabled the migrant employees to develop a more positive identity in the face of occupational downgrading. While all the narratives followed a similar cognitive pattern, one that represented the occupational world in terms of a cultural opposition between ‘us’ and ‘them’, the choice of a particular sensemaking narrative was shaped by the organisational context in which the migrant employees were embedded. In particular, the migrant workers’ emotional experiences within their new organisation influenced the way in which they discursively framed the ‘us versus them’ relationship. We contribute to the international migration literature by theorising how sensemaking links identity to migrants’ occupational experiences in new organisational contexts.

我们研究了一群来自斯里兰卡的高技能移民如何理解与职业过渡到英国相关的职业降级。我们的研究结果突出了三种截然不同的有意义的叙述，这些叙述使农民工在面对职业降级时能够建立更积极的身份。尽管所有叙述都遵循类似的认知模式，即在“我们”与“他们”之间的文化对立下代表职业世界，但特定的具有意义的叙事的选择却受到移民雇员所处的组织环境的影响。嵌入式。尤其是，农民工在其新组织中的情感经历影响了他们对“我们与他们”关系进行话语框架的方式。