Purpose - This study explores the meaning of being multicultural among international graduates of English-language management programs in Poland. Additionally, it examines how these individuals perceive the opportunities and challenges their multicultural identity brings to their professional lives.
Design/methodology/approach – Eleven participants took part in two waves of semi-structured interviews, conducted two years apart, during which they created cultural identity maps as part of a reflexive interview exercise focused on their multiple cultural identities.
Findings - Most participants identified as bicultural or multicultural, though they differed in how certain they were about being multicultural and how they interpreted its meaning. Some strongly embraced their multicultural identity, while others viewed it as a dynamic process shaped by their environment and life experiences. Moreover, interviewees predominantly viewed their multicultural identity as beneficial in professional settings, highlighting enhanced adaptability,
improved communication skills, and advantages in cross-cultural business interactions. Several graduates demonstrated cultural variability, consciously adjusting aspects of their cultural identities depending on the context, which served as a professional asset. However, some participants faced challenges related to adaptation or issues tied to gender and religion.
Originality/value – These findings suggest that multicultural identity can serve as a strategic toolkit in professional settings, empowering individuals to navigate diverse workplace environments. However, its expression may be shaped by various social factors and organizational contexts. Practical implications - The study offers recommendations for educational institutions to developmulticultural competencies and for organizations to create enabling conditions that leverage the unique capabilities of multicultural employees.
The yoga mat serves as a point of departure for an analysis of contemporary conceptions, practices, and tensions surrounding yoga, particularly in relation to materiality, spirituality, and consumption. Although mats in their current form did not exist in traditional Indian practices, their emergence in the 1980s reflects a shift in emphasis from yoga’s spiritual core toward its physical and fitness-oriented dimensions. Understood as a liminal object, the mat enables an examination of how boundaries of intimacy, individuality, and community are negotiated, as well as how practices of self-care are ritualized. The study is situated within the framework of the turn toward materiality and research on consumer culture and aesthetics. It is based on a qualitative case study of two yoga communities in Poznań (within the metropolitan middle class), drawing on autoethnographic observation, participant observation, interpretative interviews, practitioners’ and teachers’ accounts, and an analysis of yoga mat design and marketing materials.
Pozostałe osiągnięcia naukoweArtykuły (zamknięty dostęp)Journal article
Bullying is a multifaceted phenomenon requiring a wide-angle view considering the social, institutional, and cultural factors. The primary objective of the present study is to acquire in-depth insights into the narratives of former bullying victims, identify important contextual factors, and gain a better understanding of their influence on the formation of a comprehensive lived experience. Thus, this study employed the interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA). The research sample comprised of nine polish women (21–34) who had experienced bullying during their education for more than six months. Results offer empirical insights into the underlying factors beyond bullying behavior, rooted in social reality (e.g., interpersonal relationships within social networks, understanding of intentionality, social support) and in perceived outcomes (e.g., suffered harm, unpleasant emotions, secondary losses). We identified the shared characteristics of bullying experiences and coded and themed them into the following categories: exclusion, double-dealing, intimate humiliation, self-image attack, and aggressive self-defense.
