The City Named Shanghai: Towards Mapping Knowledge Migrant Employee's Value Priorities And Their Acculturation To The City Of Shanghai

Shanghai is a metropolis with great population inflow each year. However, domestic studies on internal migrants generally only focus on internal rural migrants, little attention has been paid to knowledge migrants. An empirical study was thus carried out targeting at knowledge migrants working in a high-tech multi-national corporation. The author utilized Schwartz Schwartz's Portrait Values Questionnaire and Chen Feifei's AL-KYM-SH questionnaire to explore migrant employees'value preferences with comparison to local employees and their acculturation status to this city.Based on the data collected from 88 migrant employees and 21 local employees, the author found that self-direction, benevolence and achievements rank in the top three places in migrant employees'value preferences. Local employees'choices share great similarity with migrant employees except their favor of hedonism which takes up the first place of their value priorities.In the second part of the study, the author examined migrant employees'acculturation level to Shanghai. Result shows migrant respondents generally keep a healthy mental status though suffer from great stress and pressures. These respondents mostly are satisfied with their social relationships in Shanghai and have gained social recognition especially in the work place. However, in general they are not willing to take the initiative to learn local dialect and adapt to the regional culture in Shanghai. Based upon a close investigation on demographic factors, the author further found that martial status would influence one's acculturation to Shanghai, verified Chen's finding in her studies in 2008.This research also further examines the two measurements–Schwartz Schwartz's Portrait Values Questionnaire (PVQ) and Chen Feifei's AL-KYM-SH questionnaire. Through internal reliability test, the author found that in PVQ, the value type conformity has been proved invalid because of the low internal reliability. The entire value type thus has been excluded from further analysis. The same thing happened to a variable under the value type of security. As for Chen's AL-KYM-SH, the author found that the sub-factor mutual acceptance is not valid. After adjustment, only three items under this sub-factor are preserved and re-arranged as a new sub-factor named social recognition.