When Achievement Stops Converting: Uncertainty as Narrative Gap and Class-Differentiated Repair

• In Event: Global and Transnational Sociology Section Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): 7. Migration Experiences II

Abstract

Uncertainty in the U.S. job search of Chinese international undergraduates is not simply a reflection of a difficult labor market or visa regime; it is produced through sequences of recruitment encounters that destabilize how achievement is expected to convert into mobility. Drawing on longitudinal interviews (102 interviews with 37 students) and multi-sited ethnographic and digital observation at a U.S. flagship public university, this article shows how uncertainty is produced when that schema encounters unstable capital convertibility across recruitment ecologies. In sequences marked by non-cumulative, non-diagnostic feedback—extended portal silence punctuated by sporadic openings—and by interactional cues that make sponsorship feasibility salient, students lose the ability to infer what counts and how present effort maps onto future incorporation. I conceptualize this uncertainty as a narrative gap: an erosion of conditional future-talk and narratable continuity linking past achievement, present action, and plausible becoming. The analysis distinguishes structured branching (Plan A/B/C strategies that preserve conditionality) from collapsed branching oriented toward “just landing.” Students respond through patterned repairs that restore a narratable next step by reworking time (staged temporality and foothold logics), channels of access and evaluation (relational channel shifts), or arenas of competition (competitive reorientation toward regional pipelines). Repair capacity is class-differentiated even within a broadly advantaged population, as fallback infrastructures enable delay, experimentation, and relational investment. The article contributes to cultural research by shifting attention from resource possession to the situational reliability of conversion, and to processual sociology by locating uncertainty in event sequences through which evaluation and eligibility cues reorganize inequality.

Author

• Yujin Tao, University of Wisconsin-Madison