Bicultural professionals and their careers: Experiences with identity work in the friendship cultures of Dutch consultancies

Bouwmeester, Onno, Önder, Ilayda and Skovgaard-Smith, Irene ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5181-9521 (2026) Bicultural professionals and their careers: Experiences with identity work in the friendship cultures of Dutch consultancies. German Journal of Human Resource Management. 1 –33.

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Abstract

Professional service firms tend to foster corporate friendship cultures as a means for realizing normative control while also claiming to encourage egalitarianism and being your ‘authentic self’. Existing research has demonstrated contradictory effects such as reinforcement of hierarchy and homogenization through identity regulation. However, little attention has been devoted to the growing ethnic diversity of the professional workforce. Therefore, we explore how management consultants in the Netherlands with both bicultural minority and Dutch majority backgrounds, experience working in a corporate friendship culture. Based on 37 interviews we find that both minority background as well as class and gender influence how friendship cultures are experienced, which in turn affects identity work and the experience of career support. We also find a tendency toward subgroup formation, triggered by the invitation to be yourself in a friendship culture, simultaneously having exclusionary effects. These findings contribute theoretically to the literature on HRM by showing that corporate friendship cultures work differently in a multicultural work setting. Furthermore, identity work performed with the aim of making yourself visible and stand out among career sponsors is more challenging for bicultural consultants because they first need to blend in. Overall, a friendship culture favors male, upper-middle class majority consultants. These findings put the relevance of ethnic diversity and inclusion on the agenda of literatures on friendship cultures, identity work and careers in professional service firms.

Item Type:	Article
Uncontrolled Keywords:	diversity and inclusion,bicultural consultants,identity work,normative control,corporate friendship culture,consultant career,3* ,/dk/atira/pure/researchoutput/REFrank/3_
Faculty \ School:	Faculty of Social Sciences > Norwich Business School
UEA Research Groups:	Faculty of Social Sciences > Research Groups > Employment Systems and Institutions
Related URLs:	https://doi.org/10.1177/2397002226148534...
Depositing User:	LivePure Connector
Date Deposited:	06 Oct 2026 14:51
Last Modified:	06 Oct 2026 14:51
URI:	https://ueaeprints.uea.ac.uk/id/eprint/104732
DOI:

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