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China's controversial one-child policy has been blamed for creating an ageing population, a generation of employees without siblings and a 4-2-1 family structure that places eldercare responsibility, primarily on women. Current understanding of how this affects contemporary employees' work–life interface is lacking. This study examined the moderating roles of family structure and gender in the relationships between work–life conflict (WLC), job satisfaction and career aspiration for university academics.

Online and self-administered surveys were used to collect data, which involved 420 academic staff in three Chinese research universities.

Our results revealed that WLC is positively related to career aspiration, and this relationship is stronger for academics with siblings and, within the only-children group, significantly stronger for women than for men. WLC is also negatively related to job satisfaction, and this relationship is stronger for only-children academics.

Results were limited by a cross-sectional sample of modest size. Nevertheless, this study contributes to the understanding of gender roles and changing family structure in the work–life interface of Chinese academics.

Our findings have implications for both universities seeking to improve staff well-being and for wider society. A number of support mechanisms are proposed to enhance the ability of only children, especially women, to operate as effective members of the labour market.

Our results showed that only-children academics face a unique set of difficulties across career and family domains, which have been previously neglected in literature.

This study aims to advance knowledge in international management research about how researchers’ cultural identity in fieldwork encounters may be grounded in the choice of language in multicultural and multilingual projects.

The study is based on critical reflections on the experience of two co-authors as Chinese nationals conducting research in overseas Chinese multinational corporations (MNCs) in developing economies.

Drawing on social identity theory, the authors demonstrate that the cultural identity and cultural insider/outsider positionality of both the researcher and research participants can be shaped by language, translation and other artefacts in cross-cultural interviews, constantly being shifted, managed and renegotiated during qualitative interviewing. This study highlights the politics of language which, when combined with other forms of power relations, such as the researcher’s perceived status, economic development of the MNCs’ home country and the participants’ organisational hierarchy, affect power distribution between the researcher and participants. Researchers often need to move from being an “insider” to an “outsider” and often to an “in-betweener” at different stages in an interview interaction to balance power.

This study contributes to international debates about the complex interplay of languages, politics and identity in multilingual and multicultural qualitative research. In contributing to these literatures, the authors focus on the relatively under-researched Chinese MNCs in other developing countries including Mongolia and Tanzania. Recommendations for researcher training and reflexivity are proposed.

This paper seeks to examine the career experiences of seven women who have developed successful careers in the Chinese information technology (IT) industry, focusing on the way they managed their careers and the implications this has for women's career theory in China.

Personal narrative method is used to explore the women's cumulated experiences of career management in order to draw out their feelings and attitudes.

Findings demonstrated convergence between western career theory and the situation of these successful Chinese women in IT, especially in family/career role management. Nevertheless, the paper argues that deeply embedded values in China encourage a rejection of planning and proactivity in women's career management resulting in a lack of applicability of western theory.

Findings are based on a small sample size. Personal narrative method is highly subjective and “contaminated” by selective recall of information due to the deterioration or concealment of certain key factors. However, this finding in itself contains interesting implications for international career research.

The career experiences of these women could provide role‐modelling to other women who are also pursuing careers in the IT industry in China.

The paper contributes to the developing discourse of women's career experiences within Chinese society. It highlights constraints and limitations of applying western models and traditional research techniques. It advocates a broad, contextualised approach that incorporates a stronger emphasis on internal and social values.

To promote more open discussion on translating data, this paper aims to provide a critical and reflexive evaluation of the problems and issues that the author experienced with regard to qualitative data translation.

Drawing on personal experiences of translating Chinese women's narratives into English, the author demonstrates that qualitative data translation may have linguistic, cultural and methodological problems.

Researchers and translators should recognize the linguistic and cultural differences that data translation must negotiate. It is argued here that researchers and translators should preserve and highlight cultural differences rather than resembling the dominant values of the target culture by translation. A translator is an integral part of the knowledge producing system. The roles of the translator as both an inter‐cultural communicator and a data interpreter must be acknowledged in the research process.

This paper challenges common assumptions that data translation is merely a technical problem, and that a translator could “objectively and faithfully” transfer meanings of research data from source language to target language.