Repatriation, identity, and organisational adaptation: a case study on reverse brain drain and socio-psychological drivers in Turkey’s energy sector

Abstract

This study examines the post-return experiences of engineers who completed postgraduate education abroad under a state scholarship carrying a service-or-repay bond and returned to a strategic public organisation in Turkey, the Case Company (CC): graduates either serve the institution for twice the funded period or reimburse the full cost of their training. We characterise this arrangement as scholarship-bound return migration and direct attention to what the bond cannot secure: integration after return. The research focuses on their integration into local work processes, organisational adaptation dynamics, knowledge transfer mechanisms, and institutional logic conflicts. In this context, the research question of the study has been formulated as follows: How do the socio-psychological experiences of scholarship-funded engineers evolve after their return, as they adapt to their home organisation and its competing institutional logics? Using a qualitative methodology, we conducted semi-structured interviews with 12 engineers who returned under this scholarship-bound arrangement and analysed the data using inductive and deductive content analysis in MAXQDA. Findings indicate that participants experienced reality shock due to inadequate orientation, alongside professional dissatisfaction stemming from expertise-role mismatches. However, socio-cultural factors—specifically a ‘debt of gratitude’ and strong family ties—prove pivotal in retention. Analysis through an institutional logics lens revealed persistent tensions between CC’s public-bureaucratic operating logic and the global market logic that engineers had internalised during their studies abroad. While existing literature focuses on macro-level migration factors, this study addresses micro-level organisational adaptation and cognitive dissonance within strategic sectors through institutional logic analysis.

The authors' abstract, as published at the source. Frontiers in Psychology, 2026 · DOI ↗