Negotiating Professional Legitimacy: Digital Immigrant Lecturers in Intercultural Communication

Abstract

Digital transformation in Indonesian higher education, as part of the Global South, is reshaping not only learning technologies but also communicative norms and professional relationships between lecturers and students. This study explores how digital immigrant lecturers experience and negotiate intercultural communication with digital native students. Four interrelated issues are examined: tensions between demands for digital adaptation and established professional experience; differences in communicative norms and expectations; negotiation of professional identity, face, and legitimacy; and uncertainty in digital communication that affects trust and academic relationships. Existing literature on digital immigrants has largely framed adaptation in terms of technological competence or generational divides, while communicative experience and the negotiation of professional legitimacy in Global South contexts remain insufficiently understood. The study adopts a qualitative design with an interpretive phenomenological orientation and Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA), involving 25 digital immigrant lecturers as primary participants and 12 digital native students as contextual participants. Data were collected through interviews, non-participant observations, and document analysis, using Critical Intercultural Communication as the analytical lens. Findings show that adaptation is an interpretive and relational process involving digital uncertainty, intercultural tension, professional face negotiation, and the reconstruction of academic legitimacy. The study introduces Communicative Negotiation of Professional Legitimacy, reconceptualizing digital adaptation as a communicative process through which professional position, identity, and legitimacy are negotiated in Global South higher education.