Expatriate

With the rise of globalization, overseas assignments have greatly increased over the last several decades. In order to ensure a successful assignment, companies must understand how to select, train, and support globally competent employees. Through a systematic qualitative review, we provide a framework and best practices to integrate selection, training, and environmental variables in order to maximize adjustment. We highlight what influences an expatriate’s psychological and sociocultural adjustment and propose the underlying mechanisms that can play a role in the trainee characteristics-adjustment relationship. More specifically, learning serves as an explanatory variable, whereas training design and environmental variables can change the degree to which employee characteristics influence learning, and learning influences adjustment, respectively.

Drawing on ethnographic data from fourteen in-depth interviews with individuals who have either taught or plan to teach English abroad, this study uses the English as a foreign language teacher (EFLT) as a departure point with which to examine and challenge the traditional dichotomies of work-leisure, host-guest, and home-away that are found in migration and tourism studies. A broad range of literature, including studies of backpackers; expatriates; study abroad students; working and volunteer tourists; and migrants is woven together to demonstrate that figures of mobility such as the EFLT are not separate, but rather overlap and merge in a multitude of ways. Many aspects of the lived experience of teaching English as a foreign language (TEFL) are explored, including travel motivation; recruitment; relationship to time and space; identity formation; and the return home.

Increasing globalisation of workforce has resulted into a large population of expatriate workers who engage in temporary work outside their home country. Along with monetary benefits, expatriate assignment is closely associated with a number of challenges which influence adjustment of an expatriate in a foreign country. This paper presents an expatriate adjustment model derived from review of research papers published on expatriate adjustment in the last two decades. Later section of this paper presents major internal and external expatriate support factors. The paper concludes with suggestion of a multilevel action plan at organisational level to support expatriate adjustment.

Expatriate-Repatriate Management (ERM) is increasingly considered an important branch of International Human Resource Management (HRM). With the rapid growth in the globalizing business environment, it is still an emerging field of research in the Sri Lankan context. This research paper is an attempt to find out some research gaps in the ERM process which are highly essential to address in the future empirical studies. The scope of the paper, thereby, was limited to empirical findings available in Sri Lanka and it resulted in identifying six gaps in the ERM process under the coverage of two theories namely, contingency theory, and social exchange theory. Empirical research findings of future research studies could fill these identified research gaps.

Since the 1990s, economic and cultural globalization has propelled the transnational mobility of managers and fueled cross-border careers. Some scholars have argued for the emergence of a new global business elite with cosmopolitan mind-sets and homogeneous lifestyles, while others have highlighted their disconnection from the local surroundings and their everyday life within national expatriate ‘bubbles’. Thus, the question of whether today’s mobile professionals can be described as interculturally open and competent cosmopolitans, or as pronounced anti-cosmopolitans, is still unanswered. Expatriate Managers and the Paradoxes of Working and Living Abroad considers a core protagonist of economic globalization and the management of MNCs through the lens of a practice-based theoretical approach whilst seeking to address this question by building on intensive ethnographic case studies of expatriate managers, most of them high-ranking executives, from two comparative different home countries, the US and Germany. These managers, together with their families, have been assigned to China, Germany, or the US to perform demanding coordination tasks within their multinational corporations (MNCs). Based on detailed accounts of expatriate managers’ experiences and everyday practices, the book reveals the multiple and sometimes paradoxical ways in which they deal with cultural differences as they build up new forms of working, belonging and dwelling. The findings suggest that the newly emerging mind-sets and lifestyles of expatriate managers transcend the polarized images of mobile elites as either cosmopolitan ‘global managers’ or parochial anti-cosmopolitans. Expatriate Managers and the Paradoxes of Working and Living Abroad examines the global elite from an everyday perspective, showing that understanding the dynamics of a global economy requires probing into the lifeworld’s agency and everyday arrangements of the social actors who are putting globalization into practice.

With increased recognition of the existence of emotions in everyday interpersonal interactions, the need for emotions in cross-cultural interactions has become more obvious. Emotions play an important role in cross-cultural expatriate interactions as these experiences are essentially social encounters. Yet, little research addresses the emotions felt and the emotional demands involved in the cross-cultural interaction. Research on expatriate experiences centres solely on the cross-cultural training, sensitivity, and adaptability of expatriates. What fails to be addressed, however, is the emotional aspect of this interaction. In this paper, we examine the cross-cultural expatriate experience, integrating both the cultural and emotional aspects of the interaction. In doing so, we aim to advance understanding of the expatriate experience and the potential reasons underlying expatriate success and failure.

In Voices of the Wandering, Grace Manning explores the concept of belonging through the disconnect that exists when one’s home isn’t defined by structure or established in childhood, but rather a by constantly changing and evolving ideal. Manning’s speaker draws inspiration and comfort from others who are living between countries and continents, using their voices and emotions to try and understand her own. South and West African experiences investigate the confusion and suffering that is colonialism, from blame, to hurt, to lifelong guilt, she introduces the perspectives of those on either side of the racial wall built during Apartheid. Using French to highlight language as a factor that has the power both to unite and to ostracize, the speaker ultimately allows for a duality of identity, intrinsic to a nomadic lifestyle. From the heat and surprise of Cameroon, to a France rocked by violence, to the wild Ireland of her childhood, Manning introduces a self that is shaped by an expat...

This article aims at analyzing the nature of the politicized city of Fez in terms of its own existence and the people inhabiting it in Paul Bowles’ The Spider’s House (1955). Henri Lefebvre’s theory of space which leads to the “spatial turn” mingles the physical and material with the abstract and social components of space, and regards it in a process of change. It fits into the novel, because Fez is not a passive agent; under the colonial rule, it is not static, but dynamic, being the catalyst of ominous events and situations. Bowles conceptualizes Fez as transformative: it is the cause of conflict, which leads to the unhappiness and inaction of the native people and it witnesses the transformation of them from innocence to decadence. It is responsible for the socio-politic events and is the active participant of them. It has the dominant role and shapes the future of the people and its own, but it promises prosperity neither to the colonizer nor to the colonized. It is the very picture of unrest: it with its derelict people has lost its cultural identity and cannot constitute value for its future. With its geopolitical landscape and potentials, it draws the attention of French colonial mind and plays the role of the arena of the power relations, but as the title of the novel suggests, as a politicized (colonized) space, it becomes a spider’s house: fragile, insecure and alienated in itself.
Keywords: Paul Bowles, The Spider’s House, space, spatial turn, politicized city.

Workplaces around the world are becoming ever more culturally diverse through the advance of globalisation, and as a result, more attention is being given to workplace communication between expatriates and local staff. This empirical study attempts to craft a ...

The words like “Expatriate ” and “Diaspora ” need no introduction in postcolonial literary scenario. Indian diaspora, today, has emerged with the “multiplicity of histories, variety of culture, tradition, and a deep instinct for survival. ” Indian Diaspora, though counting more than 20 million members world–wide, survives in between “home of origin” and “world of adoption. ” The process of survival of the diasporic individual / community in between the “home of origin ” and the “world of adoption ” is the voyage undertaken in the whole process from “alienation ” to final “assimilation.” Bharati Mukherjee, an Indian born Canadian / American novelist, has made a deep impression on the literary canvass. Her novels, honestly, depict the issues of her own cultural location in West Bengal in India, her displacement (alienation) from her land of origin to Canada where she was “simultaneously invisible ” as a writer and “overexposed ” as a racial minority and her final re-location (assimila...

Introduction The developing economies of the Gulf states have relied heavily on expatriate labor at all levels to support the spectacular development which has taken place over the last 50 years; so much so, that in most of the Emirates expatri-ates outnumber locals. Nowhere is ...

Transnational migration is disrupting definitions of cultural identity as its processes of cross-border mobility unsettle associations between people and place. Relationships, as one element of everyday cultural practice that circumscribes identity and belonging, are also affected by this mobility. Using data from qualitative research with Australian transnational professionals working in Asia, this paper elaborates on the interaction between identity and relationship formation. The findings indicate that participants’ attempts to develop professional and social relationships in a new cultural context lead to a re-evaluation of identity and the development of mobile subjectivity to manage difference and re-find points of comfort defined by shared meanings. The analysis is placed within broader reflections on the processes of migration and the dynamics of cultural change that are taking place within transnational global flows, supporting arguments that processes of deterritorialisation do not necessarily equate with declining allegiance to a national identity.