The changing nature of expatriation

• Author: Jean‐Luc Cerdin,Vesa Suutari,Chris Brewster,Jaime Bonache
• Date: 01 November 2018
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1002/tie.21957
• Published date: 01 November 2018

INTRODUCTION

The changing nature of expatriation

In this introductory article, we explore three distinct but related areas

of change in expatriation and then, allowing for their interaction, pro-

pose new research areas. We also introduce the articles in this Spe-

cial Issue. The areas of change that we note are changes in context,

changes in the type of international experience, and changes in the

management of expatriates.

Being conscious of the need to ensure construct clarity

(Molloy & Ployhart, 2012; Suddaby, 2010), we take as our defini-

tion of expatriation the most recent suggestion: “legally working

individuals who reside temporarily in a country of which they are

not a citizen in order to accomplish a career-related goal, being

relocated abroad either by an organization or by self-initiation, or

directly employed within the host country”(McNulty & Brewster,

2017, p. 30).

The definition, appropriately in a business review, restricts the

use of the term expatriation to people who are working (rather than

tax exiles, retirees, or students), to people who are temporarily resi-

dent in a country of which they are not a citizen (rather than more

permanent migrants or people passing through), and to people with

some kind of career-related goal. All of these people operate within a

given context, though the nature of their employment contract can

be varied: All of them need managing. We suggest that each of these

areas is changing.

We need to establish time scales. There have been expatriates

ever since there have been countries to transfer between (Freeman,

2008; Hipsher, 2008; Oberholster & Doss, 2016; Porter, 1997;

Stening, 1994; Toomey & Brewster, 2008; Walker, Norris, Lotz, &

Handy, 1985). Things changed significantly during the First World

War, when countries started establishing passports to restrict such

travel. For our purposes, the next big change came as businesses

began to recognize the importance of internationalization (Coase,

1937; Dunning, 1958; Kolde & Hill, 1967; Perlmutter, 1969). Since

then, there have been almost continually increasing numbers of peo-

ple working in countries other than their own. Academic research

into these working expatriates began in the 1950s and 1960s. From

the 1970s onward, there has been a stream of articles focused on

expatriates, the majority of it from the United States, drawing on

multinational companies there. Much of the extensive learning that

arose from that first period has been used as the basis of most mod-

ern research.

The research has generally sought for “best practice”that it is

argued can be applied anywhere, and it has therefore been largely

“context free.”Built into the research have been a number of

assumptions that we believe are becoming less viable as the context

changes. In particular, we address the changes in the context arising

from home organizations, host countries, technological change, and

the expatriate population itself.

1|CHANGES IN CONTEXT

Home organizations are changing: they are under increasing pressure

to reduce the size of their “overhead”costs, including the size of the

headquarters. This means pressure on the international human

resource management (IHRM) or Global HRM department to have

fewer specialists and to be more efficient. They have to find different

ways of managing their assigned expatriates. The range of countries

in which the headquarters of multinational enterprises are located is

changing: no longer are they mostly from the WEIRD—Western, edu-

cated, industrialized, rich, developed—countries (Henrich, Heine, &

Norenzayan, 2010); now Asian, Latin American, Middle Eastern, and

African countries have multinational enterprises. Issues involved in

organizations and in managing people from poor countries working in

other poor countries, and perhaps even more managing people from

poor countries working in rich countries, are different from our usual

understanding (Budhwar & Horwitz, 2015). Increasingly, too, small

organizations are going international, or are being “born international”

(Cavusgil & Knight, 2015), with the attendant requirement for busi-

nesses that may not even have a formal HRM department to manage

expatriation.

The host countries that people are being sent to are changing: at

one point in history, people were sent from the rich countries to the

poor countries to extract materials and goods, then they were mostly

sent from rich countries to other rich countries—that was where the

money was to be made. Now they may be sent anywhere in the

world where there is a sufficiently large market. New countries pre-

sent new challenges. These may be countries that are growing much

faster than the home country; they may have very different cultures;

they may be antagonistic to foreign investment or they may welcome

it; they may have well-established institutions that are significantly

different from those in other countries, or they may have very weak

institutions that can be easily manipulated (Doh, Rodrigues, Saka-

Helmhout, & Makhija, 2017). A largely unresearched aspect of inter-

national business is the felt need to pay bribes or to be involved in

other kinds of corruption in order to get business done (Cuervo-

DOI: 10.1002/tie.21957

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