To read this content please select one of the options below:

The evolving field of global mobility: responses to global volatility (2013–2022)

Maranda Ridgway (Nottingham Business School, Nottingham Trent University, Nottingham, UK)
Hélène Langinier (Humanis, Ecole de Management de Strasbourg, University of Strasbourg, Strasbourg, France)

Journal of Global Mobility

ISSN: 2049-8799

Article publication date: 10 May 2023

Issue publication date: 28 September 2023

559

Abstract

Purpose

A decade has passed since Dabic et al. (2015) published a systematic review of the evolution of the expatriate literature from 1970 to 2012. Moreover, the past five years have been turbulent, with many global crises affecting organizational approaches to the global movement of people, particularly expatriate workers. Thus, this article seeks to understand how global mobility has continued to evolve during such turbulence and propose avenues for future research.

Design/methodology/approach

In this study, the authors undertook a constructive replication (Köhler and Cortina, 2021) of the systematic literature review conducted by Dabic et al. (2015), informed by guidelines offered by Donthu et al. (2021) for the period 2013 to 2022. The authors conducted a performance analysis of 1,517 academic articles about expatriates and broader globally mobile workers. Additionally, the authors analyzed all expatriate-related special issues published in the past decade and provide a narrative review of seminal works from the past five years.

Findings

The expatriation field has grown exponentially; greater attention has been paid to contextualizing research, particularly concerning emerging markets, although the field remains Western-dominant. This analysis stresses the increasingly strategic nature of expatriation at a time when global staffing has become dramatically challenging. Thus, this review highlights the need for more interdisciplinarity at different levels between expatriation and the field of strategy. The authors argue the need for a multifaceted understanding of the expatriation experience.

Originality/value

The authors offer a constructive replication of a bibliometric literature review extended by a narrative analysis to complement a critical perspective on a large set of bibliographic data on the broad subject of expatriation. This addition offers an integrated view of the different themes identified by the bibliometric analysis and paves the way for future replication studies to examine how fields evolve.

Keywords

Citation

Ridgway, M. and Langinier, H. (2023), "The evolving field of global mobility: responses to global volatility (2013–2022)", Journal of Global Mobility, Vol. 11 No. 3, pp. 300-328. https://doi.org/10.1108/JGM-09-2022-0050

Publisher

:

Emerald Publishing Limited

Copyright © 2023, Emerald Publishing Limited

Related articles