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Focussing on the stratification of expatriates and the boundaries between different types of expatriates and locals, this study investigates the lived experiences and testimonies of Eastern European expatriates and their relationships in Dubai. The purpose of this article to develop the current knowledge on expatriates cohabiting in a cosmopolitan city by providing empirical evidence on expatriate bubbles in Dubai.

Explorative qualitative research was conducted using online and face-to-face interviews, along with a week-long intensive ethnography with observations, interviews and informal discussions.

Three distinct groups of people live in Dubai, namely, Westerners, expatriates from the East and Emiratis. They hardly mingle with each other on equal terms, but they do work in a complementary fashion. In Dubai, the status of East European experts, a subgroup of Westerners, is similar to their Western counterparts and in that they are considered European. Consequently, they experience a slight status development in comparison to when they work in the West. The research provides evidence on social stratification of expatriate bubbles.

This very short ethnography with a relatively small number of qualitative interviews could be complemented by a further in-depth study.

Expatriate bubbles have not previously been empirically investigated from an Eastern European perspective, nor has the unique case of Dubai been analysed extensively. Distinct expatriate bubbles with their stratified hierarchies have been identified in this study.

Seeks to investigate the adjustment of business relocatees to their host environment. It explores the facets of the relocatees’ adjustment in the following three regions: Germany as the home country and destination for domestic assignments, Western Europe and other countries. It further investigates the stress levels the relocatees display and their motives for accepting or actively seeking relocation. If the results of this survey suggest the existence of Western Europe as a distinct assignment location, these findings will form a valuable basis for the development of policies for intra‐European personnel transfers, particularly in the area of selection, training, development and compensation.

In this contribution, we systematically review the extant global leadership literature to identify important bibliometric and thematic patterns in evidence in this evolving field of scholarship. Conceptualizing the phenomenon to include leaders/managers/supervisors who hold global, expatriate, or international positions, we draw out insights accumulated from a total of 327 published articles in key management and organizational behavior journals listed in Scopus. Our analysis proceeds in two sequential phases. Our bibliometric analysis first identifies the most cited articles, most published first authors, country bases of first authors, and frequently publishing journals in this field. This characterizes both the diversity and innovative nature of scholarship in the field. Our thematic content analysis, generated through Nvivo 11, isolates two dominant overarching themes that represent the wellspring for the body of literature, namely global leader development and global leader effectiveness. These themes of development and effectiveness are further explicated through six distinct lenses namely cultural, cognitive, learning, personality trait, social/relational, and political. These lenses are underpinned by a suite of theoretical perspectives encompassing individual, system, and contextual considerations. In combination, these sets of analyses bring added systematics to the field and serve as a point of departure for future inquiry.

Due to the globalisation of business, international assignments are becoming more typical career steps in managerial careers than before. On the other hand, expatriation has been found to include several problems including high costs, adjustment challenges, inefficiency, and premature returns. As an outcome, the need for adequate preparation and training of expatriates has been stressed. Here the focus has been on pre‐departure issues while on‐site support and training provided by host units has clearly been covered less. In the present study it is analysed what kind of on‐site support and training host units provide to expatriates and what kind of support the expatriates see as necessary. In order to understand the situation expatriates are facing when arriving at their host units, their adjustment difficulties and pre‐departure training are also covered. The results indicate that training and support provided by host units is a more common form of expatriate training than pre‐departure training. Thus, existing research may exaggerate the lack of expatriate training when focusing only on pre‐departure training.

The purpose of this paper is to understand the behaviours described by expatriates (“what expatriates say they do”) when they are pressed for adjustment and, at the same time, they feel ethically challenged.

The authors interviewed 52 expatriates from the European Union working in Sub-Saharan Africa who were immersed in what was considered by them to be an ethically challenging context or situation while they were in the process of adjusting to their international assignment. The authors conducted a reflexive qualitative analysis between the data and existing literature.

The authors found that the feeling of moral discomfort that causes the perception of an ethical challenge is triggered by an event that contrasts with the expatriates’ notion of morals. After feeling ethically challenged, expatriates engage in a sensemaking process that is hinged in an “intended future identity”.

The authors contribute to the literature by stressing the ethical dimension of adjustment. The authors complement the normative approaches to ethical decision making in international contexts. The research identifies a set of events that are considered as ethical challenges by business expatriates.

The research opens the possibility to anticipate and manage potential conflicts, thus minimizing the probability of expatriation failure. Early knowledge about an expatriate's intended future identity can provide relevant information concerning the probable type of adjustment problems s/he will face.

The research combines two hitherto separate streams of literature – expatriate adjustment and ethical decision making in international contexts – to open the possibility of ethical adjustment. This is supported by a sensemaking process that is also grounded in future intentions, and not only in past experiences and present signals.

This paper presents insights on expatriates in Africa and sets out a research agenda for Africa’s expatriation. The objective of the paper is to provide background and context on expatriation in Africa and to stimulate and guide further research in this important area.

The reviewed papers were drawn from journals and other sources that reported on expatriation to/from African countries. It also incorporates an array of literature on contextual African issues, exploring conceptually how these relate to expatriation.

The review confirmed that there is little research on the topic, particularly with respect to outward expatriation and the studies that exist are one of a kind and stand alone. There has been no attempt to build systematic theory or develop a wholistic picture. This means that the field is wide open for more research. The data provide a picture of the current expatriate situation, including numbers, demographics, host/home locations, success rates and so on, and are provide a basis for further research developing and testing hypotheses regarding individual, organizational and country/national characteristics and how these influence and relate to expatriate experiences and outcomes. Researchers can also draw on the existing expatriation literature from around the world for replication studies to identify uniquely African issues as well as similarities with other locations. As Selmer (2016) noted, replication research is widely used in the sciences and is at the core of the scientific method and thus should be considered for expatriation research.

Limited previous research means there is a need for further research.

Expatriation is a critical aspect of companies operating internationally and companies are increasingly interested in doing business in African countries. Africa's economic growth and development are strong and foreign direct investment (FDI) into Africa is growing with consequent increases in the number of expatriates going to Africa. Understanding expatriation in the African context is thus very important to a variety of companies.

Management literature focusing on Africa is limited and this is true regarding expatriation. This means there is a need for researchers and practitioners to understand expatriation issues in this context, particularly considering economic growth on the continent, increasing interest in doing business there, along with increasing FDI and use of expatriates, as well as the expansion of African companies. This paper provides a research agenda as a guide on which researchers, including those in Africa, can build.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the social role played by expatriate spouses during international assignments, using a dramaturgical approach.

Role expectations were investigated on the basis of an exemplary case: the spouses of diplomatic and consular employees of the Swiss Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Qualitative data were collected in interviews with 40 male and female spouses and analyzed with a “goffmanian” dramaturgical role analysis approach.

The dramaturgical analysis of the accompanying persons’ discourse highlights the different dimensions of the expatriate spouse role and how expatriate spouses construct and personalize their role. Furthermore, this analysis brings new insights into the way male spouses may support female expatriates and reveals gender differences in the enactment of the expatriate spouse role.

This study has been carried out in the diplomatic sector, which might be more structured for the spouses in terms of role expectations than in multinational companies. Further research should be carried out to better understand these expectations in the context of multinational companies.

The dramaturgical approach is a useful conceptual framework to explore the role enactment of the expatriate spouse, especially by considering the spouse role with a new distribution of gender roles. In this context, the role repertoire approach represents a promising field of investigation for research on expatriation and international mobility.

Research on female expatriates has been substantially growing over the last decades and particularly in more recent years. Complementing previous thematic analyses of the literature, the purpose of this paper is to apply textual statistics and correspondence analysis to reveal the existing semantic structure of the field of research on female expatriates.

Using correspondence analysis, the authors explored textual data from the abstracts of 151 identified journal articles published in English since 1975. The authors obtained a graphical representation showing the various developmental stages of research on female expatriates.

The authors found that research follows a home-host country orientation and advances from an organizational focus toward individual-level studies. The authors identified various directions for future research and especially a strong need for more multilevel approaches to study men’s and women’s expatriate experiences and trajectories in various contexts.

Only articles with abstracts entered the analysis, which in turn was dependent on the content and quality of these abstracts. This limitation has been addressed by thoroughly reading each article considered.

This review adopts an original method in research on (female) expatriates and more broadly management research. It enabled the authors to map out the development of key research themes over time. Based on this analysis, gaps in current research could be identified and clear directions for future research were formulated.

Expatriate management is a popular topic in international human resource management (IHRM) because expatriates play a critical role in a firm’s international business operations. The purpose of this paper is to discuss the existing studies that often examine the expatriate management of developed country multinational enterprises (MNEs), aiming to help them identify, employ, prepare and retain expatriates and address challenges these MNEs may face, while how MNEs from emerging countries manage their expatriates is understudied.

The knowledge of expatriate management from emerging market MNEs (EMNEs) may help us understand whether there is anything new for IHRM theory and practice. This conceptual paper aims to address this research gap by selecting China, a leading emerging economy, and reviewing the existing literature in both English and Chinese to examine the status quo of the expatriate management in Chinese MNEs to highlight challenges facing these MNEs in managing their expatriates when conducting outward foreign direct investment (FDI).

This paper aims to make theoretical contributions by generating research propositions to address an under-researched area, i.e., how EMNEs manage their expatriates and the role of their expatriates in the outward FDI.

No other person’s work has been used in the main text of the paper. This paper has not been submitted for the award of any other degree or diploma in this or any other tertiary institution.

This study aims to develop a model for female expatriate work adjustment from the identity conflict perspective.

This is a theoretical paper that focuses on integrating the existing literature and proposing new constructive relationships.

We study female expatriates' adjustment processes in the work domain from the identity conflict perspective. Specifically, we categorize female expatriates' identities in the work domain into their gender identity and a work-related role identity cluster and propose that when gender identity is salient, unsupportive national and organizational cultures will lead to gender–work role identity conflicts and eventually result in maladjustment in the work domain.

First, we suggest that female expatriates' work role identities can form a cluster that includes expatriate role, managerial role and occupational role identity. We further theorize how the gender role identity and the work-related role identity cluster of female expatriates interact to influence how they adjust to their work. Second, we explore two contingency factors – host organizational culture and host national culture–and explain how they influence the interaction between female expatriates' gender identity and work-related role identities. Finally, we introduce the concept of gender–work role identity conflict and theorize how it serves as the underlying mechanism linking female expatriate identity patterns and work adjustment.