From ‘elites’ to ‘everyone': re-framing international mobility scholarship to be all-encompassing

Abstract

This article argues that the view of international mobility in the management and organization literature has been too restrictive in focusing only on high-status workers. This view needs to be widened to an all-encompassing perspective that is not limited or restricted in terms of the number, types or status of people engaged in working internationally. In particular, it argues that there are millions of low-status international workers that, with some few exceptions, we have largely ignored. Not only does it mean that scholars are failing to explore the complete picture, it adds to the research-practice gap between those scholars and the practitioners who have to manage workers of all status levels. The article points out the areas where our knowledge is lacking and suggests a “road-map” for future research to overcome these critical gaps.

Keywords:

• Expatriates
• international HRM
• international mobility
• migrants
• status

Acknowledgement

The authors thank Moshe Banai whose comments and suggestions greatly improved the manuscript.

Notes

1 These statistics are in comparison to, for example, Malaysia at 9.5% (World Bank Group 2013), South Korea at 3% (Roh 2014), and Australia at 1% (Australian Government 2016). Across the EU countries, foreign workers made up 7.4% of persons in employment in 2015 (Eurostat 2016).

2 Some have argued that MNE employees can choose where they want to go (Altman and Baruch 2012), but that evidences a serious lack of construct clarity and understanding of how MNEs work.

3 We recognize, of course, that people can switch between these categories: some who start as expatriates stay on and some who aim to be migrants leave. There is little research on these transitions (Ramboarison-Lalao, Brewster, and Boyer 2019) but the fact of fungibility only makes the importance of clarifying who is being studied at any point in time more important.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Yvonne McNulty

Dr Yvonne McNulty is a Senior Lecturer at Edith Cowan University, Australia, where she specializes in data-driven research, covering global workers with a focus on foreign manpower trends. Prior to joining ECU, Yvonne held academic appointments in Philadelphia, Singapore, and Shanghai. While living and working abroad, she became a leading expert on global work for her sharp analysis of mobility trends using data from the expatriate communities she lived in. She is known for her ability to research and study hard-to-access populations. Yvonne is editor of the Research Handbook of Expatriates (Edward Elgar, 2017), co-author of Working Internationally: Expatriation, Migration and Other Global Work (Edward Elgar, 2019), and editor of the Research Handbook of Global Families (Edward Elgar, 2021). Her research has been featured in The New York Times, Economist Intelligence Unit, The Wall Street Journal, and on ABC National and BBC Radio. Yvonne graduated from Monash University with a PhD in International Business. Originally from Perth, she currently provides pro-bono assistance to Dandelion to support WA women and teens in crisis from domestic violence and homelessness.

Chris Brewster

Chris Brewster is Professor of International Human Resource Management at Henley Business School, University of Reading, UK. He researches international and comparative HRM. He has published thirty books and over 250 articles. He has a doctorate from the LSE and an honorary doctorate from Vaasa University, Finland.