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ABSTRACT
This paper examines the processes through which the United Arab Emirates’ (UAE) cities of Abu Dhabi and Dubai attract and integrate knowledge workers into their labor markets. It focuses on how the UAE has acquired the human capital to create post-oil economies, deploying its oil windfalls into massive urban development strategies in order to create global hubs for talent. More significantly, it analyzes how the UAE’s strategies and frameworks for attracting global knowledge flows ultimately determine the degree to which expatriate knowledge embeds locally. Presentation of results from a large-scale human capital survey of firms in Dubai and Abu Dhabi, as well as key-informant interviews with senior human resource administrators at these firms, demonstrate these processes.
Acknowledgement
The author would like to acknowledge Anne M. Libby, Carolyn Cartier and three anonymous reviewers for their thoughtful comments and suggestions on earlier drafts of this paper.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1. In this section of the survey results, the data for Dubai and Abu Dhabi firms are combined in both the discussion and in the figures. The justification is that there is no significant difference in responses between firms from each location. Instead, the discussion focuses on the much more meaningful distinction in the results between local and foreign firms.