Career capital during international work experiences: contrasting self-initiated expatriate experiences and assigned expatriation

Abstract

This article explores the career capital of expatriates, differentiating between self-initiated expatriates (SEs) and company assigned expatriates (AEs). Previous research has considered issues such as individual background variables, employer and task variables, motives, compensation, and repatriation. The present study adds new perspectives related to the development of career capital. The article uses a survey of more than 200 Finnish expatriates to explore these concepts in relation to international work experiences; finding considerable similarities and some differences in the development of career capital of those sent on an expatriate assignment by an organization, and those having a self-initiated expatriate experience.

Keywords:

• career capital
• expatriates
• international careers
• knowing-how
• knowing-whom
• knowing-why
• self-initiated expatriates

Notes

1. Inkson et al. (1997) and Inkson and Myers (2003) use the term Overseas Experience (OE). Since we are Europeans, the word ‘foreign’ does not equate with ‘overseas’ and OEs refers to younger individuals motivated by travel rather than work. Previously, Suutari and Brewster (2000) used the clumsier and less accurate terms Self-Initiated Foreign Experience (SFE) to refer to these same groups but, of course, these are all expatriates too. Hence this article uses the more elegant AE/SE terminology.

2. Attempts have been made to introduce new forms of career capital, such as ‘symbolic’ capital (Bourdieu 1986; Carpenter et al. 2000; Cronin and Shaw 2002; Iellatchitch, Mayrhofer and Meyer 2003), but as this concept is still in our judgement rather unclear and perhaps unmeasurable, we have chosen to use the more usual three-fold categorization.

3. Jokinen's networking dimension overlaps with knowing-whom capital and was thus not included under the knowing-how dimension in this study.