Unexplored themes in expatriate management: inspirations from the new mobilities paradigm

Purpose

The purpose of this paper is to present a different perspective on the concept of global mobility and apply the multifaceted concept in proposing new themes to explore in expatriate management research.

Design/methodology/approach

This study draws upon the theoretical underpinnings relating to the New Mobilities paradigm from sociology to outline a new perspective on global mobility and thereby describe novel themes to include in future expatriate management studies.

Findings

This study identifies four themes in need of further development within the expatriate management research field: materiality, infrastructure and access, inequality and immobility and emotional dynamics. Within each of these themes, this study presents several examples of research questions that can provide new thrust to the theory development of expatriate management research.

Originality/value

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this paper is the first attempt to draw on central ideas in the New Mobilities paradigm to propose a future research agenda for expatriate management studies. This study aims to enhance the study of “mobility” in new and unorthodox ways.

Expatriate partners’ personality and its influence on acculturation into a new cultural context: Examining the role of dispositional affectivity

Despite the vital role that trailing partners play for successful expatriation, we still know very little about what actually causes partners to thrive and integrate effectively into the new cultural context. However, as indications have emerged that the personality of partners could be key to a favorable acculturation trajectory, we set out to explore this further. More specifically, we assess the role of expatriate partners’ dispositional affectivity, that is, positive and negative affectivity. We examine this in relation to internal acculturation (in the form of interaction and general adjustment) and external acculturation (in the form of local community embeddedness and intentions to stay or to return home). Drawing on the data of 123 trailing partners, full support was found for three out of four hypotheses regarding the effects of positive affectivity. Further, a marginally significant negative association was identified for the relationship between positive affectivity and repatriation intentions. For negative affectivity, two hypotheses were met. Interestingly, no significant influence of negative affectivity on community embeddedness was found. The association between negative affectivity and interaction adjustment was marginally significant indicating some tentative support. In sum, this study corroborates that dispositional affectivity is an overall important concept to explain trailing partners’ acculturation. However, the role of positive and negative affectivity seems to vary along the different proxies of internal and external acculturation.