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The project Views from Expatria: Photographing Place and the Self in Transience investigates the intersection between photography, expatriation, and an expanded context of human migrations. Expatriates, transient skilled workers, within today’s ease of mobility for work can easily lose sight of “home.” Recurrent transits and travels away from home are associated with the everyday experience of expatriates. Although there are many benefits associated with working abroad, these do not come without challenges for the expatriated individual. My creative work Photographing Place and Self in transience and this article reveal the social, political, and psychological complexities associated with the global phenomenon of expatriation. Using place photography and autoethnography away from practices and concepts of forced migration and refugee displacement, the work argues that living and working outside one’s home country has a profound impact on the identity of the expatriate individual. The article reassesses the ideologies of place representation, mobility, and identity, highlighting their contents and disconnects and contributes to current discourses about expatriation and the transient self.

O presente projeto tem como objetivo: o estudo das expectativas de expatriados da América Latina em relação ao processo de expatriação. Tais expectativas podem ocasionar dificuldade de adaptação ao país anfitrião e à sua cultura ou até mesmo a repatriação antecipada, significando a falha e rompimento do contrato. A pesquisa apresenta uma discussão inicial com embasamento teórico que contextualiza as dificuldades que podem ser encontradas pelo futuro expatriado no país anfitrião e que muitas vezes são ignoradas devido às expectativas ou à falta de informações suficientes antes da concretização da expatriação. A metodologia é constituída por uma pesquisa bibliográfica e de levantamento utilizando questionários para coleta de dados das pessoas que trabalham com, ou, se tornaram expatriados. Este estudo tem como justificativa contribuir para que as empresas auxiliem o expatriado com todas as informações necessárias antes da mudança para o novo país, evitando assim que expectativas irreais sejam criadas, atrapalhando sua adaptação. Além disso, este trabalho pode tornar-se um referencial aos futuros expatriados que se interessarem em se preparar para este processo longo e desafiador que é a expatriação.

PurposeThe purpose of this article is to provide a systematic literature review of research on non-traditional expatriates (NTEs) and an agenda for future research.Design/methodology/approachThe systematic literature review of NTEs 2010–2020 followed Moher et al.'s flow chart approach to undertaking a systematic literature review and included research on various categories of NTEs.FindingsThe article explains how the author developed an interest in NTEs and provides a brief distillation of the author's research on NTEs and its key contributions. The article then presents the findings of the systematic literature review of NTEs and highlights the key aspects and contributions of this research. The article examines the strengths and weaknesses of the body of research, how it relates to global mobility research broadly and presents some issues for future literature reviews.Research limitations/implicationsThe article highlights the limited research undertaken on some types of NTEs and issues of construct definition. The article presents issues for future research on NTEs including examining a wider range of NTEs, the impact of changing locations for NTEs, identity and intersectionality of NTEs, and methodological issues within NTE research. Moreover, the call for future research suggests the need for greater construct clarity including proposing a new term to define this group, namely, minority expatriates.Originality/valueThe article is original in terms of building on earlier examinations of NTEs to provide a systematic literature review of NTEs 2010–2020 and an extensive agenda for further research in the field.

Authored by three prominent global mobility scholars – Professor Chris Brewster (Henley Business School), Professor Vesa Suutari (University of Vaasa) and Dr Marie-France Waxin (American University of Sharjah) – the article reviews 20 years of research into self-initiated expatriates, a group whom, by some accounts, likely exceeds the number of assigned expatriates despite the latter being more extensively researched and understood. While authors for the series have been invited (“hand-picked”) by the editors based on their conspicuous role in shaping the field in a way that has had a lasting impact on our understanding of global mobility issues, manuscripts have been handled like any other submission to the journal. The peer review process has been strictly adhered to, with manuscripts undergoing several revisions after review by other “experts” on the topic.

This thesis is in two parts, the first part consisting of the creative submission and the second part consisting of the critical submission. The creative portion is titled 'Finding Felicia'. In this diaristic memoir, I recount my first year and a half as an expatriate, living in London while attending Kingston University. During that time, the title character, Felicia, becomes instrumental in my personal growth as well as structuring how I approached expatriation. As friendship with Felicia grows, the realization dawns that I am becoming dependent on her as the cornerstone of the life I am building abroad. However, she is scheduled to leave a year before me. As her departure date nears, the focus turns toward securing my place abroad- applying for visas as well as trying to make sure life would not be entirely empty when Felicia flew back to the States. The second portion of this thesis consists of the critical submission, 'At Home Abroad: An exploration into the genres of expatriate literature'. The critical thesis is an examination of possible categories within the overarching theme of expatriation. The thesis begins with an exploration of the expatriate literature from the 1920s post-war era through to the Beats living in Paris in the 1950s and 1960s to inform the categories of modern expatriate literature. The categories I propose split the overarching theme of expatriation into three, with each group representative of the ways in which expatriation might be approached, from narratives that show an intense focus on becoming a part of the new culture to an ambiguity concerning the expatriate's ability to integrate. Where the protagonist of the 3 texts falls on the spectrum from isolation to community involvement is a major marker of the goals and expectations held by the expatriate, which in turn helps to situate the text within a category. The three categories I propose are the sabbatical, the bohemian, and the trailing spouse expatriate narratives. The sabbatical expatriate narrative, as exemplified by Frances Mayes's Under the Tuscan Sun: At Home in Italy (1996), shows the focus of the expatriate to be integration as a pseudo-local, the narratives showing the expatriate's integration process through the use of food, attention to landscape and history, as well as a focus on learning the language, all as ways to further ingratiate themselves into their chosen community. The bohemian expatriate narrative, as exemplified by Ben Lerner's Leaving the Atocha Station (2011), shows the focus of the expatriate to be less on the actual facts of their expatriation, and more on the possibility of creating a new life or experimenting with possible identities. The third category I propose is that of the trailing spouse expatriate narrative, as exemplified by Brigid Keenan's Diplomatic Baggage: The Adventures of a Trailing Spouse (2005). The trailing spouse expatriate narratives show a different starting point for expatriation-going abroad for work, or for someone else's work-as well as show the possible difficulties of raising a family abroad and the constant sacrifices demanded to maintain the new lifestyle. All these categories address the threats to self and identity that arise with expatriation, but it is how these threats are approached by the expatriate that determines the category. This research relates to my own creative work as they both explore what it means to be an expatriate today. My creative work challenges the research by complicating different aspects of the three categories of expatriate literature discussed, despite fitting most comfortably within the bohemian narrative category. Community is addressed in the space of literature and representation, where Nancy's figure of 'myth interrupted' is presented as an important dimension of communitarian thought. Through interrogating the representability of community, its mythic foundations are subjected to a process of radical openness that allows for a vibrant and dynamic form of community to emerge. Situating these capacities in the works of authors Jackie Kay, Jon McGregor and Ali Smith, literature is presented as a singular space through which communitarian possibility can be glimpsed. The conceptual figures of 'death', 'gender transformation' and 'magic' are proposed as offering new possibilities in our understanding of community, demonstrating how literature can offer productive and innovative ways of reimagining our understanding of community in the contemporary moment. In this way, this thesis contributes to ongoing debates about the significance of 'community' in contemporary thought, drawing on literature to propose the 'politics of community' as a productive avenue for addressing this.

This study advances our understanding of the contextualization of the effects of cultural intelligence (CQ). Drawing from trait activation theory and institutional theory, we develop a multi-level model showing how host countries’ informal and formal openness towards foreigners facilitate or constrain the importance of expatriates’ CQ in becoming embedded in the host organization. Furthermore, this study positions organizational embeddedness as a mediator in the association between expatriates’ CQ and a central element of expatriates’ jobs – knowledge sharing in the foreign workplace. Results from a cross-lagged survey of 1327 expatriates from 100 different nations residing in 30 host countries combined with secondary data indicate expatriate CQ relates positively to organizational embeddedness. Cross-level interaction analyses further suggest that in-group collectivism, the proxy for host countries’ informal openness towards foreigners, facilitates the importance of CQ as a predictor of expatriates’ organizational embeddedness. In contrast, CQ was not found to interact with the proxy for host countries’ formal openness towards foreigners, i.e. national immigration policies. Consistent with predictions, we identified that CQ relates positively to knowledge sharing and that organizational embeddedness carries an indirect effect. We discuss the implications for theory and practice.

Today’s increasingly global marketplace is resulting in more organizations sending employees to work outside their home countries as expatriates. Consequently, identifying factors influencing expatriates’ cross-cultural adjustment at work and performance has become an increasingly important issue for both researchers and firms. Drawing on Kim et al. (2008), this study examines the critical elements to expatriate success, which are the relationships between cultural intelligence, cross-cultural adjustment at work, and assignment-specific performance. One-hundred and fifty-one expatriates working within the energy sector, who were mainly located in the Middle East completed questionnaires, investigating: cultural intelligence (Cultural Intelligence Scale), cross-cultural adjustment (Expatriate Adjustment Scale), performance (Expatriate Contextual/Managerial Performance Skills), cultural distance (Kogut and Singh’ index), length of staying in the host country and international work experience. Findings indicated that the four cultural intelligence components were directly and indirectly (through cross-cultural adjustment at work) associated with performance. The positive relationship between motivational cultural intelligence and cross-cultural adjustment at work was stronger when cultural distance was low, when expatriates were at the beginning of a new international assignment, and when they had lower experience. Organizations can greatly benefit from hiring cross-culturally intelligent expatriates for international assignments, providing their employees with pre-departure training programs aimed at increasing cultural intelligence, and giving them organizational resources and logistical help to support them.