The role of senior expatriate managers in the globalization process : an analysis of its significance and key components

• Main Author: Sakho, Helen
• Published: London South Bank University 2001
• Subjects: 658.4
• Online Access: http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.618666

This research is about the global movement of a group of people identified within new migratory movements associated with globalisation, and perceived by academic and other contributors as an increasingly significant element in its advancement. Expatriate managers - who are included in the category of 'highly skilled' migrants in both official statistical calculations and in conceptual terms in current discourse - are invariably perceived as a highly desirable group of migrants and are accordingly welcomed and rewarded. The research is qualitative and based mainly on 30 in-depth interviews conducted in the UK with senior expatriate and human resource (HR) managers attached to 23 American and European transnational corporations (TNCs). It is structured around two core and four sub-categories, and uses a grounded theory method of research to examine the key overall themes with which it is concerned, allowing the evolution of new categories with their own distinctive dimensions. These research themes aim to facilitate a study of the particular contribution of senior expatriates to the globalisation process by investigating their role and place in the management of TNCs' global operations. They also aim to gauge the impact of new technology on such a role and on expatriation. The suggestion by existing research that internationalisation may be increasingly facilitated (more cheaply) through technology rather than the physical presence of expatriates around the globe, is examined and conceptual and empirical interlinkages are presented between this possibility and the nature of the role of (different) expatriates. A particular aim of the research is to contextualise the migration of the highly skilled in the multi-faceted processes of globalisation, requiring a detailed consideration of some of these processes as well as the increasingly fierce debate over their nature and scope. Relying on the findings of the research, which stem from the accounts and formulations of the participants, the research suggests that expatriate managers - particularly at senior levels - continue to be a necessary pre-requisite for globalisation; that they occupy a particular location in the international division of labour and have a key task in shaping and creating new relations with and within markets situated in cultures foreign to the home base(s) of the TNCs. The transfer of skills via expatriation may thus be intertwined with the transfer and safeguarding of historically specific power relations embodied in the diffusion of economic and cultural values around the globe.