Expatriates that stay at home? Understanding Individual and Organizational perspectives on Mobility in MNCs

The dominant theme in international human resource management literature has been the investigation of expatriate failure, and the human resources policies applied to these international assignees. However, this focus has largely excluded the possibility of other types of employees who fulfil a similar cross-boundary role within the organisation, yet may undertake this work in different formats. Steeping away from the ethnocentric and HQ-centric notions of parent country, host country and third country nationals, this paper presents a theoretical model of a multinational corporation’s workforce and the human resources architectures that are applied to that workforce. This approach seeks to account for an array of emerging issues that have remained largely outside the scope of traditional expatriate research. By redefining the key outcome in terms of strategic goals for the organization, the model allows for the consideration of new influences such as different forms of mobility, new employment relationships at the domestic level and the interaction between expatriates and local employees. In particular, this paper will suggest a typology for establishing both stocks and flows of resources in the model, and suggest outcomes for the development of MNCs human resources architectures.