Expatriate Managers

The Paradoxes of Living and Working Abroad

Anna Spiegel, Ursula Mense-Petermann, Bastian Bredenkötter

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781317279334
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

Since the 1990s, economic and cultural globalization has propelled the transnational mobility of managers and fueled cross-border careers. Some scholars have argued for the emergence of a new global business elite with cosmopolitan mind-sets and homogeneous lifestyles, while others have highlighted their disconnection from the local surroundings and their everyday life within national expatriate 'bubbles'. Thus, the question of whether today's mobile professionals can be described as interculturally open and competent cosmopolitans, or as pronounced anti-cosmopolitans, is still unanswered.

Expatriate Managers and the Paradoxes of Working and Living Abroad considers a core protagonist of economic globalization and the management of MNCs through the lens of a practice-based theoretical approach whilst seeking to address this question by building on intensive ethnographic case studies of expatriate managers, most of them high-ranking executives, from two comparative different home countries, the US and Germany. These managers, together with their families, have been assigned to China, Germany, or the US to perform demanding coordination tasks within their multinational corporations (MNCs). Based on detailed accounts of expatriate managers' experiences and everyday practices, the book reveals the multiple and sometimes paradoxical ways in which they deal with cultural differences as they build up new forms of working, belonging and dwelling.

The findings suggest that the newly emerging mind-sets and lifestyles of expatriate managers transcend the polarized images of mobile elites as either cosmopolitan 'global managers' or parochial anti-cosmopolitans. Expatriate Managers and the Paradoxes of Working and Living Abroad examines the global elite from an everyday perspective, showing that understanding the dynamics of a global economy requires probing into the lifeworld's agency and everyday arrangements of the social actors who are putting globalization into practice.

1 Introduction

Anna Spiegel and Ursula Mense-Petermann

This book puts a social figure center stage who has increasingly become an object of attention whenever questions of economic globalization, increasing transnational mobility, and questions of elite formation at a global scale are discussed: the expatriate manager.

Expatriate managers are assigned to foreign subsidiaries of multinational corporations (MNCs) for a limited period of time.¹ Hence, they are transnationally mobile professionals, and they display transnational careers. Instead of only being interested in the mobility and career patterns of expatriates, however, scholars from different disciplinary backgrounds have ascribed a primary role to expatriates in economic globalization, discussing them as protagonists of the fluid, flexible, and mobile modernity. They are considered to be the core connectors and integrators of the transnational networks of modern MNCs, to feature paradigmatic forms of (hyper)mobility, and to form a transnational elite class ‘in-itself’ and ‘for-itself.’ Hence, the expatriate manager emerges as the actor who puts globalization into practice.

As such eminent actors, expatriate managers have been addressed from a series of different perspectives and portray the ‘star role’ in different bodies of literature. In the dominant part of the expatriate literature—namely, the International Business (IB) and management literature—the expatriate manager emerges as an interculturally knowledgeable “boundary spanner” (Au and Fukuda 2002; Mense-Petermann 2006; Park and Mense-Petermann 2014) and “culture carrier” (Björkman and Lu 2001). Expatriates are said to play an important part in implementing global programs, distributing best practices, bringing into line the organizational cultures of headquarters and their globally spread subsidiaries, and, thus, in furthering the global integration of MNCs (Black, Gregersen, and Mendenhall 1992; Kanter 1995). Moreover, expatriates are expected to acquire a wide and deep range of knowledge which can help organizations to better understand and manage culturally diverse and changing conditions in a world that requires both global awareness and local sensitivity (Berthoin 2001, 62). They are described as being able to meet these expectations because they are cosmopolitans who are “comfortable in many places and able to understand and bridge the differences among them” (Kanter 1995, 23). The image that is invoked by such contributions from the IB and management literature, however, tends to be that of a heroic manager—even though the same literature asserts a high rate of failure and premature returns by expatriates.

Yet the literature has not only addressed expatriate managers in their role as boundary spanners and culture carriers in MNCs but also as protagonists of a newly emerging global elite: a “transnational capitalist class” (Sklair 2001; Robinson 2012; McKenna, Ravishankar, and Weir 2015) or “world class” (Kanter 1995; see also Frank 2007; Rothkopf 2009). Hence, expatriate managers are not only considered important actors for the management of MNCs but also—in a wider politico-economic perspective—as the main actors propelling economic globalization at large and the emergence of a transnationally integrated elite class on a global scale. And as a class ‘in-itself’ and ‘for-itself,’ they are also said to be connected with one another by transnational networks, to share homogeneous lifestyles, and to have common mindsets and orientations—namely, cosmopolitan ones.

Hence, both of these strands of literature explicitly or implicitly stress cosmopolitanism as a prime characteristic of expatriates helping them to successfully act as “global integrators” (Kanter 1995) and to build up powerful transnational networks. Thus, far from only formulating cosmopolitanism as a necessary management prerequisite, this perspective depicts cosmopolitanism as an already achieved quality of globally active managers.

In yet another body of literature, studies with a sociological, social anthropological, or social geographical background, a completely different picture of the expatriate is painted: These studies—mainly investigating the nonprofessional lifeworlds and everyday practices of expatriates—claim that expatriates have strong anti-cosmopolitan orientations, which are perpetuated in nationally homogeneous ‘expat bubbles’ (Fechter 2007). Here, the view is held that elite forms of mobility and dwelling strongly advance parochial, home country–bound orientations. This view, however, leaves open the question of how expatriate managers, as parochial anti-cosmopolitans, manage to play their role as boundary spanners in MNCs successfully. Thus, the question of whether today’s mobile managers can be described as interculturally open and competent cosmopolitans or as pronounced anti-cosmopolitans remains unanswered.

How is it possible that such contradictory images regarding expatriates’ cosmopolitanism emerge? We suggest that this is a result of three main shortcomings of the existing body of expatriate literature.²

First of all, the mentioned strands of literature only focus on one side of expatriate life: Whereas the IB, management, and global business elite literature concentrates on the professional sphere and discusses expatriates’ tasks, resources, privileges, and networks as being intrinsic to their professional positions and jobs, the sociological, social anthropological, and social geographic literature mainly focuses on the non-work sphere of expatriate life and investigates residential decisions and dwelling practices, leisure spaces, urban spaces, urban mobility practices, and the private sociabilities emerging in these spaces. These bodies of literature thereby systematically neglect the ways in which professional performance and working practices, on the one hand, and everyday life in the non-work environment, on the other, are related to one another. We argue, however, that professional and nonprofessional lifeworlds of expatriate managers are deeply entangled and any understanding of expatriate managers’ working practices and professional dispositions inevitably needs to take into account these multifaceted and, in part, paradoxical entanglements. Second, these strands of literature implicitly suggest that transnational mobility and a privileged position in the global economy automatically induce the development of either cosmopolitan or parochial dispositions. What is missing here is an analysis of the processes through which the disposal over privileges, material and symbolic resources, and mobile lifestyles translate into specific orientations and practices. And last but not least, most of the literature referred to above is prescriptive in character and is built on “thin descriptions” (Geertz, 1973), only. In our study, we have therefore applied an ethnographic approach to expatriates’ lifeworlds, orientations, and practices.

Against this background, the aims of this book are as follows:

• to deliver “thick descriptions” (ibid.) of and in-depth insights into expatriate managers’ lifeworlds and orientations;
• to theorize emerging orientations and practices of expatriate managers that transcend the polarized images of mobile elites as cosmopolitan ‘global managers,’ on the one hand, and as parochial anti-cosmopolitans living in hermetically sealed ‘bubbles,’ on the other;
• to highlight the paradoxical character of expatriate managers’ cosmopolitanism.

In order to do so, this book builds on empirical research carried out by the authors along with other colleagues³ during the past four years. It is based on intensive ethnographic case studies of expatriate managers. The ethnographic case studies not only took expatriates’ agency at work into account but also shed light on their social positions and self-positioning and their everyday life within the societal context of their host localities.

In the remainder of this introduction, we will elaborate on our main theoretical concepts: practiced cosmopolitanism, MNCs as transnational social spaces, and social practices. We will also inform the reader on the ethnographic approach applied in our study and give an overview of the structure of the book.

Theorizing Corporate Expatriate Cosmopolitanism

In this subchapter, we introduce our theoretical approach to accounting for and understanding expatriate cosmopolitanism and anti-cosmopolitanism, respectively. Although we position our own approach within the debate by discussing the relevant literature more extensively in Part I of this book, we will now provide a brief introduction of the core theoretical categories informing our analysis.

Practiced Cosmopolitanism

This book is about practiced cosmopolitanism (Nowicka and Rovisco 2009a) of corporate expatriates. We build on an understanding of cosmopolitanism as a specific mode of managing meaning (Hannerz 1990, 247) characterized by a general openness and curiosity toward the cultural Other⁴ as well as respect and enjoyment of cultural differences (Szerszynski and Urry 2002; Beck 2009; Kendall, Woodward, and Skrbiš 2009). This understanding of cosmopolitanism is mainly inspired by the work of the anthropologist Ulf Hannerz, who defined cosmopolitanism as “an orientation, a willingness to engage with the other” and as “an intellectual and aesthetic openness toward divergent cultural experiences, a search for contrast rather than uniformity” (Hannerz 1990, 239). What we emphasize with the term “practiced cosmopolitanism” is that it is not enough to solely focus on cosmopolitanism as a “cultural disposition” (Szerszynski and Urry 2002, 468), a “subjective outlook” (Kendall, Woodward, and Skrbiš 2009, 13), an orientation, or a “mindset” (Tan, Ng, and Ang 2011), but that it is always necessary to take into account how such dispositions, orientations, mindsets, and outlooks are enacted and put into practice in everyday life. Hannerz already emphasized that cosmopolitanism needs to be put into ‘practice’ at the everyday level by integrating and combining different culturally rooted practices and meanings. He also emphasized that the way this integration and combination would most likely be acquired would be through participating rather than through sheer observational modes of action (Hannerz 1990, 241). Still, his initial concept of cosmopolitanism as a general openness to the cultural Other seems too vague and not tangible enough empirically (see Vertovec and Cohen 2002; Nowicka and Rovisco 2009a, 2011b). There have been various attempts to sharpen the concept of cosmopolitanism and to integrate the level of social practices. Three of these attempts to develop a more focused concept of cosmopolitanism were constitutive for writing this book.

First, it is necessary to complement the aesthetic dimension of cosmopolitanism with the dimension of social relations. This idea has been formulated most convincingly by Glick Schiller and colleagues, who understand cosmopolitanism solely in terms of interactions, participation, and shared “sociabilities” (Glick Schiller, Darieva, and Gruner-Domic 2011). They suggest understanding cosmopolitanism as a specific pattern of “sociability practices”—namely, practices establishing “social relations of inclusiveness and openness to the world” (ibid., 402). Cosmopolitanism is, then, a specific way of conceiving of and at the same time constructing cultural Otherness and of interacting with the Other. Second, several studies researched cosmopolitanism with a focus on the spatiality of everyday life and everyday practices related to these spaces. For example, in her study on construction workers in London, Datta analyzes “cosmopolitanism as spatial—where forms and degrees of openness to others are shaped by localized spatial contexts where encounters with others take place” (Datta 2009, 355). Rovisco and Nowicka have emphasized the need to research lived cosmopolitanism “in the micro-scale of everyday life interactions in concrete settings and places” (Rovisco and Nowicka 2011a, 2). Cosmopolitanism is then related to specific spatial practices of dealing with Others. Third, we argue, cosmopolitanism needs to be understood as a specific form of belonging that is the process of establishing emotionally charged attachments to social or spatial locations (Lovell 1998; Yuval-Davis 2006; Pfaff-Czarnecka 2011, 2012). Cosmopolitanism is then related to forms of multiple belonging with fragmented, multilayered, and malleable relations and attachments toward multiple objects, places, and cultural practices.

These three shifts reinforce Beck’s perspective on cosmopolitanism as being related to a “new kind of space-time experience and of human sociability” (Beck 2002, 30). Seeing cosmopolitanism as a specific form of sociability being enacted in concrete spatial practices—be it local or translocal—and related to specific forms of multiple and flexible belonging links it to the sphere of everyday life, highlights the possible junctures and disjunctures between orientations and practices, and thus opens up the concept for empirical research.

MNCs as Transnational Social Spaces

In this book, we concentrate on corporate expatriates for whom the MNC constitutes the main institution shaping their working and living abroad. At the same time, the MNC is the organizational context in which expatriate managers’ dealing with difference in the professional sphere takes place. We conceive of MNCs as transnational social spaces (Morgan 2001a, 2001b; Dörrenbächer 2007). What is new about this way of thinking about MNCs is, first, a conceptualization of MNCs as social spaces.⁵ Being rooted in the framework of social constructivism (Berger and Luckmann 1967), the concept of social space (Bourdieu 1985; Massey 1994; McDowell 1999; Lachenmann 2010) highlights that all structures and meaning are products of continuous interactions among social agents who simultaneously create and rely on structures. Being constituted by human agency, social space is thus inherently dynamic, relational, and process-like in character, and intimately linked to actors’ identity politics and sense-making. Applying the social space approach to the study of organizations in general and MNCs in particular is to conceive of organizational processes and structures as the result of agency and everyday practices of various actors within an organization and thus to emphasize the negotiated character of power relations and organizational structures, identities, and c...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction
• Part I Embedding the Expatriate Manager
• Part II Negotiating Difference in the Private Sphere
• Part III Negotiating Difference in the Professional Sphere
• Part IV Comparative Perspectives and Conclusion
• Appendix
• Index