Expatriate assignment versus overseas experience: contrasting models of international human resource development.

Journal of World Business   32.n4 (Winter 1997): pp351(18). (7709 words) 

Show details Author(s): Kerr Inkson, Michael B. Arthur, Judith Pringle and Sean Barry. Document Type: Magazine/JournalBookmark: Bookmark this Document

Abstract:

Expatriate assignment (EA) and overseas experience (OE) models of international career experience are compared. Analysis of recent case study data suggests OE's advantages over EA for people's development and its consequences. In turn, the analysis suggests both human resource management and national policy-making shift from planning toward knowledge-centered approaches.

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COPYRIGHT 1997 JAI Press, Inc.

In this paper we posit two contrasting models whereby international experience is: (1) obtained, and (2) used to support the development of career, company, and national competencies both within and outside the country in which the experience takes place. The two models are expatriate assignment and overseas experience.

In Expatriate Assignment (EA), the initiative for the international experience comes primarily from a company which operates internationally. A position may become available in a subsidiary outside the country in which the company is based. The job requires both knowledge of the company's strategy, procedures, etc., and the ability to work and live successfully in a foreign environment. A suitable individual is assigned on a temporary basis, and subsequently returns to another position in the same company in the original country. Hopefully, the experience will result in career development for the individual, competent completion of the job assignment, and organizational learning from the transfer of new skills and knowledge from the expatriate after return.

In Overseas Experience (OE), the initiative for the international experience comes from the individual. Typically, he or she will save money to bankroll the trip, resign from work, and set off overseas autonomously. Sometimes a job will be pre-arranged in a new company, but most often it will not be. The person will often shuttle between jobs, and between different areas or countries, and attempt to spend leisure and vacation time visiting new places. The obligation to pay one's way can involve accepting relatively unskilled temporary work with little apparent career value. After a period from a few months to several years duration, the person returns home, seeking to resume his or her career, or possibly start a new one.

Table 1 contrasts EA and OE. The initiation, goals, and funding of EA are, in large measure, company-mediated, though the individual may politic for an overseas posting, set personal objectives as well as pursuing company ones, and provide personal funding to enhance the experience. OE is, by definition, a personal odyssey, initiated and resourced by the self. Typically, the initial [TABULAR DATA FOR TABLE 1 OMITTED] goals are diffuse - "see the world," "try something different," find myself," etc. EA is a microcosmic international representation of the "organizational career" in which the individual moves from role to role building company-relevant skills and ascending in status within one company; whereas OE is a microcosmic representation of the "boundaryless career" (Arthur & Rousseau, 1996) in which the individual moves between companies developing skills by reference to a wider labour market. There is a large literature on EA, whereas OE is largely unresearched.

The importance of EA and OE varies across countries, both in their overall importance and in their importance relative to each other. Our data are from New Zealand, where OE has traditionally been prominent, and where a relative paucity of multinational head offices makes EA more of a rarity. In contrast, the literature suggests EA is dominant in the US. However, the EA literature may make less and less sense in the boundaryless career era. In this era, boundaries between and within companies are dissolving (Inkson, 1997), and careers are becoming increasingly fluid, characterized more and more by temporary assignments and centered on building skills across companies rather than ascending hierarchies within companies. As careers change, and as the economy becomes increasingly global, OE may become a more prominent option worldwide. Popular US programs for working abroad - notably the Peace Corps (Starr, 1994) - or for studying abroad (Carlson, Burn, Useem, & Yachimonicz, 1990) may be precursors of a broader trend calling for increased attention.

In the context of boundaryless careers, both EA and OE form a primary basis for building competencies in individuals, in companies, and in nations. Careers operate as "repositories of knowledge" (Bird, 1996), enabling the transfer of skills between companies and between nations. EA, if thoughtfully planned, may provide short-term advantage to the originating company, enabling it to build knowledge abroad, "import" that knowledge, and integrate it as part of the company's broader knowledge resources. EA may also be used by the repatriate to enhance his or her career within or across companies. However OE offers greater flexibility to leverage the career development of the individuals involved, the competencies of specific companies, and the national human resources of the countries through which they move.

Expatriate Assignment

There is a substantial, and growing, largely American literature on expatriate assignment of corporate executives. This literature is largely based on the results of surveys of expatriates, repatriates, and the companies that employ them. It focuses mainly on the human resource management (HRM) context of the company. Howard (1973) set the tone with a study of 81 returning expatriates; he noted a number of problems that needed addressing. Expatriates, it seemed, on their return from overseas lost authority, autonomy in decision making, and promotional opportunities. There tended to be no job waiting for returning expatriates and they were resented by colleagues.

These problems have been confirmed in a number of more recent studies. While expatriate assignment may be presented as a career opportunity (Oddou, 1991), and may facilitate short-term career progress, most returning expatriates report that the net effect is not positive (Oddou & Mendenhall, 1991). According to Napier and Peterson (1991), 40% of expatriates return early from their assignments. Scullion (1992) is among the writers finding that repatriation issues are not adequately addressed, and Oddou (1991) reports that nearly 50% of returnees had no position waiting for them on return. Birdseye and Hill (1995) and Engen (1995) report high rates of quitting the company by repatriates. Expatriate assignment, in short, seems to have a way of destabilizing the assignees. The costs may be high - $50,000 to $150,000 for a failed expatriate assignment (Stephens & Black, 1991), and over $250,000 for the loss, and replacement, of an employee leaving the company after return from assignment (Murray & Murray, 1986). The problem, of course, may be a largely American one - to be expected in a large country whose economy is still primarily domestic - since Japanese and European expatriates have a record of serving longer assignments than Americans, being looked after in an extended time frame with a clearer career perspective, and showing lower turnover rates (Tung, 1987).

Solutions to the "problem" of expatriate assignment are also apparent in the literature. These solutions reflect the traditional conceptualization of HRM as a centralized bureaucratic company activity. The management of expatriates must be based on a "strategic international human resource management system" backed by "policies and procedures" to enforce it (Oddou & Mendenhall, 1991). Such systems should include specific succession planning and "career pathing" for expatriates (Mendenhall, Dunbar, & Oddou, 1987). Candidates for expatriate assignment should be rigorously selected, for cross-cultural adaptability rather than for technical expertise, including the administration of psychological tests to them and their families, and properly trained in cross-cultural behavior (Mendenhall et al, 1987; Mendenhall & Oddou, 1988). Mentoring systems between repatriated staff' and expatriates should be established (Mendenhall et al., 1987). "Company programs to assist reintegration" of repatriates should be introduced (Harvey, 1989; Harris, 1989). Oddou (1991) summarizes by saying that the key means of "managing your expatriate" are appropriate selection criteria, preparation of the expatriate, provision of overseas support, and career planning, particularly in respect of repatriation.

The research literature summarized above is striking in both its omissions and its assumptions. The problems with the approach put forward may be considered at three levels: the individual, the company, and larger collectivities such as the industry or the nation.

At the individual level, one is struck by the total, rather demeaning, powerlessness attributed to the expatriate/repatriate in the process. The causes of success or failure of AE are attributed solely to the company, and the remedies for failure are apparently in the company's hands alone. The expatriate or repatriate is apparently at the mercy of superior corporate forces of HRM, which may be seen as intensive, rational, and therefore benign, or alternatively loose, ad hoc and therefore malign. Yet most expatriates cite as their reasons for accepting international assignments not their desire to achieve project results, be good corporate citizens, or advance their company careers, but their personal development, sense of adventure, and wish to work in different cultures (Mendenhall & Oddou, 1988). The failure of writers on EA to focus on individual dynamics is compounded by their consideration of EA as a discrete short-term phenomenon, separate from the long-term life history and career dynamics of the person (Feldman, 1991).

In contrast, career theory sees career development as an outcome of complex forces, including individual self-direction as well as organizational career frameworks (Arthur, Hall, & Lawrence, 1989). There is much evidence that people "sculpt" their own careers rather than allowing themselves to become corporate sculptures (Bell & Staw, 1989). Individual career behaviors create organizational patterns and inadvertently build company expertise and shape company structures (Weick, 1996). The proactive role of the expatriate/repatriate in controlling her or his own life and in building company and cross-company expertise goes largely unacknowledged in the EA literature.

At the company level, to which the literature is most clearly oriented, the diagnosis of faulty HRM and the prescriptions for improved HRM are doubtless valuable to companies seeking ways to facilitate the job satisfaction, adjustment in the company, and long-term employment of expatriates. However, we would suggest that these issues of adjustment and commitment are peripheral. In the short-term, the question of what the company objectives for EA are, and the question of whether these objectives are achieved, should be the primary consideration. A related question is whether these objectives might be achieved in different ways, such as the employment or contracting of overseas locals rather than the assignment of expatriates. In the longer-term, after repatriation, we should be interested in the specific competencies which the repatriate brings "home," the value of these competencies to the company, and the mechanisms for the reciprocal development of company and repatriate through ongoing exchange of knowledge and competence. But in much of the literature, expatriate assignment is accepted as a given, not something to meet company goals but something to be coped with. The key objective in handling EA appears to be to avoid the disruption and costs of employee distress, mobility, and turnover. Repatriate departure from the company is seen, in the context of the company, as little short of a tragedy, though of course it may also, paradoxically, represent triumph for the repatriate or for the employer to whom the repatriate moves or for the industry in general.

At the level of the industry or nation, EA represents a significant means of building inter-firm, industry, regional, and/or national expertise. The assumption, implicit in the literature, that the expatriate's acquired skills, including language and cross-cultural skills, are applicable only in the company in which the individual was when she or he acquired them, is clearly false. Through boundaryless careers, skills are transferred and developed more and more between rather than within companies, often through inter-firm networks and regional and industry groupings

(Saxenian, 1996). EA is therefore not just an individual and company issue but an issue relevant to industrial and national development. In the knowledge society, expatriates and repatriates become exporters, importers, and local traders of expertise, the most precious resources of all. To view them merely as deviant company employees requiting additional socialization into productive corporate behavior is to trivialize the whole process of expatriation.

Additionally, we suspect that the focus in EA on corporate employees, often identified by researchers as being all "executives" and "managers" creates a major sampling bias in our understanding of the process of career development and skills acquisition through expatriate experience. The activities and knowledge-building of traveling entrepreneurs, small-company salespeople, plus the many people who travel overseas when young to "see the world" (to be discussed under OE) are ignored. In short, the expatriate experience covered in mainstream accounts of EA represents only a small and limited sample of experience imported from overseas.

EA is further constrained by corporate sexism: it is estimated that fewer than 3% of expatriates are female (Brewster, 1991). The literature on women and EA suggests that women may be systematically excluded from these career options (Adler, 1994), possibly as part of a broader sex segregation of the labor market whereby, as globalization proceeds, men move into an international arena where key decisions are made, while women function in "second best" domestic positions (Calas & Smircich, 1993). There is also evidence that women prepare themselves better than men for EA and are more culturally sensitive than men (Dallalfar & Movahedi, 1996; Scullion, 1992). It may be that women are more suited than men to international assignment, even in countries apparently hostile to women, such as Iran (Dallalfar & Movahedi, 1996).

In framing EA as an issue of HRM in single companies, the EA researchers are of course merely echoing an increasingly questionable conceptualization of humans as resources, of resources as inert (or at least predictable) and therefore strategically plannable and manageable, and of employees as permanent and company-committed. In large companies which are genuinely able to maintain "lifetime employment" policies and expectations for large sections of their workforces, this may be reasonable. But in a world of increasing intercompany mobility (Stroh, Brett, & Reilly, 1994), ongoing restructuring and rationalization, inter-company collaboration, outsourcing and project work, boundaryless careers become normative and expatriation can no longer be considered as solely a company HRM issue.

Mendenhall's recent extension of his line of enquiry into EA bears out the above conclusion. EA may be seen as a complex and unpredictable adaptive system. Tiny events such as an expatriate's spouse's shopping experiences create multiple "butterfly effects" resulting in idiosyncratic outcomes. EA phenomena may therefore be better understood not as predictable effects of HRM policies but from a perspective of non-linear dynamics (Mendenhall & Macomber, 1997).

Expatriates as Heroes

Osland (1995) titles her book on expatriation, "The Adventure of Working Abroad: Hero Tales from the Global Frontier." This book goes some way towards de-trivializing expatriate

experience. Osland's data is not dry questionnaire box-ticking, but rather "tales told by expatriates". Expatriate experience is thus personalized, and takes on the rich texture of adventure stories in exotic locations. Osland uses Campbell's (1968) "myth of the hero's adventure" to show how the expatriate can be viewed as hero called to adventure, heeding the call, and crossing the threshold into the unknown, and into a place with the potential to enable transformation and spiritual rebirth. After a series of trials and ordeals the hero crosses back across the return threshold, now the master of two worlds instead of one. However, it often becomes apparent that the hero's transformation, and changes in the world left behind, may lead to fresh problems and challenges.

Osland's stories, collected from returned US expatriates, map well on to the adventure myth. The call is experienced as drama, and creates excitement, angst, and foreboding. The cultural differences between "home" and the assignment not only provide their own physical tests and obstacles, but also throw up paradoxes which provide the opportunity for cross-cultural learning. "Magical" assistance comes from local mentors, found through networking, who can interpret the culture and provide guidance through it. Transformation takes place as the hero lets go of previously unquestioned assumptions and frames of reference, accepts new roles, norms, customs, and schemas, and becomes "addicted to novelty and learning" (Osland, 1995, p. 152). Finally comes the return, from hero to company resource, from big fish in little pond to little fish in big pond, to others who aren't interested in stories, to companies who can't, or won't, use new skills, let alone new frames of reference: in short, to repatriation blues.

Osland's approach, it seems to us, represents a significant move toward better understanding of expatriate experience. The expatriate, rather than being seen as an HRM ping-pong ball, is recognized as the protagonist in an adventure of survival, learning, and accomplishment. The heroes' stories focus strongly on their social (nonwork) roles as travelers, consumers, spouses, parents, partakers of recreation and leisure, reminding us of the integrative nature of human development and the huge influences that lie (fortunately) outside company control. The stories also highlight and authenticate the physical differences and cross-cultural paradoxes which expatriates encounter.

From a boundaryless careers perspective, however, the presentation is still incomplete. The company is still there, albeit in the background, part of the narrative. The hero is called by the company, has air tickets paid and accommodation booked by the company, has mentors provided or recommended by the company, and finally returns through the company's threshold in the expectation that the company will provide a career path that makes use of the newly-acquired skills. Like the other HRM authors, Osland (1995, pp. 193-222) even provides a chapter on expatriate management, including familiar material on strategic career planning, selection criteria, pre-training, spouse and family programs, repatriation planning etc.. This may create a company fit for heroes to live in, but does it create one in which ordinary people can become heroes? The hero Jason set off on his ship the Argos, to find the Golden Fleece beyond its protective dragon. Suppose Jason had received a proper induction course, dragon-slaying training, the assistance of cultural attaches in all ports of call, and a guaranteed promotion on return, would he have been more of a hero? One suspects not!

Again, Osland focuses on the hero's company as the only suitable repository of the "great boon" of personal transformation that the hero has gained. Why? What would be wrong with examining expatriates' experiences in their wider social roles and in the new companies to which they move or in the new careers which they make, careers which will forever be informed and energized by the skills, attitudes, and transformations of the expatriate experience? Why should the crossing of national boundaries be heroic but the crossing of corporate boundaries not worth a mention? whatever the benefits of expatriates' experiences to themselves and to their companies, what about their benefits to their country (and for that matter to the countries into which they are expatriated)? We are forced to the conclusion that Osland's model needs further extension. To move toward such an alternative, let us now consider OE.

Overseas Experience: "The Big OE"

In New Zealand or Australia, one does not say "overseas experience," one says, simply "OE," or affectionately, "the big OE," because everyone knows what it means. Every year thousands of young people head overseas for a prolonged period of travel, work, and tourism. Traditionally, because of historical and cultural ties and traditions, they have gone first to Britain, and used that as a base for seeing Europe. But increasing numbers are nowadays seeking to enter the U.S., Australia, Japan, and other countries. A few well-qualified candidates secure professional overseas jobs in advance, but most just set out planning to take what work they can get, with the presumption they will at least be able to pay for necessities and continue their travels.

Table 2 indicates some key characteristics of OE. Individuals do not usually embark on OE as an exercise in work-career development. Cultural experience and geographical exploration are also sought, and individuals may make short-term career sacrifices and accept employment in unskilled work in order to facilitate valued nonwork experience. Geographical mobility is high, and savings and vacations are used to leverage travel opportunities. The traveler is motivated by broad curiosity rather than specific goals, and the learning agenda is personally improvised. The person is largely self-supporting, though valuable social networks may also be created. Although he or she may give good service to employing companies, attachments formed to these companies are by their nature temporary and tend to be weak.

In conventional views of OE, jobs are regarded as temporary, and career development as coming from cultural experience rather than from work. The exercise is seen as recreational and social more than career-oriented. OE participants have a good reputation as hard and willing workers, but their attachment to any employing company is weak. Most eventually return to their homeland, and when they do their overseas development enriches both the companies they subsequently work for and the national labor resource. Park, Pringle, and Tangri (1995) interviewed a sample of tertiary educated New Zealand women in midlife who had undertaken OE in their earlier lives. Most reflected on the importance of their broadening of perspectives and knowledge, their awareness and appreciation of cultural differences, and their building of confidence and independence. However, the greater specifics of the contributions OE makes to subsequent careers remain largely unexplored.

The case material below comes from a larger study of career development in New Zealand, which enables us to provide examples of both OE experiences and its consequences for the

individuals involved. The cases come from in-depth interviews with 75 broadly representative, randomly chosen, workforce members, focusing on their career development in the decade 1985-95. The data from the larger study are currently being analyzed, and some preliminary results are available from the authors (Arthur, Inkson, & Pringle, 1996; Inkson, Arthur, & Pringle, in press). The data here are drawn from reported OE experiences over the period of study, along with background information about earlier experiences. It turned out that over 50% of younger respondents in our study had had some form of OE in the decade in question.

In the reports below, we will respond in turn to each of the limitations of the EA literature identified earlier, concerning individual, company and industrial or national levels of analysis. As an extension of the last level we will also look at entrepreneurship and self-employment.

Individual Initiative

A common feature of OE episodes is that they come at the initiative of the person, rather than that of a corporate employer. OE is typically pursued out of a personal motivation to explore and learn, rather than in response to an employer company's specification of a role to be performed. In turn, re-entry into the home country involves further "sculpting" (Bell & Staw, 1989) of the career, independent of any existing company obligations. Three cases from our data illustrate the long-term career consequences that OE can have.

1. Susan: graduated and worked as a food technologist before going abroad and finding the same kind of work "doing sauces and things" for a UK company. However, the work was becoming monotonous when she found "an opening in the marketing department and that's when I changed over as a marketing assistant and I loved it." Susan returned home to an economy in recession, but she persisted in finding and taking work with a marketing rather than food technologist emphasis. Her persistence paid off when she landed a job as a product manager in a global company where "you learn everything the proper way." She now regards herself as a professional with transferable skills, and would leave her company if the right opportunity were to be offered. Susan "found herself," at least in a career sense, through her OE, and through an unpredictable job transfer she gained after the OE experience began. Now Susan is bound neither by national frontiers nor by attachment to a company. Her loyalty is to herself, and to the profession she loves.

2. Peter: left high school and trained as a computer programmer. He went on OE early, at age 20, spending two years in Europe. "The stuff I did ... before I left was far in advance of anything I did (in Europe), but I came back with overseas experience (on contract work for a telecommunications system) as 'walk on water' stuff. You sort of explain it to people but they don't believe it so you play along with it, take advantage of it." He leveraged his experience to gain a senior programming manager's position on his return. His rapid success continued through a series of executive positions at a major computer company, positions carefully selected to broaden Peter's understanding of the software programming marketplace. Then came a restructuring that left Peter as CEO at age 35 of a profitable independent software company. The company has grown from twelve to forty employees in its first four years of operation.

3. Jeff: went to Australia as a freshly-minted draftsman, but one "already losing interest rapidly" in the field of his qualifications. His further experience confirmed his discomfort with "the politics of the big office," but while in Australia he put together the visualization skills of the draftsman, a family tradition of being interested in gardens, and his disappointment with regular employment and resolved to be a self-employed landscape designer. With financial support from his schoolteacher wife, Jeff returned home to begin a second apprenticeship. He purposefully sought employment with the very best landscape gardeners at minimal wages in return for the opportunity to learn his new craft. Jeff's emergent success is symbolized by a comfortable family home on ten acres of land (largely planted with long-term investment and landscaping crops) and the new Porsche he keeps and drives for a hobby.

Company Experiences

While the EA literature focuses on return to employment in the same company and firm system, the OE experience typically involves inter-company rather than intra-company job transfers. The Susan and Peter cases already described illustrate how these kinds of transfer - and accompanying knowledge transfer - can happen. Some further examples are offered below.

1. Isabel's story: illustrates how employers can collaborate to provide the kind of experience under OE that is aspired to under EA. She is a research engineer at the cutting edge in the analysis of geothermal data, with a PhD as a direct byproduct of the work she performed for her employer. An overseas company in correspondence with Isabel's boss was straggling to conclude the computer modeling necessary for successful completion of a high-profile project. The boss volunteered "I know someone who can do it" and arranged for Isabel to be transferred to do the work. Both the overseas and home employers stood to benefit, as Isabel returned home wiser for the experience she had gained. We must report, though, a somewhat disappointing follow-up that also relates to EA experience. Isabel subsequently became frustrated with her home employer's inability to offer fresh work in response to her increased competence.

2. Henry: is another computer programming specialist who benefited from two tours of overseas duty, one in the early 1980s and another in the early 1990s. His latest trip was in response to "an offer I couldn't refuse" from a former colleague. However, the principal learning was personal, as he struggled to help a project that was hopelessly behind schedule and for which he was at high risk of being made the scapegoat for failure. He reports, looking back, that he became confident "in the fact that I could take a project from nothing and push it right through and handle everything that came along." He returned home to spend time with his family while upgrading his computer skills for the next twelve months at a local college. When Henry returned to employment it was with the help of overseas connections. In Henry's words "the area I work in, around the world, is a small family." Put another way, Henry's network, rather than any single employer, provided the framework for successful repatriation to happen.

3. Wendy: had dropped out of university and was stuck in "incredibly boring" clerical work before deciding to go abroad. Once away, she became "really really focused" as she realized she had to compete with local candidates for job opportunities. She finally landed an "excellent job" as sales administrator for three entrepreneurs setting up a niche computer terminal and programming company. From there, she leveraged her emergent customer service experience to

move to an overseas pharmaceutical company. At the conclusion of a difficult interpersonal relationship Susan returned home to find and successfully apply for a marketing assistant position advertised in the same pharmaceutical industry. She rejoices that "the reason why I got that other job (before returning home) ... was to prepare me for this job." Yet "that other job" was not on the horizon when Susan first went abroad.

Industry/Country Experiences

Several of the above cases suggest how industry experience gained overseas can be valuable to the host country, but not to any previous employer, on the expatriate's return. The cases also suggest the benefits of experience beyond the typically male, middle managers usually the subject of EA studies. Three further cases elaborate on these industry and country possibilities.

1. Joan: had been stuck in what she perceived to be a dead-end laboratory job when she decided to go overseas in her mid-twenties. Her initial intention was to stay away for just six months, but she ended up traveling widely for the next two and a half years, doing casual jobs to support herself along the way. When she returned she turned her travel experience into a virtue as she successfully earned a place on a competitive travel-agency-sponsored training school program, and built customer rapport based on her own travel experience. Joan is now a company manager actively engaged in the rapid pace of change of the industry, and managing her own branch office as an "experimental office" where her company initiates multiple trial marketing projects. As part of her work, Joan now teaches at the training school that first caught her interest when she returned from abroad.

2. Bruce: a manual worker, went overseas to escape unemployment and a broken home after his attempts to encourage his union to modernize its collective bargaining practices backfired. He landed a job running a bar for a friend he had once met on vacation, then found himself carrying increased responsibility as the business went insolvent and he became duty manager for the appointed receivers. Upon returning home, he was able to claim newfound "people skills" and took employment as a car salesperson. After two successful years selling cars, he used the combination of his engineering background and emergent people and selling skills to gain a position as a customer representative for an engineering supplies company. Bruce appears successful and highly trusted by his boss, the owner of the company, and is developing new ideas that increasingly involve him in the company's competitive strategy.

3. Damien: is a chef who has had a range of positions over his fourteen years in the trade, with each job move designed to expose him to new techniques and situations. Experience as a catering manager before going to England helped him land a job running the catering side of an old English pub, with accommodation for himself and his wife thrown in. Damien's regular responsibilities covered 150 meals a day and events for up to 400 people. He later returned home, needing work, to find a job advertisement for a second-in-command at a major new restaurant just opening. Helped by the depth of his experience, Damien quickly progressed to joint and then sole head chef, and is closely associated with the continuing success that the new restaurant enjoys.

Self-Employment Experiences

Our stories so far tell not only of people finding themselves, and their career direction, through OE, but also of an emergence of an enterprising spirit reminiscent of Osland's (1995) previously discussed heroes. Moreover, the heroic behavior often extends upon repatriation into self-employment, as it did in the cases of Peter and Jeff already noted. The three cases below elaborate on how the shift to self-employment can happen.

1. Kirsty: tumbled through a succession of reception, secretarial, and waitressing jobs in the US, before eventually thriving as an assistant in a florist's shop. She came to value the creative aspects of working with flowers, the small, nonbureaucratic scale of operations and the opportunity to identify with and deliver high customer satisfaction. Says Kirsty, "I basically came back ... thinking I was going to have a flower shop". However, an evaluation of the New Zealand market led her to a different conclusion, and she shifted her retailing experience to try to help her father's ailing flooring business. Although this eventually proved unsuccessful, Kirsty's passion for both self-employment and retailing survived, and she now runs her own tiling supply and installation company.

2. Phillip: had several years experience as a town planner before moving to Australia and explicitly searching private sector employment opportunities. Through a "Yellow Pages" search of planning consultants, he landed a job where he learned "retail feasibility analysis work" as well as "how they ran their business (and) how I could do a better job myself" He later came home, "bought a suit, got a haircut, got some cards printed" and with the help of a consultant friend who passed some introductory jobs his way, set up on his own. He is successful as an independent consultant and plans to continue in self-employment. A particular motivation is that self-employment will allow him to work part-time, and from home, after his first child arrives, to accommodate his wife's full-time employment.

3. Owen: carried a science degree and early experience as a government fisheries researcher into a seemingly carefree travel adventure with his girlfriend, now his wife. They eventually arrived in London, England, where Owen's interest in aquaculture led him to apply for twenty jobs and subsequently receive five job offers. He took a job for a year as manager of a trout hatchery: "The main reason I stayed there was to get a reference which might enable me to get a loan (back home)." More apparently carefree travel brought him to Scotland, where he and his girlfriend were both employed scallop farming. He found the work satisfying, because in scallop farming "the environment was the controlling factor, not us, the humans". Upon returning home, he continued with his scientific work, but soon met and worked casually for an oyster farmer, which led in turn to taking out a lease on his own oyster farm. The farm, however, doesn't take all of his time, so Owen exercises his science background doing computer work for a local sawmill, as well as occasionally helping out his sheep-farming parents.

Table 3 lists some common themes of OE experience as recounted by our career actors. Our suggestion in this paper is that OE may represent a more important means of individual enrichment and collective human resource development than does EA. In an open market economy, the acquisition of overseas expertise may be better performed fortuitously by individual career builders pursuing personal objectives rather than strategically by expatriate company servants pursuing corporate goals. As well as specific "overseas" expertise, travellers learn self-confidence, flexibility, mobility, and cross-industry skills. These are hard to acquire in

corporate settings but are core human attributes in an enterprise-driven economy. Of course, similar results may accrue to other forms of novelty-seeking behavior, such as moving to a new State, or from city to country or vice versa, or adding part-time self-employment to a full-time job. EA and OE are more important as proto-types of contrasted forms of career development than as key career mechanisms in their own right.

CONCLUSION: OE, HRM, AND NATIONAL CCOPETITIVENESS

Our suggestion in this paper is that OE may represent a more important means of knowledge acquisition, individual enrichment, and national human resource development than does EA. Our related suggestion is that the current management literature lends a false importance to EA as a means for getting international career experience. We also suggest that, in an open market economy, there are advantages to a system where the expatriate individual rather than an employing company makes decisions as to her or his career placement, development, and reintegration into the "home" environment. Thus, the acquisition of overseas expertise and its importation to the "home" environment is primarily performed fortuitously by individual career builders pursuing personal objectives rather than strategically by expatriate company servants pursuing corporate goals.

If we are right, there are important implications for HRM. The dissolution of secure corporate structures and the destabilization of hierarchical corporate careers is already leading to the reformulation of employment principles in many companies (Arthur, Claman, & DeFillippi, 1995). As companies become less reliant on "core" hierarchical career-builders and more reliant on contingent contractors and short-term employees, they must increasingly locate the expertise they need from outside, and pay for that expertise as and when they use it rather than by bartering promises of future advancement. Development opportunities for employees must recognize the likelihood that they are unlikely to remain permanently, or even long-term, with the company. The company must identify the explicit and implicit skills of its members and ensure that when she or he leaves relevant expertise has been shared and remains behind.

In this scenario, "corporate career-planning for expatriates is almost an oxymoron" (Mendenhall & Macomber, 1997). Expatriates, like other company members, become less "employees" to be "managed," and more "project partners" to be "related to" in a mutual exchange of benefits over a finite period. Probably this is more true of expatriates than of other members, because of their distance from "home". The focus in HRM must move from, "How do we plan, prepare, and protect our people so that EA doesn't cause them to leave?" to "What are the benefits we seek from this exchange and how do we ensure that we get these benefits?". In forming new relationships, companies must learn to identify and leverage the overseas experience already available inside and outside their workforces. In many cases the use of EA to manage an overseas situation probably represents the company's wish to continue control through the assignment of a "company servant" from the base country, rather than the employment of an unknown local. Perhaps some companies should experiment with more decentralized and federal structures and develop new ways of managing the interface between the base country and overseas operations.

The role of OE in economic development is worthy of consideration both by academics and by policy makers at the national level. The traditions of the nation's young people, streaming overseas at the early, "exuberant" phase of their careers (Arthur & Kram, 1989) can create a national reservoir of talent, which may be able to be used to good effect in an increasingly global and increasingly competitive economy. If this is correct, however, it is important that any policy relating to OE should be sensitive to the fact that its strength, in contrast to EA, is the freedom it gives to individuals to find their own learning from the opportunity. Any attempt at "national planning" of OE, prearrangement of projects, etc. would be to repeat at the national level the limitations which we believe already limit the potential of EA.

Frank Fluke, the hero of Keith Ovenden's novel, "O. E.," understands the phenomenon well by the end of the story:

The thing that surprises me now is how things come together in the most surprising way. Whenever I've bothered to think about people in the past going off to get their OE, I saw it from the point of view of what made them do it, why they went, how they went. I saw it all from the perspective of motivations, never from the perspective of effects. You know, that people's actions have consequences in the world irrespective of what they intend ... I've come to see that you perhaps can't ever know what motivates people, you can only ever know the effects, and then try to add them up into some sort of plausible story" (Ovenden, 1986, p. 244).

In this way people construct the life-scripts which they use to make ongoing career decisions. In this way the fragmentary explorations and experiments of the OE traveler assemble themselves into the powerful learnings which will later create and transform companies (Weick, 1996; Arthur et al., 1996). The problem with EA, considered as an investment in individual, company, and national development, is perhaps that it provides those who undertake it with too clear and too narrow a motivation to encourage truly creative development. If the cases cited by Osland (1995) are any guide, some of the most important learnings of the expatriate take place in less constrained settings. In OE it is the freedom from fixed purpose or formula, the implicit invitation to "broaden oneself," the release of the human spirit to determine its own learning, which give it its potential as a major source of learning for both those who undertake it, and for the companies which subsequently employ them.

Table 2

Characteristics of O.E

1. Cultural experience as important as work

2. Geographical mobility

3. Curiosity-driven

4. Personal learning agendas

5. Individual is self supporting

6. Weak company attachments

Table 3

Common Themes in O.E Stories

1. Self-directed experimentation

2. Self-designed apprenticeships

3. Cast off negative past legacies

4. Find occupational/industry identity

5. Develop confidence and self-reliance

6. Return with clearer career focus

7. Increased interest in self-employment

Acknowledgment: Recipient of the "Best International Paper" award at the Academy of Management Meeting, Boston, MA, August 1997. The authors wish to thank David Thomas for helpful comments on an earlier draft of this article.

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Kerr Inkson, Department of Management and Employment Relations, University of Auckland, Private Bag 92019, Auckland, New Zealand <k.inkson@auckland.ac.nz>. Michael B Arthur, School of Management, Suffolk University, 8 Ashburton Place, Boston, MA 01810 <marthur@acad.suffolk.edu>. Judith Pringle, and Sean Barry are at University of Auckland, with Kerr Inkson.

Source Citation Inkson, Kerr, et al. "Expatriate assignment versus overseas experience: contrasting models of international human resource development." Journal of World Business 32.4 (1997): 351+. Academic OneFile. Web. 1 Oct. 2010.Document URLhttp://find.galegroup.com/gtx/infomark.do?&contentSet=IAC-Documents&type=retrieve&tabID=T002&prodId=AONE&docId=A21012901&source=gale&srcprod=AONE&userGroupName=mmucal5&version=1.0

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