The regimented lives of globally mobile professionals

Citation

Selmer, J. (2014), "The regimented lives of globally mobile professionals", Journal of Global Mobility, Vol. 2 No. 1. https://doi.org/10.1108/JGM-04-2014-0010

The regimented lives of globally mobile professionals

Article Type: Editorial From: Journal of Global Mobility, Volume 2, Issue 1.

According to Viking mythology, Kraka was a beautiful young maiden when Ragnar Lodbrok (the same Viking king as in the TV series) sent for her. To test her wits, he commanded her to arrive neither dressed nor undressed, neither hungry nor full, and neither alone nor in company. Recently, I found myself in a comparable paradoxical predicament when I tried to return to my home country with my valid Swedish passport that was not sufficient for my journey. To my great surprise, I discovered that I needed six months remaining validity just to be in transit between flights in a certain country on my way back to Sweden. Although I can enter Sweden legally on my Swedish passport on its last day of validity, I was not allowed to fly to Sweden because my passport was due to expire in less than six months. Consequently, I had to obtain an emergency passport just before I left since such passports are only issued with a maximum validity of seven months. Such frustrations are common in the life of globally mobile professionals. Laws, rules, and regulations govern their lives; but, curiously, very little academic research is devoted to understanding the consequences of such a regimented existence. From visas, work permits, and taxes to driving licenses, real estate ownership rules, and schooling regulations, a globally mobile life can be a bureaucratic nightmare for both global employees and their families. Yet, we know little about how these seemingly mundane factors can shape and change global work experiences.

This is a substantial research gap and the Journal of Global Mobility (JGM) is a relevant outlet in which such research could be published. JGM provides a better service than many established academic journals, offering a prompt and professional revise and resubmit process. Our one-month turnaround policy for the first submission is very attractive and we also use the best reviewers within the field of global mobility, ensuring high-quality, developmental feedback to authors. In other words, the editorial team of the journal is well equipped to take JGM to newer heights of interesting topics and scholarly quality.

It is also worth reminding readers what JGM stands for and what we publish. JGM is the only academic journal to consistently and exclusively focus on global mobility issues. That means all authors’ articles will be read by like-minded scholars and practitioners. The coverage of JGM ranges from traditional business expatriates to new emerging themes, such as NGO expatriates and diplomats. The main focus is on white-collar or skilled workers or professionals and their immediate context at work and outside work. Our upcoming special issues on Context and global mobility: diverse global work arrangements as well as Global employees … global families both contribute to fill considerable research gaps in extant literature.

JGM welcomes all kinds of rigorous research methods, but prefers empirical contributions, with quantitative or qualitative methodology or a mixed-methods approach. We are also very interested in thorough theoretical developments and focused literature reviews. JGM would like to publish research at various levels of analysis – individual, team, and organizational. We also encourage research from a variety of domains, such as psychology, sociology, strategic management, political science (among others), as well as interdisciplinary studies.

To keep in touch with both academics and practitioners interested in global mobility issues and research, we initiated the JGM LinkedIn Group. This group features journal updates, global mobility news, and hot topics. It also provides a forum for members to share current research projects with peers and to seek new collaborations. The JGM LinkedIn Group now has well over 700 members from both industry and academic institutions, ranging from small organizations to large MNCs, from individuals just starting out with this specific interest, to CEOs. They come from world-wide locations, covering all continents of the globe. From its start on May 30, 2012, the JGM LinkedIn Group has enjoyed a phenomenal expansion with a week over week growth rate of 100 percent.

In this issue

The first issue of the second volume of JGM features five papers, demonstrating the depth and the breadth as well as the increasingly high quality of this new journal. The first paper, authored by Allan D. Engle Sr, Marion Festing and Peter J. Dowling, features global performance management and offers a comprehensive critical review of the literature which is developed using a wide range of sources. It is a commendable attempt to synthesize the literature within the global performance management area and it may also help guide the academically inclined practitioner. The succeeding paper, by Michael Dickmann and Jean-Luc Cerdin, deals with boundaryless career drivers in location decisions. The paper explores factors that make a particular location, specifically a city, attractive to individuals. Based on a qualitative study, interviewing in-bounds, out-bounds as well as locals, the paper goes beyond an individual and organizational view, also incorporating broad macro-factor career drivers. The following paper, authored by Nuno Guimarães-Costa, Miguel Pina e Cunha and Arménio Rego, combines two separate bodies of literature, expatriate adjustment and ethical decision making in international contexts, to open the possibility of ethical adjustment. Based on interviews with European expatriates working in Sub-Saharan Africa, the paper makes fascinating reading providing a cogent impression of the difficulties characterizing expatriation in this part of the world. The paper after that, authored by Naoki Ando and Yongsun Paik, examines the relationship between foreign subsidiary staffing and subsidiary performance based on foreign subsidiaries of Japanese multinational corporations. Interestingly, this study found that the number of parent country nationals has different implications for subsidiary performance than the ratio of parent country nationals to foreign subsidiary employees, indicating that staffing foreign subsidiaries could be more complex than previously believed. The last paper in this issue, by Sari Silvanto and Jason Ryan, deals with relocation branding, or the strategic issues of how to attract talent from abroad. In a way, it is a companion paper to the above paper in this issue by Dickmann and Cerdin, as it examines the literature on nation branding and talent mobility to propose strategic vision drivers that may assist nations, regions and cities to attract highly skilled workers. Being one of the few in-depth studies of the topic, this paper provides a significant contribution.

I eventually acquired an emergency passport just before I traveled, thus fulfiling the passport requirements of the country where I had to transit between flights. Kraka also succeeded in outwitting the Viking king by wearing a fish net, having an onion in her mouth and arriving with a dog. Ragnar Lodbrok was so impressed that he married her. To launch a new academic research journal is, to a certain extent, an endeavor that requires us to outwit the competition. In doing so, there are no secrets. We just have to be better than the alternatives, so that reputable scholars will prefer JGM as their outlet over others. We are not yet there, but with every issue published, the quality of our articles improves. Our editorial team and the best reviewers in the area of global mobility do their utmost for JGM to become one of the most reputable research journals within the field of international business research, completely dominating the domain of global mobility and expatriate management.

Jan Selmer