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Recent calls in international management (IM) research ask scholars to conduct more context-sensitive research, however; little attention has been paid to the methodological particularities that inform such context sensitivity. This paper aims to addresses this shortcoming by exploring how emic concepts implicate IM research processes during qualitative field studies.

We carried out ethnographic fieldwork in Brazilian subsidiaries of three German multinational enterprises. We relied on the researchers’ experiences and data from a larger research project including 63 semi-structured interviews, 7 focus groups, documents and field notes. Adopting a culturally sensitive and self-reflexive lens, we reflect on the researchers’ experiences in the Brazilian sociocultural context from an interpretive paradigm.

Our findings reveal how seven identified emic concepts affect four prototypical phases of the research process: securing access, collecting data, analyzing data and presenting findings. We discuss how these seven emic concepts influenced the research process and impacted research outcomes, as experienced by the researchers.

Findings are limited by our self-reflexive capabilities as foreign researchers, the limited explanatory power of emic categories, our paradigmatic positioning and the research context.

We contribute to research practice by providing eight suggestions for conducting international fieldwork and proposing avenues for future research.

This research contributes to the epistemological and methodological debate on context-sensitive research by arguing that intercultural sensitivity needs to be managed as an integral dimension for any form of international fieldwork. Findings contribute to interpretive approaches showing how emic concepts affect research practices, with implications for critical management perspectives.

The purpose of this paper is to present a different perspective on the concept of global mobility and apply the multifaceted concept in proposing new themes to explore in expatriate management research.

This study draws upon the theoretical underpinnings relating to the New Mobilities paradigm from sociology to outline a new perspective on global mobility and thereby describe novel themes to include in future expatriate management studies.

This study identifies four themes in need of further development within the expatriate management research field: materiality, infrastructure and access, inequality and immobility and emotional dynamics. Within each of these themes, this study presents several examples of research questions that can provide new thrust to the theory development of expatriate management research.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this paper is the first attempt to draw on central ideas in the New Mobilities paradigm to propose a future research agenda for expatriate management studies. This study aims to enhance the study of “mobility” in new and unorthodox ways.

The purpose of this paper is to examine how low status expatriates (lower position, younger, female) are positioned differently compared to high status expatriates (higher position, older, male) in terms of experiencing various types of success.

Based on 424 responses from business expatriates working within multinational corporations operating in Asia, the study tests whether low status expatriates experience higher personal success while high status expatriates see more organization-related success.

The results demonstrate that expatriates with different status-related characteristics might experience success during an international assignment differently. Additionally, our results reveal the relevance of avoiding treating success as a single variable and of investigating the actual experiences acquired while working abroad to better appreciate how expatriates experience success differently.

The extant literature offers a limited understanding of expatriate success as the phenomenon has often been conceptualized in relatively simple terms, i.e., the completion of the international assignment contract. Our study offers an alternative view. Measuring success using a single outcome variable does not fully capture the experience. Success can be perceived in different ways, and different types of success are associated with different types of characteristics.

Researchers often face challenges in locating and obtaining relevant and meaningful information during qualitative international business (IB) field research in other countries. This process constitutes an immensely critical phase, which determines the success or failure of the research endeavour. The purpose of this paper is to discuss “access” as a multidimensional and contestable concept that poses particular challenges in international and multicultural research contexts.

This paper builds on the experience as field researchers in China/Hong Kong (120 in-depth interviews) and the need to disseminate acquired field experiences, in particular concerning “access”. The multifaceted issue of “access” is rarely featured on the IB methodological agenda, and has become a silent feature of qualitative IB research.

This paper is devoted to this nexus: the lack of focus on “access” issues, and the rich sources of acquired, but mostly veiled, field experiences that feature in both IB and management research programmes. A plausible explanation for this circumstance relates to the influence of mainstream positivist and objectivist paradigms in which researchers are not recognised as having an impact on research processes, hence taking this silent feature for granted.

By viewing the multiple dimensions of “access”, we move beyond the mainstream understanding that merely relates it to the question of gaining access to a physical site and/or the time of an individual, and in which “access” is only an enterprise of securing pre-existing, tangible information. Drawing upon specific international field research experiences, this paper contributes to the methodological debate concerning “access” – beyond “technicality” and towards a concept of socio-cultural and multidimensional research practice.

The purpose of this paper is to explore how interaction adjustment influences personal development for expatriates and to examine whether the effect differs between adults that have, and have not, lived abroad during their adolescence.

The authors use survey responses from 424 business expatriates in Asia distinguishing between adult third culture kids (ATCKs) that have lived abroad during their adolescence and adult mono-culture kids (AMCKs) who have not.

The results show that while interaction adjustment generally improves the experience of personal development, this effect is stronger for ATCKs. AMCKs will experience personal development almost independently of their interaction adjustment with host nationals solely due to the novelty of the international experience. For ATCKs, just being in the new country is not enough for them to feel they have developed personally; they need to engage more deeply with the local population to achieve this.

The authors still know very little about ATCKs and about how expatriation during their adulthood develops them personally, given they have already had international experiences at a young age.

A growing number of academics relocate abroad to work as expatriates in the university sector. While this employee group seems to have a highly constructive influence on the performance of university organizations, some problems in relation to effective inclusion of these individuals have been noted. In order to further advance the theoretical understanding regarding integration efforts in international university organizations, the purpose of this paper is to explore how two types of inclusive management, empowering management (identity-blind) vs English management communication (identity-conscious), affect local and expatriate academics.

Using responses generated from a survey of 792 local and 620 expatriate academics, this paper assesses the effects of inclusive management on job engagement and stress among the two groups.

The results show that one type of inclusive management, empowering management (identity-blind), has a favorable influence on job engagement and stress in both subsamples. The other type, English management communication (identity-conscious), increases stress for local academics but has no effect on the expatriates. These findings are useful for theory development in relation to employee inclusion in international organizations.

The authors have little knowledge about how inclusive management functions in international organizations. Testing the effect of identity-blind and identity-conscious inclusive management practices among two different groups of local and expatriate academics provides new insight to this area. In particular, the use of English management communication provides new knowledge on the integration of majority and minority groups in international organizations.

Although qualitative methods have now gained a stronger foothold in International Business (IB) research, they remain under-researched, especially regarding how researchers can overcome obstacles created when interviewers exhibit ‘multiculturality’ during international field research projects. This paper analyses how researchers’ multicultural backgrounds create challenges and opportunities in data collection during in-depth interviewing, and how such backgrounds further impact on the power imbalance between researchers and interviewees.

The two multicultural co-authors of this paper draw upon their 141 in-depth interview experiences with expatriates and local staff across five separate field research projects in Mainland China, Hong Kong SAR, South Korea, Finland, and the US. Field research experiences are analysed through a Bourdieusian inspired ‘epistemic reflexive’ self-interrogation process between the two co-authors.

This paper suggests five strategies to cope with the power imbalance between the researcher and the respondent in terms of social categorisation and language: activating the ‘favoured’ ethnicity, putting the ‘desired’ passport forward, constantly reassuring of belonging to the ‘right’ social category, bonding in the interviewee’s mother tongue and adopting a multilingual approach characterised by frequent code-switching.

This paper emphasises the relevance of exploratory, self-reflexive analysis, and uncovers how social categorisation and language influence the interviewer-interviewee power imbalance. Distinct methodological contributions are proposed accordingly for IB literature: placing ‘multiculturality’ as an important concept at the forefront of qualitative IB research; and identifying ethnicity and accent as key factors in terms of securing and conducting interviews.

This paper shows the benefits of multi-sited ethnography for global migration studies in management, in particular when cosmopolitan self-initiated expatriates meet a local setting.

The author conducted a multi-sited ethnography to trace how a local East German research organization’s well-intended approach to integration becomes condescending.

Highly skilled non-Western migrant employees who represent English-language cosmopolitanism are framed as negatively “foreign” by corporate discourses and practices. This phenomenon can only be understood if one follows the interconnections of language power, White subalternity and compressed modernity and if one considers the immediate surroundings, the historical context of East German identity and wider migration frames in Germany.

Multi-sited ethnography, if power-sensitive and historically-aware, is suitable for understanding the multi-level phenomenon of global migration and identifying limiting framing-effects on management and organizations. Researcher standpoint is both its strength and its limitation.

Managers and companies can “imagine otherwise” and move beyond the unquestioned dominant frames limiting their problem analyses and, consequently, their strategies and actions.

Managers and companies are enabled to move beyond individual- and corporate-level approaches to managing migration at work and can thus take up full social responsibility in the sense of good corporate citizenship on a global level. Global mobility researchers can work towards an inclusive migration theory.

Multi-sited ethnography, in particular, one that is power-sensitive and historically aware, is an approach not yet applied to migration in the context of management and organization. By means of an example, this paper illustrates the value of this approach and enables researchers to understand its main principles. Compressed modernity and White subalternity are introduced as novel concepts structuring migration, and language power emerges as relevant far beyond the scope of the multinational corporation.