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Three years on from the Brexit vote, while it remains a central topic for debate in the media, there has been limited discussion about the human resource (HR) implications. The purpose of this paper is to provide theoretical evaluation and informed discussion, distilled into four interconnected propositions, on how employee resourcing as a HR practice may be impacted following actual Brexit decisions.

Drawing on the employee resourcing literature, the paper adopts a discursive approach which examines how the UK’s decision to exit the European Union will affect HR practice. The paper draws comparison with the global recession since 2008, a similarly unprecedented development in its discussion of employee resourcing practices and draws parallels which may help to inform the future of HR practices in the UK, because of Brexit.

This paper offers a set of propositions; the flow of talent into the UK may become more restricted and reinvigorate the “war for talent” that followed the effects of the global financial crisis on the UK. To attract and retain workers in relatively lower-skilled roles, employers may be faced with a need to re-skill such roles and adopt more flexible working arrangements. Finally, to meet skilled employment requirements, removal of restrictions to recruit from within the European Economic Area may trigger increased global migration of skilled workers.

This paper contributes to the discussions regarding the implications of Brexit for HR practice by offering propositions to shape future research agendas.

In expatriate-reliant countries, the challenge of attracting and retaining overseas talent remains, despite the COVID-19 global pandemic restricting international travel. Expatriates depend on formal organizational and host country national (HCN) support to facilitate their adjustment when moving abroad. To date, there has been a limited focus on the centrality of language in spanning boundaries between HCNs and expatriates that enables bridges to be formed. This study explored how language influences the social capital accrual and the support received by expatriates from HCNs.

Rooted in social constructionism, the authors used semi-structured interviews with a purposive sample of 20 Nigerian HCNs from two Italian organizations in the construction industry.

The findings highlight how language is key to effective social capital bridging and show how HCNs act as boundary spanners between local talent and expatriates on assignment. In this study, HCNs have superior language skills and can thus fill the semantic void in communication between the two parties. It emerged that expatriates receive more significant support and higher levels of social capital accrual than HCNs from this relationship.

Consideration should be given to providing formal language training to both expatriates and HCNs. Embedding networking relationships, such as buddying schemes or reverse mentoring, would enhance the social capital of both parties and improve performance. In addition, global talent management policies should be adjusted to provide definitive career paths and clearer promotion criteria for HCNs.

The authors find that through their language ability, HCNs may have more power over expatriates than previously considered, repositioning their status from a talent perspective. The authors argue that expatriates should not be considered by organizations the only source of global talent in such a context, and that organizations need to offer more definitive talent policies and support that accounts for both expatriates and HCNs.

A decade has passed since Dabic et al. (2015) published a systematic review of the evolution of the expatriate literature from 1970 to 2012. Moreover, the past five years have been turbulent, with many global crises affecting organizational approaches to the global movement of people, particularly expatriate workers. Thus, this article seeks to understand how global mobility has continued to evolve during such turbulence and propose avenues for future research.

In this study, the authors undertook a constructive replication (Köhler and Cortina, 2021) of the systematic literature review conducted by Dabic et al. (2015), informed by guidelines offered by Donthu et al. (2021) for the period 2013 to 2022. The authors conducted a performance analysis of 1,517 academic articles about expatriates and broader globally mobile workers. Additionally, the authors analyzed all expatriate-related special issues published in the past decade and provide a narrative review of seminal works from the past five years.

The expatriation field has grown exponentially; greater attention has been paid to contextualizing research, particularly concerning emerging markets, although the field remains Western-dominant. This analysis stresses the increasingly strategic nature of expatriation at a time when global staffing has become dramatically challenging. Thus, this review highlights the need for more interdisciplinarity at different levels between expatriation and the field of strategy. The authors argue the need for a multifaceted understanding of the expatriation experience.

The authors offer a constructive replication of a bibliometric literature review extended by a narrative analysis to complement a critical perspective on a large set of bibliographic data on the broad subject of expatriation. This addition offers an integrated view of the different themes identified by the bibliometric analysis and paves the way for future replication studies to examine how fields evolve.