EXPATRIATION: A CAREER BOOST? THE CONTRIBUTIONS OF CAREER SCRIPT THEORY TO UNDERSTANDING THE AMBIVALENT EFFECTS OF EXPATRIATION ON CAREERS

Abstract

Research reveals the equivocal impact of expatriation on career progression: positive for some, neutral, or even negative for others. Our article explores the reasons for this ambivalence through an interactionist career perspective. Adopting this perspective fully aligns our study with the new agenda of career researchers who advocate for the exploration of careers in their complexity,
i.e., as the result of a recursive interplay between the institution and the individual. Drawing on
Barley’s (1989) theory of career scripts, our article analyzes the joint influence of the organization
and the expatriate in the construction of a particular career moment: the return from expatriation.
To achieve this, we conducted interviews at both the individual and organizational levels (23 interviews
with managers responsible for international mobility in 10 multinational companies, and 43 interviews with former expatriates in 8 companies, respectively). Our results identify four organizational
career scripts for expatriates: the Executive, the High-Potential, the Missionary, and the Adventurer. Our article reveals that the impact of an expatriation on career progression depends not only on the script in which the expatriate has been placed by his or her organization, but also on the expatriate’s individual career activism, which is, itself, influenced by various features of the script. Therefore, our article provides theoretical contributions to understanding the impact of expatriation on careers, as well as the relationship between career scripts and individual action.