The phenomenon of emerging‐market organizations appointing foreign executives from distant cultural contexts to headquarters positions has stirred public and academic interest. Emerging giants, aspiring multinationals, and even local organizations that focus entirely on domestic markets have joined the global hunt for management talent. This article reports why foreign executives from significant cultural distance are appointed to local headquarters positions, what they contribute, and why these positions are not filled with local executives. Data are sourced from in‐depth interviews with two sample groups in organizations founded and headquartered in Malaysia (46 foreign executives from 13 countries and 25 host‐country peers from three local ethnocultural groups). Triangulation of dyadic data from these two sample groups reveals a dichotomy between the initial reasons for which foreign executives are appointed and the continued reasons why some of these executives remain in their positions. © 2014 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.
Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to investigate foreign executives appointed into cultural contexts distant from their country of origin and headquarters of organisations to which host-country nationals (HCNs) they supervise and HCN superiors they report to attribute a “local” national identity. Significant differences of these foreign executives in local organisations (FELOs) from other forms of expatriation, including assigned and self-initiated expatriates, are identified and discussed. Design/methodology/approach – The research utilises a qualitative exploratory approach based on triangulated multiple data sources. Data are sourced from in-depth semi-structured interviews with foreign executives (n=46) from 13 countries and their host-country peers (n=25) in organisations founded and headquartered in Malaysia. Dyadic data from the two sample groups are used to triangulate findings, while non-dyadic and socio-biographical data add further insight. Findings – The data analysis identifies issues surrounding allegiance, trust, and control, assumptions about income levels, and exposure to heightened local scrutiny as components of the distinct nature of the FELO experience. Research limitations/implications – Implications for future research on new types of international cross-cultural workplaces are discussed. While construct definitions for self-initiated expatriation (SIE) in the wider mobility and migration literature are still in flux, international management research may be at risk of neglecting local workplaces and perspectives. Practical implications – The FELO phenomenon differs significantly from expatriate assignments between headquarters and foreign subsidiaries of multinational corporations, and can be viewed as a rare and specific form of SIE. Its occurrence indicates an increasingly global market for individuals with career capital and global mobility. Originality/value – The findings elucidate the situation of FELOs and provide comparisons to other types of expatriates. The research contributes to extant literature on global mobility as it explores a specific cross-cultural phenomenon that has not been systematically investigated in the academic literature, but is described in the media and executive search firm publications as “fairly new, highly visible, and sometimes controversial” with demand for FELOs “likely to continue”.
Competence to enact responsible practices, such as recycling waste or boycotting irresponsible companies, is core to learning for responsibility. A variety of smartphone apps have been created to support such practices, while accompanying people through their lives. We aim to explore the role of such apps in learning processes of responsible practices 'in the wild', outside formal educational environments. We therefore designed learning interventions as part of a university course in which students were required to perform a smartphone-supported responsible practice over a three-week period in their everyday lives outside the classroom. The 21 participating students were required to maintain a daily learning journal (diary) in which they reflected on their responsible practice and on how apps supported them. Through a thematic analysis of 557 mentions of apps in the learning process documented in learners' diaries we identified five types of app-agency (what apps do): cognitive, action, inter-personal, personal development, and material dimensions. Findings were interpreted through an actor-network perspective: With the help of apps, learners constructed a heterogeneous network of human and nonhuman actors. Each actor contributed parts of the necessary competence for responsible practices enactment, a heterogeneous competence network weaving a web of human and nonhuman competences. The process through which new actors are enrolled into such networks is called translation. In order to understand how apps enable responsible practice, we connected app agency to four moments of translation: problematization, interessement, enrolment, and mobilization. Based on our analysis of how the mentioning of apps in students' learning diaries changed over time, we further theorize app learning as a translation process. This translation process generates networked learning through recurrent translation cycles, each focused on enrolling a different set of actors with their competence into the network. We contribute to the learning for responsibility literature by showcasing how app-supported learning may create real-life actornetworks enacting responsibility, and by priming an actor-network pedagogy for 'learning in the wild'. We also contribute to the actor-network learning literature by conceptualizing heterogeneous competence and the first processual model of learning as the construction of competent actor networks through translation.
The increasing globalization of the world economy challenges multinational as well as small and medium-sized local organizations to attract and retain global talent. Academic researchers have lately turned their attention from organizational expatriate assignments to various new types of global careers, including self-initiated expatriation in geographically and culturally distant countries. Among these new global careers, foreign executives in local organizations (FELOs) are a very specific phenomenon. Highly visible and often controversial, FELOs are appointed to help organizations compete with-and even leapfrog-international competitors. Research shows that a dichotomy exists between the initial reason for an FELO appointment and the reasons that actually make a cross-cultural workplace successful in the long term. Local organizations that appoint foreign executives without regard for contextual influences, people management skills, and capacity development do so at their peril.
Numerous microfinance initiatives around the world aim to alleviate poverty in developing countries. However, debate persists about their effectiveness and sustainability -a concern for transnational corporations and the international business community, which contribute about $9.4 billion to microfinance funding. In this policy-oriented article we aggregate findings from two studies in Indonesia that help explain why moneylending can still thrive when low-interest microfinance is widely available and why the poorest borrowers benefit less than the less-poor. To avoid methodological debates about validity, we interview market participants and triangulate the perspectives of borrowers with those of formal and informal lenders. Importantly, our research includes current and past borrowing from formal and informal sources, prompting participants to draw comparisons. We find that the importance to borrowers of key characteristics of informal lending is insufficiently recognized and that inappropriate human resource management and informal intermediation are significant problems. The latter can be an unintended consequence of formal microfinance: The availability of formal low-interest microfinance creates informal intermediation opportunities for entrepreneurs, often developing from casual intermediation into systematic deception. We discuss implications for microfinance policy with reference to the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals and offer suggestions for further research.
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