This study investigates language issues that occur inside foreign subsidiaries of multinational enterprises. It explores why English-proficient local managers resign from foreign subsidiaries within a short period. Local managers with high English proficiency and communicative competence realize better communication with expatriate managers assigned to foreign subsidiaries, which develops social capital inside the foreign subsidiary and improves their work performance. This study examines what encourages such local managers to leave their workplace within a short time, even though they are provided career-related benefits in foreign subsidiaries. This study demonstrates that when local managers with high English proficiency and communicative competence categorize themselves as an expatriate in-group rather than a local manager in-group, they tend to leave the workplace within a brief period. It argues that identification with an expatriate or local manager in-group is a critical factor that affects linguistically competent local managers’ decisions on resignation from their workplace.

A growing number of individuals identify as cosmopolitans i.e. citizens of the world. They voluntarily move from country to country in pursuit of self-fulfilment in both life and work, and build a cosmopolitan identity in the process. In this study, we investigate how cosmopolitans manage and deal with conflicting loyalties and restructure their identities over time balancing the local and the global. We are particularly interested in how a cosmopolitan identity is constructed and maintained on the side of other social identities and whether this results in liminal experiences of cosmopolitans. The empirical data for our research originates from a qualitative study of Finnish-born cosmopolitans conducted in early 2020. Their life course and identities were investigated retrospectively and analysed with the help of social identity maps. This is an ongoing research project and the paper presents work-in-progress. Our study demonstrates that this growing group of globally mobile individuals deserve more attention from International Business scholars.

This study addresses the question of how young adults develop cross-cultural and professional competencies while living abroad in their childhood or adolescence and which specific competencies they acquire. While a relation has been found between international work experience and cross-cultural competencies such as cultural flexibility and tolerance for ambiguity, we know little about the impact of early international exposure before work, during childhood, adolescence and young adulthood. This is, however, relevant, as companies look to attract professionals able to address issues on a global scale. We draw on social learning theory and its focus on the social environment and role models. Our qualitative study reveals that international experience during adolescence impacts students’ competencies, especially awareness, adaptability, people orientation, tolerance for ambiguity and professional ambition. We inductively identified four profiles of early international experience that constitute distinct social environments for learning and relate to specific cross-cultural competencies. Paying attention to the early international experience of hiring candidates and incumbents, organisations – including multinational enterprises – can benefit from the mobility of young professionals. However, our study also indicates that companies need to adjust their HRM practices to provide attractive opportunities for their global talent.

More people worldwide claim themselves as cosmopolitans or world citizens. Yet, a cause-and-effect conceptualisation of cosmopolitan individuals is lacking, leading to a void of cosmopolitan discussions in IB. By synthesizing multidisciplinary literature, we gain new insights into cosmopolitanism, using the individual as a unit of analysis. We introduce an Input-Agency-Output (IAO) model to explain cosmopolitans and their differences from other cross-cultural individuals, such as multiculturals, transnationals, expatriates, migrants. Findings suggest that unlike other cohorts, cosmopolitans possess a unique way of life. They are ambassadors of emancipation. They exert their agency power, turning their exposure to other socio-cultural schemata into the development of kaleidoscopic frames of reference through which they view the world, others and themselves. While they feel at ease negotiating differences, they do not subscribe to any particular socio-cultures. The saying, ‘a rolling stone gathers no moss’, may aptly characterize these individuals. Our paper invites scholars to rethink cosmopolitans, distinguishing them from other cohorts of cross-cultural individuals, particularly multicultural ones. We propose several ideas to advance future international human research management (IHRM) research on cosmopolitans.

Research on intercultural competence has been studied extensively in the last decades, but almost exclusively at the individual level. This study contributes to the literature by examining how the research on the Collective Intercultural Competence (CIC) has evolved over time and what is the intellectual structure of this part of the literature. We used bibliometric techniques to examine 932 articles, in all fields (management, medicine, physics, etc.), as the concept of IC is transdisciplinary, and observed two types of results: the temporal evolution of CIC (the most influential periods with key authors) and the key research streams (co-occurrence of keywords with main themes and concepts). The dominant focus is on practical applications of CIC in managing global teams and multinational corporations, which is also useful for practitioners who need to know about the IC at the team level to understand its impact on team performance to be able to improve it. Our analysis invites researchers in management to undertake studies on the CIC to fill the gap on the relationship between the intercultural theory and business practice which is increasingly centered on the strategic HRM of culturally diverse employees.

In this paper, we explore the inter-identity work of globally mobile professionals who relocate to a semi-peripheral region of their professional field. To study this phenomenon, we chose the setting of business school academics relocating to the Nordic region. We elucidate how these academics perceive their relocation to a semi-peripheral region and further engage in professional identity construction, in connection with the Nordics. We try to understand how they deal with the “center vs periphery” identity conflict as they (re)construct their professional identity. To do so, we conduct an interview-based study to allow our interviewees to narrate their experiences of being an expatriate academic in Nordic region. We further use identity theory and a narrative perspective on inter-identity work to theorize how these expatriate academics engage in inter-identity work. Our findings show the various discursive strategies our participants adopt to (re)construct their professional identity: a) (re)construct the superior nature of the periphery, b) resist the status quo by problematizing the superiority of the center, and/or c) divert the focus to the individual agency to reconcile the center-periphery hierarchy. We discuss the implication of this strategy towards the formation of a regional identity as well as integration with the regional academia.