Between 1921 and 1924 Edgar was in Baghdad, and Winifred in St Albans. Through Edgar’s eyes, we see Baghdad during the tense early years of the British ‘mandate’ in Iraq. Now a company director, Edgar’s talents were exploited by Baghdad elites, co-opting him as an ‘agent of imperialism’, as Britain dominated the new Iraqi constitutional monarchy, while the Baghdad Anglican church used him to run its new parish. Through Winifred’s eyes, her public profile flowering, we see her expatriate adjustment to middle-class suburban life, with two stepsons and two daughters occasioning stepmothering anxiety. Immersed in the local Anglican church and feminist organisations such as the National Council of Women, alongside the local Conservative association, her conservative politics co-existed with progressive and cosmopolitan social attitudes. The love correspondence is integral to their expatriate identity, with insights into early twentieth-century middle-class marital sexuality, explicit details of a playful sexual relationship underpinned by spirituality, and a description of consensual birth-control practices. Winifred’s sudden departure to join Edgar in Baghdad, placing two young daughters, unhappily, in a small, boarding school, marked the urgency of their passion, but also the strength of a companionate marriage, a product of shared expatriate experience.

Introduces the themes of empire and overseas enterprise, specifically shipping and telegraphy, as engines of social mobility, of expatriate opportunities for the British working and lower middle classes, and a related love story created by conditions of expatriate life in the Middle East, particularly Persia. It reviews imperial historians’ focus on informal empire, stressing Robert Bickers’ concept of non-elite ‘other ranks of empire’. David Lambert and Alan Lester’s concept of imperial ‘careering’, and of expatriate experience forging a ‘transformation of identity’, points to the book’s key characters as ‘agents of imperialism’: William Cooper in telegraphy, Edgar Wilson in river shipping and William’s daughter, Winifred Cooper, exploiting expatriate opportunities for independence, and eventually married to Edgar. The key source, a rich British Library archive, yields intimate insights, through letters and diaries, into familiar social history themes like class, marriage, gender and sexuality, and an argument about expatriate social mobility into retirement.

Expatriate success stories did not always run smoothly; this chapter shows how Edgar Wilson’s class transformation was beset by anxiety around real and imagined tensions with elite management figures in London and Persia. It also charts a delayed pre-war honeymoon trip to England through Russia. But work stresses on Wilson’s career extended to his marriage, forcing long periods of reluctant separation and hazardous risks to the family in southern Persia during World War One. It elucidates a key stage in the progression of the Wilsons’ social mobility under expatriate conditions, charting events impacting Middle East shipping during the war and after, told through Edgar and Winfred’s correspondence and diaries, including sexually explicit love letters, and a perilous family trek on mules across Persian mountains. For Winifred, the experience of childbirth in Tehran early in the marriage and in England, her experience of stepmothering without Edgar, marked a steep learning curve, influencing the marriage for years ahead. Spousal correspondence is a highlight of this chapter, with intimate insights into marriage and its cosmopolitan growth under the influence of expatriation and marital sexuality.

The US legal system is notoriously complex. Navigating this labyrinthine structure requires knowledge of legal precedents, procedures, and rules, along with the ability to anticipate and adapt to shifts in the legal landscape. Businesses, therefore, require the guidance of seasoned lawyers. Over the past few decades, US corporations have increasingly turned to in-house lawyers for legal services, leading to their rising prominence in the corporate hierarchy and profound changes in the US legal profession and corporate governance. This could also be true for Chinese companies operating in the United States. Hence, this chapter investigates the Chinese companies’ utilization of full-time internal legal managers within the dual institutional context. For those employing such managers, this chapter scrutinizes two key aspects: (1) whether these legal managers are locally hired or are expatriates and (2) whether they hold licenses to practice law in the United States, which approximates their ability to handle US legal risks and opportunities. Analysis under the dual institutional framework reveals not only effects of both home- and host-state institutions but also substantial intercompany variations associated with other institutional and firm-specific variables of theoretical and policy importance.

We begin our examination of managing across cultures by exploring four key topics aimed at laying the foundation for developing global management skills: the changing world of business and what it means for managers; how global organizations are changing to adapt to the new business environment; how the new global realities are facilitating an evolution from managers to global managers; and career paths for global managers

Three Anglo–German Edwardian novels of Elizabeth von Arnim, Adventures of Elizabeth in Rügen (1904), Princess Priscilla’s Fortnight (1905), and Fräulein Schmidt and Mr Anstruther (1907), perform expatriate identity as theorised by Edward Said. Elizabeth and Her German Garden (1898), in contrast, is the most English of early novels by English-born German citizen von Arnim. The restlessness and contrapuntal perspectives of expatriate consciousness generate humour in the 1904 and 1905 novels, and in-depth adoption of an alternate German–Anglo subjectivity in Rose-Marie Schmidt. Fräulein Schmidt, von Arnim’s most sophisticated novel to that point, adopts the first-person epistolary narrative of a German professor’s daughter reared in a lower-middle-class home as she finds independence, self-respect, and a writer’s voice after being proposed to, then jilted, by a young Englishman. A subliminal narrative coursing beneath the surface of Rose-Marie’s letters limn the protagonist’s underlying psychological processes.

If Underworld was primarily responsible for bringing DeLillo into worldwide critical consideration, his new global audiences have not stopped reading him. Once the darling of a coterie of American academics, DeLillo now belongs to the world.

Adjustment is the process of changing behaviour, feelings, and cognitions to achieve a balance with the environment. Adjustment is needed whenever an individual transfers from a familiar setting to an unfamiliar setting to interact effectively and to feel a sense of belonging. Expatriates experience adjustment in the cognitive, affective, and behavioural dimensions and across different domains such as for example work, culture, and personal domains. The needed change includes new routines and uncertainty which might cause anxiety. Adjustment to the new situational context is essential for expatriation success. In this chapter, we examine what we have learnt from the literature. We discuss antecedents to adjustment and critically reflect on the most common approaches to analysing expatriate adjustment. Furthermore, new alternatives on how to understand adjustment that mitigate the limitations of previous models will be highlighted and we will provide insights on how to apply a holistic assessment. Finally, we will provide our readers with some practical and research implications.

Global organizations demand a heterogeneous global talent pool. For decades, this talent pool has been dominated by what we consider traditional “there-and-back” expatriates, overseas assignees who are transferred to a host-country for three to four years and subsequently return to the home-country organization. To accommodate the pressures of globalization, it is argued that organizations today would benefit from a more dynamic talent pool which is composed of a cadre of managers that includes but also goes beyond the traditional expatriate. We speak of the global manager “family” which in addition to expatriates includes flexpatriates and inpatriates. Together these complimentary pools of talent help to facilitate the development of a global mindset among global managers that is necessary to compete beyond domestic borders. The mix of managers differs greatly relative to the duration of assignments, destinations, number of destinations, and commitment to the organization and career. As a result, we argue that each manager requires a combination of intercultural competencies or a “tool set” to reflect the demands of the assignment type which allows them to be successful in their roles. This chapter draws on a competency-based view to form the basis of the critical elements for building intercultural competency in global managers.