This chapter explores three dimensions of migrant experience in the host country. First, we focus on the individual level issues and challenges related identity, resilience, motivation to integrate/expectations. Much of the individual level struggles are closely related to human capital translation process (i.e., credential recognition or lack there of) and decisions regarding continuation vs. change of previously established career pathways. Next, we focus on the social aspect of the migrant experience. Social capital and specifically lack of local social capital as one of the more difficult aspects of the migrant experience. We discuss various ways in which migrants can go about seeking and connecting to locals and establishing relationships in the new country (e.g., mentoring, ethnic communities). Finally, the third critical aspect of the migrant experience is related to organizational integration. Organizational experiences vary based on the local culture and also the size and the type of organization. Commonly discussed issues are related to organizational entry and later integration and collaboration with local employees.

The chapter discusses the important role that repatriation plays in career development or an international assignee’s personal and professional career outcomes acquired, developed, and accumulated over time. Attention is devoted to understanding how different types of career resources and competencies, categorized as “knowing how”, “knowing whom”, and “knowing why”, are developed as a function of living and working in another country. The chapter continues by drawing on the traditional bounded and emerging proactive career perspectives to help us understand why returning home is often more complex and difficult than perceived. Next, the chapter examines repatriation “success” from both the organizational and the individual repatriate’s points of view, highlighting objective and subjective interpretations of career success. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the challenges facing the repatriation process at the individual-, team-, organizational-, and country-levels and suggests interventions that could be considered in an effort to improve the likelihood of repatriation success. Implications for future research are also discussed.

This chapter presents the book’s major insight: no single “energy transition” takes place as countries contemplate adding wind and solar power. Rather, the issue convokes a variety of state and societal actors responding to the interests and institutions associated with four different policy arenas: climate change, industrial policy, electricity service provision, and the siting of infrastructure projects in communities. As the book shows, national energy transition results from the intersection of these arenas; some push transition forward; others hold it back. The chapter previews the overarching empirical argument that South Africa’s reliance on fossil fuel for electricity meant that climate concerns presented the sector with an existential threat, leading it to challenge energy transition on industrial policy and cost/consumption grounds, in a politicized process. Meanwhile, electricity’s small role in Brazil’s climate emissions led to a less politicized process: a series of national bureaucracies followed discrete standard procedures in interaction with just a few business/citizen groups, with industrial policy and cost concerns most influential in Brazil’s overall outcomes.

This chapter discusses expatriate recruitment sources, methods, and the expatriates’ motivations to work abroad. Then it examines expatriate selection criteria, methods, and how expatriates are selected in practice. The chapter also presents the variety of expatriate preparation methods, discusses expatriate training effectiveness, and expatriate preparation in practice. It concludes by considering future avenues of research. Overall, in the area of selection and preparation for international assignments there is good material for researchers to build on and a growing understanding of the key issues. Nevertheless, there remains here a rich field for exciting research in the future.

All infrastructure projects need to be placed in particular locations, and host communities typically have local populations, economies, and ecosystems that will be affected. The literature is divided, with energy and economic scholars tending to emphasize local benefits while geographers, anthropologists, and environmental scholars tend to highlight local costs. This chapter examines how local communities in Brazil and South Africa responded to new wind and solar power installations, asking not just about their preferences but also how (and if) they were able to mobilize resources and respond. Environmental impact assessment and land-use policies set a broad framework for these questions. New research conducted for the book finds that communities resisted wind power plants in about a quarter of the 77 Brazilian cities that hosted them, most in Brazil’s poor Northeastern region, especially in an early generation of poorly chosen coastal sites. There was little community protest against solar power in Brazil. South Africa saw little community protest against wind or solar power installations, though national organization BirdLife South Africa did strongly influence siting decisions.

The primary theoretical claim in this book is that “an” energy transition is actually a series of political economy transitions. The prospect of energy transition convokes actors and disputes in at least four policy arenas. Each has a different interest structure that should generate the participation of particular, different state and society actors. These interact with the country’s more conjunctural features and coalitional struggles to produce the actual dynamics of each political economy. The four may not push in the same direction; nor are they necessarily moving at the same pace. As a result, it is necessary to set them together, to see where one may exaggerate or undermine the outcomes of another. This chapter summarizes the basic logic of each policy arena then shows how they fit together in a bureaucracy-dominant transition in Brazil and a highly polarized and politicized impasse in South Africa. The chapter also explores how these political economies are likely to appear in other middle-income and developing countries and suggests the broader usefulness of this conceptualization of modes of national energy transitions.

In order for an employee to help the organization achieve strategic success through his or her performance, he/she must work at optimal levels towards very clear and specific objectives. In other words, the organization must design and implement a performance management system (PMS) that empowers employees and allows them to work at optimal levels. However, a review of the related research shows but when it comes to expatriates, most organisations do not develop dedicated PMSs – instead, it seems that most organizations evaluate and manage expatriates on an ad-hoc basis, often leading to dissatisfaction with the outcomes and conduct of the PMS, and subsequent dip in performance levels and quality. In this chapter, we briefly trace the history of PMSs, with particular emphasis to PMSs related to expatriates, and discuss some recent PMS models. We further discuss additional contextual variables that should be incorporated into effective PMSs, and conclude by offering guidelines for designing an effective PMS for expatriates.

This chapter reviews the literature on the lynchpin of expatriate success and of global families – the expatriate partner. To better understand the adjustment and well-being of expatriate partners, we focused on three major correlates that represented partner, expatriate, and family aspects. We first identified various personal (i.e., demographic, traits, knowledge/skills/abilities/others, and attitudes/cognitions), relational, organizational, and assignment factors that are associated with the expatriate partner’s adjustment. For expatriate influences on partner adjustment and well-being, we considered both personal and job/assignment factors. For the family variables, we looked at the perspectives of both the partner and the expatriate. Through our analysis of these detected associations, we observed three major themes: crossover occurrences from partners to expatriates, the relationship between the partner and family dynamics, and under-researched topics relevant to partner adjustment. For each theme, we discuss what we currently know (or don’t know), relevant theoretical perspectives to advance our knowledge in these areas, and suggestions for future research.

This chapter addresses the following questions: Why and how do we need to rethink GM to enable it to master its future? What roles do GM professionals enact to refine their work and to make working abroad more attractive? Overall, this chapter explores the pressures that GM professionals are facing, provides insights into the roles of GM departments and develops a refined GM model. Notwithstanding some of the limitations that diverse contexts, diverging managerial objectives, lacking GM capabilities, and implementation difficulties present, it can be argued that smart, agile, flawless, and efficient GM work (SAFE GM) is at the core of a successful GM department. Smart organisational development and talent management; agile approaches to embrace a multitude of GM challenges successfully; flawless design of programme management and compliance approaches; and efficient ways to structure GM rewards, are leading to a professionalisation of global mobility work. Enacting this SAFE GM framework is likely to strengthen the position of GM departments in their organisation, making their work more strategic, operationally focussed and important.

This chapter introduces background information and recent trends in expatriation. It begins by briefly reviewing the early literature on expatriation, from the 1960s to the late-1980s. It then describes changes that occurred in the 1990s that transformed radically the area of global mobility. Finally, the chapter outlines key trends in global mobility that define the landscape of the topic today. The chapter concludes by summarising the contents and key contributions that the reader will find in each chapter of this book.

Citizens expect their states to provide basic electricity services, of acceptable price and quality. Wind and solar power have affected that by making electricity accessible for additional consumers, especially through local generation of solar power (distributed solar power), even as their prices have often been much higher than alternative electricity sources. This chapter examines how the Brazilian and South African states used wind and solar power to provide electricity services to their household and industry consumers. As electricity access was nearly universal in Brazil, wind and solar power’s primary contribution was to supply grid-scale electricity, along with a small number of solar installations for remote consumers. Growing controversies focus on the subsidies to small-scale generation and increased urban self-provision. In South Africa, wind and solar power entered a highly unequal electricity system – 32 companies used 40 percent of the electricity while the apartheid government had left Black South Africans unserved – and have done little to redress the inequalities. The same coalitions fought over the true price of electricity options as prices rose precipitously.

Early adopters of wind and solar power often chose these forms of electricity becasue they have few greenhouse gas emissions. This chapter suggests that a climate framing of electricity choices is threatening to incumbent fossil fuel sources of electricity as it implies that they must be curtailed to meet climate ambitions. The chapter has a theoretical focus on state capacity: in the positive sense that states must be able to plan for long-term interests like climate change and in the negative sense that states must be able to take on powerful actors for whom such action is an existential threat. This policy arena separates the two cases. South Africa has depended on coal-powered electricity provided by a powerful state-owned enterprise, Eskom, and built strong economic sectors around it. These fought hard against adopting wind and solar power; further headwinds came from the government’s corrupt preference for nuclear power. In contrast, given its hydropower, Brazilian climate politics was heated over deforestation, not electricity choices. Wind, but not solar power, was unproblematically added to annual electricity planning – a decision that defies the climate lens.

In this chapter, we provide a review of mainstream practice and research on global mobility compensation. We begin by briefly explaining the traditional system used for international compensation, namely, the balance sheet system, and identify its main advantages and weaknesses. We then describe and structure the current landscape of international compensation, highlighting the increasing variety and complexity that characterizes this essential area of global competitive dynamics in human resources. The paper concludes with a discussion of some topics and themes for future research in this area.