While there has been progress for women in globally mobile work, there are enduring problems and challenges. In particular, women continue to be under-represented in management and leadership roles worldwide. In this chapter, we summarise current knowledge about women and globally mobile work and present a framework of factors that may either facilitate or hinder global mobility for women. We identify some important gaps in knowledge and suggest areas for future research to improve understanding of the experiences of women and their participation in global mobility. Finally, we offer practical recommendations for policy-makers, organisations that manage globally mobile workers, leaders and managers, and women who are currently and/or aspire to be globally mobile.

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.

This chapter explores international working options other than expatriation and migration, focusing, in particular, on three of the main alternative ‘other’ ways of arranging international work: short-term assignments (STAs), international business travel (IBTs), and international commuting (McNulty & Brewster, 2019). These ‘other’ ways of working in another country tend to be shorter and, crucially, do not involve relocating ‘home’ or taking the family, if there is one, with them. The chapter explores some of the advantages and disadvantages of these alternative forms of international experience.

Self-initiated expatriates (SIEs) are an important group of the globally mobile workforce. In contrast to assigned expatriates (AEs), SIEs relocate on their own volition and without company support. In recent years, the literature on SIEs has started to burgeon leading to an enhanced knowledge of SIEs. The purpose of this chapter is to first review and summarize central findings in the nascent body of research concerned with SIEs. In this regard, we focus on the following key areas of inquiry: definitions of SIEs, their (demographic) profiles, main motivations to relocate, cross-cultural adjustment, as well as career experiences, and outcomes of self-initiated expatriation. In second step, based on our overview of the extant literatures, we outline directions for future research on SIEs in each key area. The suggested future research avenues will be helpful to guide the next generation of studies on SIEs and to move this stream of research ahead.

Electricity decision-makers often choose to build wind and solar power for economic reasons. Renewable energy development may lead to economic growth, innovation in new sectors, and better employment options. This chapter examines which industrial policies states might choose to encourage these outcomes and whether Brazil and South Africa were successful in this. When private firms are involved – both countries chose private companies to build most of their electricity, through procurement auctions – it creates significant rents for the sector that must be managed to ensurecollective rather than narrow benefits. This chapter works within theoretical literatures on state–business relations. Brazil uses an initial local requirements stage and later public finance to encourage strong growth in wind power installation and manufacturing. The difficulty in developing a solar power industry accounts for its puzzling delay. In South Africa, similar coalitions as in Chapter 2 fight about whether the public or the private sector should produce renewable energy, pitting the powerful labor movement against the state’s industrial policies, in the absence of effective just transition policies.

Introduction

Sustainable progression is necessarily defined by the basic system of morality on which democracy itself is based. It is fundamental to political-economic decision making, but it is not simply a matter of GDP growth, however that is defined.

Economic progression almost invariably depends on political decisions and political decisions almost invariably have economic consequences for the fabric of civil society about which there have been many heroic expressions of human aspiration throughout history.

The 1776 American Declaration of Independence expressed it as being ‘self-evident, that all men are created equal’, and that they are endowed with ‘certain unalienable rights’ such as ‘Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness’, to which Lincoln's Gettysburg address 100 years later added the democratic principle that ‘government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth’. At the time there were almost 4 million African Americans held in bondage as slaves – ‘Willingly, with deliberate purpose, our fathers bartered honesty for gain, and became partners with tyrants, that they might share in the profits of their tyranny.’

All men – interpreted as all humanity – may have been created equal, and in terms of innate potential, nominated by intelligence and capability, that certainly appears to be the case. However, relatively few people have been permitted lives where their equality has been allowed fulfilment. That is not unique to the US, but an aspect of the human condition in most societies. Moreover, it is a widespread if not universal experience that a single sub-group of a population is permitted to manipulate systems for their own benefit, no matter the harm that might be done to others. Such is today's organised money establishment.

The UK has governed without a written constitution and so relies on the more pragmatic pursuit of humane principles being incorporated in its laws and cultural processes. That might be argued as in the spirit of Magna Carta, though more than 500 years later the UK was a major operator and beneficiary of the slave trade. Despite progress, the achievement of equal opportunities is far from complete, and in recent decades that process appears to have been reversed.

Introduction

That people are an organisation's most important asset is an obvious truism, despite having the ring of pseudo management speak about it. Both individually and in collaboration with others, people are the creative force, inventers and improvers of organisational systems, and innovators of new products and processes in their various forms. It is real interdependent human beings who are capable of achieving all the changes necessary to achieving progression without destruction.

Major contributions are also anticipated from artificial intelligence and robotisation which might pose massive threats as well as opportunities. The basic assumption here is that, in due course, their regulation will catch up to ensure they will be made ultimately benign to human purpose, and it is human beings that will develop the regulation.

For the present it is the simplistic 19th century assumption of ‘greed is good’ economic man which poses the threats. It bears no relation to the complex reality. It is sometimes nominated as homo economicus, as though to give it the gravitas it so obviously lacks. It is necessarily based on impossible assumptions simply to make the mathematical models work. It clearly ignores inconvenient realities, but more than that, it is a self-fulfilling prophecy of human behaviour.

Real people are, of course, perfectly capable of negative contributions. They are likely to respond to their treatment in an equal and opposite manner. Treated as greedy, they may respond as such, rejecting their interdependence, minimising their contribution, and being actively destructive of organisational achievement. That is how homo economicus is expected to behave.

There is a huge empirical literature on human behaviour and motivation, which economic theorising is simply incapable of taking into account. The following sections provide a brief outline of the main critical contributions, the aim being to identify how people might best contribute to getting us to where we want to be. It is based on observation of human behaviour, both individually and collaboratively, in a wide variety of organisational settings.

Hierarchies of human need

Human beings are naturally curious animals, always ready to pursue new and different ways of doing things if the promise is sufficiently inviting and the risks not too threatening. But that preparedness to innovate is exercised within the context of human needs.

Introduction

The previous two chapters outlined how we get to where we want to be. They considered the internal components of organisational systems, the real people who are the engines of enterprise, and their coordination through life cycle progressions, noting the vital importance of protecting real competition in supposedly competitive markets and rejecting pretend competition in markets where real competition is not relevant or available.

This chapter now focuses on external interactions of organisational systems as they serve the different layers of the real economy, fulfilling their defined existential purposes and contributing to the fulfilment of the democratic commitments outlined in Chapter 4.

Constituents of organised money could also serve the real economy. They have the power and capability to make massive contributions, perhaps even decisive ones, to fulfilling sustainable democratic commitments. But, for the time being at least, they remain focused on MST, claiming neoclassical belief to cloak their actions with assumed academic respectability.

In that pursuit, constituents of organised money are limited only by the question of legality, which is sufficiently opaque as to permit much tax evasion and energetic tax avoidance as well as financial frauds, criminality and destructions already noted. Though fines are paid for such illegalities when identified, individuals are not generally held personally responsible, despite their contractual duties. Consequently, the financialised economy, driven by organised money, remains focused on destructive pursuits, rather than the fulfilment of the democratic commitments outlined in Chapter 4.

Galbraith flagged up the interdependence of public and private enterprise as key to real economic progression. That social balance is even more important now, when so much more is understood about ecological destructions that will impact everyone. Technological innovation focused on ending and reversing those destructions will depend on contributions from organisational systems in both the public sector and the private, both of which are vulnerable to abuse by their designated owners.

To be effective innovators, public and private organisations depend on an appropriately focused strategy and a progressive culture. That way their capacity for invention and innovation will enable the development of new ways of progression without destruction, as has been demonstrated by successive technological revolutions.