Chapter 3 traces the emergence of the expatriate in 1960s and 1970s anglophone international human resource management (IHRM) literature, a burgeoning academic field that accompanied the US ascendancy of its day. IHRM scholarship recognised the seminal challenge of decolonisation and, the chapter argues, academics self-consciously carved out their role and relevance in the post-war US imperial project. They did so by positioning the expatriate as a vital yet troublesome figure of multinational business that needed to be carefully selected, thoroughly trained, cautiously positioned, appropriately compensated and successfully repatriated – all of which required the support of scholarship. This also involved translating discourses of white supremacy and the immature native into management knowledge to sanctify the asymmetrical power relations that characterised multinational business. This history is rendered invisible by more recent IHRM literature that largely ignores the imperial roots of its research object and of its own role as knowledge producer.

This chapter argues that the co-occurring rise in newspaper reporting about sugar and the introduction of austerity measures in the UK are connected not in a relationship of cause and effect, but rather through mutual endorsement, with each providing fertile ground for the other. It explores this mutuality through the classed construction of fatness as overconsumption, the strategic deployment of ‘the poor’, the rhetorics of thriftiness and the depoliticising individualism of the attack on sugar. The chapter concludes that even where giving up sugar is claimed as a radical act that flies in the face of nutritional wisdoms and everyday consumption practices, its reality is profoundly conservative, holding in place prevailing relations of power and privilege and the vast inequalities on which they rely.

This general conclusion is focused squarely upon what has changed or not in the past forty years, then upon why this is so. Using Peter Hall’s typology of levels of institutional change, it argues first that incremental, ‘first-order’ change has predominated. Indeed, radical ‘third-order’ change has essentially occurred only as regards finance and capitalization, capital–labour relations, private education and union or party activism. Meanwhile primary education, company and organizational hierarchies and state involvement in social movements and political parties have all barely changed at all. What is even more interesting, however, is to revisit the causal claims presented in the book’s introduction. Here I underline that neo-liberalism and evocations of globalization have indeed impacted upon French society and politics, but only indirectly. In all cases, their impact has been conditioned, mediated and, in most cases, limited by the political work carried out by varying actors to change or reproduce institutions. Finally, the chapter moves to a close by reflecting once again upon what the French state has now become. As seen throughout the book, the French state remains omnipresent in French society and politics. Nevertheless, I claim that it is increasingly becoming a ‘flailing state’ due to the way it recruits and trains its elites, then seeks to act upon society. Finally – and classically – the last words of the chapter set out some avenues for future research on France, as well as how the concepts used in this book could and should now be further refined and developed.

Chapter 6 examines the definition of the expatriate as a temporary migrant through the work of the Expatriate Archive Centre (EAC) in The Hague. The chapter explores how the category is constituted and negotiated in the archival space, and what readings of migration, the city and the nation the temporary expatriate helps produce. The EAC defines the expatriate as anyone who lives abroad temporarily. However, the expatriate at work in the archival space does not abide by the category’s designation as the temporary migrant. Temporality emerges as key to the politics of the expatriate, but the temporary expatriate introduces both archival dilemmas and progressive potential. On the one hand, it achieves the discursive occlusion of past and present structural inequalities that centrally shape the migrations documented by the archive. On the other hand, it facilitates the collection and public availability of documents that aid our understanding of the workings of power and privilege, and release migration from its association with marginality which renders it a fertile proxy ground for racist politics.

This chapter provides an opportunity to address formal definitions of politics more directly by focusing upon social movements and political parties. I group them together because, in the literature on France, analysis rightly often emphasizes how the French state is frequently active in the structuring of both. The empirical material presented here largely confirms this claim. In the case of environmentalist movements, I show how and why the latter have consistently looked to the state for financial and symbolic backing. More surprisingly, this has also been the case for the Parti Socialiste and the centre-right party which today calls itself Les Républicains. Indeed, these two parties have not only received considerable state subsidies, many of their leaders have themselves been senior state civil servants. In contrast, the gilets jaunes movement of 2018–19 arose largely as a protest against the state and its elites. However, before rushing to just pigeonhole it as simply ‘populist’, it is important to realize how much its demands have also been structured as regards what they expect from a state they see as impotent. This sentiment of impotency has also impacted upon the two political parties dealt with here: neither have successfully managed to structure and maintain a relationship with their respective militants. Indeed, through becoming largely empty shells, since the early 2000s both have participated in a chain reaction that has led to the emergence of competing parties and generalized dissatisfaction with the nation’s professional politicians.

The focus for this chapter is the continued marginalisation of women in the post-Good Friday Agreement landscape of Northern Ireland. Although women have made some gains in representation in formal politics, they are largely excluded from community development and their contribution to building relations within and between communities is often overlooked. Gender parity at a regional political level has been difficult to achieve in Northern Ireland; likewise, gender parity has also been elusive in memory work. Over twenty years of the peace process and building peace in Northern Ireland has not translated into gender equality in terms of which stories are told, which voices are heard and how the past is understood. Taking on board the approach of memory studies, exploring the participation of women within memory politics becomes even more salient. Focusing on the experiences of a small cohort of women from loyalist communities across Northern Ireland, many of which were disproportionately affected by the Troubles, this chapter will explore their role in memory work linked to tourism and heritage in their neighbourhoods, and their opportunities to shape, inform and influence the dominant narratives emerging from, and about, their communities. Although they are actively involved in many aspects of community life, it is apparent that the contemporary application of remembering is something these women feel they are largely excluded from.

Among the various readings of the expatriate today, a key one is ‘the international’, a term often used synonymously with expatriate. Chapter 5 traces the production of this ‘international’ expatriate in the context of Nairobi’s ‘international community’ as assembled and narrated by the expat network InterNations. The chapter discusses how an individual in Nairobi becomes international performatively, through the consumption of casual cross-border mobility, which in the context of uneven border regimes involves the reinterpretation of privilege as achievement. The chapter then examines the uneven social relations and unevenly valued labour that socially reproduces the InterNations community, and discusses how the international community is produced through the everyday racialised, gendered and classed arrangement of bodies in and into Nairobi’s expat hangouts. The expatriate’s international emerges as an imaginary that idealises flux and mobility across a space that remains intensely bordered and ordered along ascribed gendered, classed and racialised schemata. Although the category is diversified in line with broader shifts in local and global power, the normative ideal at the heart of the international expat remains whiteness, imaginatively spatialised as ‘Western’.

Chapter 7 discusses recent debates in international human resource management (IHRM) literature on alternatives to the ‘traditional expatriate’, particularly ‘self-initiated expatriates’, ‘inpatriates’ and ‘migrants’. The chapter interrogates these new categories of IHRM literature and notes a ‘selective flexibility’ that stretches the category expatriate in ways that reproduce the inequalities that already underwrote the ‘traditional expatriate’. Still, power and inequality are frequently evaded in seemingly technical debates about the proper boundaries of analytical categories. The chapter then traces how migration studies turned to study expatriates as high-powered corporate migrants within a framework of (highly) skilled migration. This expatriate, the chapter argues, stands in marked contrast to the usual migrant in migration studies. The chapter finds that much research on migration collectively, if inadvertently, helps to reproduce popular imaginations of migrants as the global racialised poor, and thus actively participates in postcolonial governance through migration. From this vantage point, methodological nationalism can be understood as a racialised technology of governance with an imperial genealogy. Finally, the chapter examines the relationship of IHRM and migration studies, their mutual disregard and shared silences. The chapter argues that colonial aphasia not only shapes their quite closely aligned ‘typical’ expatriates and migrants, but underwrites their very academic disconnection and division of labour – i.e. colonial aphasia is at work in the very constitution of the two fields as separate fields.

Drawing on nine book-length self-help manuals for giving up sugar, this chapter focuses on the normative moral, social and practical labour of giving up sugar. It explores the ways in which the authors distance their programmes from dieting, and promise liberation, radiant wellness and the end of cravings as a reward for their self-investment, enhanced self-knowledge and practical mastery of the sugar-free life. The chapter argues that the work of relinquishing sugar is an act of self-making; it is a testimony to the determination of the individual to take responsibility for health, distinguishing them from the feckless overconsuming Other against whom their success can be measured.

This chapter outlines the broad argument of the book – that Research Ethics Committees (RECs) are bodies that serve to assess and attest to the trustworthiness of medical researchers. This is explored through a discussion of the origins of RECs in the self-regulation of the medical profession, and the way in which the structure of prior review of research requires regulatory decisions before research takes place. Focusing on work exploring the British regulatory state of the late twentieth century, this introduction makes the point that RECs – with their focus on interpersonal trust – sit uneasily within the context of modern regulation which has tended to move towards retrospective audit as a mode of governance. The chapter then goes on to discuss methodological issues and then introduce the specific sites at which observations were carried out, and explore the way in which previous ethnographic authors writing about trust decisions have operationalised their ideas to enable analysis.

The Conclusion argues that the attack on sugar rests on a cultivated singularity of purpose that can maintain coherence only by forcefully narrowing the field of vision until all we can see is sugar (and the fat bodies it is deemed to cause). This erases the fat-phobia, entrenched inequalities and crushing nutricentricity of the attack on sugar and overweights sugar with expectation, alleviating the pressure to look elsewhere and ask the next questions. As the focus on sugar begins to fade, the Conclusion speculates on what the war on obesity might turn to next to revivify itself and makes the case for focusing on political choices rather than food choices.

The introduction establishes the key aims and arguments of the book and provides an outline of the different chapters. It introduces the three key sites to which the book follows the expatriate to tell situated stories of the category’s history and politics, its making and remaking, contestation and lived experience: international human resource management literature, the Expatriate Archive Centre in The Hague, and Nairobi, Kenya. In following the expatriate, the book traces the category’s postcolonial history and presence from mid-twentieth-century political decolonisation to today’s politics of migration. The book shows the expatriate to be a malleable and mobile category, of shifting meaning and changing membership. It is also a contested category, as passionately embraced by some as it is rejected by others. Finally, it can be a surprising category, doing unexpected work, effective in ways that are not determined. Yet, throughout its meanderings and disputes, the expatriate proves consistently central to struggles over inequality, power and social justice.