Chris Brewster

• Doctor of Philosophy
• University of Reading

The literature on expatriation typically assumes that cultural and institutional familiarity facilitates expatriate adjustment. This assumption underplays the role of the historical context, especially the influence of painful colonial pasts that often lie beneath such familiarity. In addition, seeking to capture expatriate adjustment as a single m...

This panel symposium is designed to extend our understanding of how people are managed in organizations across the globe – the traditional focus of comparative human resource management (HRM) research – exploring how international and global events and influences have an effect at the country level. Much of the evidence for this discussion has been...

This book examines the evolving landscape of work in the context of rapidly developing information and communication technology and Artificial Intelligence. It argues that while in the twentieth century there was a standardisation of work style, the twenty-first century is seeing the creation of ever more flexible forms of work, epitomised by the r...

The expression of voice is valuable for organisations and individuals but most of what we know about voice is drawn from western contexts. This paper focuses on why, how and on what issues expatriates speak up. Examining voice in the multinational context of the United Arab Emirates allows us to develop a more in‐depth understanding of national, or...

It has been argued that the different ways human resource management is conducted in different countries can be at least partly explained by theories of comparative capitalisms. Earlier work has highlighted much diversity between coordinated market economies, but the liberal markets are commonly assumed to represent a more coherent category. This a...

Migration is one of the most pressing global issues of our time. However, relatively little is known about the factors and mechanisms that govern the post-migration experiences of skilled migrants. We adopt an acculturation- and social identity-based approach to examine how differences between institutional characteristics in the destination and or...

Many of the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals apply directly to Human resource management (HRM) within organisations, and most of them have indirect relevance. It is clear, however, that by 2030 the world will have failed to meet the Goals. Although the connection between the SDGs and HRM is not so apparent, it has been argued that the...

Although migration has long been studied in other academic disciplines, the scholarly focus on migrants in international business as crucial agents of change in organizations is comparatively recent. During the recent pandemic, migrants in many countries were particularly at risk, in both their health and their economic situations, as most countrie...

Purpose This study aims to examine whether and why subsidiary-unit managers’ prior international work experiences across multinational enterprises’ (MNEs) home and host countries impact their subsidiary-unit performance, considering the mediating effect of their advice networks. Design/methodology/approach A survey on 222 subsidiary-unit managers...

We use an exploratory, qualitative study of African female migrants' integration in France to explore their family-planning decision-making as they strive to achieve a good work-family balance (WFB). The life stories of nineteen African female migrants highlight the effects of their aspirations for successful socio-professional integration in their...

What insights can postcolonialism and decoloniality offer into workplace accentism? Drawing upon these two strands of literature, this article contributes to workplace research through proposing a view of accentism as an intersectional phenomenon, rooted in the historically sedimented unequal social structure and relations formed during the colonia...

In this study, we use embeddedness and boundaryless career perspectives to investigate the extent to which Britain's withdrawal from the European Union ('Brexit') led business, economics and management academics to consider emigrating. Using a representative survey of two partially overlapping groups, we find that the impact of Brexit was surprisin...

Governments across the Arabian Gulf aim to reduce their dependence on expatriates by implementing localisation policies. Building on institutional and legitimacy theories, we seek to advance our understanding of the effects of such policies on multinational enterprises (MNEs). We used data from 157 MNEs operating in Saudi Arabia and found the indig...

Migration is increasingly viewed as a high-priority policy issue among politicians, intergovernmental organizations, NGOs, and civil society throughout the world. Its implications for the private sector, for economic prosperity, and for the cross-border activities of firms are undeniable and likely to grow in importance. Yet, despite its relevance...

Purpose This paper aims to discuss multiple uses of the concept of “bubble” as a metaphor to refer to different experiences of foreign working communities and suggests a more flexible and comprehensive approach. Design/methodology/approach Based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted at different locations, the authors propose changing the use of the...

Purpose This study explores whether expatriation type (assigned expatriates (AEs) versus self-initiated expatriates (SIEs)) is linked to job exhaustion via possible differences in required efforts for their jobs and the rewards they gain from them, and/or the balance between efforts and rewards. Adopting effort–reward imbalance (ERI) and job demand...

It is argued that women are held back in their efforts to achieve career advancement by inequitable opportunities to acquire and leverage career capital. Using career capital theory, this empirically grounded investigation examines how female MBAs report increases in knowing-how, knowing-whom and knowing-why, in relation to their male counterparts....

This paper explores the role of intra‐company transfers in the United Kingdom government's labour immigration policy over the last quarter century. It demonstrates their role in determining the number of non‐European Economic Area foreigners working in the country and examines the way policy, both generally and specifically, has developed. It prese...

Key points We know that civility matters, but it has to be tempered with our ability to continue to engage critically with fellow scholars. Criticism has two meanings: one involving attacks on the motivation or character of the individual concerned and the other involving analytical deconstruction of individual's work. Given how much of ourselves w...

Purpose The pandemic emphasised the importance for society of the “hidden” workforce – cleaners, delivery drivers, security guards or hospital porters. This paper explores the well-being of low-status expatriates in the international workplace exemplified by the United Arab Emirates (UAE). This is one of the first studies examining the well-being o...

As geopolitical crises unfold and the world turns its attention to the movement of people across borders, management scholars endeavoring to inform business and policy must open new lines of inquiry if they are to maximize impact. In this guidepost, we argue for three important avenues that deserve special attention: transformation in directionalit...

A widespread rhetoric suggests that market-like rules dominate employment relationships, and particularly compensation, but empirical evidence is inconclusive. This research examines organisations’ compensation policies in clusters of European capitalist economies to test such a hypothesis. Four fuzzy clusters emerged from data, namely, Standard, I...

The global outbreak of COVID-19 led to a rapid shift to Working from Home (WFH). In universities and other parts of the education sector, on-line teaching and assessment become mandatory. We use research from a representative large-scale (n = 2,287) survey of business, management and economics academics in the UK to examine how prior on-line experi...

Background: Nowadays, studying small and medium-sized companies, particularly with regard to the management of human resources that takes place in them, is particularly relevant. Effectively, knowing that about 99.8% of companies are small and medium-sized, contributing very significantly to high levels of employability, it is extremely important t...

As part of this 60th anniversary edition of the Asia Pacific Journal of Human Resources, this paper provides a review of the impact of technology over the last decade on the role of HRM. This period was bookended by the global financial crisis and the Covid‐19 pandemic and saw the emergence of fourth industrial revolution. The decade provided a pla...

This study examines the psychological contracts held by expatriates with low socioeconomic status. We develop and test a moderated mediation model that examines the direct relationship between organisational support and intention to leave via the mediating role of psychological contract fulfilment. We also examine the moderating role of transaction...

Each industrial revolution brought with it the promise of a better society, but each one included collateral damage for the workforce: the destruction of skills and jobs and the undermining of basic occupational health and safety. Many of us are now experiencing the fourth industrial revolution. For the first time since the first industrial revolut...

Research about the Covid-19 pandemic has taken center stage in shaping the work of many scholars, inter alia highlighting the importance of research in addressing the grand challenges humanity faces. However, the pandemic has also ushered in increased administrative, teaching and out of work commitments for many researchers, leading to concerns tha...

Purpose This paper aims: to undertake a systematic literature review on SIEs, examining twenty years of literature published between 2000 and 2020, focusing on the most-cited empirical work in the field; to analyse the topics covered by these studies; and to propose a research agenda. Design/methodology/approach We conducted a systematic literatur...

In this paper, we assess the development of financial participation schemes, employee share ownership and profit-sharing in selected European countries and the degree to which they are correlated with strategic human resource management, and industrial relations, that is collective bargaining, unionization and works councils, and national context....

Increasingly, multinational enterprises (MNEs) and even indigenous organizations are beginning to take a wider view of their potential workforce: human resource management (HRM) and talent management (TM) are becoming more international and more global (Vaiman, Sparrow, Schuler, & Collings, 2019a, b). We can see this in the way that, for example, h...

The study of employee voice in small and medium enterprises (SMEs) across national contexts remains under-theorised and under-studied. This paper uses Kaufman’s integrative model of employee voice, and an exploratory study of 30 interviews with employees in non-unionised SMEs in the United Kingdom, Thailand and Nigeria, to compare the employee expe...

We examine the careers of expatriates in an inter-governmental organization (IGO) who undertake a mix of hardship and non-hardship assignments. Considering the individual, organizational, and broader environmental domains, and using conservation of resources theory, we examine what contributes to such expatriates’ career satisfaction. Based on surv...

In recent years, scholars and practitioners have increasingly recognized that human resource management (HRM) has paid insufficient attention to the impact of context. While research has been devoted to examining the impact of national context on HRM systems, this literature has been largely separate from that focused on other levels of context aff...

In recent years, scholars and practitioners have increasingly recognized that human resource management (HRM) has paid insufficient attention to the impact of context. While research has been devoted to examining the impact of national context on HRM systems, this literature has been largely separate from that focused on other levels of context aff...

In recent years, scholars and practitioners have increasingly recognized that human resource management (HRM) has paid insufficient attention to the impact of context. While research has been devoted to examining the impact of national context on HRM systems, this literature has been largely separate from that focused on other levels of context aff...

In recent years, scholars and practitioners have increasingly recognized that human resource management (HRM) has paid insufficient attention to the impact of context. While research has been devoted to examining the impact of national context on HRM systems, this literature has been largely separate from that focused on other levels of context aff...

Human resource management (HRM) has paid insufficient attention to the impact of context. In this paper we outline the need for HRM to take full account of context, particularly national context, and to use both cultural theories and, particularly, institutional theories to do that. We use papers that utilize the Cranet data to show how that can b...

This study explores variations in the incidence of performance appraisals according to setting and multinationality. Using data from Europe and adopting the lens of comparative capitalisms, we found that performance appraisal (particularly, systems linking rating to rewards) is used more in the Anglo-Saxon Liberal Market Economies (LMEs) than in th...

This paper explores the career choices and trajectories of women self‐initiated expatriates (SIEs). Extant research on these issues has tended to view women expatriates as a coherent group. We used a qualitative approach, involving semi‐structured interviews with 51 women SIEs, to examine women's reasons to relocate, reasons for employment, past an...

This paper examines the effects of two-way congruences and incongruences between three components of paternalistic leadership, namely, benevolence, morality, and authoritarianism, on overall subordinate justice perceptions. We hypothesize that these dyad in-/congruences would differentially predict subordinate overall justice perceptions, with perc...

Ten years ago, Stahl et al. (J Int Bus Stud 41:690–709, 2010) performed a meta-analysis of the literature on cultural diversity and team performance, aiming to improve our understanding of “the mechanisms and contextual conditions under which cultural diversity affects team processes” (p. 691). State-of-the-art studies still echo the article’s conc...

The objectives of this chapter are, after a brief discussion of SIE career success/satisfaction, to examine the host country’s institutional and cultural characteristics that have an impact on SIE’s career success, and to propose a research model and agenda. Since there is almost no research on the impact of host country characteristics on SIEs’ ca...

Purpose The evolution of firm level practices over time has always been a keen area of interest for management scholars. However, in comparison to other social scientists, particularly economists, the relative dearth of firm level panel data sets has restricted the methodological options for exploring inter-temporal changes. Design/methodology/app...

With approximately 50 million people across the globe considered expatriates (persons living and working abroad for a limited time), global mobility is an important issue for individuals, organisations, and national governments, and a major research stream in universities and business schools. Written by a team of internationally renowned scholars...

With approximately 50 million people across the globe considered expatriates (persons living and working abroad for a limited time), global mobility is an important issue for individuals, organisations, and national governments, and a major research stream in universities and business schools. Written by a team of internationally renowned scholars...

With approximately 50 million people across the globe considered expatriates (persons living and working abroad for a limited time), global mobility is an important issue for individuals, organisations, and national governments, and a major research stream in universities and business schools. Written by a team of internationally renowned scholars...

This study explores how HRM and trust are inter-related, and what this means for how we understand HRM under different varieties of capitalism. We explore the direct impact of different indicators of societal trust on intra-organisational HRM practice, using large-scale internationally comparative survey evidence. We find that countries with high l...

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to explain how candidates' expectations of salary in relation to job offers as expatriates in developing societies are related to country image and to age. Design/methodology/approach Data were collected from over 500 engineers living in France, Portugal and Spain, evaluating two hypothetical expatriate proposa...

For organisations and for individuals, effective recruitment, selection and preparation of new employees or employees in new circumstances are always important. This issue is exacerbated in the case of international assignments, where issues of cross-national adjustment complicate the picture. The objective of this chapter is to examine and summari...

The global outbreak of Covid-19 led to a government ‘lockdown’ in the UK requiring people to stay in their homes, except for necessary visits to shops and for exercise immediate communities, for three months. All universities were forced into a rapid shift to on-line teaching and assessment. We use research from a representative sample of 2,287 bus...

This article argues that the view of international mobility in the management and organization literature has been too restrictive in focusing only on high-status workers. This view needs to be widened to an all-encompassing perspective that is not limited or restricted in terms of the number, types or status of people engaged in working internatio...

Purpose: The objectives of this conceptual chapter are to examine the host country’s institutional and cultural characteristics that have an impact on SIE’s career success, and to propose a research model and agenda. Scope/method: Since there is almost no research on the impact of host country characteristics on SIE’s career success, we reviewed t...

There is increasing evidence that multinational enterprises (MNEs) from less dominant economies tend to mimic and disseminate human resource management (HRM) practices sourced from a dominant economy, usually the United States, to overcome their “liabilities of origin.” However, our understanding of the specific challenges involved in the implement...

This research examines a newer breed of globally mobile international employee, older academic international business travellers (AIBTs). This is the first study to examine older academics who retire or reduce their responsibilities but continue to work – and to work internationally. Using semi-structured interviews with older academics from Austra...

Collecting large‐scale comparative management data from multiple countries poses challenges in demonstrating methodological rigour, including the need for representativeness. We examine the rigour of sample representativeness, the counterbalancing effect of sample relevance, and explore sampling options, equivalence across countries, data collectio...

For organisations and for individuals, effective recruitment, selection and preparation of new employees or employees in new circumstances are always important. This issue is exacerbated in the case of international assignments, where issues of cross-national adjustment complicate the picture. The objective of this chapter is to examine and summari...