Expatriate Manager: Eine neue kosmopolitische Elite? Habitus, Alltagspraktiken und Netzwerke
Final Report Abstract
Since the 1990s, economic and cultural globalization has propelled the transnational mobility of managers and fuelled cross-border careers. Some scholars have argued for the emergence of a new global business elite with cosmopolitan mind-sets, homogeneous lifestyles, and transnational networks, while others have highlighted their disconnection from the local surroundings and their everyday life within national expatriate ‘bubbles’. Thus the question of whether today’s mobile professionals can be described as interculturally open and competent cosmopolitans, or as pronounced anti-cosmopolitans, represents a pending research gap. Our research project addressed this question by building on intensive ethnographic case studies of expatriate managers, most of them high-ranking executives, from two different home countries, the US and Germany. These managers, together with their families, had been assigned to China, Germany, or the US, respectively, to perform demanding coordination tasks within their multinational corporations (MNCs). Based on detailed accounts of expatriate managers’ experiences and everyday practices, the project revealed the multiple and sometimes paradoxical ways in which mobile professionals deal with cultural differences as they build up new forms of working, belonging and dwelling. Our findings suggest that the newly emerging mind-sets and lifestyles of expatriate managers transcend the polarized images of mobile elites as either cosmopolitan ‘global managers’ or parochial anticosmopolitans. Our findings suggest that mobility and mobility work do not automatically lead to cosmopolitan sociabilities, but paradoxically also to new “stoppages and fixities”. What became clear is that both closure and openness were related to the mobile lives of the expatriate managers and their families. Our data thus strengthens the argument that empathy and reflexivity are not the only outcomes of diversity. The same can be said about mobility. Conceiving of cosmopolitanism as one possible answer among others to the reshaping of everyday sociabilities and identities brought about by increased mobility opens the perspective to further research on the contexts in which such specific answers are cultivated. Both diversity and ambivalences contradict the image of a homogeneous expatriate ‘bubble life’ and the image of a cosmopolitan transnational class. Theoretically, this research project contributes an empirical grounding of the criticism of conceiving of cosmopolitanism as a consistent and coherent habitus-like set of practices. First, it shows that definitions of cosmopolitanism as openness to an undifferentiated and placeless cultural Other fall short, because empirically actors use differentiated and hierarchically structured concepts of the Other. Second, it uncovers the tensions between a discursive and a practiced cosmopolitanism. These tensions arise because cosmopolitanism, as a practice, only unfolds in encounters with the materiality and sociability of the Other, thus giving the Other a significant amount of power in shaping and defining this encounter, even to such an extent that the cosmopolitan ambition of one of the parties involved (locals, expatriates) can be severely sabotaged and cannot be translated into a practiced cosmopolitanism. Third, the results indicate that cosmopolitanism is related to practices of controlling difference and that cosmopolitanism is more likely to be found in individually controllable realms of the everyday life—such as consumption or housing practices—than in the more complex realms of sociability. Hence, the project delivers a significant differentiation of the debate about cosmopolitanism and global mind-sets of transnationally mobile managers, as well as to the debate about the emergence of a transnational business elite. This differentiation builds on newly developed theoretical concepts that help to considerably advance our understanding of the interrelations of the transnational mobility, elite positions, and dispositions of expatriate managers that they (re-)produce in their everyday practices on their stints.
Publications
- 2014. “Managing Across Borders: Global Integration and Knowledge Exchange in MNCs.” Competition & Change 18 (3): 265–79
Park, Kathleen, and Ursula Mense-Petermann
(See online at https://dx.doi.org/10.1179/1024529414Z.00000000060) - 2014. “‘Bridging the Differences‘ - Die Arbeit des ‚boundary spanning‘ und ihre Regulierung in Transnationalen Unternehmen.” In Vielfalt und Zusammenhalt. Verhandlungen des 36. Kongresses der Deutschen Gesellschaft für Soziologie in Bochum und Dortmund 2012, Teil 1, edited by Martina Löw, 297–311. Frankfurt am Main: Campus
Mense-Petermann, Ursula
- 2016. “Verflochtene Mobilitäten und ihr Management: Mobilitätspraktiken von Expatriate-Managern und ihren ‚trailing spouses‘ im Auslandseinsatz.” Österreichische Zeitschrift für Soziologie 41: 15–31
Spiegel, Anna, and Ursula Mense-Petermann
(See online at https://doi.org/10.1007/s11614-016-0188-8) - “Global mobility policies, social positioning and boundary spanning work of expatriate managers.” Bielefelder Beiträge zur Wirtschafts- und Arbeitssoziologie (bi.WAS) (1), 2016
Mense-Petermann, Ursula, and Anna Spiegel
