Migration, cosmopolitanism and ‘global citizenship’ from the 1990s

This chapter concludes the chronological section by examining testimony of migrants from the 1990s, pointing to intensification of cosmopolitan mentalities and motivations like lifestyle enhancement. It focuses in some depth on stories of two generations of women through the separate but connected mobilities of mother and daughter, both global in outlook but deeply loyal to adopted localities. Noting that scholarship on globalisation has done little to relate the macro trends to mentalities of ordinary people, it suggests that modern migrant story-telling might shed light on how the globalising world has impacted upon wider populations as well as migrants themselves. It scrutinizes politically motivated mobility, particularly inspired by hostility to British politics and class, involving both expatriate employment, transnational marriage and serial migration; this is juxtaposed against family migration and travel seemingly devoid of political motivations but imbued with a virtual lifetime of adventure motivations. The chapter concludes with a case of a woman’s serial migration from Britain to Europe to South Africa to Australia, highlighting experiences of the ‘trailing spouse’ of an expatriate husband, of their later migration, and the impact of frequent mobility on marriage and family as well as on shifting identities.

DEALING WITH DUAL CAREER COUPLES: A TOOL FOR ACCEPTING AND MAKING INTERNATIONAL ASSIGNMENTS EFFECTIVE

The study seeks to explore existing literature on how MNCs are dealing with dual career couples for international assignees to accept international assignment and what these MNCs have not been able to provide so that contribution can be made to the existing literature. The study was exploratory research where the contributions of various authors were assessed to determine if dual career couples pose a threat for international assignees to accept international assignment. The exploration reveals that MNCs need to deal with issues associated with dual career couples since it contribute significantly to the rejection of international assignments. There are various strategies MNCs adopt in order to entice the international assignee’s spouse to give his or her blessing to the international assignment and mainly among them captured in the literature are providing a lump sum payment for the trailing spouse, inter-firm networking, assisting the trailing spouse to find job in the host country, engaging in reciprocal arrangement with other MNCs to find job for the trailing spouse in the host country and providing career support in order to make the trailing spouse skills, knowledge and abilities relevant to the host country job market. The study identified two strategies that could be used to deal with dual career couples which were not captured in the literature and these are the active involvement of the expatriate spouses in the recruitment and selection process and the use of virtual assignments by relying on the availability of technology for international assignments.