Of Moves & Humans : Expatriation Journeys that Matter : a reconstruction of the intra-organizational emancipatory project of highly qualified self-initiated expatriate workers : from symbolic dynamics to underlying identity-processes : a multidisciplinary qualitative research

Self-initiated expatriates (SIEs), people who decide to expatriate without organisational support, are a valuable human resource for companies and a rich source of human capital. Today, understanding these workers remains challenging for academic experts and managerial actors. Building upon both theoretical and empirical analyses, we identified the specific biases that have constrained the advancement of research in SIEs studies. In order to overcome these constraints, we plunged into qualitative empirical research with a two-step design. Our approach first allowed in-depth interviews that put workers' perspectives at the heart of our analytical construction. Then, we rigorously analysed our results through reading grids that we created based on philosophical readings. Adopting a multidisciplinary approach, we considered philosophy, management studies and sociology to investigate what lies behind the SIE. Our analyses lead to frame this autonomous form of expatriation as a departure from an organization, rather than a move to a specific destination. This radical shift in the way to investigate self-initiated expatriates not only unveils a symbolic potential but enables us to grasp such expatriation as an emancipatory journey. We then investigated the decision-making process capitalizing on sociological constructions. We moved beyond treating decision-making as a purely individual matter without stakeholder involvement and reveal a dialectic way of identity-formation in the decision to expatriate. This construction shifts the focus to analyse the revival of a co-construction of talent and the promise of a congruent 'talent' state as the outcome of an expatriation. We finally dived into the how workers live their expatriation. In our fourth essay, we theorize expatriation as a process to epitomize how workers negotiate intra-personal tensions in their everyday organizational lives to overcome adaptation challenges. This thesis ends with a fifth essay that questions the obsolescence of globalization as a context. We introduce it as an actor, that penetrates the normative belief system of workers. As a result, globalisation is described as initiating a need for workers to be promised an exclusivity that breaks with the egalitarian order. Altogether, our work brings new factors into the organizational logics of the attraction and retention processes of highly qualified expatriate workers.