Chapter 7: This chapter looks at two recent performances, Arinzé Kene’s Misty (2018) and Neil Bartlett’s The Plague (2017), which depict cities under siege. Contagions, figurative and literal, spread among residents, destroying lives and tearing the fabric of the urban environment. In both productions the city is at war with itself, via the circulation of disease that passes between infrastructure and people. Focusing on these plays and their productions, this chapter explores how ideas of contagion are deployed to capture a sense of intangible danger spreading throughout the city, especially London, and how this formulation finds impetus in contemporary discourse that mobilizes the risk of economic, cultural, and political contagion as part of a divisive rhetoric. The chapter also considers how we might understand these forms of representation and discourse in light of the prevalence of ‘pathogenic performativity’, in which the language and phantasmagoria of contagion are deployed as tactics of governance, with theatre enabling its exposure or perpetuation.

Chapter 14: This chapter explores advances in stage technology from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries that profoundly shaped and influenced both theatrical performance and playwriting, particularly in the domain of stage lighting. Opening with the mid-twentieth-century example of Josef Svoboda, the chapter then goes back to the invention of limelight and its behind-the-scenes manipulation, which leads into a consideration of other kinds of technologically oriented off-stage labor. The discussion then turns to theatrical patents of the late nineteenth century, building on recent scholarship on backstage labor with a view to considering how scientific, technological, and theatrical work merge and often share this status of invisibility. The conclusion proposes a model for approaching and teaching theatre history based on a greater recognition of the role of technology, especially in our understanding of ‘science on stage’.

Chapter 6: This chapter discusses how, as scientific medicine gained ascendancy in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, theatre became an important site for the examination of scientific medicine’s aspirations, achievements, limitations, and dangers. Early twentieth-century plays celebrated the pioneers of modern disease research and their accomplishments, while later twentieth- and early twenty-first century plays display a growing critique of scientific medicine and its conception of the body as an object of medical knowledge. David Feldshuh’s Miss Evers’ Boys considers the human and ethical stakes of the infamous Tuskegee syphilis study, and Suzan-Lori Parks’s Venus addresses the historical objectification of anomalous bodies. Margaret Edson’s Wit, given extensive discussion here, explores the conflict between scientism and subjectivity in the context of the modern research hospital. The medium of theatre is central to these dramatic critiques; medical science may formulate the human body as an object of knowledge, but theatre’s bodies look back in the midst of their display.

Chapter 8: This chapter analyzes the legacy and influence of the diagnostic gaze in contemporary British theatre, examining how theatre can offer a site to negotiate the complex dynamic between psychiatric institutions and the experiences of patients. Contemporary psychiatry has overseen a vast expansion in the categorization of mental illness. Mental disorders can be identified and ascribed to individual patients in an act of diagnosis that signals mental illness as a ‘performative malady’. Alongside reflecting shifts in the etiology of mental disorder (increasingly focused upon a biomedical model), the speech-act of diagnosis has implications for the legal status and care of the patient. Analyzing works such as Joe Penhall’s Some Voices and Lucy Prebble’s The Effect, this chapter suggests how theatre can offer a reimagination of diagnosis by situating and troubling the role of the psychiatric user.

Chapter 9: This chapter begins by noting that as science has become more interdisciplinary and recognized as a form of contingent knowledge circulated across cultural fields, devising has emerged as a suitable method for creating performances with scientific content and themes. By virtue of its multivocality (involving a number of authors), its multimodal forms of storytelling and address (through language, dance, physicalization, digital media, installation and site-specific environments, and the like), and its presentational modes, devised performance can often render scientific ideas performative, capturing not just what they ‘are’ but what they ‘do’ and how they disseminate in the public understanding. Across scientific fields that are increasingly interrelated, devised performance provides new ways to move beyond merely conveying scientific ideas, choosing instead to invite spectators actively to map domains of knowledge and construct ideas that are constantly in transit.

Chapter 10: This chapter covers a broad range of practices, from science public engagement events to collaborations between artists and scientists, theatre for young people, drama education initiatives, and global activism projects. Several case studies are examined: first, examples of exhibitions, lectures, and demonstrations focusing on Michael Faraday and the Royal Institution Christmas Lectures, and on public autopsy demonstrations as well; second, arts-science collaborations, known as ‘sci-art,’ with reference particularly to the work of Y Touring; and third, theatre and activism in relation to climate change, as exemplified by Climate Change Theatre Action project. The discussion is framed within the author’s own experience as a practitioner working at the boundaries of theatre and science.

Chapter 4: This chapter argues for a new way of thinking about what an ecologically oriented dialogue between theatre and science might give rise to. Three canonical Western texts – Plato’s cave, Shakespeare’s Hamlet, and Beckett’s Endgame – are read as instances of geology. The aim is to show how Western theatre is not simply a privileged space for human society to reflect on itself, as is often claimed, but a nonhuman medium, a decidedly mineralized practice – the very thing that so troubled Plato and that has caused Western philosophy to remain so suspicious of the stage. Reading Western theatre as geology, moreover, permits a theory of eco-performance criticism appropriate to and for the Anthropocene. Where accepted models of eco-theatre tend to run into dangerous contradiction, practically and theoretically, by divorcing themselves from theatre’s larger ecology and history, this chapter discloses, by contrast, the extent to which the theatrical medium is always already ecological by dint of its occluded mineralogy.

Chapter 5: This chapter situates the American artist Deke Weaver’s long-term project The Unreliable Bestiary within the ecological politics of the Anthropocene. Weaver aims to create a performance for every letter of the English alphabet, with each letter representing an endangered species or threatened habitat. The performances he has made to date – Monkey (2009), Elephant (2010), Wolf (2013), Bear (2016–17), and Tiger (2019) – address the looming threat of the sixth great extinction by pairing the most fantastic flights of the animalized imagination with the most astonishing facts discovered by animal science. Reactivating and reconfiguring the medieval bestiary in this way allows Weaver to braid together an epistemology derived from the ‘squishy science’ of performance with an affect he calls ‘plain old wonder’, producing a new theatrical grammar for being in and with extinction and a new ethical framework for encountering our remaining animal others.

Chapter 13: This chapter traces the theatrum mundi (theatre as world) metaphor back to its technical and philosophical roots. By comparing iconographic sources from scientific texts with scenographic ones, the chapter follows the evolution of the notions of machine and wonder in the seventeenth century and argues that the material culture of theatre played an important role in the development of Cartesian physics and the new cosmology and, in particular, in the mechanization of the world picture. The chapter focuses on the relationship between Fontenelle, Descartes, and the engineer and architect Giacomo Torelli, whose scenography gained him the name of ‘the great sorcerer’. Paradoxically, it is by taking up Torelli’s design, combined with Descartes’s new definition of meteors, that Fontenelle manages to define a new type of ‘wonder’, scientific and no longer magical.

This chapter explores three dimensions of migrant experience in the host country. First, we focus on the individual level issues and challenges related identity, resilience, motivation to integrate/expectations. Much of the individual level struggles are closely related to human capital translation process (i.e., credential recognition or lack there of) and decisions regarding continuation vs. change of previously established career pathways. Next, we focus on the social aspect of the migrant experience. Social capital and specifically lack of local social capital as one of the more difficult aspects of the migrant experience. We discuss various ways in which migrants can go about seeking and connecting to locals and establishing relationships in the new country (e.g., mentoring, ethnic communities). Finally, the third critical aspect of the migrant experience is related to organizational integration. Organizational experiences vary based on the local culture and also the size and the type of organization. Commonly discussed issues are related to organizational entry and later integration and collaboration with local employees.

The chapter discusses the important role that repatriation plays in career development or an international assignee’s personal and professional career outcomes acquired, developed, and accumulated over time. Attention is devoted to understanding how different types of career resources and competencies, categorized as “knowing how”, “knowing whom”, and “knowing why”, are developed as a function of living and working in another country. The chapter continues by drawing on the traditional bounded and emerging proactive career perspectives to help us understand why returning home is often more complex and difficult than perceived. Next, the chapter examines repatriation “success” from both the organizational and the individual repatriate’s points of view, highlighting objective and subjective interpretations of career success. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the challenges facing the repatriation process at the individual-, team-, organizational-, and country-levels and suggests interventions that could be considered in an effort to improve the likelihood of repatriation success. Implications for future research are also discussed.

This chapter discusses expatriate recruitment sources, methods, and the expatriates’ motivations to work abroad. Then it examines expatriate selection criteria, methods, and how expatriates are selected in practice. The chapter also presents the variety of expatriate preparation methods, discusses expatriate training effectiveness, and expatriate preparation in practice. It concludes by considering future avenues of research. Overall, in the area of selection and preparation for international assignments there is good material for researchers to build on and a growing understanding of the key issues. Nevertheless, there remains here a rich field for exciting research in the future.

In order for an employee to help the organization achieve strategic success through his or her performance, he/she must work at optimal levels towards very clear and specific objectives. In other words, the organization must design and implement a performance management system (PMS) that empowers employees and allows them to work at optimal levels. However, a review of the related research shows but when it comes to expatriates, most organisations do not develop dedicated PMSs – instead, it seems that most organizations evaluate and manage expatriates on an ad-hoc basis, often leading to dissatisfaction with the outcomes and conduct of the PMS, and subsequent dip in performance levels and quality. In this chapter, we briefly trace the history of PMSs, with particular emphasis to PMSs related to expatriates, and discuss some recent PMS models. We further discuss additional contextual variables that should be incorporated into effective PMSs, and conclude by offering guidelines for designing an effective PMS for expatriates.

This chapter reviews the literature on the lynchpin of expatriate success and of global families – the expatriate partner. To better understand the adjustment and well-being of expatriate partners, we focused on three major correlates that represented partner, expatriate, and family aspects. We first identified various personal (i.e., demographic, traits, knowledge/skills/abilities/others, and attitudes/cognitions), relational, organizational, and assignment factors that are associated with the expatriate partner’s adjustment. For expatriate influences on partner adjustment and well-being, we considered both personal and job/assignment factors. For the family variables, we looked at the perspectives of both the partner and the expatriate. Through our analysis of these detected associations, we observed three major themes: crossover occurrences from partners to expatriates, the relationship between the partner and family dynamics, and under-researched topics relevant to partner adjustment. For each theme, we discuss what we currently know (or don’t know), relevant theoretical perspectives to advance our knowledge in these areas, and suggestions for future research.

This chapter addresses the following questions: Why and how do we need to rethink GM to enable it to master its future? What roles do GM professionals enact to refine their work and to make working abroad more attractive? Overall, this chapter explores the pressures that GM professionals are facing, provides insights into the roles of GM departments and develops a refined GM model. Notwithstanding some of the limitations that diverse contexts, diverging managerial objectives, lacking GM capabilities, and implementation difficulties present, it can be argued that smart, agile, flawless, and efficient GM work (SAFE GM) is at the core of a successful GM department. Smart organisational development and talent management; agile approaches to embrace a multitude of GM challenges successfully; flawless design of programme management and compliance approaches; and efficient ways to structure GM rewards, are leading to a professionalisation of global mobility work. Enacting this SAFE GM framework is likely to strengthen the position of GM departments in their organisation, making their work more strategic, operationally focussed and important.