This chapter explores what is involved in global assignments, from moving abroad to returning home. Topics include: the purposes and types of global assignments; potential benefits and challenges of living and working globally; dealing with culture shock; choosing an acculturation strategy; and successful repatriation

Ellison’s reflections on his stay in Rome betray the awareness of living in a “barely controlled chaos” (CE 29), even in “exile” (Bellow Papers). Notably, Ellison was reluctant to associate himself with the community of black expatriates in Europe and with any conversation on black world cultures, a category connected to the anticolonial movements and the cultural politics of the Communist Internationale. This chapter looks at the tension between the private dimension of living abroad and the writer’s comments on current international events, to foreground an understanding of cultural identity much closer to what soon afterward will be termed African Diasporic cultures.

Chapter 8 examines how veterans worked to reassert their wartime connection to peacetime Việt Nam. Many veterans returned to Việt Nam with strong feelings of diasporic connection to the physical space of the country, feelings that were often challenged by local practices, national memories, and the effects of the passage of time. This chapter explores how veterans negotiated that challenge by engaging in nostalgic practices – such as recreating “bar culture,” expressing nostalgic discontent at the corruption of peacetime Việt Nam, and establishing hierarchies of diasporic belonging among the expatriate communities – before turning to explore how veterans justified their presence in Việt Nam, showing how they harnessed Australian and American wartime culture, values, and knowledge in order to establish their authority. This chapter concludes by analyzing how Australian and US returnees made sense of their return to Việt Nam as living legacies of war.

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.

In this chapter, we attempt to summarize the vast literature on evaluation of cross-cultural training programs. We start by discussing theoretical frameworks that can be gainfully employed for assessing the effectiveness of training programs. Evaluation frameworks have stressed the need to consider affective, cognitive and behavioral dimensions of training and the need for evaluations to assess economic, social and psychological outcomes. Theoretical frameworks suggest whether, how and why training programs are effective. Our review, however, also suggests that there is a large gap between optimal training evaluations and the reality of existing empirical research. We present empirical research on the effectiveness of CCT for outcomes grouped according to the Kirkpatrick’s four levels of training evaluation. Best practices for training design and delivery are also presented. Finally, we review the role of individual differences in cross-cultural training success, basically underscoring the need for an aptitude by treatment interaction.

The root of the problem plaguing the international system was the bond of allegiance that tied a person to her state. How did that bond form? What happened to that bond when a person lived far beyond the boundaries of her state? In a world of migration, trade, and international investment how would that bond be defined? Chapter 2 is about that bond of allegiance and how it was reconceptualized in an age of globalization. This chapter has three arguments. First, that the collapse of the mercantilist empires in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries created a crisis of allegiance in which bonds were multiplied and stretched, entangling international politics. Second, that both people and corporations instrumentalized their nationality as a way to obtain a kind of insurance in a volatile world. Third, several states and the international law community recognized this instrumentalization and attempted to curb it only to run into irreconcilable hemispheric disputes over how to define nationality. This irreconcilable hemispheric dispute effectively destroyed nationality as a form of viable protection in a globalized world and would lead to the proliferation of international legal regimes in the twentieth century.