Expatriate academics: An era of higher education internationalization

Expatriate academics make up a rapidly growing professional group that is driven by the emergence of an international academic labor market, international staff mobility, and growing numbers of international students. Hence, academics often relocate for job reasons. A reason for that is that they can be characterized by having a high non-organization-specific capital, which makes them particularly mobile in the international labour market. Most research of expatriates has up to now focused on business expatriates. Recently, however, a number of studies of expatriate academics have been published. Such studies are needed since there is evidence that universities are investing a great amount of resources in hiring and retaining international academic staff. It can be argued that the increasing numbers of expatriate academics could make human resource management in universities more problematic, as they present growing challenges for academic institutions since expatriate academics may in some aspects function differently from their local counterparts and also from other types of expatriates. Therefore, it is important to acquire knowledge of this under-researched professional group not the least since this group contributes highly to the productivity of the university sector. Besides definitions of expatriate academics and their detailed descriptions, this chapter also features their work engagement, adjustment, work-related outcomes and reasons to relocate, as well as a research agenda on future research on expatriate academics.