gender differential paper IJCRB

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INTERDISCIPLINARY JOURNAL OF CONTEMPORARY RESEARCH IN BUSINESS
JUNE 2011
VOL 3, NO 2
seems important to satisfy expatriates in their professional as well as private situation in
Denmark for a long or even permanent time.
Nevertheless, expatriates seem to get considerably less attention and support by the Danish
government and society than other groups of foreigners. This is even more astonishing when
considering the Danish immigration statistics. In 2008 about 6,000 foreigners came to Denmark
for asylum or family reunion, the groups which are in the focus of the political and public
discussion of integration. However, in the same year about 70,000 (Nygaard, 2009) foreigners
came for work or study reasons and, still, they are rarely included in the integration activities of
the government. Expatriates, just as any other groups of foreigners, bring their cultural heritage
with them, which will come into contact with the host country culture. These cultural differences
might lead to problems and could be one of the reasons for the often reported ‘failures’ of
expatriates on international assignments (see e.g. Forster 1997). Expatriates are primarily
business people having a job to do. A great part of expatriate literature deals with expatriates
doing business in foreign cultures, how they fail and can be trained to do better. However,
expatriates are also private individual shaving to cope with the changes in their live and with
their personal situation in a foreign country. In this research, therefore, their integration as a
private individual is of interest, rather than their skills of doing business in a foreign country.
Nevertheless, the integration of the expatriate as a private individual could be of high interest for
a variety of stakeholders. This could be businesses relocating or employing foreign workers as
well as countries relying on the expatriates’ knowledge and skills. Hence, in order to predict
possible problem areas, it seems important to understand the psychological and social processes
an expatriate goes through when living abroad (Morley et al. 2006).
This inclusion of the psychological aspect of cultural barriers and the interdependence of
willingness and adaptation has not been widely discussed in the literature (Selmer 2000). It
seems as if the literature tends to assume that expatriates are willing to adjust and therefore focus
on the ability to do so, on the underlying processes or on the obstacles that they might face.
However, especially expatriates that come for a limited time to a foreign country might not be
willing to change; rather they might want to remain a home country orientation (Berry et al.
2002; Gudykunst and Kim 2003). In order to successfully retain expatriates, it is important that
they feel satisfied with their situation. Hence, knowing what makes them satisfied is crucial. In
order to integrate them, knowing whether they want to integrate, what would make them feel
integrated and how this could be achieved seems fundamental. Accordingly, the depth of desired
contact with the dominant society and culture needs to be studied. This paper wants to make a
contribution by giving expatriates the chance to explain what integration means to them, whether
and how they want to become part of the local culture and society and how they experience this
process of integration in Denmark.
Literature Review
Expatriate research has had a growing interest, especially due to the rapidly increasing amount of
multinational corporations and globalization of business (Morley et al. 2006). Furthermore, an
enormous amount of academic literature regarding cultural contacts exists. Parts of this literature
deal with expatriates specifically but also literature on immigrants and other sojourners has
delivered important insights for this research. Studies about expatriates or other cross cultural
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