You are now one of us - negotiating ‘fitting in’ in the workplace

Abstract

This state-of-the-art review focuses on issues around accessing and integrating into the workplace. In the globalized economy, mobility for work purposes is not a new phenomenon. The knowledge economy and its emphasis on the production and circulation of information and intellectual capital is directly related to mobility, which in a number of sectors is associated with entering the profession, securing better work conditions and moving up the career ladder. Particularly research on the modern workplace in Europe (which constitutes our own geographical areas of interest) has shown that an international workforce constitutes the daily reality in most organizations. Boundaries of the past, such as global/local, public/private or small/large, have little bearing on employees’ current demographics (Angouri and Piekkari 2015). Indeed, mobile professionals have become the norm and are often ‘invisible’. They are not sitting comfortably under the expat label of the 1980s and 1990s which denoted a linear move from place A to place B (and back) and a privileged lifestyle. Nor are they categorized as economic migrants, a label often used interchangeably with other labels to indicate forced displacement such as asylum seekers or refugees. One can argue that these are typically matters of terminology; however, they usefully indicate that professional mobility is a complex matter that cannot easily be explained using existing theories and categorizations.