‘Hidden’ expatriates: international mobility in the United Arab Emirates as a challenge to current understanding of expatriation

• Author: Chris Brewster,Washika Haak‐Saheem
• Date: 01 July 2017
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/1748-8583.12147
• Published date: 01 July 2017

‘Hidden’expatriates: international mobility in the

United Arab Emirates as a challenge to current

understanding of expatriation

Washika Haak-Saheem ,College of BusinessAdministration, Universityof Dubai

Chris Brewster,Departmentof Management, University of Vaasa

Human Resource Management Journal, Vol 27,no 3, 2017, pages 423–439

Expatriates are often assumed to have enhanced terms and conditions and, because that makes them

expensive, to be in key managerial or technical specialist roles. Employees who come from abroad and

are in more manual or even menial roles are usually referred to as ‘migrants’. However, there are millions

of people around the world who are not migrants, their intended sojourn in a foreign country is seen by

them and their employers as temporary, but their employment contracts are far from advantageous

compared with those of locals. These ‘hidden’expatriates are brought into focus in the emerging Arab Gulf

States. In some of these countries, the population consists mainly of expatriates, with the local population a

small minority: These expatriates include many in lower-management or manual or menial jobs. We

demarcate these expatriates from organisationally assigned expatriates, self-initiated expatriates and

migrants. We use qualitative data from such expatriates in the United Arab Emirates to explore the issues

this raises for governments, employers and the expatriates –and for our understanding of the phenomenon

of expatriation.

Contact: Washika Haak-Saheem, Collegeof Business Administration, University of Dubai, PO Box

14143, Dubai, UAE. Email: wsaheem@ud.ac.ae

Keywords: expatriation; hidden expatriates; Arab Gulf countries; United Arab Emirates;

Emiratisation; contextual perspective

INTRODUCTION

Given the constantgrowth of globalisation and itspolitical and economic implications,

the process and management of expatriation have been a key issue in international

HRM (IHRM). Earlystudies researched employeesassigned from their headquarters,

usually in developed countries, to international operations (e.g. Tung, 1998; Adler, 2002;

Hechanova et al., 2003) and, usually implicitly, defined ‘expatriates’as those categorised as

such by their employers and enjoying advantageous terms and conditions of employment

(Lan, 2011). In addition to these organisationally assigned expatriates (AEs), Suutari and

Brewster (2000) extended the definition to include self-initiated expatriates (SIEs), i.e.

individuals who had made their own way to a job in another country and who were not

employed on expatriate terms and conditions. More recent research accords increased

interest toward migrants (Al Ariss and Crowley-Henry, 2013) to advance our understanding

of international work experience.

Fundamental to all definitions of expatriation are four assumptions (Suutari and Brewster,

2000; Biemann and Andresen, 2010; Andresen et al., 2013; Haslberger and Vaiman, 2013;

Cerdin and Selmer,2014). Expatriates must

HUMAN RESOURCEMANAGEMENT JOURNAL, VOL27, NO 3, 2017 423

©2017 John Wiley& Sons Ltd

Pleasecite this articlein press as: Haak-Saheem,W.and Brewster, C. (2017)‘‘Hidden’expatriates:internationalmobilityin the United ArabEmirates as a

challengeto current understandingof expatriation’.HumanRes ource Management J ournal 27: 3, 423–439

doi: 10.1111/1748-8583.12147

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•be relocated to a country of which they are not a citizen;

•intend to be there for a year or more but for their staynot to be permanent;

•have a regular job in the host country; and

•be skilled or professional employees.

It is this final assumption that we challenge in this article.

The literaturehas applied the term ‘expatriate’to a breadth of distinct formsof international

transfer acrossthe globe. In addition to the AEs dispatchedby large multinational enterprises,

there is now a rich theoretical discussion on alternative forms of international experience,

including SIEs (Andresen et al., 2013; Haslberger and Vaiman, 2013), migrants (Al Ariss and

Crowley-Henry, 2013), short-term assignees (Tahvanainan et al., 2005), business travellers and

others (Konopaske et al., 2009; Andresen et al., 2014). Not all of these fall within the usually

understooddefinition of expatriates:for example, migrants arrive in the hostcountry intending

to stay, short-term assignees tend to stay for less than 6 months and certainly not more than a

year, and business travellers do not relocate to the country at all. These are internationally

mobile individuals but not expatriates.

For the expatriates themselves, given the increasing research interest, definitions and

attempts at categorisation have tended to be non-analytical, increasing the lack of clarity and

ambiguity (Baruch et al., 2013). Furthermore, as Suddaby (2010) and Vaiman and Brewster

(2015) point out, much moreattention needs to be paid to contextual conditions impacting on

given constructs (Whetten, 1989; Gergen, 2012).

The particular case of the Arab Gulf States provides a less often studied context for

expatriation–and challenges one of the four taken-for-granted assumptions about expatriates.

More specifically, our focus here is on expatriation in the United ArabEmirates (UAE), which

constitutes –along with Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Saudi Arabia and Qatar –the Gulf

CooperationCouncil (GCC). Locals form only a minorityof the population in the UAE. Recent

research revealsthat 99 per cent of employeesin the private sector areforeigners (Al-Waqfi and

Forstenlechner, 2014). Although there has been some analysis of the demographic

characteristics within the Gulf States (Chammartin, 2004), this has not yet explored the

implication of these demographic challenges for HRM. The dominance of the international

workforce across a wide range of jobs constitutes a unique environment challenging the

existing expatriation literature. Rapid economic and social development has created a large

demand for foreign employees in the Gulf in general, and the UAE in particular attracts a

wide range of individuals across all sections and levels of the economy. In these

circumstances, expatriation has distinct implications for HR theory and practice that we

explore in this article.

To do this, our article explores the different types of expatriation in the UAE, as follows.

First, we outline the key assumptions underlying the notion of expatriates in the extant

literature. Then we examine the position in the UAE. Next we explain the methodology we

used to explorethese issues. Given the lackof attention to the ‘hidden’expatriateswe expose in

this study, we conductedqualitative research toidentify their issues and clarifythe distinctions

between types of expatriate in the UAE. Thenwe present our findings, and finally, we discuss

the challenge of our analysis for theory and practice and draw conclusions.

LITERATURE ON EXPATRIATION

Expatriation has been a significant issue in the scholarly study of business and management

since the 1960s (Boudin, 1960; Oberg, 1963) and is important in international business (Black

Expatriationin the United Arab Emirates

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©2017 John Wiley& Sons Ltd.