Does the colour of your skin affect the success of your expatriation?

Our academic studies of global mobility have begun to be more sophisticated. We have gone beyond assuming that the only international workers that mattered were the expatriates sent by their companies; we now recognise that many individuals make their own way to live and work in another country and they all need managing. We have begun to distinguish between expatriates and other migrants, not on the basis of popular prejudice (“expatriates, good; migrants, bad”) but on the basis of careful analysis of conceptual constructs. We have gone beyond assuming that all expatriates are highly qualified managers and technical specialists, and we now recognise that there are people doing every kind of work in countries that are not their own. We no longer believe that people who move between countries fit into two simple categories of those experts that we need to run our international businesses and those who are doing the jobs that our smart locals are no longer prepared to do.

None of this is new, of course. These are all groups of people that have been moving around the world for centuries and managers have been working with them all that time. And they are all groups of people who have been much studied in other literatures, such as politics, economics, human geography and migration studies. What is new is the attention being paid to these issues in the business and management literature and the widening understanding of how important human resource management is for all these internationally mobile individuals and for the businesses they work in.
   
So, we now have research into a much wider range of modes of international working. We continue to study expatriates, but we also study people who are just in the country for a few weeks or months. We also research international commuters, people on regular fly-in-fly-out contracts and frequent business travellers. We are now beginning to examine the issues involved in permanent settlement in another country. In every case, for the individuals concerned work is vital and the organisations in the rich countries will have to become smarter at the paradoxical skills of thinking about how we can use the full range of international workers while at the same time understanding that each subgroup may need to be managed differently.

To assist with this latter endeavour, research has begun to explore, for example, the differences in the experiences of (and therefore the management of) qualified expatriates and qualified settlers, between male and female workers, between married and single internationally mobile workers and between heterosexual and homosexual workers. One characteristic that has been noticeably absent from the research has been skin colour. We still tend to discuss all expatriates or all business travellers without mentioning their skin colour, perhaps because we make the assumption that they are all white people ...

In many countries there is a strong correlation between country of origin and the kinds of work that international workers can find. Generally speaking, if you are from a rich western country, you are more likely to be in a managerial job; if you are from a poor Asian or African country you are more likely to be a security guard, a nanny, a care worker or a building site labourer. But what about people who are from western countries, with good university qualifications, but who are black? For them, unlike for white westerners, the visible signs and the invisible characteristics may point in different directions. 

Research has been conducted into highly qualified westerners in academic jobs in the United Arab Emirates (a good place to research these issues as one a tenth of the population there are local UAE citizens - the rest are from outside the country). Dr Milena Tekeste interviewed black women among this privileged group. They are in an interesting position: because they are western foreigners working in senior positions in academic institutions they have high status; but because they are women with black skin, they do not look like the typical high status foreigner.

Tekeste adds to the evidence that being a woman makes almost no difference to career success in a foreign country. There may be some evidence that women in fact make better expatriates than men, but the differences seem to be marginal. The research does not extend to other categories of international worker, but there seems to be little reason not to assume that the findings would be similar. 

Being black did make a difference though. The evidence was that, although there were cases of sig-nificant success, many of these academics (and academic managers) had more difficulties in being listened to and in getting good work and promotions than their white counterparts. They also had more difficulties outside work: it was not unknown, for example, for a famous professor, waiting at the school gates to collect her child, being assumed to be a nanny and being told, brusquely, to look after a couple of other children while their mothers went off for a chat. I leave the reader to imagine the response ... What was interesting about these cases, in and out of the work environment, was that the perpetrators of the prejudice were not the UAE Arabs, but other (white) westerners.  

There is obvious learning here for western international workers if they are women or if they are black. But there are also messages for HRM specialists. Assuming that the role involves generating the best results from all the people in our purview, we need to be more aware of the issue of skin colour, more prepared to discuss it, and more prepared to take specific action to reduce the manifestations of prejudice among those with power and to help those who may suffer from such prejudice. There is room for a lot more research by academics here and a lot more attention from HRM specialists.