ABSTRACT
Within management of international staff, issues related to selection, training and expatriate adjustment have received plenty of attention in international HRM research (Mendenhall et al. 1987; Sparrow and Hiltrop 1994). The repatriation phenomenon, however, is still largely left empirically unexplored or is approached from such a variety of perspectives (e.g. Adler 1981; Harvey 1989; Black 1992) that no coherent research programme can be established. As a result, our understanding of what is happening in repatriation, what factors are behind it and how they operate is very limited. The need to increase theoretical and empirical understanding of repatriation is further multiplied by the immediate re-entry problems with which the HR function is coping (e.g. Hamill 1989).
