ABSTRACT
Homer’s Odyssey is probably the first and certainly the most famous story of repatriation (Schütz, 1945). Return is the last step in the classical hero’s journey (Osland, 1995). But even though the repatriate is coming home, there is still a need for adjustment. As in Odysseus’s case, the situation in the home country is not what it was when the expatriate left, and the returnee, while relying on a static picture of the past, has changed too. Schütz points out that the fundamental mistake many repatriates make is to assume that reliance on the memories of the past will provide a good guide to the present and future. It may be even more difficult than that implies. Switching media, we can draw a message from Dorothy, the heroine of the Hollywood film The Wizard of Oz. After she has been in the magical Land of Oz for a while, Dorothy dreams of returning to her home in Kansas; as the audience, we are aware that what she dreams is a much more positive version of home than the reality that she experienced when she was there. People reinterpret their past and give it new or different meanings in light of their recent experiences (Schütz, 1945). This results in “the typical shock described by Homer” (Schütz, 1945: 369). To take account of this shock, Gullahorn and Gullahorn (1963) proposed an extension to the U-curve hypothesis and talked of a W-curve covering expatriation and repatriation in international assignments.
