ABSTRACT
This conclusion presents some closing thoughts on concepts discussed in preceding chapters of this book. The book endeavours to understand and to further theorize the practiced cosmopolitanism of corporate expatriates. It is, thus, situated within the ongoing scholarly debate about the relationship between mobility and cosmopolitanism, both considered key characteristics of the second modernity. The book focuses on intensive ethnographic case studies of expatriate managers, most of them high-ranking executives assigned to foreign subsidiaries to perform demanding coordination tasks within their multinational corporations (MNCs). The ethnographic case studies of German and US-American corporate expatriates show that the ways in which they deal with difference are far too complex to be subsumed under the polar opposites of being either cosmopolitans or anti-cosmopolitans. Corporate expatriates differ from the figure of the classical stranger in significant ways. They are caught in the paradoxical situation of simultaneously being strangers and autochthons.
