Work-related mobility has brought new conditions of action for individuals and organizations, as well as new managerial challenges for in and of organizations. This reports the outcomes of a study that analyzed the implications of business expatriations as contemporary global mobility setting. Empirical analytical support is given by 24 individual cases observed in the context of five international companies, born or present in Portugal, considered as a semi-peripherical economy. Results suggest that, as a lived experience, being or becoming an expatriate in a company can correspond to a work and life situation permeable to the experience of a sense of contradiction, diffluence and caesura, a circumstance that is associated with inherent objective attributes of an expatriation as contemporary global work arrangement. As research results suggest, this can be linked with short earlier international experience and employee exposure to international work settings, and somewhat aversive mobility-related attitudes, in what concerns job-related resource preservation dynamics. Three expatriate willingness profiles (conformist, protean, disrupted) and six attributes (e.g., permanent temporariness, multiple allegiances, role discontinuity, work-life imbalances, ill-managed return expectations) are described and discussed to this regard, as operators that contribute to differentiate worker agency and mobility subjective experiences.

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Global work,Expatriates,Worker agency