International Migration, Labour Mobility and HRM

This chapter presents to the generalist HRM reader a background to migration studies in order to understand the challenges and opportunities that labour mobility creates for organisations. Theoretical, empirical and historical tools are provided to interpret the context of contemporary labour migration from a critical perspective. Despite the growth of mobility and its greater significance at societal level, scholarship on this subject in HRM and cognate disciplines remains quantitatively and qualitatively limited. Here we employ an interdisciplinary approach, which highlights the social, gendered and multinational dimensions of labour mobility. This review affords a more realistic picture of migration patterns and possibly a better understanding of the demands it makes on organisations.