Expatriate Staffing in International Financial Centres : London, 1998

The aims of the study were:<br> to advance our theoretical understanding of why financial transnational corporations (TNCs) still require British professional and managerial expatriates to be posted to global financial centres (GFCs) in these times of rapid improvements in information technology (IT), and how such labour accumulates knowledge through becoming embedded in an expatriate lifestyle, undertaken in particular networks and spaces;<br> to collect a new and unique set of quantitative and qualitative data on the existence of British expatriate transnational communities from both TNCs and expatriate themselves, in London, Singapore and New York City;<br> to contribute to the development of methodology in migration studies and the new economic geography/sociology by adopting a multi-method approach.<br> In order to address these research aims, the project had seven major inter-linking objectives:<br> to create a new synthesis of migration studies and the new economic geography/sociology by dovetailing their theoretical writings;<br> to investigate the magnitude of British expatriates who move between London and other GFCs, through the use of a postal questionnaire survey;<br> to explore the strategies of London based financial TNCs in their use of expatriation by interviewing Directors of Human Resources (DHRs) in advanced producer services;<br> to use focus group research to provide a study of London-based repatriated labour;<br> to collect unique data through a combination of semi-structured interview surveys and time-space diaries, thus providing an original insight into the networks of British expatriates in Singapore and New York City.