Privileged Migration and the Family: Family matters in corporate expatriation

The corporate expatriate is seen as being able to transverse the world with ease, making them privileged. Yet this visualisation focuses on an individual as opposed to the family. In this chapter, we explore existing literature that frames the motivations and experiences of family members, highlighting how this literature moves the family from the periphery to the centre of our understanding of corporate expatriate mobilities. Through the chapter we show that this literature, despite its emphasis on the relational, could go further in considering the temporal in understanding the family’s role in corporate expatriate migration. Drawing from two separate studies which interviewed Australian and British migrants who undertook expatriate assignments in Singapore, the chapter demonstrates how corporate expatriate mobility is negotiated through an entanglement between different family member’s journeys through time and space. However, this does little to contest the notion that corporate expatriate mobility is privileged.