Abstract: | Expatriate assignees represent a critical node in most international organizations' networks, and exploring and documenting the experiences of these assignees is important from both the organizational and individual perspective. Subsumed under the theme “International Assignments and Global Careers,” this special issue of Thunderbird International Business Review brings together a complement of selected papers originally presented at the Seventh Conference on International Human Resource Management hosted at the University of Limerick in June 2003. This introduction briefly explores the contemporary context and rationale for the international assignment in order to frame and position the subsequent contributions, which deal with, among other things, knowledge transfer, recruitment, staffing, competencies, and structural specificities in international assignments and global careers. © 2004 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. |