Do three years make a difference? An updated review and analysis of self-initiated expatriation

Self-initiated expatriates (SIEs) were initially described by Inkson et al. (J World Bus 32:351–368, 1997) as individuals who move abroad on their own volition, with personal funding, oriented towards development and career goals. After almost two decades of research, it is imperative to review the knowledge that has been developed and identify future areas of intervention. Doherty (Int J Manag Rev 15:447–469, 2013. doi:10.1111/ijmr.12005) initiated the review and this paper aims to update it and explore some unapproached aspects. Five different data bases were targeted and searched for peer-reviewed articles published in English, between 1997 and 2014, which recognized self-initiated expatriation as a distinguished form of mobility and used this terminology in the title and/or keywords list. A total of 94 articles met these inclusion criteria, 45 of which were published between 2012 and 2014. By systematically analyzing them, it was observed a surpassing growth in the number of published articles in the last 3 years. This signalizes an increase of the academic interest in studying the SIEs all over the world, involving bidirectional moves between developed and developing countries. The constructs identified by Doherty (2013) at the three different levels (micro, meso and macro) continued to be explored, using qualitative or quantitative approaches. Besides this, a multi-informant approach has been adopted in some studies, while others focused on concept clarification, taking into consideration some of Doherty’s (2013) suggestions for future research. Three years of research made an enormous contribution to the development of knowledge about SIEs, but some aspects can be further explored; hence they are identified and thoroughly discussed.