Global talent responses to city internationalization: Expatriate strategies of navigating institutional practices of macro talent management

Abstract This article advances research at the intersection of macro talent management (TM) and the career capital of expatriates. It does so by reporting the findings of a qualitative study of self-initiated expatriates’ strategies of engaging the practices of a city-level TM institution to facilitate career capital formation. Strategies of engaging city-level practices of TM have diverse, at times paradoxical implications. Self-initiated expatriates employ strategies of engaging institutional practices to (1) support global career mobility without considerable adjustment, (2) develop local networks and careers in the host country, and (3) even actively escaping an expanding sphere of international institutions. The article explains how dynamics of career capital formation occur as (un)anticipated consequences of being exposed to institutional logics of adopted TM practices. Corporate and market-oriented logics of TM realized in an international city institution ambiguously combined with community logics, for some self-initiated expatriates resembling those of traditional expatriate institutions.