ABSTRACT
For many thousands of years people have had cross-border careers if we see ‘borders’ as ‘the edge or boundary of anything’ (Concise Oxford Dictionary, 1995). They have strayed outside their normal hunting grounds or started trading with other tribes, for example, Assyrian commercial organizations had a highly international spread four thousand years ago. Guided by a head office they would have subsidiaries, foreign and international workers and a strategy to seek ‘global’ markets and resources in the then ‘known’ world (Moore and Lewis, 1999). Based on a career definition such as Arthur et al.’s (1989a) as ‘an evolving sequence of a person's work experience over time’, Dickmann and Baruch (2011:7) have added an international perspective through specifying that the sequence needs to take place in more than one country. Given the fast pace of globalization of trade, production, supply chains, innovation and investment flows as well as the dramatic changes brought about by the internet enabling very broad, international social networks and information access, the world may indeed feel evermore like a ‘global village’ (MacLuhan, 1960).
