There have been many calls for new directions in IHRM research from within this tradition.
In particular, they ask that practitioners and researchers alike think about:
• the value of international assignments in terms of building individual social capital and individual careers relative to that of building organisational social capital (Collings, Scullion and Dowling, 2009);
• the role of expatriates and international mobility in brokering reverse transfers of knowledge (Corredoira and Rosenkopf, 2010);
• the mechanisms that condition variations in social capital and facilitate the transfer of knowledge, and to test the alternative governance mechanisms that may be applied and the social structures necessary for ‘integrative mechanisms’ for collaboration (Gooderham, Minbaeva and Pedersen, 2011);
• understanding expatriate networks and beginning to link this to the development of potentially superior cognition (Sparrow, 2012);
• social capital and knowledge transfer at the operational and middle-management levels of MNCs (Mäkelä, Björkman and Ehrnrooth, 2009).
Consider these questions from the point of view of an organisation you are familiar with.