Purpose – Although several authors have suggested that host country nationals (HCNs) play an important role in the management of expatriates (e.g. Toh and DeNisi, 2003; Farh et al. , 2010), research has also suggested that this relationship is not always good, and the flow of critical information...

This paper proposes a methodology for governing expatriate assignments in the context of corporate-level objectives.The approach taken is to envisage expatriate managerial assignments within the theoretical framework of agency theory and the knowledge-based view of the firm. The paper begins...