Expatriates as a Knowledge Sharing Mechanism - A case study of A Professional Service Firm

摘要

Professional service firms are gaining more attention in the academic field today due tothe improved importance of the sector in the developed world. When professionalservice firms internationalize, expatriation is a common tool for transferring companyspecific tacit and explicit knowledge, unique for the firm. Previous scholars havehowever not, to our knowledge, taken the transfer of knowledge back to the home officeinto consideration; this thesis aims at describing the flow of knowledge in bothdirections, managed by the expatriates.To investigate the management of knowledge in internationalizing PSFs, onemanagement consultant firm is studied and three qualitative, in-depth interviews are heldwith personnel from both the home office as well as the subsidiary, situated in China.Thereafter, this is analyzed with theories regarding transnational corporations,knowledge, knowledge management, expatriates and professional service firms.The main findings suggest that expatriates do function as an important knowledgesharing mechanism for mainly explicit knowledge. Tacit knowledge is also accumulatedby operating on a foreign market, however our findings indicate that this knowledge istoo difficult to spread throughout the whole organization, hence it is kept embedded inthe expatriates.These findings are finally discussed and suggestions for future research regarding thetransfer of knowledge with the use of real-time information technology, retention ofexpatriates, choice of knowledge sharing strategy and firm size as an influence onknowledge sharing, are put forward.