Abstract

From a historic perspective, examining 55 years of research, from the 1960s to the 2010s, supplemented by an initial overview of essential academic books on expatriates, 1497 research articles are identified and categorized into 27 major themes and 22 minor themes. Some of the latter are classified as ‘hot’, that is, those that in the future could become major themes. Investigating the scholars behind the quickly growing volume of research on expatriates, it is shown that a few individuals have dominated this development, due to the development of research themes and specific personal circumstances. It is argued that academic research on expatriates has a great future since the long-term trend of the annual average per decade of published academic research articles is increasing at a rapid rate and this is also the trend for the annual average of research articles on expatriates per decade of the major themes. However, the future may not look like the history, as it seldom does, since the main impact may come from new trends in global mobility, international work and changing conditions for such endeavours.