 In this topic we are going to discuss the role of in-patriots in international assignments. Now in-patriots are another type of employees who are sent on international assignment and the distinction is basically based on the definition. These are also employees who are sent on international assignments for a longer period of time. They are supposed to relocate from one country to the other. But because of the direction of relocation, they are called in-patriots. So let's take a look what are in-patriots. You know that ex-patriots are people who are sent from the parent country to the host country for subsidiary management. In-patriots are the other way around. They are the host country nationals which are sent from the host country to the parent country headquarter. Or they are third country nationals who are sent from a foreign location to a parent country usually which is a corporate headquarter of the multinational organization. So third country nationals who are not the host country nationals who are from some other country they are brought into the parent country headquarters and definitely host country nationals who are from the host country. They are sent from the host country to the parent country. For example, if an American multinational is operating in Pakistan they send Pakistani employees from Pakistan to America to work in the headquarters. So that is an in-patriot who moves from, they are HCNs and TCNs moving towards the parent country. Why they are appointed? They are expected to share the local contextual knowledge with the headquarter staff in order to facilitate effective corporate activities in these local markets. One of the reasons is that the local knowledge about that particular market that is something which needs to be transferred in a more effective manner. People coming from the parent country to the host country may not be able to transfer the knowledge so people from the host country are actually sent in the parent country to transfer the knowledge from the local markets and how things are done in the local country. They are socialized in the headquarter corporate culture and they learn from specific routines and behaviors that enable them to master management tasks within the organization. So this is another way around. One is that they are required to transfer the knowledge from the local market to the headquarters and the headquarters also trains them and inculcates in them the firm specific values which are important for the firm to build a corporate culture, a shared value system which can be transferred then globally. And as a result, inpatriates seem to act both as knowledge senders as well as receivers. So they send the knowledge from the local market to the headquarters and receive the knowledge from the headquarters to the local market. The drivers for recruiting inpatriates is number one desire to create a global core competency and a cultural diversity of strategic perspective in the top management team. So when you hire people from various different countries and you bring them to the headquarters, you train them over there, you are actually creating a diverse global core competency and then when you are developing those people from various different countries which we discussed in the geocentric approach where people are trained from every place and they are brought into the management pool so you are developing a strategically diverse management pool which brings people from all over the world and trains them and makes them capable of globally managing your firm and that makes them capable of actually fulfilling that statement which we say very frequently in international management and that is think global and act local. So only those people can think global and act local who are given global exposure but they also have the local knowledge to actually make a combination of global and local requirements. So that is one of the major driver of recruiting inpatriates. Then another important driver for recruiting inpatriates is the desire to provide career opportunities for high potential employees in the host countries which are the host country nationals and the third country nationals so this is also a part of your management values, your organizational values that you want to develop the carriers of people who have a potential and it doesn't matter and this is something which is consonant with the geocentric approach that you want to give the opportunity to every person who has got the ability and the national boundaries and national ethnicities they are not important if somebody has got the talent your organization has those type of values in which you develop the talent and career of people in a truly global manner. So that is another driver of recruiting inpatriates to your headquarters and another third important reason is that some locations are difficult in terms of quality of life and cultural adjustments so in order to manage your subsidiary business in locations which are difficult what you do is that you hire people from those locations you train them in your headquarters because you cannot send your own local people the parent country nationals to those difficult locations for example if somebody wants to operate a subsidiary in Afghanistan it is a difficult country and the situation is difficult in terms of cultural and security issues so rather than sending somebody to that country people from the same country they would be taken to the parent country headquarters and trained in the foreign location and then sent back so that they can manage the subsidiary that is operating in that particular difficult location so this is also an important driver of recruiting inpatriates to your parent headquarters