 High students, in this topic and the subsequent ones, we are going to discuss a very important aspect of international human resource management, which is re-entry and carrier issues. You know that when people are sent on international assignments, that is the process of expatriation. When it creates, when they are sent on international assignments, obviously they are not sent permanently. They are also supposed to come back to the home country after serving on the international assignment. In the previous topics, you would remember that we had discussed that there could be different duration of the international assignment ranging from a short period of time of one month to up till three to five years. But certainly it is a process in which the person has to come back. So, the coming back of the expatriates is a part of the expatriation process. The coming back of the expatriates is termed as repatriation, repatriation back to the home country. So, the process of bringing the expatriate back to the home country is called repatriation and repatriation is actually a part of the expatriation process automatically. When you send somebody on an international assignment, when you send somebody outside, it is a part of the process that that person will have to come back in most of the cases. In international human resource management, the topic of expatriation and the process of expatriation considered only the going out of the employee from parent country to the post country. There was not much emphasis given on the coming back to the home country process. So, although repatriation is an inherent automatic process of the expatriation process, it was not given due importance and was not considered to be an important process of the expatriation process. But why? Because one of the reasons is that employees were rarely sent on international assignments let's say 30 to 50 years back because the multinationals did not operate on that huge level of globalization and they did not have that much of international impact. Usually organizations stayed within a certain kind of area. For example, organizations belonging to the European area stayed within Europe, belonging to American area stayed within America, belonging to Chinese area stayed within that area. So, the process of expatriation was not that huge because of which this part of the process of repatriation remained unnoticed. But now that the globalization process, because of the globalization, the expatriation process has become one of the major highlights of the organizations of the multinationals. Therefore, now the scholarly attention is also being given to the process of repatriation because it carries a very huge important value how a person is repatriated back to the home country. You must have heard that pre-departure training in expatriate training, about the host country culture, cultural awareness training and cultural shock is also heard by you, you have read about it in your course too. But this will be very interesting for you. Cultural shock is not only in the host country, when expatriate repatriates back to their home country, then it also feels like a cultural shock. So, when you look at the expatriation process, this process inherently involves the process of re-entry or repatriation which was previously neglected in the previous scholarly literature and also by the organization's managerial policies. So, you can see in this diagram that the process of expatriation starts from recruitment selection, then the pre-departure training takes place, then the expatriation management also takes place on the assignment and then finally the expatriation process involves re-entry or re-assignment in home country back home. And this is something which is ongoing between, I mean when you are on the assignment you are also being prepared for coming back and you are also the organization as well as the individual is in a process of planning what the person is supposed to do when he or she comes back to the home country. So, I was talking about the very interesting fact that we usually talk about cultural shock. When a person comes from a, from one country to a host country, we talk about cultural shock that when you go to a new culture, you feel a cultural shock because of the different traditions, different cultures, different values, different norms, different ways of living. So, this is a very interesting fact that when you come back to your home country after four, five years, then you also get a cultural shock because some things come out of your subconscious that what are the things that are managed in your home country. So, this is called reverse culture shock or re-entry shock. For example, I would give you my own example that when I went for PhD in UK over there the traffic laws and safety laws are very strict. So you are supposed to wear a belt, you are supposed to make your child sit in the back seat. So, when I came back after spending four years in UK, to Pakistan, it took me a few years to get back to my home country and I had a small daughter who was four years old. She was used to this fact that you are supposed to sit in the back seat because it is dangerous that you make your child sit in your lap in the front seat. When I came back after spending four years in UK to Pakistan, it was a cultural shock for me that and whenever I observed parents making their children sit in their laps in the front seat without wearing a seat belt, I would say, oh my God, they are doing something which is so unsafe and they shouldn't be doing something like so. I had gone through a kind of conditioning which had made me learn certain kind of behaviors which were new for me in my home country when I came back. So it is something which you experience that when you learn new things, new behaviors in a new culture, when you come back to your home country, the behaviors which are different and you have learned them and you don't see them being applied in your own culture, it is something which brings a cultural shock to you. So this is what is the reverse culture shock or re-entry shock. Repatriation is seen as the last step in the international assignment process, but this is not the last step. This is actually the beginning of the person's re-entry into the home country environment and if the re-patriation process is managed well, the person would be able to contribute effectively towards the organization in a more effective way. If the re-patriation process is not taken care of in an effective manner, the person could lose motivation, he could lose interest, he could feel frustrated and that could actually lead to retention problems and turnover intentions. And this is something that we are also going to discuss in a coming case study in the coming topics. So re-patriation is a very important aspect of the expatriation process and must be dealt with by the organization in a systematic manner.