Female expatriates from Swedish MNCs in Japan: barriers and adjustments

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This thesis purpose is to gain a deeper understanding of female expatriates working within Swedish multinational corporations located in Japan. The purpose is achieved by describing, exploring and to some extent explain the female expatriates' faced barriers and the factors affecting their adjustments to living and working in Japan. By having a qualitative research approach and studying four cases, whom we performed telephone interviews with, we have been able to collect our empirical data. In this data we found evidence that the barriers faced by female expatriates working in Japan can be associated to their gender, however these do not affect the work performances of the expatriate. The barriers that are relevant are of more individual characteristics, such as the move to another country, language skills, age, housing, socialization, not having enough experiences, and work. Moreover, the factors affecting the female expatriates' adjustments are the factors affecting the building of relationships and the source and type of social interaction and support. These factors can be personal characteristics, the job situation and location, location of residence, cultural norms, language skills, support from family/colleagues/host nationals/other expatriates/local functionaries, and the receiving of emotional/ informative/instrumental support. Lastly, although there ar...