Chapter 1: Enhancing Absorptive Capacity and Management Knowledge Transfer Through Host Country Workforce Training: Lessons From Sacagawea and Squanto

An increasing trend promoting strategic knowledge management in multinational enterprises (MNEs) is based on the assumption that competitive advantage is to be enjoyed by organizations that widely distribute knowledge and capability throughout their internal units and to all employees, rather than entrusting knowledge and decision-making capability to only a relatively few executives and managers (Dixon, 2000; Takeuchi & Nonaka, 2004). Traditionally, expatriates have been sent abroad for diverse purposes, primarily for providing direct supervisory control of international operations but also to promote expatriate development and broader organization development (Edstrom & Galbraith, 1977). Yet as we increasingly become a global information economy where effective knowledge acquisition, transfer, and application are crucial, there has been a dramatic change in perceptions of the role of the expatriate manager (Harzing, 2001; Hocking, Brown, & Harzing, 2004; Doz, Santos, & Williamson, 2001). By means of their international assignments, expatriates are able to transfer knowledge from headquarters to the foreign subsidiary for strategic control purposes, and also can acquire new potentially valuable knowledge and know-how from the foreign operation to be transferred back to headquarters and throughout the MNE’s global operations (Downes & Thomas, 1999, 2000; Dunning, 2003; Riusala & Suutari, 2004).