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Introduction: The Psychology of Global Mobility

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The Psychology of Global Mobility

Part of the book series: International and Cultural Psychology ((ICUP))

Abstract

Globalization has magnified the salience of global mobility, for travelers and new settlers, host communities, policy-makers and social scientists alike. This book is a response to that challenge. Its contributions by leading thinkers crystallize a new and emerging field. Collectively the contributions argue that the Psychology of Global Mobility, like global mobility itself, is a pressing concern for Human Development. The book offers a useful response to the United Nations’ Human Development Report for 2009. This called for more multi-disciplinary approaches to understanding and enabling the human capabilities that both (i) drive and (ii) result from, global mobility. The book’s chapters analyze the historical, methodological and ethical context for mobility; its motivational substrates in personality, gender identity, economy, and climate change like disasters natural and man-made; mediating roles for cross-cultural adjustment via training, acculturation, inclusion and wellbeing; and mobility’s consequences for individual careers, equal opportunity, global connectivity via technology, and human poverty reduction. Human development, the book shows, is a dynamic product stemming significantly from motivation, adjustment and performance, occurring mutually between the more and less globally mobile.

Quando andate a casa, conoscete che cosa lasciate, ma non che cosa troverete

(When you leave your home, you know what you leave behind, but not what you will find)

– Old Italian Proverb

Where today are the Pequot? Where are the Narragansett, the Mohican, the Pokanoket, and many other once powerful tribes of our people? They have vanished before the avarice and the oppression of the White Man, as snow before a summer sun. Will we let ourselves be destroyed in our turn without a struggle, give up our homes, our country bequeathed to us by the Great Spirit, the graves of our dead and everything that is dear to us? I know you will cry with me Never! Never!

– Shawnee chief, Tecumseh (1811).

Sleep Not Longer, O Choctaws and Chickasaws,

from a speech before the Joint Council of the Choctaw and Chickasaw nations

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Outside of direct quotations and publication titles, throughout this book the term “new settler” is preferred over “immigrant”,” “emigrant” and “migrant” – which carry unwanted associations with racism and biological migration not new settlement. “Emigration” and “immigration” are useful for distinguishing outward from inward new settlement processes (and vice-versa).

Abbreviations

IOM:

International Association for Migration

n Ach:

Need for Achievement

HDR:

Human Development Report

UNDP:

United Nations Development Programme

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  1. Poverty Research Group, School of Psychology, Massey University, Auckland, New Zealand

    Stuart C. Carr

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    Stuart C. Carr

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Carr, S.C. (2010). Introduction: The Psychology of Global Mobility. In: Carr, S. (eds) The Psychology of Global Mobility. International and Cultural Psychology. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4419-6208-9_1

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