Localization of staff in a hostile context: an exploratory investigation in Afghanistan
研究了在阿富汗等敌对环境中，国际组织是否将专业岗位本地化的决策，发现安全、腐败、公正性等社会和组织层面的新影响因素，并强调利用本地人力资源构建可持续竞争优势。
Hostile environments pose a distinct threat to international organizations and their staff and yet they are under researched within the literature on IHRM. Localization of staff may present a means to manage some of the risks and also to provide the resources needed to achieve competitive advantage. Drawing on the resource-based view and institutional theory, we explored resource- and capability-based and institutional influences in relation to the decision of whether to localize professional staff in a hostile environment (Afghanistan). Using in-depth semi-structured interviews with representatives from four organizations in Afghanistan, our investigation identified new influences on localization at the societal and organizational level. These include ongoing security issues as well as influences on localization such as corruption, impartiality and the need for outside experiences as well as perspectives not identified in previous work. In addition, we emphasize the importance of both picking appropriate valuable local human resources and using appropriate internal capabilities to develop and deploy them in such a way to build firm-specific assets which are also rare, inimitable and non-substitutable, thus leading to sustainable competitive advantage.