1. Introduction

International assignments have increased in both scale and scope over the last few decades. However, they have remained largely under-exploited for business internationalisation purposes: especially in emerging market contexts. This chapter outlines the main trends related to international assignments together with their different formats, roles, and employee segments engaged in them. It also discusses how the changed firm–employee relations reflect in international employee mobility and vice versa. It identifies the deficiencies in international assignment research and highlights the lack of an in-depth explanation of emerging market firms’ and their employees’ assignment implementation- and management-related choices as determined by multilevel factors as one of the main shortages of international assignment literature. It then defines the focus of the monograph, the research objectives, and the methodological approach used in the empirical study (together with its limitations). It also outlines the theories employed in the study to explain the multilevel interactions among the variables and contexts of international staffing in emerging markets and emerging market firms. It concludes with a summary of the main contributions presented in the monograph and an outline of its structure.