This paper explores the role of intra-company transfers in the United Kingdom government's labour immigration policy over the last quarter century. It demonstrates their role in determining the number of non-European Economic Area foreigners working in the country and examines the way policy, both generally and specifically, has developed. It presents new statistical data and uses that evidence to examine the interplay between the government and multinational corporations in the determination of a significant element of foreign labour immigration. Its findings demonstrate that intra-company transfers have consistently played a major role in the management of UK labour immigration with a small number of occupations and countries of origin characterizing the system at various times. It concludes that the system has operated through a symbiotic relationship between government and major companies to the mutual benefit of both. However, 'Brexit' and the COVID-19 pandemic are leading to reassessment of political and corporate objectives.

This chapter discusses labour migration and reviews the significance of the labour migration process for population and employment. It looks at an increasingly significant element in labour migration within developed countries, that within internal labour markets of large employing organizations. Labour migration and its attendant occupational selectivity should be viewed in the light of the specific tasks to be performed in any occupation and the role of the occupation in the employer’s allocation of tasks. The chapter also discusses the nature of housing difficulties. Much of the discussion about housing barriers to labour migration generally has hinged on the question of tenure. In general owner occupation, private-rented furnished tenancies and tied accommodation have been associated with higher degrees of labour migration, council housing and private rent unfurnished tenancies with less. Housing policies also need to be considered in the light of local conditions.

UK HEIs have recently developed overseas campus-based teaching, some as branches but most as collaborations with local institutions, usually offering scientific, technical and commercial degree courses in English. Academic staffing has evolved rapidly towards international recruitment, supplemented by supervisory and specialist inputs from the UK. The paper focuses on staffing arrangements in various campus-based, collaborative and teaching-only cases, including recruitment, contractual and personnel development, during the early period of IBC development. We show that different development models and mobility portfolios were created, but they face similar challenges in attracting and guiding the work of an international cadre of staff able to deliver the UK HEI 'quality model' of teaching. We find that at this early stage, contracts were mostly short term and locally based, with a generally ad hoc approach to induction, training and monitoring. We suggest that greater attention will be needed to such issues if these developments are to sustain UK-style teaching in a changing international higher education environment.

This article suggests that as their internal labor markets become more multinational in scope, UK universities may acquire similar staffing characteristics to commercial multinational enterprises (MNEs). Comparing evidence from four UK universities with several surveys of MNEs it concludes that, although there are broad similarities in the challenges posed by international operations, there are also several key differences: universities lack the infrastructure to manage overseas staff requirements; have different approaches to career development; view the role of secondments differently; and have a different attitude to dealing with contingency. It argues that, as the size and variety of overseas campuses expand, the staffing models applied in the early days of establishment will not work. If overseas developments are to become core functions of UK universities, mobility portfolios based simply on ad hoc secondments and business travel, international staff recruitment, and electronic communications will not sustain the quality-driven business model being adopted by UK universities. The human resource ethos of the home institutions will also have to change.

MNEs have traditionally employed various combinations of international exchange to deploy their staff expertise to where it is needed. Such ‘portfolios of mobility’ need to be adapted to diverse market and project requirements, the operation of numerous production and market locations, and the training of international staff. This paper builds on a recent cross-sector comparison of these strategies among UK-based MNEs by focusing on one sector, business consultancy. Expert staff deployment to serve international clients is a core function for these firms. Its management, however, also reflects other corporate priorities. These include supporting the internationalisation policies of parent companies; responding to new regional markets and client relations; effective project management; and exploiting modern communications developments. International business consultancies appear to be leading the move towards shorter term, but higher quality international staff mobility, more virtual exchange of expertise, and significant recruitment localisation, often involving mergers and joint ventures.

The international mobility of MNE personnel has been increasing in recent years both through traditional forms of expatriation and short-term assignments and through business travel. These overall portfolios of mobility, however, have been complemented by intensified virtual communication and growing localization of recruitment in developing production and market regions. In this article, we report on a return survey of the impacts of the 2008 recession on the mobility portfolios of a sample of UK-based MNEs and consider how far it has affected established trends. We begin by reviewing evidence from recent large-scale surveys on corporate staff mobility. We then focus on how the relationship between established business goals and global mobility strategies was rebalanced within individual companies as the recession took hold. Our evidence indicates the widely variable effects of recession, strongly affecting operations in some parts of the world, but making little, if any, change elsewhere. In many cases, corporate restructuring or the increased focus on emerging markets were already reshaping mobility portfolios. Diversification and flexibility have underlain the development of these portfolios over the last decade. The recession has accelerated several processes already under way, including a shift towards alternatives to traditional assignments and the closer incorporation of new and emerging markets into mobility systems. It has also allowed companies to drive through changes that might otherwise have been more contentious, such as reducing the financial incentives for assignment.

Multinational enterprises (MNEs) employ various combinations of international exchange to deploy their staff expertise to where it is needed. Such ‘portfolios of mobility’, combining permanent staff transfers, expatriate residential assignments, business travel and commuting, help to sustain corporate functions across a variety of production and market environments (Koser and Salt, 1997; Salt, 1997; Goshall and Bartlett, 1998; Forsgren, Holm and Johanson, 2005; Faulconbridge and Beaverstock, 2008; Jones, 2008a; Millar and Salt, 2008).

The migration streams to the UK during the twentieth century flow almost entirely independently of each other. Within the immigration settlement system different countries have predominated at different times and brought to the UK people of varied character (Coleman and Salt, 1992: 444). In popular perception immigration into the UK since the Second World War has consisted mainly of poor non-white people from the New Commonwealth, supplemented more recently by asylum seekers from Africa and parts of Asia and finally by labour migrants from Eastern Europe. In reality, the largest long-standing group is the Irish who have created chains of migration since the mid-nineteenth century. Unlike the Irish, most other Europeans came to work, not settle. In the late 1940s and early 1950s they were actively recruited by British employers. The main exceptions are those who entered as refugees or who remained in the UK at the end of the Second World War. Immigrants from the New Commonwealth, a diverse group, came in waves from the late 1940s, first from the Caribbean, then India and Pakistan, Bangladesh and more recently Africa. Their arrival was accompanied by the first serious legislation aimed at immigration control, a process that continued with quickening speed until the last 10–15 years has seen an almost annual addition to the government's legislative immigration arsenal. Much of the legislation has been steered towards entry controls but significant also has been a legislative stream designed to promote both social and civic integration.

It is only comparatively recently that the role of institutions in orchestrating migration has come under serious investigation. Most migration theories continue to emphasise migrants and their actions as a key to understanding processes of movement (Koser and Salt, 1997). In fact, international labour migration may be conceptualised as a business, populated by a range of institutions each of which has some influence on the processes, patterns and outcomes of movement. These institutions include employers and trades unions, government, universities, regulatory bodies, migrant organisations and facilitators such as lawyers. They constitute networks of interrelationships, some of which are more important than others. They each have their own operational strategies and, to achieve their objectives, they negotiate with each other in order to reach compromise accommodations which produce migration outcomes. This process leads to tensions that in turn may create the need for further negotiations and new migration outcomes.

Small co-located teams can share 'Common Operating Pictures' to enable high levels of cooperation and backup amongst the team members. However, when teams are large or distributed across poor communications networks, sharing operating pictures with all members of the team can consume so much communication resource and individual attention that it reduces the team's effectiveness in accomplishing its task. This paper introduces the costs and benefits of distributing picture components, and ways of encouraging the communications to be appropriate and useful: to build sufficiently good common pictures amongst suitable team members for them to function. It follows that a 'single picture of the truth' is rarely desirable even when technically possible, and this paper shows why that is so. Building suitably distributed, shared and incomplete pictures requires sophisticated evaluation and management of information - information that may be real world observations or assessments of them. Understanding how such information needs are expressed and fulfilled in distributed teams should transfer across several information management and information exploitation disciplines.

Professor James (‘Jim’) Johnson died on the morning of 12 March 2009 at his home in Lancaster; he was aged 78. He will be remembered for his research in historical geography and population studies, his books on urban geography, migration, and Ireland, and above all else for the inspirational nature of his teaching. Jim was born in Coleraine on 19 November 1930 and spent his boyhood years in a house off the Antrim Road. In 1943 he entered the prestigious Belfast Royal Academy as a Foundation Entrance Scholar; 5 years later he was elected head boy. With a Belfast City Scholarship, he entered Queen's University Belfast in 1949 to read for a degree in geography, in a department headed by Professor Estyn Evans. In the following year, he received a Foundation Undergraduate Scholarship and in 1951 he was elected student president of the geographical society. He graduated in 1953 with an upper second BA degree and was encouraged by Evans to seek opportunities for postgraduate study. At this time, funds were limited in the UK but universities in the USA were eager to attract talented young scholars. Jim Johnson was one such young man. With the assistance of a Fulbright Travel Award and a Whitbeck Fellowship, he spent the academic session 1953–54 at the University of Wisconsin, where he completed a taught MA. He was invited to stay on at Wisconsin but felt that he had to leave since his father was then dying of cancer. At University College London, Professor H.C. Darby was in need of a colleague to teach introductory meteorology and climatology, following the death of meteorologist Reg Cornish. Jim had just completed just such a graduate course at Wisconsin, given by Professor Glenn Trewartha, who also taught population geography. Evans must have informed Darby that his former student was available and, after a brief interview, Jim was appointed an assistant lecturer at UCL in October 1954. Two years later, climatologist Tony Chandler joined the UCL staff, so Jim no longer had to lecture on physical geography. As was the custom of the time, he began doctoral work on a part-time basis, being assisted with a research award from the British Academy in 1956, the year of his marriage to Jean McKane. His thesis topic was ‘The historical geography of Londonderry in the 19th century’, under the supervision of Darby. By the late 1950s, Jim had published a substantial number of articles, partly as a preparation for his thesis, but also to present the results of archaeological research that he had undertaken in Ulster with two of Evans's other students, Bruce Proudfoot and Ronald Buchanan. In 1957, Jim achieved lecturer status at UCL and was highly regarded by Darby, who wrote: ‘Johnson is one of those people to whom one instinctively turns when faced with some problem. He is one of our key men’. Five years later, Jim completed his doctorate, committing his results to a suite of scholarly papers rather than a monograph. In preparation for the 20th International Geographical Congress, which was to be held in the UK in 1964, he served as secretary to the Symposia and Field Studies Committee, and amply demonstrated his organisational and interpersonal qualities. To coincide with this major event, he wrote a chapter on the expansion of housing in interwar London that symbolised his growing interest in urban geography and in suburbs in particular. Jim's name came to the attention of the University of Wisconsin once again, and Professor A.H. Clark made an offer of a tenured position, which Jim declined. At UCL, he was promoted to a readership in 1965 and received another British Academy research award, but he had agreed to assume the heavy burden of being departmental tutor. This job required coping with a non-stop flow of issues concerning students, their teaching, progress and examination. To complicate matters further, all undergraduate teaching in geography was being devolved from the old University of London inter-collegiate system to the constituent colleges. A completely new ‘course unit’ system had to be devised and implemented. As departmental tutor, therefore, Jim cut his teeth on administration and would put the skills he developed at UCL to good use in the rest of his career. Later in the 1960s, he started to develop academic contacts in Germany, Poland and Bulgaria, as well as researching agricultural conditions in western Ireland with Brendan McAodha, another former Queen's student. In 1970, Jim, John Salt and Peter Wood obtained the UCL Geography Department's first major research award for a 3-year study of housing and labour migration founded by the Rowntree Trust. Jim amply demonstrated his leadership skills and his professionalism as a researcher, combining intellectual rigour with empirically based practicality, heavily dosed with common sense. ‘But, what do we do on Monday morning?’ was one of his memorable phrases. Like several of his contemporaries in UCL Geography, Jim was looking for a department of his own and this came in the form of the new University of Lancaster. Jim, his wife Jean and their four children moved north, and Jim set about creating a completely new department. This was a fundamentally different challenge from administering the large, well-established operation at UCL. Colleagues had to be appointed, accommodation identified and equipped, working relationships forged with the university authorities, and students recruited; the first undergraduates arrived in 1975. Jim was head of department for the next 10 years, carefully and successfully steering its growth, coping with a major share of teaching, and shouldering major leadership responsibilities among a steadily increasing team of younger colleagues. In addition, he was principal of Lonsdale College within the university. His research activities continued in urban, rural and population geography. He retired in 1994 but agreed to serve as principal of Charlotte Mason College in Ambleside, at that time still part of Lancaster University, for a year. He retained his interest in geography itself by serving on the North West Regional Committee of the Royal Geographical Society for a number of years. Jim and Jean continued to live in Lancaster and were regular visitors on campus. They took a lively interest in the town's voluntary organisations, particularly the Lancaster Civic Society and the local branch of the NSPCC, and enjoyed visiting many parts of the world in the course of a number of memorable sea cruises. Jim had his share of professional responsibilities, including presidency of the Institute of British Geographers in 1990, when he delivered an address at the annual conference held in Glasgow about his beloved topic of migration within and from Ireland to Britain in the nineteenth century. However, it is as a teacher that he will be remembered by those who had the privilege of studying under him. His lectures were prepared meticulously and were delivered with enthusiasm and fluency. The audience in the back row could rest assured that they would be able to hear his every word. Occasional jokes and asides, and frequent ‘random examples from Belfast’ peppered his lectures at UCL on cartography, human geography, urban geography, and Ireland. Quite simply, listening to him was fun and made one want to learn. His habit of lecturing eyes closed, particularly when walking across the podium, could be disconcerting for those in the front row. And there was one occasion when he managed to jam a finger into a mercifully unplugged electric socket. Jim's blend of human geography was unforgettable, combining the archaeological-historical approach from Estyn Evans, with the recent trends that he had been taught at Wisconsin and continued to develop through assiduous reading. His course on urban geography, highlighting processes rather than morphology, was very different from the brand of urban study then presented by older members of the University of London. First appearing in 1967, his Urban Geography was not only ‘an introductory analysis’ but a genuinely pioneering, readable textbook that went into several editions. Jim's academic interests combined the best of the old and the new. He did not climb aboard various bandwagons as they appeared, preferring to wait, observe, weigh up and then decide. He accepted change only after due consideration. His initial description of a computer was that it was a tin box filled with monkeys typing away like mad on a mass of keys. Yet he was fascinated by the challenge of accurate measurement in geography, publishing a paper with Terry Coppock in 1962 on that very topic. Jim recognised that novelties do not necessarily solve problems; his portfolio of research publications, ranging across rural settlement, urban geography and population studies is testament to the high quality of his scholarly judgement. Jim Johnson will be missed for his presence and his unstoppable good humour; he was truly a larger than life character. He will be remembered for his devotion to his chosen discipline, to his departments in London and Lancaster, to generations of undergraduates and graduate students, and to his family. He is survived by his wife Jean, his daughters Ruth and Kathleen and his sons David and Owen, and his seven grandchildren. As a superb teacher and an excellent colleague, he will not be forgotten. Johnson J H 1964 The suburban expansion of housing in London, 1918–1939 in Coppock J T and Prince H C eds Greater London Faber, London 142–66 Johnson J H 1967 Urban geography: an introductory analysis Pergamon, Oxford Johnson J H ed 1974 Suburban growth: geographical processes at the edge of the city Wiley, Chichester Johnson J H ed 1983 Geography and regional planning: Proceedings of the Second British–Bulgarian Geographical Seminar, 1980 Geobooks, Norwich Johnson J H ed 1985 Geography applied to practical problems: Proceedings of the Third British–Bulgarian Geographical Seminar, 1983 Geobooks, Norwich Johnson J H 1990 The context of migration: the example of Ireland in the nineteenth century Transactions, Institute of British Geographers 15 259–76 Johnson J H 1994 The human geography of Ireland Wiley, London Johnson J H and Cooke R U eds 1969 Trends in geography Pergamon, Oxford Johnson J H and Coppock J T 1962 Measurement in human geography Economic Geography 38 130–7 Johnson J H and Pooley C G eds 1982 The structure of 19th-century cities Croom Helm, London Johnson J H and Salt J eds 1990 Labour migration: the internal geographical mobility of labour in the developed world Fulton, London Johnson J H and Salt J 1992 Population migration Nelson, London Johnson J H, Salt J and Wood P A 1974 Housing and the migration of labour in England and Wales Saxon House, Aldershot

Junior military commanders must cope with evidence provided in various forms across many bearers from several sources. They need to remember and combine long extracts from briefings, recent radio messages, background contexts and regulations, verbal shouts from nearby soldiers and heavily constrained senses (due to smoke, noise, sheltering in cover, etc) to form awareness of the local situation. Systems have evolved to share information more clearly and less ambiguously in these environments, and with little extra cognitive load. However, many were developed for regular warfare with well-defined front lines, and current small wars and multinational counter-insurgency operations have made some of these less useful. This paper describes some of these systems, suggests possibly more useful ways to model them, and outlines issues with ordinary technical solutions. The intent is to describe such an 'extreme' information management/exploitation environment in order to draw out concepts that are hidden in more normal environments, and ideally to spark an interest in readers from other domains who could suggest improvements.