The literature on expatriation typically assumes that cultural and institutional familiarity facilitates expatriate adjustment. This assumption underplays the role of the historical context, especially the influence of painful colonial pasts that often lie beneath such familiarity. In addition, seeking to capture expatriate adjustment as a single measure, such literature does not engage with the differences in the extent to which expatriates achieve cognitive, behavioral, and affective adjustment. Using a qualitative study addressing the work experiences of Brazilians living in Portugal, we argue that to fully understand expatriate adjustment, we must pay attention to the historical colonial relationship between the expatriate’s home and host country. Specifically, we discuss the importance of social representations of history for how expatriates narrate, interpret, and act in response to their experiences. Our research makes two theoretical contributions. First, we explain how historical colonial relationships affect expatriate adjustment and how this leads to adjustment only being partial. Second, we develop a nuanced understanding of expatriate adjustment by drawing attention to its three interdependent dimensions (cognitive, behavioral, and affective), showing that an expatriate may be well adjusted in one dimension but less adjusted in another. We call for organizations to engage more, and more critically, with history.

关于外派的文献通常假设文化和制度的熟悉程度有助于外派的适应。这种假设低估了历史背景的作用，尤其是通常隐藏在这种熟悉之下的痛苦殖民历史的影响。此外，试图将外籍人士的适应作为一个单一的衡量标准来捕捉，这些文献并没有涉及外籍人士实现认知、行为和情感适应程度的差异。通过一项针对居住在葡萄牙的巴西人工作经验的定性研究，我们认为，要充分了解外籍人士的适应情况，我们必须关注外籍人士的祖国和东道国之间的历史殖民关系。具体来说，我们讨论了历史的社会表征对于外籍人士如何叙述、解释和行动以回应他们的经历的重要性。我们的研究做出了两个理论贡献。首先，我们解释了历史上的殖民关系如何影响外籍人士的适应，以及这如何导致仅部分适应。其次，我们通过关注外籍人士的三个相互依存的维度（认知、行为和情感）来发展对外籍人士适应的细致入微的理解，表明外籍人士可能在一个维度上适应得很好，但在另一个维度上适应得较少。我们呼吁组织更多、更批判性地参与历史。