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This article addresses the issue of professional learning of Swedish physicians returning from their work for international aid organisations in the global South. It is a qualitative case study based on 16 in-depth interviews, which uses a thematic narrative analysis, a typology of knowledge, and the concept of symbolic capital. The doctors' assignments in settings radically different from the welfare state context meant professional challenges, including an initial feeling of de-skilling, but also enhanced reflexivity and intensive and complex learning. The doctors acquired new medical and organisational knowledge, improved diagnostic skills, new perspectives on different health care systems, cultural contexts, global power relations, and postcolonial hierarchies. Since their return to Sweden, they have encountered a friendly but rather shallow interest in their experiences. Their new insights and ideas for change have not been easy to validate as symbolic capital, and their intensive individual learning is seldom utilised for organisational learning.

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This article addresses the relationship between highly skilled international mobility and knowledge by focussing on knowledge transfer work. Empirically, this study is based on interviews of professionals in the Swedish medical field who returned to Sweden after a period of work in other countries. The medical field harbours many transnationally valid competences and standardised lines of work, but even in this field, knowledge transfer is a process requiring effort, skills, negotiation, translation and adjustment to the specific organisational and cultural contexts. The studied professionals' knowledge transfer work showed a spectrum, ranging from smooth, almost friction-free transfers to the ones where much translation and transformation was required, depending on the context and the professional's status in the workplace. The professionals also developed and made use of knowledge transfer skills, such as the ability to observe, analyse and adjust to cultural differences between workplaces, healthcare systems or academic systems, as well as the ability to translate knowledge to make it relevant and viable in the specific context.