Addressing the Elephant in the Room: Migration and its Implications for Business School Teaching

Abstract

Migration is a pressing global phenomenon, interconnected with human rights, sustainability, economic development, and geopolitics. It has important implications for the activities, strategies, structures, and decision-making processes of firms. Yet despite its undeniable impact on management, migration has been all-but ignored in business school teaching curricula. In this essay, we seek to make two contributions. First, we clarify the grounds for integrating migration issues into management education. Second, we delineate how to achieve this. Specifically, we suggest that teaching migration as a threshold concept can provide a way to reshape students’ ways of thinking about the complex and often paradoxical relationships between corporations, nation states, intergovernmental organizations, civil society, and industry. We highlight the core characteristics of this approach and provide insights into the less discussed pedagogical potential of unbounded threshold concepts.