Imagining a Transnational Future for Research on Differences

Abstract

This chapter examines offers new directions for organizational scholarship based on the key concepts derived from transnational migration studies and applied to notions of self, culture and work. Fundamentally, transnational modes of thinking and analyzing require us to consider the composition and coming together of society rather than a reflection of the boundaries/boundedness of nation-states. They provide insights as to what citizenship means beyond an accident of birth and turn our gaze to the ways in which historical conjunctures impact contemporary economic arrangements, political debates and cultural institutions. For organization scholars who want to study diversity and cross-cultural management and attend to difference, transnational modes provide insights as to new ways of understanding people in the form of mobile subjectivities and move us to consider the question of who/what is the subject of management research? By relying on new ontologies and epistemologies available from a transnational migration studies framework, the chapter offers insights about how the social world is being made and remade and the consequences of such action and intention for the (organizational) lives of people around the world. In doing so, it opens up vistas for new research questions, agendas, and approaches to guide organizational scholars and scholarship.