Inequalities on the Move

Abstract

This chapter focuses explicitly on inequalities to outline why and how they need much more attention in organizational research. The starting point of this chapter is examination of why ‘diversity work’ or practices to become more inclusive in organizations continues to be necessary in the context of multicultural societies. It then moves onto discuss power relations as relevant to the replication and emergence of inequalities in organizations, something that is not examined sufficiently in current scholarship on diversity and cross-cultural management. The chapter then moves on to outline how future diversity scholarship requires an ethical commitment to tracing the formation of multiscalar inequalities inclusive of organizational practices and policies that may be producing and/or replicating them. The chapter concludes by suggesting that the mobility turn in social sciences is not a celebratory one to suggest that everyone moves but rather, a serious engagement with the interrelated relations of power, inequality and dispossession taking shape in a multiscalar fashion as people move either out of choice, force or need in relation to work and organizations. In all, the chapter focuses on the relevance of inequality for scholarship on people and difference that span social fields in work contexts that span geographies.