Hybrid Selves

This chapter focuses on hybrid selves, a new kind of self that arises as a result of the distinct context, experiences and set of social and material practices that a person engages in to understand themselves and those around them. While there are many different ways to define hybrid, its use here examines those novel socio-cultural transformations, combinations and “mixings” that take shape at the moment of cultural encounter. Hybrid selves form differently even if facing the same set of circumstances and conditions such studying the everyday lives of business people can elucidate the repertoires of actions that they embody and eschew. By outlining the main tenets of hybrid selves, this chapter challenges conceptualizations of ‘self’ that are based on static notions of identity which limit how we can understand people. It provides examples and comparative illustrations of hybrid selves and contrasts them with research that aims to study similar people in diversity and cross-cultural management. The chapter points out main differences between hybrid selves and bi-cultural or multicultural notions of identity that generally offer hyphenation as a solution to the complex ways people may understand themselves.

Introduction

The introduction provides the reader with a context for transnational migration studies and its importance for studying people, work and organizations today. Starting out referencing contemporary trends, such as Brexit, the election of Trump and general rise of anti-immigrant, righ-wing regimes globally, the introductory chapter lays the foundation for a transnational migration perspective. Key ideas from transnational migration studies, an interdisciplinary field born out of sociology, are explained and their relevance for theorizing and studying difference in the context of globally-mobile people made explicit. The chapter then outlines how existing approaches to the study of people and work under these new times and in the context of mobility has taken shape in the management, focusing explicitly on diversity and cross-cultural management areas. These two scholarly areas represent the dominant approach to the study of people and difference albeit there have been critical interjections into static notions of identity, place and work in these areas. Altogether, the introduction lays the foundation for the book in terms of the need for and importance of transnational migration studies as a much-needed theoretical approach for rethinking identity, difference and work in the diversity and cross-cultural management fields.

Transmigrants

This chapter focuses on transmigrants, a particular kind of transnational personhood derived from the idea that identity is not fixed and people can act in reflexive, agentic ways to craft their sense of self based on context. It then compares and contrasts this approach to personhood with existing notions of identity and self in the diversity and cross-cultural management research fields. Specifically, diversity literature that acknowledges and examines dynamic aspects of identities does so by focusing on identity formation and using intersectional lenses. Similarly, attempts to capture the multi-faceted and dynamic nature of people in the cross-cultural management field are dominated by concerns over whether individuals are blending national culture and economic ideology in ways that converge or diverge in organizations as a means to understand how individuals may be crafting their own set of values beyond culture. Based on these trends, the chapter provides comparative critique on existing approaches in the diversity and cross-cultural management field that aim to speak of a diverse and globally-mobile subject. The chapter concludes with the implications of such a mobile understanding of self for work and organizational life.

Transnational Migration Studies

This chapter outlines the three main concepts that are derived from transnational migration studies. Transnational migration signifies mobility that not only spans geographies but also space and social fields, allowing scholars to account for and understand how (new) forms of identity, belonging, and nationhood materialize. In turn, the ongoing societal changes taking shape by way of transnational migration reflect a new reality and social condition, that of mobility and encounters between/among people across relations of difference that are themselves constantly shifting. To expand on new directions for management scholarship that are possible based on transnational migration studies, this chapter identifies three key concepts: multiscalar global perspective, moving beyond methodological nationalism and globalhistorical conjunctures. Each of these concepts are expanded upon in terms of their main points and contributions to thinking about the new social condition of mobility as it relates to theorizing people, difference and work—an endeavour that is the focus of the following three chapters.

Diversity Research After Mobility: Multiculturalism

This chapter focuses explicitly on the concept of multiculturalism by providing critique and offering new ways to proceed in research. The critique focuses on the fact that when research addresses multiculturalism, it does so as an add-on to an existing self such that the multicultural self is understood as the result of identifying with more two sets of cultural and to an extent, political values. Such approaches neither attend to power dimensions of race and ethnicity as they relate to multiculturalism nor to the structural inequalities that people with and without migrant histories face in their lives and work settings among other organizations. To move forward, the chapter discusses how multiculturalism in the context of diversity research must attend to historic formations and their present-day manifestations in relation to the possibilities of subjectivity: what kinds of selves are possible for whom and under what conditions in organizations? By way of this question and building upon the key insights of transnational migration studies in relation to new subjects of research, this chapter puts forth new ways of thinking or theorizing about multiculturalism and engaging in research to examine it in the context of work and organizations.

Imagining a Transnational Future for Research on Differences

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.

Mobile Methodologies

This chapter starts off by noting that transnational approaches contribute a multiscalar understanding and analysis of mobile subjectivities such that attending them to them requires moving beyond comparative lenses. To clarify, a transnational paradigm does not discount the importance of the nation-state but rather, holds is as a precarious achievement and construction made possible by discourses of difference and belonging. Yet the nation-state and thus, ‘cultural values’ as reflections of nation-states cannot be the starting point for an analysis that aims to understand subjectivities that move across scales and the specificity of experiences associated with mobile encounters. This chapter provides examples of work that can attend to these issues under the notion of “mobile methodologies”. Under this approach, researchers move with the research object/subject over time, place and space as needed to understand the assembling of transnational lives, experiences and practices. The chapter contrasts these approaches with existing works within diversity and cross-cultural management research that adopt comparative and static methods that are unable to attend to mobile subjects. In sum, the chapter offers critique and new directions for methodologies that can be used to study transnational subjects.

Cosmopolitans

As the final chapter expanding upon the new agentic, reflexive subjectivities arising from transnational migration, the focus herein is on cosmopolitanism and cosmopolitans. The first section of the chapter underscores the main tenets of cosmopolitanism and cosmopolitans and thereby offers insights into the various ways this notion has been theorized. This sets the stage for empirical examples of cosmopolitanism in research that takes shape at the intersections of global business, work and difference. These examples challenge the notion of cosmopolitanism as referencing people who have a global mindset and are ‘citizens of everywhere and nowhere’ approaches which dominate cross-cultural management and examinations of difference in a global context. The third section focuses on the ways ‘global nomad’ as a particular example of cosmopolitanism challenges financialized notions of diversity in the context of organizations and neo-liberalism. In concluding this chapter, the final consideration is around the linkage of cosmopolitanism to an ethics of difference that embodies the epistemic, social and material aspects of transnational being and belonging. By addressing these concerns, the chapter offers new directions in relation to the quest for theorizing and accounting for various forms of difference in relation to people and work.

Inequalities on the Move

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.