In today's global politics of identity and difference, the migration condition is symptomatically central for [Stuart] Hall, for it speaks through a ‘double syntax’ in which difference may be driven toward the all-or-nothing danger of ethnic absolutism—or it may … enable us to learn something from diasporic survival about how to live with others and otherness.

Kobena Mercer, introduction to Stuart Hall (1994/2017), The Fateful Triangle: Race, Ethnicity and Nation, pp 10–11

Contextualizing migration

Migration has been one of the most pronounced ways through which societies have transformed over the course of history. According to the United Nations (UN) migration report for 2017, there were about 258 million migrants globally, up from 220 million in 2010 and 173 million in 2000 (see Table 1). While much of the extant theories and theorizing about migration has taken shape in Europe and North America in regard to ‘incoming’ migrants, the reality is that Asia to Asia migration is the biggest flow of people, and 106 million of the 258 million global migrants were born in Asia. Between 2000 and 2017, Asia gained about 30 million migrants followed by Europe at 22 million and North America at 17 million.

At the same, more than 50% of all international migrants live in ten countries and areas, with the largest number residing in the United States (50 million or about 19% of the world's migratory population). This was followed by Saudi Arabia, Germany and the Russian Federation with each of them hosting around 12 million migrants each. In the US, immigrants represent about 15.3% of the entire population, in Saudi Arabia, 37% of the population, in Germany, 14.8% of the population and in the Russian Federation, they represent 8.1% (Migration Policy Institute, 2017). Perhaps most urgently, the number of refugees and asylum seekers due to forced displacement has continued to rise with the developing world hosting around 83% of the world's refugees and asylum seekers. In this context, Turkey had the largest refugee population globally, hosting about 3.1 million of such migrants due to growing humanitarian crisis and war in neighboring countries, most urgently in Syria. In all, these numbers indicate that there are several trends that are relevant for how we theorize transnational aspects of migration.

As the final chapter expanded on 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’ (Levy et al., 2007)—approaches which dominate cross-cultural management and examinations of difference in a global context. In contrast to this idea of cosmopolitanism, a transnational migration studies offers a multiscalar perspective that uncovers the granularity and performative aspects of this concept inclusive of its ethical dimensions. The third section focuses on the ways ‘global nomad’ as an example of cosmopolitanism challenges financialized notions of diversity in the context of organizations and neoliberalism. The focus herein is on the ways ethics and labor intersect as people construct ways of being and belonging to the world through their agentic economic activities. In concluding this chapter, the final consideration is around the link of cosmopolitanism to an ethics of difference that embodies the epistemic, social, and material aspects of transnational being and belonging. By addressing these concerns in the context of MOS research, the goal is to offer new directions in relation to the quest for theorizing and accounting for various forms of difference in relation to people and work.

Conceptualizing cosmopolitanism and cosmopolitans: agency, tastes and ethics

In the context of globalization, the movement of workers across national borders has received much attention in the international management literature, including research that aims to understand the ways ‘brain circulation’ contributes to the upskilling of organizations and regions (Tung, 2008b). Despite its origin in Saxenian's (2005) seminal work on transnational ties, immigrants and upskilling, ‘brain circulation’ of skilled workers and immigrants in the context of international and cross-cultural management has focused almost explicitly on their ‘value’ for organizations, such as in being cultural intermediaries for Western multinational corporations and Chinese locals (Hartmann et al., 2010), and on understanding the effectiveness of their international careers across cultures (Tams and Arthur, 2007) including ways to differentiate between self and assigned expatriates (Biemann and Andresen, 2010).

Over the course of history, migration, or the movement of people across various geographic and national borders, has resulted in important societal changes across socio-cultural, technological, economic and political dimensions. These movements have brought about opportunities for new combinations of ideas, practices and processes as people live their personal and professional lives at the intersections of multiple social and cultural worlds. At their most immediate, infusions of newcomers to existing societies have brought about significant changes in how people understand themselves and cultural Others. In essence, the mobility of people, ideas and practices has resulted in the emergence of novel mixings that have challenged and expanded on the existing contours of societies. It is no longer possible to speak about homogenous societies but, rather, it is necessary to acknowledge and understand how societies and nations are the result of centuries of people mixing together.

In contemporary times, these mobilities require reconsideration of how individuals are identified as part of a culture, a group or even a nation. Moreover, can we really understand differences between and among people based on nationality, culture or any other dimension in the context of mobility? Sometimes, the best displays of the complex nature of citizenship are during large-scale global events, such as the Olympics or soccer World Cup. In such instances, the intersections of race, ethnicity/heritage, language and citizenship (and privilege) allow consideration of the diversity of societies and patterns of mobility—such as Italian athletes of Somali descent, Korean-American athletes with dual citizenship competing for South Korea, Australians of Greek-descent waiving Greek and Australian flags, and so forth. These mixings of people and cultures are also evidenced in everyday lives through the production and consumption of cultural products, such as books, movies or music, that circulate globally, creating transnationally shared social imaginaries and experiences despite national borders. As a result of these ongoing encounters between and among different groups of people, societies have become transformed, bringing about opportunities to understand ‘difference’ differently or new ways of understanding one's self and cultural ‘Others’ in the context of changing social relationships.

This chapter focuses further on subjectivities arriving out of the new mobility ontology in a broad sense while the following two chapters outline specific forms that transmigrants can take. If a transnational paradigm provides insights that can reshape our understanding of diversity and attend to assumptions about mobility, belonging, and difference, then one starting point for this conversation is the very subject of diversity/difference research. In this regard, the subject of research and subjectivity need attention to underscore the fundamentally different assumptions guiding them under a transnational perspective. To address these issues, this chapter delves deeper into issues related to ontological and epistemic assumptions of existing approaches to the study of subjects under conditions of mobility. Here, it should be noted that it is not the broad array of subjects that are the focus of this chapter but rather how mobility reorients the ways in which organizational research has examined diversity and difference in relation to individuals. It proposes transmigrants as a way to rethink the subjects of work and, in doing so, provides opportunities for rethinking diversity. Another important consideration is the context for studying such new subjectivities. In this sense, the formations of new selves are by themselves not necessarily celebratory or emancipatory moments but they can potentially replicate existing or even create new inequalities across transnational social fields. This issue is taken up more concretely in Chapter 7.

In all, this chapter offers three points. First, the argument presented herein is that the focus on individuals and diversity has generally taken shape under the umbrella concept of ‘identity’ in the MOS literature and become the predominant way in which scholarship attending to people, culture, and difference understands its subject of study in the context of work and organizations. Such an argument warrants examination of not only the analytic focus of extant literature on diversity and difference but also its fundamental ontological and epistemological assumptions. While some of the discussions presented here have been considered by Özkazanç-Pan and Calás (2015), here the consideration is to underscore why these approaches are insufficient in examining the transnational aspects of lived experiences in the context of inequalities.

In this chapter, the focus is on hybrids as another form of subjectivity taking shape under conditions of mobility. The previous chapter focused on transmigrants, emphasizing the agentic and reflexive nature of transnational selves that are formed with particular attention to issues of belonging, nationhood, and race/ethnicity. The emphasis herein is on the creation of novel ways of being and belonging to the social world that take shape through transnational scales. The added element beyond the agentic and reflexive consideration of the previous chapter is the creative, emergent, and novel aspects of subjectivity that take shape depending on context and encounters. These new hybrid subjectivities are not readily represented by the axioms of diversity and difference research as they use problematic notions of identity and culture as the main frameworks. Notably, such subjectivities arrive out of the intersections of three important considerations: the epistemic, social, and material dimensions as understood from a transnational lens. Hence, this chapter focuses on those elements that make hybrid selves the new subjects of work and, in doing so, provides alternative ways for theorizing and studying subjectivities arriving out of mobility ontologies. To achieve this, the first section provides an outline of what constitutes hybrid selves followed by how such subjectivities manifest themselves at work through empirical examples. In the third and final section, there is discussion of the epistemic, social, and material dimensions that altogether allow for the emergence of hybrid selves with implications around how differences are studied and valued in MOS.

Understanding hybrids

Hybrid selves and hybridity more broadly is an approach to understanding in-between, third space subjectivities that arise from the encounters between/among different people and cultures, where culture is understood as a shifting set of scripts, narratives, and sense of the world. As a concept that speaks to liminal spaces, hybridity also has currency in postcolonial traditions (Young, 1995/2005; Frenkel and Shenhav, 2006; Özkazanç-Pan, 2008), in literature (Bakhtin, 1981) and in work that speaks to the intersections of feminism and cultural studies (Anzaldúa, 1987; Saldívar-Hull, 2000). In postcolonial traditions, hybridity speaks to those agentic colonizer-colonized encounters whereby the rules of recognition were being defied, including attempts to subvert colonial authority (Fanon, 1952/2008, 1963; Bhabha, 1990).

What is to become of management and organization studies after an encounter with transnational migration studies? Can the field change to accommodate and offer space to theorize subjectivities that do not fit into extant categories of identity and difference as found in the diversity and cross-cultural management literatures? What possibilities are there for research in a post-multicultural and post-national world where mobility demarcates the lives, both personal and professional, of millions of people? Rather than suggest that the MOS field wholly abandon existing approaches, it is likely that the contributions from transnational migration studies, by way of this book and other interventions, will create alternatives to mainstream approaches. Change is slow in academic disciplines and in intellectual communities—often, paradigmatic fault lines emerge, demarcating and bounding particular approaches as mainstream while, at the same time, marginalizing others (Kuhn, 1962). The incommensurability discussion creeps into these decidedly political and interest-laden conversations in the sciences despite simultaneous claims that social science, much like normal science, should be infused with ‘objectivity’ and logical empiricism (Burrell and Morgan, 1979).

In contemporary debates among scholars in MOS, the same considerations around the ‘right’ and appropriate frames that should be deployed in the context of social science research still continue—an approach that is particularly relevant given that much of the research on these topics is taken up by business scholars embedded in business schools. The conservative nature of such research often contributes small, incremental knowledge rather than offering novel insights or fundamentally new theories about the nature of people, work, and organizations. Parker (2018) argues that business schools are fundamentally handmaidens of neoliberal capitalism, replicating mental models, practices, and work contexts that contribute to extractive labor and inequality. Within this context, scholars who present novel perspectives guided by different ontologies and critical epistemologies often face an uphill battle trying to publish in the most mainstream management and organization studies journal. Their work often questions the underlying tenets of the field through critical gazes and theories, such as poststructuralism, labor history, feminism and others under the broad umbrella of critical management studies (Willmott, 1992).

The previous chapter focused on one of the new ways in which transnational migration studies inform the field of management and organization studies vis-à-vis the theorization and study of difference beyond the level of people. In this regard, the ways in which multiculturalism as a concept and practice have been studied and deployed in the MOS field were critiqued and new considerations offered for a nuanced and contextualized approach to its adoption. This chapter builds on novel ways the field of MOS can move forward in attending to difference by considering the notion of inequalities. That is, how inequalities take shape in the context of organizations and due to organizations, and the various ways in which such inequalities exist in multi-levels in societies among other considerations. To understand the relevance of inequalities for the study of difference, this chapter focuses on three elements.

The first is an examination of how individual experiences around inequality need to be brought to the forefront of any research on diversity, difference, and cross-cultural experiences. In other words, the ways in which inequalities take shape in the context of one's particular positionality and in relation to organizational experiences need further examination. While these issues have been considered to a larger extent in other social science fields, such as sociology, anthropology, and geography, they have yet to impact management and organization studies in a substantial way. In many ways, the study of inequalities can sometimes become overly focused on ‘perceptions’ of justice in organizations, such as the oftdeployed procedural or distribute justice aspects of organizational behavior research (see Rupp et al., 2017, for an overview), and their relationship to employee behaviors or organizational outcomes. Rather, the focus on inequalities arriving from transnational migration studies will expand on this rather narrow and individualist (and relative) notion of ‘justice’ and ‘fairness’. In fact, the ways in which inequalities take shape through intentional and nonintentional acts in particular organizations need to be examined in considering the embedded nature of organizations in relation to their socio-cultural, political, and economic contexts.

This book is the result of many years of transnational living, being and belonging, spanning the majority of my childhood and adult life. The language of transnational migration studies has allowed me to theorize and give voice to those experiences and practices that were often found in my own life and experiences. Yet in my doctoral training at a business school, I found that the majority of concepts, frameworks, and tools available to study ‘people like me’ and many of my colleagues and friends simply did not account for the complexity of transnational lives. Under the guidance of my advisor, Prof. Marta B. Calás, transnationalism and migration studies became important lenses to examine lives that were often not accounted for in most mainstream cross-cultural management and diversity literatures. Over the course of a decade, these frameworks have provided some insights not only in my personal and professional life but also for the direction of my work and the kinds of research questions I have been able to ask.

True to the transnational experiences and subjectivities highlighted in this book, the writing of the book is no different than the very concepts discussed herein. This book was written over the course of one year in Guilford, CT, Boston, MA, Providence, RI, New York City, Istanbul, Turkey, Tokyo, Japan and Sydney, Australia—each place reflecting a space and place that I inhabited long term or for short durations of time. These travels and the transnational modes that accompanied the mobility allowed me to not only see the ways in which being and belonging were taking shape in different contexts, but to also embody it. During the summer of 2018, a trip to a seaside resort in Turkey yielded a conversation with a young adult who had left his home country of Kazakhstan to live and work in the area. He spoke little Turkish but a lot more English—he was a waiter at the restaurant in the resort and his main concern was that the tourists from mostly Arab-speaking Middle East countries had learned Turkish during their extended stays in Turkey and not as much English. Thus, he was barely able to speak with them but still expected to wait on them.

In this chapter, I outline three key concepts derived from transnational migration studies and use them in the following chapters to expand on existing notions of subjectivity and personhood derived from static ontologies. As a starting point, transnational migration studies derives from migration studies, which is a field of inquiry examining the multiple ways individuals move between/among places and nations to engage in various kinds of social, cultural, economic, and political activities (Levitt et al., 2003; Levitt and Glick Schiller, 2004; Vertovec, 2009; Kretsedemas et al., 2013; Waldinger, 2013). Following seminal contributions by Portes (1997) and Portes et al. (1999) that examined transnational dimensions of migration research and concurrent with the mobility turn in social sciences, a transnational approach to migration studies has now become an important analytic lens for the study of mobility, people, and social inequalities (Faist, 2013).

By considering the contours of society and the social, cultural, economic, and political activities taking place across borders (Waldinger and Fitzgerald, 2004), a transnational lens allows examination of the mechanisms through which nations are defined and particular people, histories, and cultures become normalized as part of the nation while ‘Others’, inclusive of their histories and cultures, become marginalized or erased. Moreover, it allows reconsideration of existing categories of analysis related to people, specifically in relation to race and ethnicity. Transnational migration studies challenges static notions of identity and derived categories of subjectivity based on race and ethnicity as these concepts reflect fundamentally reified social groupings and racialized power relations (see for example DuBois, 1903, 1940; also Bonilla-Silva, 2006; Gilroy, 1993; Hall, 1994). Consequently, this approach challenges existing categories that have been used to study and define people and communities and, by extension, society (this topic is further expanded on in Chapter 6). Transnationalism provokes consideration of how societies take shape over time and continue to function given that notions of societal replication are problematic—no longer are the members of society homogenous and static; rather, they are constantly in a state of becoming and relationality.

The focus in the previous chapters has been on the new ways to think about broad societal concepts and issues in the context of diversity and cross-cultural research. Namely, the focus was on multiculturalism and mobile inequalities as two equally important and relevant topics that need to be critically unpacked but also reimagined in terms of their relevance for diversity and culture research. In contrast to these more theoretical discussions, this chapter offers discussion in relation to ethics, epistemology, and methodology. To engage scholars that might want to know how to go about doing research guided by mobility, the chapter provides some concrete examples and perspective related to the appropriate methodologies that can guide research in a transnational mode. These examples are provided to offer different ways transnational research can take shape. At the same time, the chapter delves into shared aspects of what might be seemingly very different methodologies and use of methods in these various examples. In all, the chapter aims to provoke questions around what considerations and approaches are necessary in order to carry out research guided by transnational migration studies frameworks.

For example, guided by an ontology of mobility, what new considerations and expectations are there in relation to methodology or the theory of methods? Furthermore, how can scholars study mobile objects/subjects of study when the very methods of social science are guided by static ontologies and generally place-based? And how do notions of ethics and epistemology contribute to rethinking about methodology as the theory of methods? This chapter aims to provide insights to these issues and questions, and also to provide examples based on empirical work across different academic disciplines. In doing so, the goal is to provide multiple ways to engage transnationalism and mobility in thinking about and crafting appropriate methodology. This chapter contributes and, moreover, to our ability to see the ways in which multiscalar global ways of being and belonging take shape. This approach and discussion allow consideration of how adopting particular sets of approaches, methods, and maneuvers can allow the examination of transnationalism in relation to subjectivities, practices, and ideas among other objects/subjects that may exist in a transnational fashion.