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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.

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.