Towards a multiparadigmatic approach in critical cross-cultural management research: Possibilities from transnational migration studies

Abstract

To address calls for multiparadigmatic approaches to critical cross-cultural management (CCM) research, this paper engages with ontological, epistemological, and methodological possibilities from transnational migration studies (TMS). Guided by a mobility lens and adding to existing critical approaches within CCM scholarship that have critiqued Western epistemologies and static cultural models for representation, this paper aims to expand critically-oriented paradigms for research related to ‘people on the move’ and migration experiences. As the ontological premise of TMS, the mobility lens focuses on movement, including experiences of inequality, dispossession, and displacement, and its implications for the formation of social groups that defy categorization and reification through references to national borders. By expanding upon three key concepts from TMS, transnational social fields, scalar notions of being and belonging, and historical conjunctures, the paper contributes to ongoing conversations in critical CCM about ethics and representation beyond methodological nationalism, rethinking the unit of analysis through encounters, and extending the ‘field’ in fieldwork. Building on these potential contributions, the paper engages in three epistemic reflections on ‘ethics on the move’, representation and surveillance, and interdisciplinarity as emergent considerations for future critical qualitative research on people, mobility, culture, and global work in the broader field of management and organization studies (MOS).

Within critical management studies, an established and robust line of critique of cross-cultural management has taken shape in the last four decades. Scholars espousing critical epistemologies have examined the foundational Western assumptions of cross-cultural management research (Fougère and Moulettes, 2007; Frenkel and Shenhav, 2006; Jack et al., 2008; Westwood, 2006) and offered critiques of representation (Kwek, 2003; Prasad and Prasad, 2003), cultural differences (Boussebaa, 2021), and knowledge claims (Ozkazanc-Pan, 2008). Such work has questioned the foundational assumptions of human resource management practices (Romani et al., 2020a), and the use of overly positivistic research agendas (Prasad, 2015).

These critiques join existing concerns around the challenges of theorizing and measuring culture voiced from within the cross-cultural management (CCM) and business field (Boyacigiller and Adler, 1991; Caprar et al., 2015). Efforts within CCM have focused on ways to move beyond the theoretical frameworks available from seminal works, including Hoftede’s (1984) Culture’s Consequences (see Kirkman et al., 2017; Tung and Stahl, 2018). Such scholarship has sought to identify new ways to think about diversity and ‘foreignness’ (Lu et al., 2022; Stahl et al., 2016) and foster insights about the positive rather than negative aspects of cultural differences (Stahl and Tung, 2015). Other scholars have pointed out the need to move beyond cultural dimensions, human resource management, and corporate culture as the dominant focal areas in CCM (Barmeyer et al., 2019).

At the intersection of critical management studies (CMS) and cross-cultural management (CCM) research is critical cross-cultural management research (Romani et al., 2018). Within this field, scholars guided by various different critical paradigms have called for greater researcher reflexivity in ethnographic cross-cultural management research (Collins and McNulty, 2020; Mahadevan, 2020; Mahadevan and Moore, 2023; Moore and Mahadevan, 2020; Søderberg, 2020), shown the epistemic limits of CCM research on cross-cultural training through a critical auto-ethnography (Mahadevan, 2023), and questioned the reification of cultural differences as the natural order of social relations (Romani et al., 2020b). A special issue of International Journal of Cross Cultural Management has focused explicitly on ways to critically understand ‘otherness’ and ‘othering’ rather than focus on finding ‘objective’ cultural differences (see Mahadevan and Primecz, 2024).

Researchers have also focused on the importance of acknowledging power relations within global encounters particularly in the context of skilled migrants who face prejudice and ‘othering’ in host nations businesses (Mahadevan, 2024a, 2024b) and shown that status hierarchies imposed upon immigrants by government agencies can be reinforced by organizations (Harrison et al., 2021). Others have highlighted different experiences of migrant integration through a multi-paradigmatic approach (Primecz et al., 2023) and focused on the importance of ethnicity, gender, and diversity as they relate to encounters across power differences within different cultural contexts (Golnaraghi and Dye, 2016). Recent research has demonstrated the possibilities of diversity, equity, and inclusion in international business research through an intersectionality lens (Primecz and Mahadevan, 2025).

Guided by a variety of critical epistemologies and theories, these works are representative of the robust and growing field of critical cross-cultural management scholarship and provide important new directions for the broader CCM field. In line with calls to expand existing paradigms and theoretical frameworks deployed for critical CCM research (Grosskopf et al., 2025; Primecz et al., 2025; Zoelner, 2025), I discuss potential insights from transnational migration studies (TMS) and focus specifically on the ways in which transnational movement and mobility impact the study of culture and people in the context of business and organizational life across borders. Potential contributions from TMS align well with calls from within critical CCM to expand existing theories and disciplines used for the study of people, mobility, culture, and global work.

To this end, scholars explicitly suggest that deploying frameworks from a mobility paradigm can be fruitful for extending research on who or what moves globally (see Dimitrova et al., 2024). Critical work guided by a mobility lens has examined expatriation policies of Chinese multinational firms in the African continent, and made explicit the imperialist assumptions underlying these policies within Western expatriation literature (Jackson and Horwitz, 2018). At the same time, there are recent works within critical management studies that deploy a transnational mobility framework to examine culture, diversity, and identity in a global context (Ozkazanc-Pan, 2019a, 2023; Ozkazanc-Pan and Calás, 2015). Bringing additional and complementary ontological, epistemic, and methodological considerations by way of TMS, this paper seeks to contribute to the growing number of frameworks used in critical CCM.

Ontologically, TMS is representative of the ‘mobility turn’ in the social sciences (Faist, 2013; Faist et al., 2013; Levitt and Jaworsky, 2007) and, most notably, in the anthropological study of cultures and people across geographies, places, and spaces. The mobility turn focuses on the various ways in which the study of movement can inform a new understanding of social formations and emerging forms of inequalities in society. It allows for a new critique of stasis-informed approaches to people, capital, and information ‘on the move’ (Appadurai, 1996). Mobility, as an ontological premise, allows consideration for lives and professional networks that are created through different scales (i.e., local, global, transnational, etc.) and migration experiences, including those resulting in dispossession and displacement, that defy easy categorization and reification through references to national borders (Adey, 2017). Guided by this ontology, TMS focuses on transnational social fields and scalar notions of being and belonging as epistemic concepts to critically study people and work in a ‘world on the move’, and historical conjunctures as a methodology that shapes the starting point of research.

Through these epistemic and methodological considerations, the paper aims to provide additional frameworks and approaches for critical CCM fieldwork. Specifically, the paper opens up possibilities for reorienting representational scripts that rely on methodological nationalism through an ethics lens, expands upon existing units of analysis through the notion of encounters, and extends the transnational boundaries of the ‘field’ in fieldwork. In doing so, the paper contributes to calls for a multiparadigmatic approach in interrogating existing norms and forms of cultural differentiation inclusive of power relations (Bausch and Mahadevan, 2025). By engaging with TMS, the paper provides opportunities to ask new and different research questions related to people, mobility, culture, and global work. Beyond potential contributions to existing concepts and framework used in critical CCM research, the paper engages in three epistemic reflections, namely, ‘ethics on the move’, representation and surveillance, and interdisciplinarity, for critical qualitative scholarship within management and organization studies (MOS).

Transnational migration studies: Ontology, epistemology, and methodology

Schiller et al. (1992) coined transmigrants to provide a new concept in the study of transnationalism, the phenomenon whereby individuals left their homelands for a new life elsewhere, but remained connected to their communities back ‘home’. The new concept was in response to sociological research in migration studies which, up to that point, had explicitly assumed a natural break between home and host country, and a migratory experience that was conceptualized as linear with individuals moving from one place to another. In the sociological literature, such individuals were examined as ‘immigrants’ or ‘migrants’, with the understanding that while they were mobile, they were moving in one direction between ‘sending’ and ‘receiving’ nations (see Castles, 2007).

To expand on this unidirectional approach, Schiller, Basch, and Blanc-Szanton (re)defined transnationalism as “the processes by which immigrants build social fields that link together their country of origin and their country of settlement. Immigrants who build such social fields are designated ‘transmigrants.’ Transmigrants develop and maintain multiple relations-familial, economic, social, organizational, religious, and political that span borders” (1992: 1). The field that developed out of these engagements, transnational migration studies, focused on how individuals build social worlds that linked different scales of experience and relationships across cultures, distances, places, and spaces beyond ‘home’ and ‘host’ country. Here, scale denotes an “analytical tool” that is used “to examine and structure socio-spatial processes and practices” (Porst and Sakdapolrak, 2017: 114) in relation to local, global, and transnational social groups and professional lives. Conceptualized in this manner, focusing on ‘scale’ provides insights into how people exist, connect, and foster community across the different layers of their social worlds inclusive of their work experiences. Next, I expand further into the ontological, epistemological, and methodological tenets of the field and then move onto discuss how TMS ¹ seeks to contribute additional frameworks available for critical CCM research.

Ontology

From an ontological perspective, TMS describes the social world as one that is constantly on the move and in the process of becoming. In such a world, static reference points like the nation-state, society, or culture are scrutinized as incapable of capturing the experiences and identities arising out of movement (Wimmer and Glick Schiller, 2003). In other words, mobility is central to how research informed by TMS ‘makes sense of the world’ and conceptualizes its objects/subjects of inquiry. As Sheller suggests, the mobility turn requires, “examining the place of movement within the very workings of social institutions and of social practices, those institutions and practices that form people’s lives… Mobilities depend on multiple kinds of material objects, as well as lumpy, fragile, aged, gendered, racialised, and more or less impaired bodies, inhabited as people are intermittently on the move” (2017: 628-629). Extending these ontological assumptions into the domain of the social and society, TMS focuses on “mobile lives” (Elliott and Urry, 2010) and how they are created and sustained in the midst of ongoing consumerism, inequalities, and digital relationships.

Paradoxically, while people may be ‘on the move’, technical systems, infrastructures, and institutions that they encounter on a daily basis and that in turn, inform their social reality remain static and immutable to an extent. More importantly, people have differential and unequal access to these structures in and across societies (Graham and Marvin, 2001). Consequently, power disparities arising out of institutional arrangements, such as visa regulations or work requirements, render some people dispossessed in their mobility experiences (see Glick Schiller, 2005). As Fauser and Bada (2024) suggest, increasingly the world is marked by inequality, dispossession, and displacement as the dominant experiences of mobility. In turn, these complex experiences of mobility and immobility are foundational to the epistemic tenets of TMS.

Epistemology

In regards to claims around knowledge and specifically, the ethics of representation, TMS’s analytic starting point is around society, specifically its form (i.e., who is included) and location (i.e., what are its boundaries). The epistemic focus and ethical engagement is on how mobility impacts our understanding and theorizing of social groups. TMS refocuses efforts to understand the creation of modern societies and the experiences of individuals who are ‘on the move’ away from the ‘container society’ (Taylor, 1996), whereby society is defined in form and location by reference to the nation-state. By adopting a mobility approach, TMS recognizes extant social hierarchies and status differences as part of nation-building processes and migration experiences. And while there are adjacent concepts of culture, such as superdiversity (Vertovec, 2007) and multiculturalism (see Berkes, 2010), that speak to the complexity and multiplicity of of cultural identities, they do not necessarily address the role of power relations and inequities in the migration process. In contrast to such nation-based and multiculturally-focused explanations of cultural differences, TMS adopts transnational social fields with its focus on scalar notions of being and belonging inclusive of power relations.

Transnational social fields is an examination of how individuals actively participate in being part of a social group that is not defined by geography (i.e., nation-state) and exists across a variety of different scales (i.e., community, locality, diasporic, regional, global, etc.). Specifically, it focuses on ‘way of being’, or “the actual social relations and practices that individuals engage in rather than to the identities associated with their actions” and ‘ways of belonging’ or the “practices that signal or enact an identity which demonstrates a conscious connection to a particular group…such as wearing a Christian cross or Jewish star, flying a flag, choosing a particular cuisine. Ways of belonging combine action and an awareness of the kind of identity that action signifies” (Levitt and Glick Schiller, 2004: 1008). Such an approach to the study of people, culture, and global work requires being attuned to the ways personal and professional lives are created through different scales of participation. This means that scholars “trace multiple, intersecting and often unequal social relations across space and through time” and contextualize the social world within “multi-scalar, globe-spanning capitalist processes” whereby any effort to understand differences between/among people in different cultural contexts also means attending to “structures of unequal power that span the globe” (Glick Schiller, 2015: 2277-2278).

At the same time, mobility is not available to all people given growing restrictions on travel and tourism (see Paasi, 2022; Paasi and Ferdoush, 2022). Nations can still limit the ‘form’ and ‘location’ of society through legal, political, and epistemic interventions that denote certain groups as ‘illegal’ or through physical force by using the military to prevent border crossings. Within this context of limited mobility, individuals desperate to escape war, famine, and other perils in hopes of finding a better life elsewhere have fallen victim to human trafficking (i.e., drownings of North African people hoping to get into Greece by way of the Mediterranean). There is also growing populism and anti-immigrant sentiment across the globe (see Glick Schiller, 2024). The current Trump administration in the U.S. has been following the right-wing Project 2025 blueprint in many of the recent Executive Orders, such as those targeting DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) efforts in government, cancelling cultural celebrations focused on women and minorities, and engaging in mass deportation efforts (Shao et al., 2025). Altogether, these activities and policies are representative of historical conjunctures or particular events/transformations in history that have significant impacts on the creation of transnational social fields and the ability of certain people to move. TMS addresses these mobility-related analytics through an epistemic focus on transnational social fields and through historical conjunctures as a methodological approach.

Methodology

Despite growing critique, methodological nationalism and individualism remain dominant when qualitative researchers focus on differences in migration experiences but do so by conceptualizing society as a natural extension of nation-states. This approach does not sufficiently acknowledge the broader social context of mobility. To this end, Wimmer and Glick Schiller (2002a) describe methodological nationalism as “the territorialization of social science imaginary and the reduction of the analytical focus to the boundaries of the nation-state. The social sciences have become obsessed with describing processes within nation-state boundaries as contrasted with those outside, and have correspondingly lost sight of the connections between such nationally defined territories” (307). On this point, engaging in transnationally-focused research under postcolonial conditions requires acknowledging asymmetrical power relations and researcher positionalities, questioning dominant epistemic tools that reify institutional arrangements in nation-states, and recognizing the role of mostly Western funding organizations for conducting fieldwork (Mustonen and Scheel, 2024).

Already within the domain of critical CCM, scholars have also moved beyond and/or questioned the appropriateness of using nation-states as a proxy for culture and cultural differences, particularly given the existence of other dimensions of social difference (see Adler and Aycan, 2020). Other critical scholars have focused on the importance of power relations within CCM research and the importance of focusing on ‘othering’ rather than/only differences (Primecz et al., 2016). TMS adds another possible theoretical framework to deploy within the domain of critical CCM and specifically, provides additional epistemic considerations and methodological approaches for scholars who want to examine power relations and social groups including those taking shape in postcolonial and decolonial conditions. Specifically, TMS adds historical conjunctural methodology as a possibility for expanding upon critical methodologies within CCM.

To clarify, historical conjunctures is a methodological approach that places transnational social-field making processes and activities in historic context as the starting point for any fieldwork. The context informs scholars’ examination of how mobilities and movement become possible, or not, for some people, and the consequences of that mobility for the creation of boundary-spanning identities, organizations, and networks (Lubbers et al., 2020). Conjuncture, in this sense, refers to a particular moment or series of transformations in history that are used as the starting point for a transnational migration analysis (i.e., Covid-19 pandemic, new immigration policy, executive order declaring there are only two genders, etc.) Çaglar and Glick Schiller suggest:

A conjunctural analysis examines the multiscalar, globally extending relationships of places to processes of accumulating wealth and power, to constructions of meaning and affect, and to the ways in which modes of social, political, and economic life are organized and reproduced. Such an analysis brings together intersecting global transformations that condition the growth of different organizational forms of industry and agriculture; the growth of nation-states and national movements; the content, meaning, and role of religion; the nature and articulation of crises; the dynamics and success of movements for social justice; and the efficacy and forms of capital accumulation. Differing specific iterations of institutional structures and policies in specific states and regions reflect as well as contribute to transnational or global transformations and affect modes of life, production and social reproduction, and ideologies of self and society everywhere (2018: 22-23).

A conjunctural approach to fieldwork surfaces power relations, racialization, and the creation of inequalities as part of the research (Glick Schiller and Salazar, 2013). This approach is highly relevant for the domain of critical CCM and the study of organizations, work, and people that are on the move. Within this domain, mobility dynamics can be uncovered through a multiplicity of methods, such as shadowing, visual analysis of images, network analyses and ride or walk alongs (see Sheller, 2017: 629). Thus, a variety of methods can be deployed to examine different aspects of phenomena and researchers can ‘follow’ or trace the contours of people, ideas, information and objects through mobile methodologies (Fincham et al., 2009). The aim of these research endeavors is not necessarily to outright compare and differentiate but rather understand the transnational connectivities between and among different people, groups, practices and the ways in which various forms of inequality are taking shape.

A great example of this approach is qualitative research by Çaglar and Glick Schiller (2018: 216) that explores “the multiple disparate but interconnected ways in which the daily lives of residents in three cities [Halle, Germany; Manchester, New Hampshire, USA, and Mardin, Turkey] were situated within networks that made them actors within simultaneous, interconnected local, regional, national, supranational, and global relations of power” as each city went through an economic redevelopment effort. The authors go on to state, “Our explorations of urban regeneration projects and the actors involved in their development…made clear that the local was not a level of analysis or a discrete domain but an arena of multiple institutional actors within the power geometry of a specific conjuncture” (Çaglar and Glick Schiller, 2018: 217). As such, their approach reflects a multiscalar understanding of transnational processes related to urban redevelopment processes and the various ways the lives of residents were impacted across three distinct cities.

To clarify, there are already mobility-focused methods, like multi-sited ethnography (see Marcus, 1995 for seminal work), that engage in “follow the people” or “follow the thing” across different sites to offer cross-sectional insights, including fieldwork within critical CCM (Mahadevan, 2024a). What is unique in a TMS-informed historical conjunctural approach to qualitative research is the starting point of fieldwork. In multi-sited ethnography, sites are conceptualized as distinct and separate from each other and researchers ‘follow’ subjects/objects from one site to another. In a conjunctural approach, the foundational assumption about sites is different, “Each research site is always multiscalar because all places are constituted in relationship to elsewhere as parts of intersecting networks linking multiple forms of disparate institutionalized power (Çaglar and Glick Schiller, 2018: 10-11).

In the above example, the three cities were chosen based on their economic redevelopment efforts (the historical conjuncture) and studied “not as a bounded unit but as a multiscalar social field of interconnection” as interviews, participant observations, website and document analysis, and the collection of statistical information informed the approach to fieldwork (Çaglar and Glick Schiller, 2018: 35). Consequently, mobility-informed methods are necessary but not sufficient if decoupled from TMS’s epistemic and ethical foundations that focus on transnational social-field building processes embedded within various inequalities and capitalist processes. In all, epistemic and methodological considerations must be well-aligned when undertaking fieldwork informed by TMS.

Expanding paradigms for qualitative research in critical cross-cultural management

Epistemic and methodological insights from TMS could be helpful for scholars pursuing multiparadigmatic approaches to qualitative research in critical CCM. Here, I expand upon three areas that are relevant in this regard: rethinking representation, ethics, and methodological nationalism; rethinking the unit of analysis through encounters; and extending the boundaries of research and the emergent ‘field’ in fieldwork.

Rethinking representation: Methodological nationalism and ethics

One of the defining features of transnational migration studies is the entanglement of methodology with epistemology and ethics: methodology reflects the intentional choice of methods, an articulation of ethical commitments, and an epistemic concern about the starting point of the analysis. TMS adopts historical conjunctures as its methodological approach, whereby representational categories and methods are chosen based on their ability to address inequality, racialization, gendering, etc. in a transnational fashion. This approach stands in contrast to ‘methodological nationalism’ (Beck, 2007) whereby ethnicity and nation are conceptualized as “naturally given entities” (Amelina and Faist, 2012: 1710). To be clear, scholars within the domain of critical CCM have already deployed similar critiques by using postcolonial and similar frameworks (see Allen and Girei, 2024) to question static, Western, and nation-derived cultural scripts for representing people. However, there are additional and different paradigmatic critiques possible through a TMS framework. Examining ‘differences’ in people guided by TMS focuses on representational approaches that also speak about ethical commitments to demonstrating how social lives take shape within transnational social fields embedded in global inequalities.

To this end, TMS-derived qualitative research pays attention to the “practice of bordering and processes of boundary-making” (Scheel and Tazzioli, 2022: 3) rather than labeling individuals as migrants. Labeling is not simply about differentiating or categorizing people. It is a consideration of how Western representational scripts embody a form of epistemic violence when used to “invent” ‘the cultural Other’ (Castro-Gómez and Martin, 2002). In other words, TMS-informed research raises questions around the ethics of representation when the use of ‘cultural differences’ as an analytic framework to understand people or business practices ignores the violence, inequalities, and disparities that are the result of transnational capitalist processes. For example, a TMS-informed approach to examining globally mobile professionals would recognize and contextualize their mobility and organizational experiences within racialized and gendered global capital accumulation and wage inequality (see Ngai and Chan, 2012; also Hickel et al., 2021), rather than focusing explicitly on providing, for example, insights for more inclusive HR practices.

Moreover, TMS provides additional paradigmatic concepts to address concerns explicitly raised by critical CCM researchers (Jackson, 2024; also Szkudlarek et al., 2020): who are the subjects we should study? How do we represent them in a manner that is epistemically and ethically appropriate? And more broadly, what should we study under the domain of critical CCM? As one example, research guided by TMS concepts could include examining the experiences of refugees and forced migrants (Bach, 2003) within the context of international business, low-wage employment, and HR–policies. Such research has the potential to contribute to qualitative research within critical CCM work by including human rights in any analysis of global business particularly as developing economies increasingly subject refugees and migrants to forced labor conditions (see Goethals et al., 2017). Examples of such forced labor, including modern slavery, can be found across the globe including Syrian refugees in the textile industry in Turkey, Filipino migrants in the construction industry in the U.A.E., Uyghurs in work and “re-education” camps in China, and Congolese refugees hawking in South Africa to name a few groups and contexts.

Another area that can be expanded upon is gender and race in relation to transnational migration (Bair, 2010) and the emergence of gendered and racialized inequalities for transmigrant laborers. This research focus could bridge the domain of critical CCM with critical work within CSR (corporate social responsibility). Critical scholarship within CSR has already examined transnational processes of gendered and racialized global capitalism enabled by corporate policies and practices in the ‘Global South’ (see Ozkazanc-Pan, 2019b; also Mahler and Pessar, 2001). In such cases, Western cultural norms embodied in corporate policies can exacerbate ongoing living and working conditions for transmigrant women and girls despite claims around social responsibility and female empowerment (Calkin, 2016).

Third, there can be expanded focus on those who are immobile and working in informal sectors. These groups are still embedded in transnational processes of capitalism but unable to escape or move away from the socio-cultural, economic, and political conditions of their context. In their introduction to the special issue of Migration Letters on ‘Transnational (im)immobilities and informality in Europe’, Fradejas-García et al. (2021: 121) state, “In the EU, regimes of mobility at multiple scales affect various people on the move who are pushed into informality in order to acquire social mobility while having to combat border regimes, racialisation, inequalities, and state bureaucracies.” Their work and the special issue articles go on to explore experiences of immobility and informality that take shape when mobility regimes curtail or altogether ban movement for some communities while allowing it for others. In this sense, the research offers insights into two seemingly binary opposites taking shape simultaneously: how mobility and immobility are possible in the same socio-cultural, economic, and political context. As such, examining (im)mobility regimes, inequalities, and global workers using TMS frameworks would complement the domain of qualitative critical CCM research.

Rethinking units of analysis: Encounters

From a transnational migration framework, studying subjects or phenomena as bounded, predefined units limits our understanding of their transnational and scalar dimensions. This raises an important question that might resonate with critical CCM scholars, “What is the appropriate unit of analysis for critically-informed CCM research guided by a TMS framework?” or put differently, “What should one pay attention to?” One possibility arriving from TMS is to focus on encounters (see Lennerfors, 2026), whereby scholars examine how people engage live lives that simultaneously “incorporate daily activities, routines, and institutions located both in a destination country and transnationally” (Levitt and Glick Schiller, 2004: 1003). As a unit of analysis, encounters encapsulates the social field making interactions, activities, and engagements of people. As Lennerfors (2026) suggests, encounters is a consideration of “what do people do when they relate to culture?” One way to engage in this query is for research to focus on how professional work activities, inclusive of encounters with other actors, take shape simultaneously across social fields.

To this end, Harrington and Seabrooke (2020: 399) provide a review of research on transnational professionals, showcasing how such individuals have “high-level abstract knowledge, high mobility across national and organizational settings, social and cultural capital, and distributed agency to shape global practices.” By bringing together an analysis that focuses on the ongoing encounters between professionals, organizations, and institutions, the scholars call attention to the role of agency, power, and territoriality in any analysis related to occupation and professional identity across borders. In doing so, they expand sociological analysis of professions to include transnational networks and institutional work given that firms are no longer the dominant provider of job opportunities.

Beyond this example, another possibility for critical CCM research is to examine global assignment experiences, organizational HRM practices, or ways of transferring knowledge between different MNC subsidiaries through a historical conjuncture. For example, Martel (2024) focuses on the Covid-19 pandemic and demonstrates how virtual collectivities were assembled through online encounters between and among different people who shared their professional and personal experiences. Once the pandemic restrictions for in-person interactions were lifted, these virtual collectivities dissolved and did not become re-established ‘in the real world.’ In this sense, the pandemic-driven online encounters created an opportunity for the emergence of a novel unit of analysis: virtual collectivities, which did not exist prior to the pandemic. Tracing the contours of these encounters within a particular historical conjuncture can yield insights that would be otherwise missed if a predetermined unit of analysis drove the qualitative research.

A final possibility arriving from TMS is related to carrying out qualitative research on global mobility and focuses on the positionality of the researcher in the field. On this point, Ozkazanc-Pan (2023: 211) suggests, “Rather than remaining static in one location or site, the researcher can create or manufacture the boundaries of the field based on contextualizing the research, locating it within broader themes, trends, or practices”. Such a consideration builds upon calls for reflexivity (Grosskopf and Barmeyer, 2021) and acknowledgment of power relations (Jackson, 2023) that already exist in cross-cultural management fieldwork but adds the dimension of mobility. Thus, it is possible that encounters during the fieldwork results in shifting scalar power dynamics or new and emergent social formations (see Sasiwongsaroj et al., 2024). In these cases, it is important to understand the role of the researcher particularly in regards to the subjects and their responsibility in crafting a narrative that adequately captures the shifting encounters and experiences associated with the work (see Folkes, 2023). To this end, the unit of analysis is not simply a technical choice but a political one that requires acknowledging the socio-cultural and political consequences of choosing particular representational schemes to study individuals participating in the research.

Extending the boundaries of research: The emergent ‘field’ in fieldwork

In addition to deciding on how to address the unit of analysis associated with the research, qualitative scholars must also determine the ‘field’ in fieldwork. Similar to Nicolini’s (2009) zooming in and out perspective on fieldwork, TMS provides an additional consideration around the multiscalar global perspective. This scalar contribution allows consideration for the local, national, and global within the same analytic framework or transnational social ‘field’, particularly in relation to power relations and positionality. Specifically, TMS-inspired global mobility research has the potential to address “the reproduction and movement of people and profits across national borders. Such a perspective places the debates about international migration and development and the contemporary polemics and policies on immigration, asylum, and global talent within the same analytical framework, allowing migration scholars to address the mutual constitution of the local and the global” (Glick Schiller, 2009: 14). Global capital accumulation and deindustrialization have “heightened the demand for an inexpensive flexible workforce, while simultaneously creating pressure to restrict access to the costly privileges of citizenship” (McDowell and Wonders, 2009: 55). Migration, then, is intimately connected to neoliberalism and corporate aims to maximize profits, such as outsourcing jobs to lower wage locations (Robinson and Santos, 2014) and the movement of capital and elite professionals across borders.

For example, a multiparadigmatic examination of globally mobile professionals can include consideration of those who are rendered immobile, such as garment workers (see Kumar, 2015), and unable to choose the conditions of their employment within the context of global capital accumulation. The movement of capital to global sites and locations to secure the ‘best returns’, usually by way of global talent, creates immobility for global South laborers while White professional bodies move across spaces with seemingly relative ease (Lundström, 2024). Often, elite professionals versus the wage laborers are theorized in isolation from each other despite being embedded in multiscalar social fields and global capitalist processes that intersect and are interdependent. Examining this phenomenon, which is highly relevant for critical CCM, in a multiparadigmatic manner would mean expanding the transnational social ‘field’ to include both White professional bodies and Global south laborers, who are all entangled, albeit differently, in capitalist processes of accumulation and dispossession within the context of MNCs.

Another example of expanding the ‘field’ in research is offered by Nazareno et al. (2021), a multidisciplinary team from sociology, ethnic studies, and public health, who draw upon transnational feminism and intersectionality to explain the disproportionate number of Filipino nurse deaths during the COVID-19 pandemic. Through a historical conjunctural approach, the scholars explain that English-speaking Filipinos are overrepresented in the U.S. nursing sector due to historic colonial ties between the two nations coupled with a contemporary nursing shortage, which created opportunities for visa-based mobility. Yet despite their movement to the U.S., the nurses end up ‘stuck’. They have limited opportunity to advance professionally due to racialized discrimination and little ability to ‘go back’ given they send monthly remittances to their extended family in the Philippines as the primary income-earner. This analysis showcases how Filipino nurses are not only ‘mobile professionals’ in need of better workplace protections, but that they are also embedded within historic colonial and contemporary transnational networks and social fields that limit their mobility.

As such, expanding the ‘field’ through multiparadigmatic critical research on mobile professionals could include “the simultaneous incorporation of migrants into multiple social fields, that may include but are not delimited to the localities where they settle and from which they came, could carry us beyond a reified and essentialised concept of community and into the study of migrants and non-migrants within open social fields of differential power” (Wimmer and Glick Schiller, 2002b: 233). In other words, a multiscalar global perspective arriving from TMS opens up possibilities for addressing seemingly disparate phenomena, providing opportunities for critical qualitative researchers to expand their epistemic and methodological approaches within the domain of critical CCM.

Future research: What comes next?

Guided by its mobility-focused ontology, critical epistemology, and historical conjunctural methodology, TMS contributes to calls for multiparadigmatic approaches by critical CCM scholars. More succinctly, TMS creates an opportunity to ask a different and complementary set of research questions about people, mobility, culture, and global work within the critical CCM field. Expanding on these potential contributions, TMS also fosters epistemic reflections on ‘ethics on the move’, representation and surveillance, and interdisciplinarity as important considerations for critical qualitative research on global work within MOS.

The first reflection is around ‘ethics on the move’, or how an ontology of mobility surfaces ethical tensions related to representing people, lives, and experiences. This point builds upon existing postcolonial and decolonial critiques of Western epistemologies for representation (Banerjee, 2022; also Ozkazanc-Pan, 2008; Nkomo, 2011). On this point, Sager suggests, “...an ethics of mobility asks questions such as what are the goods protected by borders and boundaries? Should these goods be protected in this way? Who is excluded from accessing these goods? Why are these people excluded? How are they excluded? What are the means of exclusion, and are they proportional?” (2017: 12). In other words, it is not sufficient for qualitative researchers to pay attention to mobility but rather, also consider how approaches to the study of people, such as migrants or cultural others, requires an imposed categorization. Epistemic claims and representational scripts can function much like a border: they can create boundaries around groups that are normalized as part of society and at the same time, exclude those that are considered as outsider, culturally different, and potentially in need of surveillance and discipline. Thus, it is important for qualitative researchers to understand their role in (re)creating social ordering among and between different people as cultural categorization can be a form of hierarchy. Beyond research, these assumptions can show up in our classrooms, popular media, and policy documents, potentially further exacerbating inequalities and negative stereotypes about cultural ‘Others’. Thus, we need to consider the ethical consequences of our methodological choices in the study of ‘cultural others’ (Cook and Butz, 2019). As such, purposeful pursuit of “immigrant narratives [can] reveal the social consequences of immigration policies” (Lehman et al., 2016: 68) and offer opportunities for qualitative researchers to empower their informants rather than continue to epistemically subjugate them.

Second, and building on the above point, an additional reflection is related to the relationship between representational commitments and government or state-sponsored surveillance techniques. For example, accounting for migrants, immigrants, and expatriates in multinational organizations requires legal consideration about their employability beyond their economic value for the corporation. Whether such mobile individuals can be hired and how to structure global assignments to ensure compliance with local requirements is relevant for human resources within MNCs (Kesserling, 2015). By naming particular people as migrants, immigrants, or expatriates, MNCs are engaging in bordering processes, and “ultimately, the enforcement of borders to curb ‘illegal’ immigrants and migrants requires surveillance through sophisticated techniques or ‘technologies of control’” (see Pickering and Weber, 2006). Thus, scholarship that recreates the categorization and nomenclature of bordering as part of its knowledge claims about globally mobile professionals can become less about scientific pursuits and more about upholding the interests of nation-states. In this sense, As Sager suggests,

Not only have state borders been “externalized”—enforced at distant locations such as airports in different continents, international waters, or foreign territories—they have also become increasingly “internalized” and mobile with surveillance and enforcement occurring in the heartland of national territories (2017: 5).

Transnational frameworks demonstrate how MNCs can function as extended sites of surveillance on behalf of nation-states through their HR-practices, such as labeling employees as expatriates and so forth. It is important for qualitative researchers to understand the role of their epistemic commitments given that their choice of representational categories may perpetuate particular nation-state interests and bordering policies. To this end, Baas and Glick Schiller (2024: 3) suggest “migration scholars not only document the transformations in migration but to say clearly and forcefully: migration is a social good and is part of our struggle for a more just world.”

Finally, the complexity of mobility phenomena coupled with calls for increased multiparadigmatic research requires critical qualitative scholars to become well-versed in interdisciplinary literature. Rather than studying mobility experiences in isolation from other disciplines, qualitative researchers in MOS should be better equipped to expand their theoretical training and frameworks. In other words, there should be more interdisciplinary critical qualitative research on culture and global work both in terms of literature deployed and research teams. Yet this call is not without its challenges given growing careerism, publication pressures for tenure (i.e., solo authored in a FT50 journal), disciplinary gatekeeping, and imposition of positivist research expectations on qualitative fieldwork by non-critical/mainstream journal editors. Ironically, “interdisciplinarity is becoming a rule of thumb for natural scientists in scientific fields unifying across old boundaries: for example, in the intersection of biological and physical sciences, or the pathbreaking work in complexity science in which natural sciences are marching boldly into social scientific territories, (Favell, 2007: 261). Perhaps it’s time for critical MOS scholars to also work more collaboratively across disciplines to examine the complex and interrelated ways organizational phenomena are taking shape.

In summary, transnational migration studies provides possibilities for multiparadigmatic critical CCM research through its epistemic and methodological engagements that allow for rethinking the norms and forms of representation in a social world experiencing a variety of (im)mobility regimes and growing transnational economic inequalities. In the U.S., we are witnessing the dehumanizing efforts of immigration policies as families are ripped apart, businesses shuttered, and communities living in fear for their lives and livelihoods due to ongoing deportations. These efforts are not unique to the U.S. and are, in fact, taking shape in different ways across the globe, resulting in the erosion of human dignity, curbing of social justice efforts, and diminished economic inclusion initiatives. To this end, in their introduction to the special of Transitions, Baas and Glick Schiller (2024: 4) suggest scholars address “the cumulative results of the intense anti-migration politics of the present day and to raise new research questions about the future of mobility across borders, especially where it concerns those seeking employment and livelihoods elsewhere.” Can management scholars of various kinds rise to the challenge of studying such a world?