Organizations and migrant integration: Towards a multiparadigm narrative approach

This paper explores the potential of conducting multiparadigm research within and beyond cross-cultural management, using narratives to examine how organizations shape migrant integration experiences and trajectories. It highlights the strengths of paradigmatic multiplicity in research with examples of three illustrative studies respectively using functionalist, interpretive and critical perspectives, while also considering the boundaries of these individual approaches. The paper proceeds to explore the potential of adopting a multiparadigm approach within a research strategy that places narratives at the centre of enquiry. It identifies the scope and focus of future research for a socially and politically important area of enquiry; it evaluates the application of diverse paradigm-driven methodological perspectives including the challenges involved in using them alone and in combination; and it develops a transferable framework to guide research in cross-cultural management, organization and migration studies that helps to assure procedural and conceptual rigour, and to generate practicable insights that facilitate successful integration outcomes.

Openness as Organizing Principle: Introduction to the Special Issue

'Openness' has become an organizational leitmotif of our time, spreading across a growing set of organizational domains. However, discussions within these specialized domains (e.g. open data, open government or open innovation) treat openness in isolation and specific to the particularities of those domains. The intention of this Special Issue therefore is to foster cross-domain conversations to exchange insights and build cumulative knowledge on openness. To do so, this Introduction to the Special Issue argues that openness should be investigated as a general organizing principle, which we refer to as Open Organizing. Across domains, we define Open Organizing as a dynamic organizing principle along the primary dimension of transparency/opacity and the secondary dimensions of inclusion/exclusion and distributed/concentrated decision rights. As such, Open Organizing raises an overarching problem of design, which results from more specific epistemic, normative and political challenges.

Conceptualizing disability accommodation device acceptance by workgroups through a sociomaterial lens

Purpose

The provision of accommodation devices is said to aid organizational inclusion of employees with a disability. However, devices that are meant to enable might only partially facilitate productivity, independence, and social inclusion if these devices are not accepted by the user's workgroup. The authors outline a conceptual model of accommodation device acceptance through a sociomaterial lens to suggest conditions influencing workgroup device acceptance.

Design/methodology/approach

To build the model, the authors draw upon the sociomateriality and disability literature to frame accommodation devices as experienced in ongoing interactions, representing the goals, feelings, and interpretations of specific workgroups. The authors also unpack attributes of devices—instrumentality, aesthetics, and symbolism—and propose how each of these can pattern social conduct to influence device acceptance. The authors then draw upon the disability literature to identify attributes of workgroups that can be expected to amplify or diminish the effect of device attributes on device acceptance in that workgroup.

Findings

The conceptualization, which the authors illustrate with examples particular to visual impairment, presents implications for who and what serves as a gatekeeper to accommodation device acceptance and thereby workgroup inclusion.

Originality/value

Prior research has focused on conditions under which devices are requested by users or made available by organizations, undergirded by the assumption that devices are well-specified once provided and that they operate relatively predictably when used in various workgroups. The authors focus instead on what happens after the device is provided and highlight the complex and dynamic interaction between an accommodation device and the workgroup, which influences device and user acceptance.

Destigmatization Through Visualization: Striving to redefine refugee workers’ worth

Refugee workers struggle to find employment because they are stigmatized. Research suggests that organizations can help destigmatize actors such as refugees by recognizing them and confirming their worth in society. Here, we explore pictures that refugee job-placement organizations in Austria and Germany used to redefine refugees’ moral worthiness – that is, their worth in relation to higher-order normative principles such as civic duty, efficiency and creativity. Analysing images used in organizations’ destigmatization efforts is essential, as pictures visualize and materialize refugees rather than abstractly describing them. Hence, visualization shapes the worthiness of refugee workers in the eyes of prospective employers. Combining social semiotics with the economies of worth framework, we found that job-placement organizations use three visualization practices – professionalizing, domesticizing and stylizing – that draw on distinct moral orders. We found that although these practices were intended to destigmatize, they also – counterintuitively – restigmatize. By leveraging social semiotic studies of visualization, our results advance stigmatization studies by showing how visualization can unintendedly restigmatize and by revealing that the visualization practices we identified are built upon multiple forms of worth. Our analysis also theoretically and methodologically extends studies of organizational morality by explaining how moral dimensions are expressed through visual registers.

Cultivating diversity as an ethos with an anti-racism approach in the scientific enterprise

The diversity of the U.S. population is currently not reflected in the genomic workforce and across the greater scientific enterprise. Although diversity and inclusion efforts have focused on increasing the number of individuals from underrepresented groups across scientific fields, structural racism remains. Thus, the cultivation and adoption of diversity as an ethos requires shifting our focus to being intentional about an institution’s character, culture, and climate. One way for this ethos to be sustained is by facilitating an intentional anti-racism approach within the field. Adopting a new perspective on diversity utilizing an anti-racism approach will support genomics researchers as we build supportive, collaborative research environments. We seek to expand critical thought in the framing of diversity in the research enterprise and propose an anti-racism approach that informs deliberate actions required to address structural racism.