Jasmin Mahadevan, Katharina Kilian-Yasin, Iuliana Ancuţa Ilie and Franziska Müller
The purpose of this paper is to highlight the dangers of Orientalist framing. Orientalism (Said, 1979/2003) shows how “the West” actually creates “the Orient” as an inferior…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to highlight the dangers of Orientalist framing. Orientalism (Said, 1979/2003) shows how “the West” actually creates “the Orient” as an inferior opposite to affirm itself, for instance by using imaginative geographical frames such as “East” and “West” (Said, 1993).
Design/methodology/approach
Qualitative interviews were conducted with the members of a German-Tunisian project team in research engineering. The interview purpose was to let individuals reflect upon their experiences of difference and to find out whether these experiences are preframed by imaginative geographical categories.
Findings
Tunisian researchers were subjected to the dominant imaginative geographical frame “the Arab world.” This frame involves ascribed religiousness, gender stereotyping and ascriptions of backwardness.
Research limitations/implications
Research needs to investigate Orientalist thought and imaginative geographies in specific organizational and interpersonal interactions lest they overshadow managerial theory and practice.
Practical implications
Practitioners need to challenge dominant frames and Orientalist thought in their own practice and organizational surroundings to devise a truly inclusive managerial practice, for instance, regarding Muslim minorities.
Social implications
In times of Islamophobia and anti-Muslim sentiment in “the West,” this paper highlights the frames from which such sentiments might originate, and the need to reflect upon them.
Originality/value
The theoretical value lies in introducing a critical framing approach and the concept of imaginative geographies to perceived differences at work. For practice, it highlights how certain individuals are constructed as “Muslim others” and subjected to ascriptions of negative difference. By this mechanism, their inclusion is obstructed.
Details
Keywords
This paper shows the benefits of multi-sited ethnography for global migration studies in management, in particular when cosmopolitan self-initiated expatriates meet a local…
Abstract
Purpose
This paper shows the benefits of multi-sited ethnography for global migration studies in management, in particular when cosmopolitan self-initiated expatriates meet a local setting.
Design/methodology/approach
The author conducted a multi-sited ethnography to trace how a local East German research organization’s well-intended approach to integration becomes condescending.
Findings
Highly skilled non-Western migrant employees who represent English-language cosmopolitanism are framed as negatively “foreign” by corporate discourses and practices. This phenomenon can only be understood if one follows the interconnections of language power, White subalternity and compressed modernity and if one considers the immediate surroundings, the historical context of East German identity and wider migration frames in Germany.
Research limitations/implications
Multi-sited ethnography, if power-sensitive and historically-aware, is suitable for understanding the multi-level phenomenon of global migration and identifying limiting framing-effects on management and organizations. Researcher standpoint is both its strength and its limitation.
Practical implications
Managers and companies can “imagine otherwise” and move beyond the unquestioned dominant frames limiting their problem analyses and, consequently, their strategies and actions.
Social implications
Managers and companies are enabled to move beyond individual- and corporate-level approaches to managing migration at work and can thus take up full social responsibility in the sense of good corporate citizenship on a global level. Global mobility researchers can work towards an inclusive migration theory.
Originality/value
Multi-sited ethnography, in particular, one that is power-sensitive and historically aware, is an approach not yet applied to migration in the context of management and organization. By means of an example, this paper illustrates the value of this approach and enables researchers to understand its main principles. Compressed modernity and White subalternity are introduced as novel concepts structuring migration, and language power emerges as relevant far beyond the scope of the multinational corporation.