Migration and mobility are key features of a globalized world (Urry, 2000). Due to this development, management and organizations have become increasingly culturally diverse. When speaking of culture in this call, we refer to any processes of collective identity through which individuals construct relative difference between social self and other (Lawler, 2008). Such cultural diversity is never context-free. Rather, it evolves within a specific national, geographic, social, economic and cultural environment. Neither micro-level human interactions, nor meso-organizational and macro-societal boundary conditions are devoid of power. Rather, they are shaped by historical and neo-colonial imbalances of power which result in historically excluded or marginalized groups (Prasad, Pringle and Konrad, 2006). These boundary conditions might restrain individual agency, yet, they might also facilitate resistance.
This call addresses the question of how complex organizational diversity and related cultural dynamics can be understood in context. We understand context as referring to relations of power, to the specific nature of interactions, and to the socio-structural boundary conditions and their historical roots. If these are not reflected upon, specific configurations of cultures inorganizations might result in marginalization, othering, sophisticated stereotyping (Osland etal, 2000) and exclusion (Zanoni et al., 2010).
Jasmin Mahadevan, Pforzheim University, Germany, [email protected]
Henriett Primecz, Corvinus University of Budapest, [email protected]
Laurence Romani, Stockholm School of Economics, [email protected]