This chapter focuses further on subjectivities arriving out of the new mobility ontology in a broad sense while the following two chapters outline specific forms that transmigrants can take. If a transnational paradigm provides insights that can reshape our understanding of diversity and attend to assumptions about mobility, belonging, and difference, then one starting point for this conversation is the very subject of diversity/difference research. In this regard, the subject of research and subjectivity need attention to underscore the fundamentally different assumptions guiding them under a transnational perspective. To address these issues, this chapter delves deeper into issues related to ontological and epistemic assumptions of existing approaches to the study of subjects under conditions of mobility. Here, it should be noted that it is not the broad array of subjects that are the focus of this chapter but rather how mobility reorients the ways in which organizational research has examined diversity and difference in relation to individuals. It proposes transmigrants as a way to rethink the subjects of work and, in doing so, provides opportunities for rethinking diversity. Another important consideration is the context for studying such new subjectivities. In this sense, the formations of new selves are by themselves not necessarily celebratory or emancipatory moments but they can potentially replicate existing or even create new inequalities across transnational social fields. This issue is taken up more concretely in Chapter 7.

In all, this chapter offers three points. First, the argument presented herein is that the focus on individuals and diversity has generally taken shape under the umbrella concept of ‘identity’ in the MOS literature and become the predominant way in which scholarship attending to people, culture, and difference understands its subject of study in the context of work and organizations. Such an argument warrants examination of not only the analytic focus of extant literature on diversity and difference but also its fundamental ontological and epistemological assumptions. While some of the discussions presented here have been considered by Özkazanç-Pan and Calás (2015), here the consideration is to underscore why these approaches are insufficient in examining the transnational aspects of lived experiences in the context of inequalities.