What is to become of management and organization studies after an encounter with transnational migration studies? Can the field change to accommodate and offer space to theorize subjectivities that do not fit into extant categories of identity and difference as found in the diversity and cross-cultural management literatures? What possibilities are there for research in a post-multicultural and post-national world where mobility demarcates the lives, both personal and professional, of millions of people? Rather than suggest that the MOS field wholly abandon existing approaches, it is likely that the contributions from transnational migration studies, by way of this book and other interventions, will create alternatives to mainstream approaches. Change is slow in academic disciplines and in intellectual communities—often, paradigmatic fault lines emerge, demarcating and bounding particular approaches as mainstream while, at the same time, marginalizing others (Kuhn, 1962). The incommensurability discussion creeps into these decidedly political and interest-laden conversations in the sciences despite simultaneous claims that social science, much like normal science, should be infused with ‘objectivity’ and logical empiricism (Burrell and Morgan, 1979).

In contemporary debates among scholars in MOS, the same considerations around the ‘right’ and appropriate frames that should be deployed in the context of social science research still continue—an approach that is particularly relevant given that much of the research on these topics is taken up by business scholars embedded in business schools. The conservative nature of such research often contributes small, incremental knowledge rather than offering novel insights or fundamentally new theories about the nature of people, work, and organizations. Parker (2018) argues that business schools are fundamentally handmaidens of neoliberal capitalism, replicating mental models, practices, and work contexts that contribute to extractive labor and inequality. Within this context, scholars who present novel perspectives guided by different ontologies and critical epistemologies often face an uphill battle trying to publish in the most mainstream management and organization studies journal. Their work often questions the underlying tenets of the field through critical gazes and theories, such as poststructuralism, labor history, feminism and others under the broad umbrella of critical management studies (Willmott, 1992).