In this paper, we explore the experiences of EU migrants working in UK restaurants in the aftermath of the Brexit vote. We do so through a care ethics lens, which we bring together with the integrative approach to organisational silence to consider the ethical consequences of the organisational policies of political silence adopted by the restaurant chains in our qualitative empirical study. We develop the concept of political organisational silence and probe its ethical dimensions, showing how at the organisational level (...) it falls short of constituting a practice of caring for migrant workers in politically divisive and hostile times. We argue that organisational policies of political silence emphasise the exploitative nature of the business of (im)migration, which prioritises concern for profits over care for the needs of others. Organisations refuse caring responsibility for migrant workers, leaving care to the migrants themselves and their co-workers and managers. Whilst peer-care practices partially fill this politically silent care-vacuum, this leaves individuals to negotiate difficult tensions without institutional support at a time of increased uncertainty, complexity, hostility, violence, and vulnerability. Drawing lessons from our study and its aftermath, we call for a care manifesto to inform the business of (im)migration, which would need to include caring political responsibility towards migrant workers exercised through caring political organisational voice as well as silence. (shrink)

Our study examines managerial vulnerability in a bureaucratic context, namely in Finnish immigration centres. We bring a care ethics perspective to the study of vulnerability and address how managers navigate relationships with vulnerable clients and their own vulnerability. Based on empirical data collected through interviews with immigration centre managers, we show how managers negotiated their (in)vulnerability through two alternating positionalities: (1) professionalism, through which they seek to control negative emotions in order to manage their own experiences of vulnerability and affective (...) relationships with clients, and (2) temporal disconformity, which provides space to engage and manage with a variety of emotions and manoeuvre bureaucratic professional norms. Our study then contributes to the literature on managerial work by demonstrating how managers cope with their vulnerable selves and how different notions of care emerge in complex, ethically sensitive managerial situations. (shrink)

This study examines the multi-contextual dynamics of refugee entrepreneurship through the lens of embeddedness. It attempts to explain the interplay of inclusion and exclusion within a host society. For this purpose, the study qualitatively analyses the narratives of 39 Syrian refugee entrepreneurs and four critical informants in Türkiye. Our findings reveal a diverse set of refugee entrepreneurs, categorized into survival, ethnic-targeting, and integrating entrepreneurs, based on their motivations and level of embeddedness. Interestingly, as refugee entrepreneurs become more embedded in the (...) host country, they experience increased exclusion due to various societal factors. To navigate these challenges, entrepreneurs continually negotiate their societal position using innovative strategies to combat exclusion. Our study incorporates social, political, institutional, and spatial contexts across host, home, and third countries. Thus, it extends the embeddedness literature by highlighting refugee entrepreneurs' multi-layered and multi-locational embeddedness. Our findings also emphasise the significant role of political embeddedness, which Research often overlooks. Differentially excluding refugee entrepreneurs from society and their counter-strategies are closely tied to their limited political embeddedness. Finally, we discuss the ethical and policy implications of promoting the inclusion of refugee entrepreneurs and contributing to the United Nations' Sustainable Development Goals. We argue that clear integration policies, removal of institutional barriers, and international cooperation are necessary. (shrink)

Workplace incivility is experienced ubiquitously by immigrants. While a growing body of literature has sought to identify the causes and the outcomes of this phenomenon, what remains largely underexplored is the role of legal status in configuring how workplace incivility manifests in the immigrant experience. To advance the extant literature, in this article we investigate the question: How does legal status inform the ways in which immigrants exercise agency in response to workplace incivility? In addressing this question, we draw on (...) the methodological resources provided by duoethnography and develop vignettes to make visible the dynamics with workplace incivility that we have individually encountered in the academic organizations in which we have been located—based in the UK and Canada. In juxtaposing the vignettes against one another, we are offered a glimpse into how legal status shapes the forms and the depth of agency available to immigrants to respond to incidents of workplace incivility. In light of our findings, we problematize the nexus between an immigrant’s agency and workplace incivility as well as consider the implications this nexus has to ongoing debates in business ethics. (shrink)

Economic migration is a significant and growing development around the world but has produced unequal outcomes and experiences for marginalized groups. To theoretically explain such inequalities, we argue that integration experiences of immigrants in the host country differ based on the privilege that their demographic category bestows on them (or not). We elucidate our arguments by unpacking the concept of ‘privilege’ to theorize two key sources of privilege—_locational_ and _historical_—and explain them using the global economic divide (Global North vs. Global (...) South) and local social divides (race and caste). We propose that locational and historical privilege manifest as various types of capital that immigrants carry into their host countries. We juxtapose these two sources of privilege and its levels (low vs. high) to develop a typology of immigrants—_Marginalized, Peripheral, Assimilated,_ and _Wanted—_that captures differences in migrants’ integration experiences. By shining a light on the systematic differences between immigrants based on privilege, our research brings additional nuance to the scholarship on immigrant workers and inclusive organizations; and broadens avenues to make human resource practices more ethical by taking these differences into account. (shrink)

Research on racism in the workplace has long focused on organizational remedies for this moral problem. Given the acknowledged inadequacies of organizational solutions such as anti-racism training, attention is now turning to how immigrants manage their individual experiences of racism in a western context. Employing an agentic lens, this article describes a qualitative study of 43 African nurses in the UK in which their capacity for withstanding workplace racism is examined. It investigates how participants draw upon a range of religious (...) coping strategies to make sense of and respond to racism. The data indicate that African nurses rely on specific coping strategies at different points in time and across various contexts, adapting their coping approaches to accommodate their personal growth and individual experiences. This underscores the versatility, context-dependency, and temporal aspects of religious coping among immigrants. The study’s findings are particularly interesting given the limited role that religion plays in western organizations. (shrink)

This paper examines how alternative forms of organising integration in resource-scarce environments expand across settings, by considering the role of local embeddedness and an ethic of care in enabling this expansion. It builds on theories of imitation in organization studies in combination with theories of ethics of care and bricolage applied to welfare and migration studies. The paper is informed by the case of Yalla Trappan, a work cooperative of immigrant women in the city of Malmö, Sweden, and the attempts (...) to diffuse this organization and its methods to other cities in the country. The findings indicate that the expansion of alternative forms of integration into resource-scarce contexts is enabled by simultaneous practices of imitation and bricolage, ingrained in an ethic of care. The article shows, first, how many important practices were developed by imitating accounts of the original ideas, through a broadcasting mode of imitation. Next, it explains why the local translation of these practices in resource-scarce contexts, consisting of ‘bricolage work’ based on material, market, institutional, human, and cultural elements, was necessary. The conclusion is that the expansion of novel forms of integration requires imitation, but of a kind that involves the bricolage of local translations. Such bricolage is always collective (which does not diminish the importance of individual agency), multi-spatial and not just local, and wrapped in an ethic of care, rather than in an economic logic. The article concludes by discussing the implications of these findings with the ethics of migration. (shrink)

This paper examines how accounting can both entrench and challenge an inhumane and costly neoliberal policy—namely, the Australian government’s offshore detention of asylum seekers. Drawing on Bruff, Rethinking Marxism 26:113–129 (2014) and Smith, Competition & Change 23:192–217 (2019), we acknowledge that the neoliberalism underpinning immigration policies and the practices related to asylum seekers takes an _authoritarian_ tone. Through the securitisation and militarisation of the border, the Australian state politicises and silences marginalised social groups such as asylum-seekers. Studies have exposed accounting (...) as a technology that upholds neoliberalism by representing policy as objective and factual. Curiously, there has been a wilful intention by successive Australian governments to silence the accounting for offshore detention. We seek to demystify this _un_accounting and _un_accountability by exploring counter-accounts produced by meso-level organisations that support asylum seekers. We apply a close-reading method in analysing limited governmental accounts and various counter-accounts to demonstrate how counter-accounts give visibility to practices that an authoritarian neoliberal regime has obfuscated. We also reflect on the potential for counter-accounting to foster broader social change by holding the Australian government accountable to moral and ethical standards of care for human life. This paper considers the intersections between accounting and authoritarian neoliberalism and presents counter-accounts as mechanisms that can challenge these neoliberal norms. (shrink)