Dear GDO colleagues,
See details for a stream on migration, gender and organization I'm co-convening for the Gender, Work and Organization Conference in Sydney, 13-16th June 2018. Please consider submitting your work to this stream and circulate to any interested colleagues.
Looking forward to seeing some of you in Sydney in June 2018!
Best
Angelika
(Apologies for cross posting!)
Call for Proposals:
Migration, gender and organizing – organisational and employer practices of inclusion
Stream @ Gender, Work and Organization
10th Biennial International Interdisciplinary Conference
Sydney, 13-16 June 2018
Convenors:
Regine Bendl (Vienna University of Economics and Business, Austria)
Anita Bosch (University Stellenbosch Business School, South Africa)
Edwina Pio (Auckland University of Technology, New Zealand)
Angelika Schmidt (Vienna University of Economics and Business, Austria)
Bärbel S. Traunsteiner (Vienna University of Economics and Business, Austria)
This stream focuses on the area of migration, work and organizations in relation to gender and gender-related intersectional perspectives. Particularly we are interested in what way organisations or employers, their policies and practices, are influenced and are influencing the labour participation of female and male migrants, refugees and their relatives, and also how the transnational kinship ties of migrants, refugees and their relatives, influence the uptake of employment, the enactment of roles, and in turn influence workplace practices and policies. The focus on gender in the context of the workplace/employment is central to this stream. Gender allows for exploration of agency, differences in reasons and impetus for migration and also in outcomes of migratory work. In this regard, Mahler and Pessar's "gendered geographies of power" framework is specifically useful in "analysing people's social agency-corporal and cognitive- given their own initiative as well as their positioning within multiple hierarchies of power operative within and across many [geographical] terrains" (2001, p. 447).
For this stream, migrants are not limited to refugees and foreign nationals and their families (Wekwete, De Braine & Bosch, 2013) who may take up white- and blue-collar work, or precarious work in other countries (Mitchell-eaton, & Parreñas, 2013; Parreñas, 2009), but also include national citizens who are urbanizing due to economic pressure, which is especially evident in domestic work in South America (Blofield, 2009), Africa (Dimova, Hough, Kyaa, & Manji, 2015) and Asia (Qavum, & Raka, 2013). The questions we wish to explore in this stream are underpinned by two forces. Firstly, a long history of exclusion, abuse and discrimination of migrant workers especially those who are sexual minorities, ethnic minorities, religious minorities and women (Alexis, Vydelingum, & Robbins, 2007; Batnitzky, & McDowell, 2011; Cantwell, 2011; Dlamini, Anucha, & Wolfe, 2012; Dyer, McDowell, & Batnitzky, 2010; Fleming, Villa- Torres, Taboada, Richards, & Barrington, 2017; Johansson, & Śliwa, 2016; Lin, & Mac an Ghaill, 2013; Pio, 2005, 2007; Syed & Pio, 2017). The second centres on the privileging of migrant workers with associated advantages that are often not available to locals/nationals, when migrant workers are regarded as having a better education and skills (Czarniawska, & Sevón, 2008; Roos, 2013; Leonard, 2013) or a desirable work-ethic (Crush, & Tshitereke, 2001), amongst other characteristics. Migrant labour is therefore not solely based on a historical system of lack of power but on the other hand also a system that privileges otherness over the local – both accentuated through a gender lens. Both these forces are shaped by policy frameworks such as indigenization, which is widely advocated in Africa, or alternative legal-social frameworks that protect the employment of nationals or reconfigure geographies of employment (Fairhurst, & Phalatse, 1999). We want to look at strategies of inclusion or dealing with these workers, given the two forces, from an organisational, workplace or employer perspective. In which ways do organizations or employers in the formal sector – inter/national, profit, non-profit and domestic – create initiatives, settings and strategies to include migrants and/or refugees (and their relatives) as foreign workers and how may these strategies be gendered? How do organizations in the formal sector deal with the privileging of migrants and the consequences of such inclusion, often influenced by gender?
We seek to debate and analyse the inclusion of female and male migrants and refugees into organizations by providing a space for presenting lived experiences that may show counterintuitive gendered encounters, organizational practices, policy frameworks, theoretical and philosophical stances, and community/private initiatives, that highlight the myriad forces that make inclusion in an employment/organisational setting challenging.
Questions that might be addressed by papers in this stream, by no means exhaustive, include:
• Which 'role model' or benchmark - initiatives, strategies and examples regarding the inclusion of female and male migrants and refugees into the labour market exist at an organizational level?
• How and in which way do intersectional power systems influence the participation of male and female migrants and refugees as foreign workers and which organizational examples exist in terms of empowerment, inclusion and justice – also for nationals/locals?
• Which phenomena exist for the labour inclusion of relatives of migrants and refugees, for instance trailing spouses (partners) and which gender-specific implications and effects can be identified?
• Which ways of inclusion of migrants and refugees exist and in what way does the intersectionality of the 'foreign' workers origin, culture, tribal/ethnic/kinship/religion affiliation and gender, influence such inclusion?
• How does the location of an employer organisation in a developed or developing country, influence organisational/employer practices and outcomes?
• To what extent are organisational practice and policies influenced by differences in relation to migration based on choice (e.g. applying for a job in another country and getting it) or forced-migration (e.g. political instability/religious persecution/ethnic cleansing, that compels people to leave their country/region of origin)?
• Which intersectional gender and ethnic/tribal/kinship/religion related knowledge is important for employing organisations in the host country to have when employing migrants or refugees?
For submission details go to: www.mq.edu.au/events/gwosydney
For stream enquiries please contact: Bärbel S. Traunsteiner baerbel.susanne.traunsteiner@wu.ac.at and Anita Bosch: anita.bosch@usb.ac.za
Papers from the stream will be selected for a special issue proposal of the Gender, Work and Organization journal.