Special Issue Call for Papers
Nomadic Life and the Ethico-Political Implications of Organizing in Forcible Migration
Guest Editors
• Sophie Alkhaled, Lancaster University Management School, UK
• Daniel Hjorth, Lund University School of Economics and Management,
Sweden, and Copenhagen Business School, Denmark
• Alessia Contu, University of Massachusetts, USA
• Johanna Mair, Hertie School, Germany
• Monder Ram, Aston Business School, UK
Contact: s.alkhaled@lancaster.ac.uk
Submission Deadline: April 30, 2026
In 2024, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) estimates that the total number of forcibly displaced people around the world had exceeded 100 million, with 43 million being refugees fleeing to other countries. The forcibly displaced are fleeing extreme contexts of war, abject poverty, discrimination and mass persecution, environmental disasters and climate crises. With an estimation of 1.2 billion climate refugees by 2050, the large influx of refugees imposes immeasurable pressure on local communities already suffering with poverty, unemployment, and limited resources. In response, the UNHCR’s Global Compact on Refugees (2018) has pledged a “thrive not just survive” principle, easing the pressure on host countries by supporting their governments in offering refugees economic pathways to “building self-reliance” through employment and entrepreneurship. This represents a formidable organizational challenge, and, as such a phenomenon where organizational research urgently needs to progress its knowledge and understanding.
Migration is one of the defining issues of our time, and although the causes and consequences of migration have been long debated across academic disciplines, the media, and in political and public arenas, organizational scholars rarely incorporate migration as a focus of study (Choudhury et al., 2021; Creed et al., 2022). Migrant life, life in-between, life where zoe and bios are in tension (Agamben, 1998), life when becoming-human and nomadic subjectivity is the conditions for organizing (Braidotti, 2018) requires renewed attention. Organizational research needs to develop nuance and granularity in terms of the concept of migration, such that is has more meaning and precision when organization studies engage with society. That is, we lack precision in analyses of the conditions under/in which migrants live with, work in/with, and create organizations, of how migrant life changes lives, and of how lives organizationally are moved into and move out of migrant life. Beyond describing mere geographical relocation, migrant life and its nomadic subjectivity describes life as increasingly technologically mediated, materially embodied and embedded in community. Politically, this is ‘a people’ and ‘a missing people’ (Braidotti, 2018) we as organizational scholars do not presently understand well.
While we have seen a rise in studying migration, organizations and entrepreneurship in recent years (Ram et al., 2017; Sinkovics & Reuber, 2021) there is little nuance in conceptualizing and contextualizing ‘the migrant’ within the migration category and reflecting on the western-centric methodological reproduction of inequalities particularly when studying the global south (Reuber et al., 2022; Ram et al., 2008). That is, homogenizing migrants means there is a lack of appreciation of the different social, economic, political and legal statuses between migrants, and therefore, facing the risk of exploitation, open resistance, gender-based violence and hostility from some host communities and politicians. This is detrimental to understanding migrant life and its dealing with organizations, working within organizations and creating organizations (e.g. enterprises, social enterprises or social innovations) to navigate institutional voids and craft new institutional arrangements (Mair, Marti & Ventresca, 2012). Furthermore, little is known about how the migrant’s ‘social status’ and individual experiences of work and organizing vary during indeterminate liminality (Alkhaled & Sasaki, 2022) from feminist, intersectional, posthumanist and new materialist perspectives (Essers & Benschop, 2007; Harding, Gilmore & Ford, 2022; de Vaujany, Gherardi & Silva, 2024). That is, we continue to lack an understanding on how their migration status intersects with social inequalities (Mair et al., 2016; Özkazanç-Pan, 2019; Amis et al., 2022) that are arguably based on ‘involuntary’ social group memberships, i.e. based on their gender, class, caste, religion, age, sexuality, ethnicity, disability and race (Al-Dajani et al., 2015; Knappert et al., 2018; Fotaki & Pullen, 2024), and the compounded impact these multiple intersections have on migrant community integration (van Djik et al., 2022). What we know even less about, is return migration, and re-migration, re-integration and readjustment processes for ‘returnees’ who voluntarily and involuntarily return to their homeland (Lin et al., 2019; Wang, 2020).
Organizations are one of the primary settings in which migrants interact with the economy and society; and therefore, they both impact and are impacted by migrants, as they seek work in established organizations or start their own organizations through migrant entrepreneurship (Hjorth, & Reay, 2022). One reason for the relative lack of conceptual attention to this phenomenon might be found in organizational research’s theoretical history with heavy emphasis on the economic order, control and ‘manageability’ of the already organized. The state of present societies demands from organization studies research to better engage with and theorize conflict (Contu, 2019), violence and its organization (Costas & Grey, 2019), organizational silence, responsibility and ethics (Reeves & Bristow, 2024), the body and organizations (Segarra et al., 2024), feminist organizing of solidarity and social (non)movements (Alkhaled, 2021) which require a greater capacity to conceptualize difference and the ethico-political consequences thereof for organization, organizing and the organized. The past few decades of organizational research based on process philosophy (Helin et al., 2014), feminist theorizing (Fotaki & Pullen, 2024) and the more recent developments in posthumanist interdisciplinary research (Braidotti, 2018; Harding, Gilmore & Ford, 2022) have significantly strengthened our capacity to study and analyze differences and conflicts. Furthermore, studies of extreme contexts reveal organizing processes where conventional demarcations between organization/environment become blurred and traditional forms inadequate. Thus, by examining how forcibly displaced individuals navigate the "disorganized and unsettled" nature of these contexts provides a unique context for theorizing organizational improvisation, fluidity and adaptation. This opens the possibilities to create new knowledge of how marginalized groups engage in organization-creation, creative resistance, activist disorganization, and other forms of organizing we cannot anticipate as means of survival, coping, and living, which leads to expanding our understanding of agency and power within organizational settings.
This special issue of Organization Studies seeks to make the study of forced migration more central in organizational research, resulting in a distinctive stream of inquiry linking a more granular understanding of forced migration to organizations, organizing, and organization-creation. The critical performativity (Contu, 2020) of this special issue is to foreground people who, in the conditions of forced migration, is a ‘missing people’ in organizational research (Braidotti, 2018; Lambert, 2021). We welcome research on forced migration that covers broad areas of interest, such as crisis management perspectives, organizational responses to climate-induced displacement, and digital transformation in migrant integration, the improvisational organizing in refugee camps, temporal dynamics of transit zones, and creation of alternative economic spaces that represent contexts for scholars studying precarity and resilience (Kornberger et al., 2025). By positioning forced migration as a revelatory context rather than merely a topic, we invite theoretical contributions from scholars who may not identify directly with migration studies but examine organizing under constraints, in more extreme conditions, and, as part thereof, entrepreneurial and innovative organizationcreation.
Our key goal in the Special Issue is therefore to bring together scholarship that sheds new light on the concept of forced migration and its relationships to nomadic subjectivity and the relational-heterogeneous assemblages through which organization-creation happen. Beyond this, however, we imagine that nomadic subjectivity and life can be the result of affirming the primacy of relations (over stable identity, place, home), as part of a creative modality of living, a ‘becoming-minoritarian’ that honors rhizomatic rather than root-like identities (Braidotti, 2011). It asks how this is related to processes of becoming-human that characterize migrant life in the in-between, and its nomadic subjectivities, and to investigate not only how resistance, escape and flight are organized, but also how opportunities and affirmation of assemblages of people, matter, and resources are organized. It will open the door to the multiple possibilities of how forced migration operates - in the double sense that migrants are also forced to be included in this category, to belong to ‘those people,’ and deal with this ‘misplaced-ness’, which in itself organizes them as a certain ‘problem’ to deal with for other organizations, and how they creatively organize themselves out of this definitional category. Such organization-creation, its related subjectivities, and value creation, in the context or lifetext of forced migration, we know very little about.
With this call for papers, we hope to stimulate academic attention to this broad topical area. Consistent with the mandate of Organization Studies, we aim to promote the understanding of organizations, organizing, and the organized, and the social relevance of that understanding in relation to the challenges around forced migration identified here. Below we offer our initial thoughts on possible questions. However, we stress that this list is not meant to narrow our collective imagination. In the spirit of robust academic engagement that is participatory and multi-vocal, and that builds on and contributes to engaged organizational scholarship, we encourage innovative, thoughtful, and provocative submissions from scholars at all stages of their academic careers.
Indicative research questions
- How does forced migration take place? What are the organizational mechanisms of forced migration that lead to a nomadic life?
- How does becoming-nomadic, as a passionate choice for a creative life, happen today, affirming rhizomatic multiplicity rather than root-like sameness?
- How do migrants engage in organization-creation during forcible displacement? And how do these organizations evolve over time?
- What are the formal and informal institutional conditions that shape subjectivities, livelihoods and work opportunities during forced migration?
- How do forced migrants organize themselves, their homes, fellow migrants and host communities to build sustainable work?
- How do new and emerging technologies affect migrants’ abilities to organize during forcible displacement?
- How do migrants’ social identities (e.g. gender, race, ethnicity, religion, ability, sexuality) intersect and impact their ability to effectively organize/enterprise for survival, and/or for social change?
- What are the unintended negative consequences of directly/indirectly ‘coercing’ migrants into work or entrepreneurship as means of integration or building self-reliance in host communities? How does it impact their identity work?
- How is violence generated in organizations in a way that perpetuates forced migration? Why and how are some organizational processes more effective than others in reducing visible and invisible forms of violence against migrant communities?
- What mechanisms support/hinder organizational responsibility, and how are these enacted? How do the ethico-political implications of forced migration impact perceptions of responsibility locally and globally?
- How is advocacy for forced migrants organized? Who are the actors? How do they mobilize? How do they voice solidarity? How are the silenced? How do these processes take place over time as they support those who are stateless or deprived citizen rights?
- How do contemporary organization and entrepreneurship theories help/hinder theorizing migrant experiences of work during forcible displacement?
- How does studying forcible displacement advance new organizational theory, for example, as pertaining to the creative power of movement, otherness, and conflict?
- How does migrant and nomadic life function in the absence of fundamental western assumptions around what constitutes identity, organizations, entrepreneurship, human agency, resource availability, and opportunity recognition and creation?
- What can posthuman and new materialist approaches to organization, organizing, the organized and the disorganized offer research on becoming-nomadic, on becomingminoritarian’ as in rhizomatic identities and life honoring a creative modality?
- How can postcolonial, transnational and translocational feminist approaches advance understanding of forced migration and organizations?
- What new methods and constructs are needed to examine and explicate the lived reality of forced migrants? How can we better measure and evaluate the impact of their organizing?
Submission Process
Please submit your manuscript through the journal’s online submission system (http://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/orgstudies). You will need to create a user account if you do not already have one, and you must select the appropriate Special Issue at the “Manuscript Type” option. The Special Issue Editors handle all manuscripts following the journal’s policies and procedures; they expect authors to follow the journal’s submission guidelines (https://journals.sagepub.com/author-instructions/OSS). You can submit your manuscript for this Special Issue between April 15 and April 30, 2026. For administrative support and general queries please contact Sophia Tzagaraki, Managing Editor of Organization Studies (osofficer@gmail.com) or John Kokkonakis at the OS office (orgstudassist@gmail.com).
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