Responses to Work/Employment Issues and Global Politics: Shared Wisdom from the HR Ambassadors

Interfaces represent boundaries that both connect and divide us. Organizations, employees, and management scholars, focusing on the opportunities provided by interfaces, rely on the diversity and free flow of ideas and people to sustain innovation and scientific progress. Paradoxically, others including workers whose jobs are displaced or eliminated, focus on the threats that come from diversity and free flow of ideas and people. Together these have created a “perfect storm&x201D; that is playing out globally in political movements to restrict immigration and labor mobility, and in highly-charged opposition to those movements. The HR Division Ambassadors group, with scholars representing 58 countries, proposes to offer a front-line, “bottom up&x201D; perspective to help the wider Academy membership better understand and respond to these events in the way we do best--with information, science and reason. Since many of the current tensions are rooted in issues related to the nature of work, workers, globalization, and organizational change, we draw on the scholarly expertise of the HR Ambassadors to suggest directions for research on work and employment practices affected by these changes, to consider how and whether organizations should respond to protest or change policies related to immigration and mobility, and to facilitate an open discussion about these issues from multiple countries and multiple perspectives, including audience members."