Introduction: New Directions in Gender, Diversity and Organization Theorizing – Re-imagining Feminist Post-colonialism, Transnationalism and Geographies of Power

This special issue reviews contemporary gender and diversity insights into management and organization studies (MOS). The purpose of this issue is to critically evaluate key threads and concepts contributing to academic debates in diversity, gender and feminist theorizing. This paper highlights key threads in current scholarship, including relationality, power, intersectionality and social constructionist epistemologies and, in so doing, uncovers new insights and contributions. The paper provides a model which locates different themes and ‘moments’ in the development of gender and diversity scholarship and acts as a heuristic device which can guide gender and diversity scholarship and assist in conceptualizing the field. Building on the key threads weaving the special issue together, the paper advances new understandings of gender and diversity through integrating feminist post-colonial scholarship, transnationalism and geographies of space and place literatures. The paper argues for scholars to ‘re-imagine’ different possibilities for gender and diversity enquiry so as to encourage interdisciplinarity and align with social science research in contemporary critiques of globalization and global social capital in order to add richness and complexity to current theorizing. Specifically, the authors argue for MOS researchers to engage in dialogue with all global stakeholders, and they encourage cross-fertilization of theories and values between writers from both the Global North and the Global South.