This dissertation explores what happens when organizations make efforts to include migrant professionals. Drawing on sociology and organization studies, the dissertation analyzes a program targeting highly skilled migrants striving to become part of a new workplace. An 18-month ethnography reveals the complex power relations involved in inclusion processes. It shows how inclusion brings about multiple tensions, providing opportunities to expose unequal power structures. By situating the analysis in tensions, this monograph disentangles the conditions under which inclusion takes place.

Taking the migrant professional’s perspective, this dissertation responds to the question, ‘how are the terms of inclusion engaged with?’. It argues for an understanding of inclusion as a process characterized by negotiation under arbitrary conditions. Such negotiation often contradicts official discourses of migrant professional success. This finding brings the reader into the everyday barriers and enablers migrant professionals experience regarding skills, professionalism, ethnicity, culture, class, language, and religion in a new organizational context. The dissertation proposes to give a central place to the terms and conditions under which ‘the other’ is invited to be part of an organization and society.