While organizations tout the benefits of diverse work environments, what is it like to hire a first member of the excluded category? What strategies are employed in order to break through one’s own organizational biases and then become a place that is attractive for high talented newcomers who were previously excluded? In order to answer these questions I analyze administrative data, survey data, and qualitative fieldwork among firms in Saudi Arabia who hired their first female employees and promoted many to managerial positions. This commitment from top leadership generally came by one of three means: a business case was made to a top decision maker for the urgent need for culture change at the organization, new leadership injected the value of diversity into new strategic plans for the organization, or the company was pushed to change from the outside. I find that commitment from top management explains how firms began hiring females, and that they used a variety of strategies to do so, which I categorize as from within, from without, and rotational strategies. I outline what I call a processual model of culture change in organizations modeled on the experience of Saudi firms. A processual model of culture change begins with seeking and obtaining commitment from top leaders and subsequently dedicating resources to diversity efforts. However I find that simply allocating resources is not enough. Organizations must agentically design and implement multiple-pronged strategies contextualized to their particular organizational environment. By understanding the phenomena of increased female employment in Saudi Arabia we can bring these insights to organizations in other male-dominated contexts.

In the UAE, migrant workers are excluded from the broader society and denied the right to social, economic, and spatial inclusion. Drawing from the narratives of forty-four temporary low-wage migrant workers from eleven different countries employed in low wage work in Dubai in the United Arab Emirates, this study focuses on the scale of the room—the cramped, confined space that low-wage migrants share. It examines the experiences of participants who sat at the margins of the margin through a matrix of mutually reinforcing processes, including the historically rooted contemporary structures that determined the vertical hierarchies established by the socioeconomic elite—along the lines of nationality, race, and ethnicity—and the dominant social relations throughout UAE society. These processes are reinforced spatially through the location of the cramped, confined accommodation within the city and through its conditions. Social exclusion and the devaluing of certain nationalities are further reinforced within the space of worker accommodation in relation to the stratification of low-wage migrant groups whose behavior replicates society’s vertical hierarchies. The room workers shared represented their exclusion from the broader society, from the “real” Dubai, where some groups of migrants believed they had earned their right to belong. The place where they believed they belonged was influenced by who they believed they were. For them, exclusion was a rejection and denial of what they believed they were justly entitled.

Despite the Arab Gulf states' large and diverse foreign populations, existing frameworks have largely failed to capture the wide variety of migrant types and migration experiences in the region. Recent literature has called for scholars to account for complex and interconnected experiences of inclusion, exclusion, and belonging in the Gulf. Yet, to date, these theories have neither been tested empirically nor expanded to account for migrants’ cultural and socio-economic identities and home country characteristics of migrants. This article introduces the concept of bargaining power to develop a new theoretical and empirical framework that characterizes and quantifies intersectional lived experiences of migration and belonging. Using data from a nationally representative survey of foreign residents in Qatar, we identify two separable dimensions of migrant lived experiences corresponding to the internal and external bargaining power afforded by cultural group, socio-economic class, and home-country characteristics, respectively. We then use our framework to generate a typology of Gulf migration experience and, significantly, to predict migrants’ actual attitudes and behaviors: subjective evaluation of the host country and intentions for long-term settlement. We conclude by describing the relevance of our bargaining power framework to the study of varieties of migration experience in other migration regimes.

The launch of Saudi Vision 2030 in April 2016 prioritized job creation (and associated Saudization) to reduce unemployment amongst the Kingdom’s predominantly youthful population. Yet, despite moderate growth in employment in some sectors like mining and petrochemicals in certain regions outside the main cities such as the Northern Borders and Jizan, unemployment remains high and nearly 40% of Saudis in their early 20s are unemployed (Saudi General Authority on Statistics 2020). Existing research on young Saudis’ attitude to work points to disengagement, low motivation, and a sense of ‘entitlement’(Ramady, M.). Through employing a mixed method approach, this paper focuses on work narratives of Saudis from different regions to better understand the diverse attitudes toward work across the country. Nine in-depth interviews with Saudis who began working in the 1960s illuminate the way attitudes and aspirations have evolved, illuminating historical sociocultural factors that explain in part why resistance to state-led job creation initiatives to in the increasingly diversifying economy have not led to widespread labour market nationalisation success. The interviews are complimented by survey data from 700 young Saudis highlighting contemporary attitudes toward work and employment. These allow for an exploration of how regional variations in attitudes toward work have evolved over time, and whether these are mirrored in contemporary regional constituencies as well as those regional groupings residing in main urban centers. Drawing on the literature of sociology of work, narrative analysis uncovers the effects of rapid urbanisation on work attitudes. The narratives highlight the effects of replacing informal work with widespread public employment in the 1960s and 1970s on definitions of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ jobs (Kalleberg, A.; Jerome and Schmitt; Hodgkiss, P.). In addition to mapping Saudi work-identity narratives, the interviews capture insights from a generation of Saudis who experienced transformative economic and social developments over the past 55 years, allowing us to illustrate how historical events and economic shifts were perceived at different points in history. While studies on labor markets within the region are predominantly quantitative and economic, this study relies on the rich data narratives to highlight the source of attitudes and aspirations, potentially illuminating sociocultural factors that are often overlooked and could inform more effective policy interventions.