CIICPD 2023

1.2 Multinational Companies and Super-diversity A direct consequence of globalisation is multinational companies – organisations running their international economic activities at an international level, i.e. across national borders. Typically, headquarters, located in a selected country, manage a number of branches worldwide, a situation that results in the higher mobility of human capital along with a rich exchange of know-how, experience, and labour force. For their diverse organisational structures combining highly qualified expatriates in managerial positions and foreign labour migrants for the manual jobs, all in intense contact with the local workers, multinationals, as Nekvapil and Sherman put it, generally retain “significant prestige and power, manifested not only in the economic area but also in the organisational, cultural and linguistic ones” (2018, p. 329). As such, as the authors show they “can act as an important diversifying element” (2018, p. 329), creating the social atmosphere in wider social contexts. And indeed, global interactions primarily prompted by the economic interests and activities of the multinationals breed a complex social, cultural, and political diversity at local levels. A typical example of such complexity can be illustrated by Czechia, the home to a well-known multinational corporation discussed in this chapter. Czechia has been a country with changing diversity contexts set by key historical milestones since the establishment of Czechoslovakia in 1918. Defined as “‘old’ diversity” (Sloboda, 2016, p. 2), the first Czech ethnic melting pot was set by the Habsburgs who brought in various minorities of Germans, Poles, Croats, Jews, Slovaks, Roma, Hungarians, Ukrainians, or Rusyns. This originally highly diversified reality was diminished after the Second World War with the genocide of the Jews and Roma in the Holocaust, and the displacement of Germans and Croats by locals after the conflict. The process of narrowing ethnic diversity continued with the socialist strategy from the 1950s of promoting homogeneity, which was only partially compensated by the immigration of smaller specific groups from Greece, Poland, Cuba, Mongolia or Vietnam (Botu and Konečný, 2005; Králová and Tsivos 2012; Otčenášek, 2002; Sloboda, 2003; Sloboda, 2016). “Layered on the ‘old’ diversity” (Nekvapil and Sherman, 2018, p. 331) created during the country earlier developments, a “‘new’ diversity” (Sloboda, 2016) formed after the 1989 social changes upon the reopening of the country’s borders, restitution of private property, privatisation of state property, and implementation of a market economy. As a result of the liberalisation of the state, which prompted tourism, allowed immigration, and boosted the well-being of the country, some of the old ethnic groups, such as Ukrainians, Slovaks, Vietnamese and Russians, grew in size, while new smaller groups moved in. This formed a complex sociocultural diversity that literature defines as superdiversity (Sloboda 2003; Sloboda 2016; Nekvapil and Sherman, 2018). As Nekvapil and Sherman explain, superdiversity is reflected in the reality of multinationals. It is characterised by the relationship between the geographical location that divides the countries into core and periphery, and the respective division of labour between the headquarters and their branches. Typically, as this system indicates, the headquarters are located in the core countries that are distinguished by “high wages and high capital-intensity and skill level” (2018, p. 330), while the branches are usually

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