Legitimizing the apprenticeship practice in a distant environment: Institutional entrepreneurship through inter-organizational networks

Abstract

This paper asks how Multinational Enterprises (MNEs) engage in institutional entrepreneurship to successfully transfer the organizational practice of apprenticeship-based training from Continental Europe to the distant host environment of the United States. In our case study, we highlight the important role of inter-organizational networks to coordinate engagement with the cognitive, normative, and regulative pillars of host country institutions. This networked form of institutional entrepreneurship involves the formation of inter-organizational networks for the purpose of bringing about institutional change collaboratively. In the process of transferring apprenticeship, a particular vision of workforce training was created, support gathered, and institutional change was sustained locally around the issue of training. We argue further that networked institutional entrepreneurship is a useful strategic tool to overcome the particular kind of institutional distance between the institutional settings of more coordinated market economies (CMEs) and more liberal market-oriented economies (LMEs). We contribute to existing knowledge by showing how practice transfer is shaped by particular kinds of institutional distance, and highlighting the role of inter-organizational networks as a way of governing collective agency associated with institutional entrepreneurship and the emergence of new local proto-institutions. © 2016 Elsevier Inc.

Keywords

Author Keywords

Apprenticeships Agency Qualitative case study Institutional entrepreneurship Institutional distance Comparative capitalisms Inter-organizational networks MNEs Networked institutional entrepreneurship Practice transfer

Index Keywords

Author Affiliations

Department of Management, Freie Universität Berlin, Berlin, Berlin, Germany

Funding & Acknowledgements

Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, DFG

Grant: GRK 1012

We thank Sara McGaughey and the editorial team for their clear and constructive guidance, and the two anonymous JWB reviewers for their thoughtful comments that helped us improve the paper. We are also grateful to Tony Edwards, Anja Kirsch, Nikolas Rathert, and Joerg Sydow for their comments on earlier versions of the manuscript. Previous drafts of the paper were presented at the 2014 Annual Meeting of the Academy of International Business (AIB), as well as the 2014 Annual Conference of the Society for the Advancement of Socio-Economics (SASE). Fieldwork for this research was supported by the doctoral program Research on Organizational Paths at Freie Universitaet Berlin, funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG; Grant number GRK 1012 ). Finally, we thank the International Business Department of the Darla Moore School of Business at the University of South Carolina for having hosted the first author during fieldwork in 2013.

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Legitimizing the apprenticeship practice in a distant environment: Institutional entrepreneurship through inter-organizational networks

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