Multinationals, Social Agency and Institutional Change; Variation by Sector

Abstract

Multinational corporations (MNCs) operate at a crossroads of countervailing influences. While headquarters are typically embedded in the institutional settings of their home country, subsidiaries tend to internalize regulative and cognitive frames in their own national and regional contexts. MNCs now frequently assume highly diffuse global structures, operating across regionally dispersed horizontal and vertical networks, thereby exposing them to a global mosaic of societal, institutional and socio-economic influences. Moreover, MNCs are subjected to regulative effects emanating from transnational regulation. Recent departures in institutional theory have sought to recognize how local ‘embedding’ in the various geographical sites of operation of MNCs has rendered their structures and cultures pluralistic in nature (Kostova & Roth, 2002; Morgan & Kristensen, 2006). It is increasingly acknowledged by organizational theorists that viewing MNCs through a universalistic or unitary lens fails to adequately capture their inherent social and political complexity and neglects the reality of an internal anatomy that frequently comprises an array of ‘cellular’ and politically contested ‘social spaces’ (Edwards & Belanger, 2009; Geppert & Dorrenbacher, 2014; Hollinshead & Maclean, 2007) involving interplays of major actors in dispersed ‘home’ and ‘host’ contexts. It may be argued that comparative institutionalist theories, which have placed a considerable emphasis on the influence of national institutional arrangements and exogenous structural factors in the moulding of international organization, have run the risk of asserting an over-deterministic linkage between the effects of various institutional features (such as industrial relations, education and training, and corporate governance systems) of various ‘distinct types of capitalism’ (Hall & Soskice, 2001; Whitley, 1999) and the internal ordering of the MNC. In positioning this Special Issue, we aim to ‘lower’ the focal point of critical inquiry to bring to the fore the significance of sector, and sector-specific actors, in the determination of the strategies, structures and behaviours of MNCs. Such a trajectory is designed to provide a more nuanced, disaggregated and ‘inside-out’ view of the realities of MNC organization