Traditional indigenous institutional systems versus modern corporations: An East African context

Abstract

Physical spaces and land attachment, topophilia, in which institutional life occurs can have profound impacts on actors’ actions and outcomes but have largely been ignored in organizational and management research. Drawing on ideas from geography, we explore the roles that physical spaces and topophilia play on the indigenous institutional context. The context for our study is the Maasai people versus foreign-own multinational companies (MNCs) which operate on their physical space in Loliondo Ward, in Tanzania. Despite efforts by MNCs to equip the Maasai communities with new social development initiatives to navigate through modern economic opportunities, conflicts surrounding natural resource use between Maasai and MNCs remain unabated in the region. In examining this case, we found that the curation of physical spaces and topophilia is mediated and even complicated by the existence of profoundly different institutional systems between Maasai traditional values versus MNCs’ modern corporate values. Our f...