Institutionalization Theory and the Multinational Corporation

Over the last decade and a half, analyses of the strategy and organization of MNCs have increasingly widened their scope to incorporate detailed institutional portrayals of business environments. Relatively little of this work, however, has drawn on the simultaneously evolving body of sociological theory concerning the relationships between organizations and environments. Indeed, the two fields seemed to moving in different directions. As researchers into multinational enterprises focused their level of analysis on the study of businesses and product lines within the MNC, organization theory increasingly raised the level of analysis above the level of the individual organization to populations or fields. Scholars working on MNC organization tended either to remain within the ‘strategy-structure’ tradition of contingency theory or to move away from the detailed studies of formal structure that had dominated earlier work in favor of an emphasis on strategy and process, whereas macro-organization theory concentrated increasingly on structure (organizational forms, institutionalized patterns, the structure of networks) and paid less and less attention to strategy.