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This study examines the case of an initial training, called “Dojo”, invented and implemented at a production site in the Czech Republic. It clarifies the initial training program implementation process and offers a conceptual framework for cooperative management of subsidiary activities at the site and firm.

This study conducts an in-depth analysis of qualitative data from the Czech production site over a five-year period. The theoretical base is the theorization and labeling phase of management innovation (MI), the final phase of which legitimizes a new management practice. Interview data, archival data, pictures and financial data are used for the analysis.

To legitimize the Dojo in the operational flow controlled by the site and firm, the Czech production site acquires validation of the Dojo from employees and board members of the Japanese and European headquarters, helping the site build trustful relationships with them. Training programs, process standardization and skills standardization of the workers offer benefits to the trainees, production site and firm.

The authors offer theoretical insights into MI at the subsidiary-level, which past studies have not differentiated at the firm-level. The authors also provide details of the implementation and management of initial training for newly hired blue-collar workers at the production site. The findings complement related literature on human resource management and operational management.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the scope for action of local human resource managers, who are employed in foreign subsidiaries of multinational companies (MNCs), for implementing training activities. These managers are situated in relationships to headquarters and the local environment. Related to this is the question whether MNCs contribute to the local skill base by implementing training activities or whether they exploit the existing skill formation system.

This study focusses on German subsidiaries of MNCs with headquarters in the USA and the UK, France, China and Japan. The study is based on 107 expert interviews with subsidiary managers and representatives of local stakeholder organisations, such as educational organisations, chambers, economic promotion agencies and governmental bodies in Germany.

The study reveals that headquarters introduce general schemes for training. In addition to these MNC-internal trainings, local managers use their information advantage over headquarters to implement dual training activities.

The training activities of subsidiaries are dependent on the institutional settings of the host country.

Albeit dual training activities are laborious and tie the local managers down for the medium and long term, the future need of the subsidiary for adequately skilled workforce prompts local managers’ engagement in implementing dual training activities.

Subsidiaries contribute to the local skill base and do not act in a free-rider position, at least in the German variety of capitalism.

The study deepens insights on distanced relations within and how subsidiaries generate scope for action by using this kind of relationships.

This study explores the politics of ideology in the process of sensegiving and sensemaking at a Japanese retailer in Hong Kong. Studies on power and politics are scarce despite key role of power and politics in understanding the factors behind the conflict between the management's policy legitimization (sensegiving) and employees' policy interpretation (sensemaking). By using the three dimensions proposed in the critical sensemaking approach (discourse, rules and contexts), this paper explores the complex mechanism of power and politics in sensemaking and sensegiving.

Using 15 months of participant observation as a salesperson, this paper discusses how the Japan-centric customer service philosophy (dominant discourse), customer service policies and practices (organizational rules) and asymmetric power structure between the Japanese global headquarters and Hong Kong subsidiaries (formative contexts) are presented and perpetuated through the sensegiving–sensemaking process.

Dominant discourse was observed in the management's sensegiving, which placed the Japanese style of customer service over others. This ethnocentric dominant discourse informed the creation of customer service policies, although the realization of the discourse was determined by the employees' conflicting interpretations of the organizational rules. As a formative context, an asymmetric power structure was present that positioned the Hong Kong subsidiary as subservient to the global headquarters in Japan. This shows that the political process of sensegiving and sensemaking deeply implicates the dominant discourse, organizational rules and power structure as central forces that determine the level of perpetuating ideology.

This research illustrates the wider implications of power and politics in sensegiving–sensemaking studies and provides a complex picture of ethnocentric management.

Foreign markets possess different characteristics to domestic ones; this means that dynamic marketing capabilities (DMCs) should be adjusted. This paper aims to understand how these DMCs enable firms to achieve greater legitimacy in international markets.

This research uses a qualitative approach based on in-depth interviews in collaboration with an association of exporting firms.

Findings suggest five areas of DMCs to improve organizational legitimacy overseas: flexibility, relationship management, local market sensitivity, anticipation and exemplariness. Those capabilities should be combined and will play a different role depending on the implementation phase of the external company. Resource allocation and capability development should follow an integrative approach emphasizing proximity, adaptability, alliances, engagement and credibility to reach differentiation in foreign markets.

The originality is mainly focused on the cohabitation and strong synergies between DMCs and legitimacy. This aspect is particularly relevant because legitimized companies have higher levels of survival, which is fundamental in the international venture.

Wars, and violent conflicts generally, can generate significant institutional dynamics and new legitimacy pressures for multinational enterprises (MNEs). The purpose of this paper is to understand the nature or source of institutional pressures facing MNEs in war and to examine how MNEs respond and navigate these institutional pressures.

This is a conceptual paper.

Through the theoretical lens of institutional theory and drawing on insights from the devastating Russian–Ukrainian war in Europe, the study provides a framework that explains the nature of institutional pressures impacting MNEs in a major war conflict and how MNEs respond to these pressures. Central to the framework is the impact of formal and informal institutions on MNEs during war. As a result of regulatory and social pressures, MNEs have to make important strategic decisions either to protect their legitimacy or to defend their economic objectives against institutional demands.

As the paper situates the pressures of war for MNEs in a formal and informal institutional context, this offers a new approach to understanding the costs and pressures of war on MNEs.

The purpose is to identify and explore barriers to overcome for developing collaborative innovation between a global service supplier and two of its industrial customers in Sweden.

The research had an action-based research approach in which the researchers were interacting and collaborating with the practitioners in the companies. The empirical part includes primary data from multiple interviews, and two workshops with dialogues with participants from the involved companies. The use of complementary data collection methods gave rich input to understanding the context for collaborative innovation, and to uncovering barriers, to develop solutions for collaborative innovation. The empirical barriers were analysed using theoretically derived barriers from a literature review. The analysis generated four broad themes of barriers which were discussed and led to conclusions and theoretical and practical implications on: the customer's safety culture, the business model, the parties' understanding of innovation and the management of collaborative innovation in supply chains.

The thematic analysis generated four broad themes: the customer's safety culture, the business model, the parties' understanding of innovation and the management of collaborative innovation. These themes where analysed using theoretically derived barriers from a literature review. The industrial context, the understanding of innovation and its management created barriers.

The unique access to the service supplier and its two independent industrial customers adds a rich contextual framing to the process of identifying and exploring the barriers to collaborative innovation. The conclusion emphasizes the importance of an industrial business context, the business logic in terms of business models and for the understanding and management of collaborative innovation.

This study aims to examine how the legitimacy of internal auditing is reconstructed during enterprise resource planning (ERP)-driven technological change.

The study is based on the comparative analysis of internal auditing and its transformation due to ERP implementations at two case firms operating in the food sector in Egypt – one a major Egyptian multinational corporation (MNC) and the other a major domestic company (DC).

Internal auditors (IAs) at MNC saw ERP implementation as an opportunity to reconstruct the legitimacy of internal auditing work by engaging and partnering with actors involved with the ERP change. In doing so, the IAs acquired system certifications and provided line functions and external auditors with data-driven business insights. The “practical coping mechanism” adopted by the IAs led to the acceptance (and legitimacy) of their work. In contrast, IAs at DC adopted a purposeful strategy of disengaging, blaming and rejecting since they were skeptical of the top management team's (TMT's) sincerity. The “disinterestedness” led to the loss of legitimacy in the eyes of the stakeholders.

The article offers two contributions. First, it extends the literature by highlighting a spectrum of behavior displayed by IAs (coping with impending issues vs strategic purposefulness) during ERP-driven technological change. Second, the article contributes to the literature on legitimacy by highlighting four intertwined micro-processes – participating, socializing, learning and role-forging – that contribute to reconstructing the legitimacy of internal auditing.

Drawing on Suchman’s conception of cognitive legitimacy and Boswell’s account of the political functions of expert knowledge, this paper aims to study the due process followed by the International Integrated Reporting Council (IIRC) prior to the publication of the first version of the International Integrated Reporting Framework (IIRF). Specifically, the author analyses the lobbying strategies used in the comment letters sent by a subset of lobbyists, “the experts”, represented by accounting bodies and firms, regulators and academics.

From both a form- and meaning-oriented analysis, this paper focuses on how the experts resorted to the functions of knowledge when they took part in the IIRF’s public consultation. The author first carries out a quantitative content analysis of the responses to the 2013 Consultation Draft submitted by those constituents considered as accounting expert lobbyists. Then, the author analyse how these actors framed their comments under expert knowledge to legitimise the IIRC, the IIRF and the accounting profession itself.

The findings suggest that the expert groups welcomed the opportunity, not simply to legitimise the IIRC through their democratic support, but to provide a technocratic settlement that ensures the due process is based on the mobilisation of expert knowledge as a legitimate source. By drawing on the cognitive legitimacy of expert lobbyists, the IIRC drew on the political functions of expert knowledge to reduce uncertainty and gain stability.

Analysis of the lobbying strategies used by the accounting experts whose position could make a difference and receive more attention from the IIRC makes this contribution of particular interest, especially since the first version of the IIRF sought to guide disclosure and sustainable business practices around the world.

Experts as political actors play a legitimising role since they are capable of producing relevant knowledge that, due to its nature and scope, certainly affects policymaking and sustainable development.

This research provides a sociopolitical perspective to comprehend how some lobbying strategies, in this case, of expert actors, contribute to legitimising a standard-setter body and its endeavours in the context of voluntary standards.

This paper aims to critically analyse the transposition implications of Union Directive 2014/95. This Directive identified the need to raise the transparency of the social and environmental information provided by the undertakings to a similarly high level across all Member States.

The paper considers how the European Member States of the European Union (EU) have transposed Directive 2014/95 into their regulations. The focus is on the juridification of social accounting in the pursuit of creating an overlapping consensus through Habermas’s concept of internal colonisation. The paper uses qualitative content analysis to scrutinise the national laws that transpose Directive 2014/95, discussing both what has been accomplished and what can be achieved by the release of future legislative provisions.

Despite the aim of Directive 2014/95 to create a common language for disclosing non-financial information, this study shows an implementation gap among and between Member States and an inconsistent picture of the employment of this Directive. Its implementation in the 28 European countries was considered a process of colonisation in implementing Union directives among European undertakings. However, the implementation process, which exemplifies Habermas’s juridification, has failed due to the lack of balance between moral discourse and actions.

This paper contributes to the ongoing debates concerning the implementation of mandatory disclosure of environmental and social information in the EU Member States, promoting new directions for the EU’s democratic laws on social accounting. In addition, it offers an example of how internal colonisation only catalyses effects when moral laws are legitimised through the provision of procedures.

This study aims to investigate how a French multinational enterprise (MNE) is developing employee stock ownership (ESO) in its subsidiaries in Peru and Mexico, both Latin American countries with deep social and economic inequalities.

This is a qualitative case study which conducted interviews with representatives of the French MNE and its subsidiaries in Peru and Mexico.

The employee stock purchase plans offered by the company to its employees support the achievement of the sustainable development goals (SDGs) 1, 8 and 10 in these countries.

The authors argue that MNEs could become flagships in the SDG achievement in emerging economies.

By contributing to better workplace outcomes and enhanced corporate performance, ESO is in line with SDG 8. ESO also fulfills SDGs 1 and 10 by allowing employees to build up savings and wealth, whose lack is the main source of inequality and poverty. Reciprocity and binary economics theories explain these relationships.