Divergent Glocalization in a Multinational Enterprise. Institutional-Bound Strategic Change in European and US Subsidiaries Facing the Late-2000 Recession

Glocalization, the blending of global and local cultural elements, has largely been interpreted as an in-between process, compromising between homogenous global standards and heterogeneous local traditions. Investigating strategic change in an MNE from 2005 to 2011, we found that glocalization can also unfold as a beyond process leading to divergent outcomes, outside the poles of an imagined local-global continuum. We studied the cognitive, political and institutional mechanisms that accounted for the process of blending strategies and structures before and during the late-2000 financial crisis and outlined a theory of institutional-bound strategic change within MNEs. We found sensegiving from the centre to be proactive during economic expansion and reactive during economic downturn. Following change initiation, sensegiving and sensemaking coalesced into a political iterative process of organizational identity work at subsidiary and HQ levels. We also found cognitive mechanisms were ‘taken over’ by political and institutional mechanisms: internally and externally demanded rationalization and the political prisms generated by multiple corporate governance traditions overshadowed the purely cognitive mechanism of sensemaking. Paradoxically, local societal-specific patterns of organization and strategy were preserved due to the actions of powerful central HQ-actors.