48.1
Institutional Entrepreneurs in Multi-National Corporations: Embedding the Managers' Networks into Organizational Fields
The activities of Japanese multinational corporations in the Asian region are now in transition. They over decades have been characterized by a tradition in which managerial control has been centralized by its home base in Japan. But this has changed with the expansion of production-consumption in the Asian region. Contemporary MNCs are much more sensitive to local conditions. Such changes have induced new organizational forms with the formation of regional networks surrounding these headquarters with active and energetic horizontal exchanges.
These institutional systems effectively function when activities in regional networks are appropriately embedded into related organizational fields. In many cases, such regional activities are initiated by headquarters in Japan, however they require appropriate and realistic organizational procedures. In general, Japanese expatriates who are delegated from the head office in Japan have played vital roles in such system-construction as institutional entrepreneurs. They utilize their positions and authority derived from the head office, and at the same time they have made efforts to advance their local networks and use resources and relationships in the host community so as to develop a new institutional scheme which is responsive to the perceptions of members who are involved in these networks.
For some reasons, their efforts have not always led to successful outcomes. In this research, the entrepreneurial characteristics that have been shown in the construction of appropriate relations between their networks and the fields are presented in order to identify the factors which determine success and failure.