Managing a cross-institutional setting a case study of a Western firm's subsidiary in the Ukraine

Sammanfattning: This study explores the development of a Western firm's subsidiary in the Ukraine and sets out to contribute to the theoretical development about the managing of subsidiaries in the Post-Soviet market. The cross-institutional approach to analyse the subsidiary has been adopted to explore influence from the institutional setting of the parent firm and from local institutions. In the theoretical framework, special attention is directed to studies analysing the challenges that Western firms encounter when operating in the Post-Soviet market. Institutional theory therefore serves as a framework for theories on market entries, networks and management transfers.The empirical study is based on a case study conducted in connection to a training project for local employees of a Western firm's subsidiary operating in the Ukraine. Besides being a source of inspiration, the training project provided good access to respondents and insights about the challenges that the subsidiary faced.The analysis shows that the introduction of the Western firm's management in the subsidiary reflects in the local employees' forming of identities. A clear pattern is that local employees' development of identities in line with the Western firm's norms is supported by socialisation in settings dominated by the Western firm. A setting dominated by conflicts between Western and local norms, in contrast, resulted in developments of conflict identities. The analysis of the subsidiary's managing of influences from the local institutional setting indicates that this concerned filtering. Striking was that the subsidiary was successful in managing influences when the filtering conditions were characterised by consonance. Looking into aspects making the filtering of external influences difficult, the analysis points out barter trade and local actors' boundary spanning towards authorities in the Ukrainian society as aspects creating dissonances and vacuum. Thus, influences characterised by dissonance and/or vacuum made it particularly difficult for the subsidiary to manage these influences.One of the major contributions of this thesis is the cross-institutional approach to analyse developments in a subsidiary in the Post-Soviet market. By applying this approach the study suggests that the managing of a cross-institutional setting concerns both internal and external boundary spanning. Of vital importance for the internal boundary spanning are issues influencing local employees' forming of a 'we' with the Western firm's representatives. The standpoint is that this concerns local employees' identity identification, which is a new perspective on management transfers towards a subsidiary in the Post-Soviet market. Concerning the managing of external boundary spanning, the study points towards the importance of observing local actors' ways of dealing with dissonances and vacuum in local networks.