TY - JOUR
T1 - The Global Professional Service Firm
T2 - 'One Firm' Models versus (Italian) Distant Institutionalized Practices
AU - Muzio, Daniel
AU - Faulconbridge, James
PY - 2013/7
Y1 - 2013/7
N2 - Through a historical case study of the internationalization of large English law firms into Italy, this paper uses Scott's (2005) three pillars approach to look at how local institutions constrain and mediate the strategies and practices of global professional services firms. In doing so, it corrects the economic bias in the growing body of literature on the internationalization of PSFs by stressing how local regulations, norms and cultural frameworks affect the reproduction of home country practices, such as the one firm model pursued by large English law firms, in host-country jurisdictions. The paper also extends existing work on institutional duality (Kostova, 1999, Kostova & Roth, 2002) by developing a fine-grained, micro-level analysis which emphasizes the connections between institutions and practices. This is crucial, we contend, since the difficulties encountered by PSFs (and multinationals more generally) in their internationalization do not result from collisions between home- and host-country institutional structures per se, but between the diverse practices generated by distant institutional environments.
AB - Through a historical case study of the internationalization of large English law firms into Italy, this paper uses Scott's (2005) three pillars approach to look at how local institutions constrain and mediate the strategies and practices of global professional services firms. In doing so, it corrects the economic bias in the growing body of literature on the internationalization of PSFs by stressing how local regulations, norms and cultural frameworks affect the reproduction of home country practices, such as the one firm model pursued by large English law firms, in host-country jurisdictions. The paper also extends existing work on institutional duality (Kostova, 1999, Kostova & Roth, 2002) by developing a fine-grained, micro-level analysis which emphasizes the connections between institutions and practices. This is crucial, we contend, since the difficulties encountered by PSFs (and multinationals more generally) in their internationalization do not result from collisions between home- and host-country institutional structures per se, but between the diverse practices generated by distant institutional environments.
KW - institutional duality
KW - institutional theory
KW - internationalization
KW - one firm model
KW - professional services firms
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=84879825860&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1177/0170840612470232
DO - 10.1177/0170840612470232
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:84879825860
SN - 0170-8406
VL - 34
SP - 897
EP - 925
JO - Organization Studies
JF - Organization Studies
IS - 7
ER -