This paper has been published in Human Resource Development International, 5/3: 263-277in 2002.

Management learning and knowledge transfer in transforming societies: approaches, issues and future directions

Ed ClarkSchool of Management, Royal Holloway, University of London

Mike GeppertEuropean Business Management School, University of Wales Swansea.

Abstract: The purpose of this article is to explore thetopics of management learning and cross border knowledge transfer as they contribute to understanding the development of post-socialist management as a humanresource. At the heart of work in this field have been assumptions about the nature of the socio-economic changes taking place in the former Soviet region. We argue that structuralist theories of knowledge transferand management learning tend to reflect and reinforce the ‘economic transition’ model, while ethnographic andcomparative institutionalist views confirm the complexity and ambiguity inherent in the conception of post-socialism as societal transformation. The conceptual ideas and empirical findings developed in the contributions to this Special Issue are then related to these debates and the article concludes by proposing possible directions for further research working within the societal transformation framework.

Keywords: management learning, knowledge transfer, economic transition, societal transformation, post-socialism

Introduction

This Special Issue has its origins in discussions between the two editors over the last seven years. We first met at aworkshop at the University of Cambridge under the auspices of the European Union funded EMOT (European Management and

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Organization in Transition) programme. Several papers from that workshop were published as a Special Issue of Organization Studies (Volume 17, Number 2) in 1996 with a title very similar to this current Special Issue. Two years ago, we agreed that research on management learning and knowledgetransfer in post-socialist countries had expanded to such anextent that it would be timely to put together some work from the most recent studies that touch the field. The publication of this Special Issue of HRDI completes that project.

The articles in this Issue examine theoretical and empiricalproblems that are at the core of new developments in the field of HRD, focusing as they do on learning processes bothwithin and between organizations1. The authors address the ways in which, as both formal interventions and tacit socialprocesses, new knowledge and practices become established aspart of the rapid transformation of existing organizations. They further consider the problems and consequences of theseprocesses for the development of management as a human resource within those organizations. In this introductory article, we discuss how the conceptual ideas and empirical findings developed in this Special Issue relate to earlier debates about management learning in transforming societies,outline new developments in the field and consider possible directions for further research.

Knowledge transfer here refers to the cross-cultural, cross-border and cross-organizational processes whereby information, ideas and practices move between two different business systems. In the context of this Special Issue, the movement takes place between a Western location, broadly understood to be ‘capitalist’ and an enterprise located in aformer socialist country. There is a range of possible situations. First, the enterprise in the post-socialist 1 McGoldrick et al. (2001: 347-348), for example, have argued that recent HRD research is expanding from the classic fields of training and employee development towards organizational and societal issues that have not been traditionally considered to be within the domain ofHRD.

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country can be an entirely new enterprise formed by the Western firm on a greenfield site but staffed to a greater or lesser extent by local managers and employees. However, more often than not, a post-socialist enterprise, or some fragment of it, has merged with or been acquired by the Western company. Less directly, knowledge transfer can take place between Western sources and state-owned enterprises (SOEs), former SOEs or other local businesses that are independent of foreign capital. Such indirect mechanisms include international consultancy firms, assistance programmes of international economic agencies (such as the International Monetary Fund, World Bank, European Bank for Reconstruction and Development) or, even more subtly, educational programmes such as MBAs set up at local universities (cf. Soulsby and Clark 1996).

We reserve the concept of management learning for those internal organizational processes of knowledge acquisition, whereby managers in the organizations concerned assimilate new values, ideas, systems and techniques and thereby, in their changed practices, produce new organizational patternsand processes. This definition deliberately includes not just the appropriation of new technical knowledge (such as new accounting techniques or marketing tools), but also new ways of thinking and understanding, new discourses and, moredeeply, the values, beliefs and assumptions upon which new practices are founded. Clearly, knowledge transfer and management learning are related processes that can be understood as having both structural characteristics and interactional dimensions. As we shall see later, decisions about the conceptualization of these processes and then how to study them are critical influences on the kinds of knowledge created about the topic.

Our arguments unfold as follows. First, we outline somethingabout the complexity of the post-socialism, which sets the context in which the study of knowledge transfer and management learning has taken place. The way in which the changing post-socialist business environment and its

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relationship to wider social and economic processes is conceptualized has a fundamental impact on the understandingof the topic and on how this literature relates to that of orthodox international business (cf. Child and Czeglédy 1996). We next discuss the evolution and differentiation of recent social scientific approaches to management learning and knowledge transfer in Central Eastern European (CEE) andformer Soviet societies. After that, we introduce the papers, relate them to the outlined theoretical developmentsin the field and conclude by addressing the implications of the issues raised for further research.

Post-socialism as societal transformation

The fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989 and the subsequent demise of Soviet influence in CEE, followed rapidly by the disintegration of the Soviet Union itself in 1991, created a unique set of societal conditions. Within the planning structures of state socialism, the average SOE had been a large, functionally organized operational unit, strongly oriented on production activities. There had been little need to develop many of the taken-for-granted skills and practices of market-economic business, such as marketing, financial, strategic and human resource management (cf. Hegewisch, Brewster and Koubek 1996; Pollert1999; Savitt 1998; Seal, Sucher and Zelenka 1996).

The post-1989 SOEs inherited structures and procedures that were maladapted to the new circumstances with which they were faced as the region underwent geopolitical upheaval. Bythe same token, the new management cadre comprised largely recycled communists – the so-called nomenklatura – and newly promoted middle-ranking administrators. These post-socialistmanagers were desperately ill-equipped for functioning in the new economic circumstances wrought by the collapse of the known structures of the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance (CMEA) and by the forced uncertainties of workingin Western markets. The region’s social and economic systemsbecame “... a ‘living laboratory’ in organizational

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transformation within a context of profound institutional change” (Child and Czeglédy 1996: 167).

A significant element of the management research that has taken place over the last 12 years within this ‘laboratory’ has concerned the processes whereby post-socialist enterprises and management have adjusted to the new circumstances by acquiring more appropriate values, ideas, knowledge, techniques and systems.

The study of management learning and the development of human resources in former communist countries differs significantly from research in stable Western societies, because of the different processes and the nature of the problems that are characteristic of post-socialism. In Western societies, environmental change takes place within arelatively stable framework of social and economic institutions, and managers of business organizations therefore operate within relatively known parameters. On theother hand, in the post-socialist societies, the fundamentalnature of social change leaves both organizations and managers in a state of uncertainty and ambiguity, caused by simultaneous radical change at all levels of society, from the macro to the individual (Clark and Soulsby 1999: 41ff). Research across a range of post-socialist societies also indicates that the transformation of business contexts and the speed and degree of change within organizations vary significantly even between neighbouring countries such as Hungary and Romania (cf. Edwards and Lawrence 2000).

As an important background to understanding changes in organization and management, social scientists have disagreed about how best to conceptualize the nature of the changing business context in post-socialist countries. Therehave been two main competing conceptions, economic transition v.societal transformation. Each has its own origins, disciplinary attachments and theoretical and methodological implications.

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Early discussion about post-socialist changes focused on thequestion of how to shift the hierarchical, command economy to one that was based on market-competitive principles and practices. The starting and end points were characterized inideal type terms and the economic transition was understood to be the definable economic and formal-institutional passage between these two known points (e.g. Clague 1992; also see Child and Czeglédy, 1996). This conception was, in both the East and the West, often based on clear normative preferences, which projected market capitalism as offering economic (as well as social and political) benefits over disgraced state socialism. This was hailed as a victory for Western capitalism in the social, economic and ideological cold war. The successful transition of state socialism was tantamount to a universal, linear modernization process, where the end-goal was an open free market economy. This, inturn, was usually equated with Anglo-Saxon economic institutional designs, that were strongly promulgated through international agents like the International MonetaryFund. Other possible destinations were ignored or otherwise excluded from serious consideration.

The economic transition precept had clear implications for the micro-economic restructuring of the institutions and practices of organization and management. The transition process implied the development of post-socialist forms of organization and management practices based on specific Western conceptions and assumptions of capitalism. Management knowledge and technical know-how could be introduced and implanted directly via Western foreign investors, or indirectly through imported educational or training programmes (often financed by international institutions like those mentioned above). In these simple transfer processes, it was expected that post-socialist enterprises and managers would be able to learn new ways of operating, to assimilate and thereby reproduce global principles and practices of ‘good’ management.

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The second conception of societal transformation emerged as an increasingly powerful image of the post-socialist experience. This approach reflected a more socio-economic orinstitutionalist perspective on complex social change and expressions of dissatisfaction with prescriptive economic transition theories:

‘...models of transition from one overly abstract, coherent and general state or system, such as ...state socialism, to another, such as ...liberal capitalism, are far too simple and dichotomous’ (Whitley 1995: 24).

The direct implications of conceptualizing post-socialist change as societal transformation were two-fold. First, change was understood to reverberate through society simultaneously at all levels from the macro to the individual social actor, refuting the implicit priority given to the institutional design of market structures and systems. Business, management and enterprise had to be seen as socially and historically embedded institutions, with deep roots that made ‘instant capitalism’ an impossible fantasy. Second, and as a consequence, the notion of transformation denoted, in contrast to that of transition, the ambiguous and ill-defined realities of the starting point and the uncertainty over the direction, speed and nature of the journey from ‘real socialism’ to ‘somewhere’ (Schmidt 1995).

In highlighting the complexity and uncertainty inherent in the post-socialist condition, societal transformation pointsto the role of historical legacy and institutional inertia as processes that sustain national diversity, not to convergence with globalized economic and institutional norms. Researchers working within this perspective have therefore focused on those factors that slow down, complicate or deviate any attempts to design a formal pathway to market capitalism. It has become clear, for example, that there are critical differences between the post-socialist countries, in their actual experiences of

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state socialism, their 1990 starting points and their post-socialist experience (e.g. regarding privatization or the role of state).

The concept of a transforming society has encouraged more differentiated reflection about how different institutional origins and contexts have influenced organizational change and management learning processes at the level of the post-socialist enterprise. On the one hand, it points to the roleof organizational and management legacies from state socialism in influencing the nature of management learning and the processes of knowledge acquisition. The considerabledifferences between the institutional systems and national cultures of post-socialist countries have meant that imported ideas become assimilated in differing degrees of success and failure. On the other hand, the notion of societal transformation suggested the importance of understanding the diverse national-institutional sources of new ideas and practices. There are many models of Western capitalism (Whitley 1999), and knowledge from some capitalist forms may more easily take root in post-socialismthan from others. Moreover, since Western societies are not as stable and consistent as often presumed (Czarnawska-Joerges 1994), ‘established’ Western management principles might not constitute reliable foundations for theorizing knowledge transfer and management learning in transforming societies.

The implications of this way of thinking about management, organization and institutional process may be that it is necessary to develop new models and constructs in order to understand the conditions and processes of knowledge transfer and management learning in post-socialist countries. Research into management learning in transformingsocieties is not therefore just an attempt to test or apply theories devised in Western capitalist societies. Conceptualizing the post-socialist context as transformational change affecting all levels of society offers new empirical opportunities for the construction of

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novel theoretical approaches to management learning, in which conflict and heterogeneity – reflecting institutional,historical and cultural diversity - are characteristic.

Approaches to management learning in transforming societies

Perspectives on management learning in and knowledge transfer to post-socialist enterprises have emerged within, and reflect, this wider set of theoretical and conceptual concerns. It is possible to distinguish two broad approachesto theorizing these processes, each with their own characteristics. Structuralist views tend to be consonant with economic transition thinking and emphasize technical-economic aspects and convergent learning outcomes. Ethnographic and comparative institutionalist approaches, onthe other hand, tend to affirm the complexity, uncertainty and ambiguity of knowledge transfer between and learning processes in organizations embedded in diverse institutionalsystems and cultures. The general thrust of such arguments coincides with the more open, less formalistic assumptions embodied in transformation thinking.

From a structuralist perspective, knowledge transfer is seenin as a formal, uncontested process whereby ideas move directly from Western source to post-socialist destination. It is presumed that post-socialist enterprises have to acquire Western procedures and practices because of the shortcomings that were inherited from 40 or more years of operating in a command economy. Post-socialist managers, by the same token, are believed to have little choice but to adopt imported market-economic practices wholesale, because this is the only chance for their enterprises to satisfy theefficiency or normative imperatives they are assumed to face. ‘Best practice’ from experienced Western business mustbe copied in order to survive (Geppert and Merkens 1999: 27-30).

The implication is that knowledge transfer and learning are one-way processes, with the Western sources acting as the

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‘senders’ and ‘teachers’ and the ‘East’ as the ‘recipients’ and ‘learners’. The formal interest in technical change and economic outcomes leads to a focus on the transmission and reception of formal codified knowledge, communicating management tasks requiring certain skills (e.g. marketing and accounting) that had not existed in former SOEs. In thissense, structuralist approaches can be understood as ‘surgical interventions’ (Geppert and Merkens 1999: 29) to install new management functions or to restructure, outsource and often close previously integrated functional sub-units, such as maintenance workshops or firm-owned kindergarten.

In this structuralist framework, researchers normally build deductive models from which hypotheses are drawn and subjected to testing through the collection of quantitative data and the analysis of variance between variables. As a result of these methodological choices, the motive and purpose of managers in the transfer and learning process tend to be attributed by fiat. Without any detailed study ofactual managerial conduct, inferring intention through assuming some form of business rationality – e.g. the searchfor technical efficiency or institutional legitimacy – is the only way structural theorists can explain why managers learn. The neglect of the social or human processes of transfer and learning is inherent in this approach (cf. Kristensen and Zeitlin 2001: 180).

Research indicates not only that foreign investors and consultants prefer to operate within a structuralist framework, but also that post-socialist managers tend to seethe direct inscription of technical knowledge and proceduresas the only means of transforming their companies into Western-style business organizations (see Geppert and Merkens 1999). As such, the structuralist assumptions of knowledge transfer have become reflected in an implicit, sometimes explicit, understanding of the internal process ofmanagement learning as imitation.

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Imitative management learning is often explained with reference to neo-institutionalist arguments (e.g. DiMaggio and Powell 1983; Meyer and Rowan 1977) that emphasize the need for managers to legitimate their decisions and actions to external and internal stakeholders. Research has identified the problems of legitimacy faced by many managers, especially in the pre-privatization phase of the post-socialist enterprise, when enterprises had to be seen to adopt Western practices in order to secure resources for organizational survival. However, research has shown that legitimacy was also a very particular personal dilemma for nomenklatura managers, whose professional careers were challenged by the fall of communism and whose own survival depended on an image of managerial competence and knowledge (cf. Soulsby and Clark 1998; also Lang and Steger in this Issue). It is clear that, in these circumstances, ‘imitation’ is actually a very complex social accomplishmentassociated, for example, with impression management, and nota simple structural process. Moreover, micro-sociological research about the learning process has tended to reveal theprecarious and often misleading nature of managerial claims to ‘have learned’ Western practices. Too often, such learning has amounted to the acquisition and competent use of Western management discourses, leaving changes to more market economic practices either unrealized or significantly delayed (e.g. Clark and Soulsby 1999; Vamosi 2001).

In short, structuralist – economic or neo-institutionalist - theories have emphasized knowledge transfer and managementlearning as a one-way process of transmitting and adopting codified, explicit forms of knowledge that serve to improve the legitimacy and the efficiency of business activities. They have offered ideas and practices based on ‘successful’ Western recipes, assumed passive acceptance, and therefore predicted that processes and outcomes in the economic organizations in post-socialist countries will converge towards Western management norms. Additionally, they have tended to hold implicit assumptions about the superiority ofideas originating from the West, and, by implication, have

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presumed existing management knowledge in post-socialist countries to be at best irrelevant, at worst a barrier to efficient management.

However, alternative contributions to theorizing knowledge transfer and management learning in post-socialism have developed around approaches such as comparative institutionalist and ethnographic (or culturalist) studies2.Contrary to the structuralism of transition economists and neo-institutionalists, authors in this research stream have argued that management knowledge cannot be easily transferred across national, cultural and institutional boundaries and thus implemented unproblematically within post-socialist firms without modification. Processes of transfer and learning are dependent not only of the efficient transmission of new explicit knowledge from an authoritative Western source. Rather, these processes are complex (not simple), social (not only technical) and they involve the active participation of both parties (not just active transmission and passive reception). Indeed, the local managers’ experiences, skills and tacit knowledge are critical components that must be taken in consideration in order to understand how managers learn, share and spread newideas and practices. While sharing these views about the variety and contextuality of learning processes and outcomes, however, ethnographic and comparative institutionalist arguments start from opposite positions.

Ethnographic studies, which examine the management learning from intensive field work, focus on the social construction of everyday management realities, conceptualizing managementlearning as social processes characterized by both conflict,resistance and creativity (see, for example, Rottenburg 1994; Ashwin 1999; Dunn 1999). The understanding of management learning and knowledge transfer goes beyond the role dichotomy that sees Western managers as trainers and

2 Contributions in these research traditions can be found, for example, in Dittrich et al. (1995), Burawoy & Verdery (1999) and Grabher & Stark (1997)

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Eastern managers as learners to consider actual learning as the creation of knowledge from jointly shared experiences (Child and Czegledy 1996: 174). This approach points to important questions at the heart of learning and transfer asa social process of exchanging knowledge between post-socialist and expatriate managers. For example, how and to what extent do local managers participate in the learning process; how and why do cross-cultural conflicts emerge; howare established local learning patterns changed and local knowledge modified; how and in which particular areas is novel knowledge created? Such research highlights the precariousness of learning, appreciates the nuances of social interaction processes and the subtlety of interactiveand communicative influences on the acquisition of, and the emergent interpretation of, Western ideas.

The micro emphasis of ethnographic studies and their focus on the details of social process tends to downplay the societal effects of institutions on changes in internal management practices. At best, institutional arrangements are seen as secondary contextual factors and not systematically discussed. On the other hand, cross-national institutional approaches tend to stress the role of comparative institutional arrangements and expectations as they influence organizational development and management learning. In doing so, patterns of management learning and knowledge sharing are closely linked to the institutional legacies of state socialism and even earlier periods, as well as newly evolving institutional settings such as the educational, financial, legal and industrial systems in post-socialist countries (e.g. Whitley 1995; Stark 1992). Although, implicitly, these institutional legacies, expectations and differences influence the everyday conduct of managers involved in learning processes, affecting for example their interpretation of knowledge relevance to localproblems and contexts, comparative institutionalist studies tend to be relatively weak on such social detail.

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Knowledge transfer and management learning in transforming societies have attracted a variety of different theoretical and methodological approaches, and each serves to highlight important aspects of the topic. Within the transition-economic tradition, structural views have explicitly or implicitly focused on a technical, unilateral process of transmission and acquisition. As management transformation, however, the transfer and learning on new ideas and practices turn out to be a complex and socially contested process, in which emergent knowledge is socially negotiated and embedded within an ambiguous institutional context.

Introducing the contributions to this Special Issue

The six articles that make up this Special Issue reflect this diversity of theoretical and methodological positions. The authors hail from five different countries and the articles cover several countries from within the former Soviet bloc. Four of the five articles report directly on empirical findings, while the other (Lang and Steger) offersa meta-analysis of research across the CEE region. Some of the articles have distinctly structuralist aims (Alas and Sharifi, Lang and Steger and Piske), while others offer social constructionist and ethnographic views (e.g. Hetrick and Dobosz and Jankowicz). Some focus on the problems of transferring technical management knowledge such as Human Resource Management (HRM) practices (Hetrick) and the Learning Organization (Alas and Sharifi), while others attempt to unravel the implications of local tacit knowledgefor acquiring specific practices such as Qualitative Management (Dobosz and Jankowicz) or general market-economicpractices.

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Lang and Steger’s article provides an important application of the principles of institutionalist theory. They start from a critical review of transition-economic approaches to knowledge transfer and lay down foundations from the neo-institutionalist sociology that has emerged in North American sociology. The main task of the article is to develop a set of testable hypotheses about the transmission of market-economic ideas, and this is accomplished by drawing heavily on existing empirical research on transforming management in post-socialist countries. Their institutionalist view of cross-border knowledge transfer particularly highlights the problems created by the asymmetric relationship between the agents of Western capitalism and those of transforming CEE countries.

Piske, like most of the contributors, is particularly interested in the problems of management learning created bythe infusion of foreign direct investment (FDI) into existing CEE enterprises. His approach is clearly located with the structuralist tradition, adopting a quantitative modeling approach to develop hypotheses about the relationships between learning and the degree of effective integration of 29 acquired Polish enterprises into their German owners. He finds that German companies that introducegreater degrees of change more quickly and more transparently are more successful in effecting organizational learning (and hence integration). These statistically significant empirical patterns raise many questions about the associated internal social processes of learning, and Piske offers a number of feasible but broad inferences about Polish managers’ and employees’ attitudes and expectations.

In contrast to Piske, Alas and Sharifi study her large survey of indigenous Estonian enterprises with little or no direct contact with FDI and the technical knowledge that comes with such relationships. She draws heavily upon the conventional change management literature, aims to examine the relationship between organizational change and

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organizational learning in her mixed sample and to find out how far concepts of organizational learning have infiltratedthese domestic firms. Not surprisingly, she finds out that managers believe their firms have had to change transformatively, but that the degree to which learning has taken place and transformation therefore realized is not uniform across the sample. That younger firms have succeededin promoting more change may have been predictable, but Alasand Sharifi also emphasize the problems of learning confronted by medium-sized companies.

Hetrick reports on her investigation into the transfer of HRM ideas and practices from Western owners to seven Polish subsidiaries. Her wider interest is in exploring questions of convergence and globalization through this intensive casestudy approach, but her rich empirical materials, based on semi-structured interviews in the subsidiaries, offer deep insights into the subtleties of management learning. Despitethe foreign parents’ wishes to constrain the shape of HRM within the subsidiaries, local managers display varying degrees of discretion in selecting, interpreting and adapting to ‘global knowledge’. More casual observation, it seems that indigenous Polish enterprises have rarely even begun to engage with Western HRM knowledge. In this study, the continuing influence of distinctively Polish institutionalized practices has significant ‘diversity-preserving’ implications even when a Western head office asserts isomorphic pressures.

In some respects, Hetrick’s work mediates between mainly structural research of the first three contributors and the ethnographic study of Dobosz and Jankowicz. The basic empirical materials in Dobosz and Jankowicz’s study of the transfer of Quality Management ideas from a British car company to its acquired Polish subsidiary comprise close observations that are exemplary of ethnographic research. The aim is to examine the ways in which notions of quality ‘travelled’ from a Western institutional location to a Polish company with different cultural, historical and

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institutional legacies. The findings identify the problems of dis-embedding the idea of quality management from its Western context and then re-embedding and re-institutionalizing it so that it becomes a substantively rational element in Polish management. It follows that the process of management learning is the equivalent of the social (translation and negotiation) process of embedding and institutionalization, and this empirically grounded observation reinforces the proposition that learning is active knowledge creation rather than passive imitation.

Collectively, the articles demonstrate the benefits of examining the nature of individual and organizational learning from a variety of theoretical perspectives and methodological stances. All agree that the movement of knowledge, ideas and practices are critical to the development of the post-socialist management resource, as one element of the larger process of organizational transformation. However, the authors show that human resource development across cultural boundaries is complex and problematic, and apparently straightforward foreign interventions often founder on the subtle unspoken problems of tacit understanding, which limit local receptiveness.

Management learning and knowledge transfer: future directions?

The last ten years has witnessed the burgeoning of research into inter-organizational, cross-cultural knowledge transferand management learning in post-socialist countries. This has brought with it a vast expansion in empirical knowledge of different socio-economic systems and patterns of knowledge transfer, enriching, for example, the literature on international and comparative management. There are signsin the research reported in this Special Issue of new important lines of argument, but overall, theoretical developments since 1996 in our understanding of knowledge transfer and management learning in transforming societies have been limited. The chasm between structural/neo-

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institutionalism and ethnographic/comparative institutionalism is still great, some attempts at reconciliation – even if only implicitly – have been made bymore thoughtful research. In this concluding section, we consider the state of this field of research and tentativelyidentify issues that call for future exploration.

Empirical issues and developments

Future research in this area should show greater sensitivityto the variable nature of the transformative context. One obvious but much neglected point is that, 12 years after thecollapse of the CEE communist regimes, the contemporary context of post-socialism is increasingly influenced by post-1989 history. It has become orthodoxy to refer to the continuing role of command-economic legacies, but it is clear that recent histories are very different even between near neighbours such as East Germany, the Czech Republic andHungary. For example, patterns of knowledge transfer and management learning have been significantly affected by the dominant tendencies in privatization: absorption of assets within one institutional context (Germany), acquisition of assets by foreign capital (Hungary), or domestic distribution of assets (Czech Republic).

As demonstrated in this Special Issue, a lot of high qualitywork in this area has been conducted through detailed fieldwork in enterprises within one transforming context. Although providing ethnographically rich materials, this research strategy has hampered the truly comparative study of transfer and learning processes by focusing more on internal organizational details and less on developing comparative analysis. There is a need, more than a decade into the post-socialist transformation, to compare and contrast processes and changes in more and lesser developed post-socialist societies – as well as between transforming post-socialist and other emerging economies (such as Brazil or India). Future research projects should take on the comparative challenge, either directly through

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comprehensive research design, or, as Lang and Steger have shown, through careful re-analysis of existing research. This latter may be the more realizable approach given the resources necessary for systematic comparative research programmes, but it demands the application of rigorous ground rules for qualitative comparative method (Ragin 1987).

On a related theme, we would call for more qualitative cross-national studies in which knowledge transfer to transforming societies is examined more methodically in terms of the country of origin. In general, researchers studying post-socialism have underplayed the variety of established Western capitalist models from which management practices have derived, and thereby have missed opportunities to contribute to the diversity/convergence debate. Constructing a matrix of country of origin and destination country effects on knowledge transfer and management learning would offer the potential for creating amore sophisticated understanding of global, regional and national influences in international business and management.

A great deal of research has concentrated on knowledge transfer and management learning as consequences of Western FDI. Although this is a very important source of new ideas and practices, it directs the focus of empirical attention away from certain countries (e.g. Bulgaria, Belarus), or from certain industries (e.g. heavy engineering) within certain countries. In many transforming societies, enterprises have had to change by “learning from ourselves as a group” (Czeglédy 1996), pointing to the role of indirect channels of external knowledge transfer and the greater reliance on the internal development of inherited practices. We suggest that more attention needs to be given to these circuitous routes and indigenous processes.

Theoretical issues and developments

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The articles that appear in this Special Issue demonstrate how researchers have developed new ways of talking about knowledge transfer and management learning. Well-rehearsed terms like change, importation, diffusion, imitation, isomorphism, adaptation and integration continue to predominate, but structural concepts like deinstitutionalization and reinstitutionalization, and processual metaphors like translation and ‘travel of ideas’ help to understand knowledge transfer and management learning from promising new angles. These new conceptualizations emphasize the historical origins, the cognitive ambiguities and the subtle modification of ideas and practices as they move between institutional, cultural and linguistic contexts. These views spell the end of the old technical, one-way certainties of transfer and learning that typified early views of the economic transition.

While comparative institutionalist and social constructionist approaches, in different ways, offer theoretical mechanisms to explore the diverse and contested nature of knowledge transfer and management learning processes, there is merit in theory construction that attempts to bridge the gap between them. Such integrative efforts concentrate on developing a detailed understanding of how and why institutional pressures become implicated in the social processes of management action (cf. Clark and Soulsby 1999; Geppert 2000). Referring to the social and institutional embeddedness of management and organization, these theorists have explored the relationships between the structural-institutional and human agency characteristics ofmanagement action during times of transformation.

At a structural level, knowledge transfer in this context isasymmetric, involving the movement of ideas from one powerful institutional system to another weaker one. But neither an idea nor its movement is neutral. Rather, at bothends of the transmission process, the ideas are imbued with locally situated meaning arising from a host of cultural andinstitutional influences. In addition, social and political

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motives infuse the transfer process with significance beyondthe technical content of the ideas themselves, as they are packaged, delivered and received by powerful social actors, each with (competing) aims of gaining, sustaining or increasing their control over the organization in the face of tensions created by new practices. These tensions and conflicts are institutional or cultural in origin, but are reproduced by organizational actors enacting socially and institutionally embedded strategies and drawing on local tacit knowledge to make sense of (learn from) the new ideas (e.g. Geppert 2002).

This line of theorizing places at the centre of analysis some of the issues that have been well addressed in the range of studies reported here e.g. the role of human agency, sensemaking and social interaction processes in the perception and interpretation of the relevance of ‘foreign’ ideas for the local context. However, it also highlights other aspects of knowledge transfer and management learning that have been traditionally neglected by both comparative institutionalists and social constructionists, viz. the roleof power, politics and contestation. The view that evolves from social process versions of institutional theory is thatknowledge is not transmitted or learned as clearly defined units, but is created through experiential and interactive processes in which levels of conflict are always present. The power asymmetries and institutional differences suggest that knowledge transfer and management learning can never bea simple technical process, but field research needs to reflect and theorize far more deeply and explicitly about the political processes inherent in the creation of new management ideas and practices.

The outcomes of such complex institutional, social and political processes in terms of changing local management knowledge and practice are inevitably emergent rather than determined. From empirical findings, it is unclear under what conditions, if any, transfer and learning processes would result in irrefutable convergence around some

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globalized management norms. On the other hand, studies since the fall of the Berlin Wall have discovered that the processes of knowledge transfer and management learning haveexhibited a bewildering variety of forms, in relation to both the structural diversity of the national institutional contexts and the complexity of cultural and political motives underlying strategic choices. In short, research in this field has dramatically lessened the confidence of the early 1990s that enterprises in transforming societies will,in any simple sense, take shape around global capitalist principles of market-economic practice.

Addresses for correspondence

Ed ClarkSchool of ManagementRoyal Holloway University of LondonEgham TW20 0EXSurreyUnited KingdomTelephone: +44 (0)1784 414007Fax: +44 (0)1784 439854Email: ed.clark@rhul.ac.uk

Mike GeppertEuropean Business Management SchoolUniversity of Wales SwanseaSingleton ParkSwansea SA2 0TRUnited KingdomTelephone: +44 (0)1792 295061Fax: +44 (0)1792 295626Email: m.geppert@swansea.ac.uk

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