Institutional theory asserts that an organization’s context determines which circulatingideas it considers appropriate and thus chooses to adapt. Yet, ideas are able to travelacross high institutional distances between significantly different contexts when assistedby intermediaries in the recipient context. Via an institutional translation perspective,emphasizing that ideas are adapted to fit local contexts through processes of translation asthey travel, we explore how such local intermediaries facilitate ideas to travel into contextswith which they have a poor institutional fit. The extant literature, however, offers littleinsight into this phenomenon, endemic high-distance translation, despite being importantfor both practice and theory as it enables countries and organizations to adopt foreignideas without external support and answers calls for research on how distinct contextsshapes processes underlying translation, respectively. Thus, with aim to elaborate uponthe extant literature we conduct a qualitative case study of local intermediaries in CostaRica facilitating translation of ideas concerning digitalization of the agriculture sector,which is highly traditional and institutionally a poor fit for digitalization. From our casefindings, we develop a theoretical framework for high-distance translation facilitated bylocal intermediaries. The framework outlines an end-to-end process of endemic highdistancetranslation and provides novel insights into how three functions — transferringforeign ideas to the local context via transposition, presenting the idea to recipients inan understandable and interest evoking way via adaptive conveyance, and collaborativelyiterating upon the idea to adapt it to the local context via joint recontextualization —allow local intermediaries to bridge translation barriers imposed by institutional distance.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UPSALLA1/oai:DiVA.org:su-202486 |
| Date | January 2022 |
| Creators | Granath, Linus, Luusua, Emil, Keelty, Joshua |
| Publisher | Stockholms universitet, Företagsekonomiska institutionen |
| Source Sets | DiVA Archive at Upsalla University |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Student thesis, info:eu-repo/semantics/bachelorThesis, text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Rights | info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess |
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