ABSTRACT
For more than two decades, international business (IB) scholars have been applying institutional perspectives to the study of multinational enterprises (MNEs), especially the institutional economic and the sociologically rooted neo-institutionalist perspectives. While the former, using fundamentally economic arguments, acknowledges self-interested behavior by MNEs (Peng, 2001, 2003), our review of the latter 2 suggests that it has been dominated by the conventional neo-institutionalist assumptions (DiMaggio and Powell, 1991; cf. Hirsch and Lounsbury, 1997) and has overlooked the role of interest and agency in MNEs’ actions. Consequently, MNEs are mostly described as passive recipients of institutionalized host-country contexts. But contexts are not all equally institutionalized and while some comprise stable, mature fields, others offer changing fields that favor attempts to resist or change institutions. Such is the case of emerging economies, “low-income, rapid-growth countries using economic liberalization as their primary engine of growth” that include both developing countries and transition economies (Hoskisson et al., 2000: 249). They typically feature volatile contexts (Peng and Heath, 1996) that are ideal for the study of MNEs as interest-driven agents.
