Abstract
This article offers a contextualised explanation of the process of institutional bridging by Delta, a British SME, in order to internationalise to China across high institutional distance. The study uncovers three novel mechanisms of 'Cross-institutional Dissonance Mitigation', 'Multi-level Strategic Embedding', and 'Cross-institutional Consonance Retuning' to explain how and why a failing SME with limited resources and networks was able to bridge the institutional distance and internationalise to the challenging Chinese market. This article contributes to the literature on SME internationalisation across high institutional distance by opening the 'black box' of SME institutional bridging, hence demonstrating the benefits of contextualised explanations to extend research into internationalisation phenomena that span multiple institutional boundaries.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 307-340 |
| Number of pages | 34 |
| Journal | Management and Organization Review |
| Volume | 15 |
| Issue number | 2 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - 1 Jun 2019 |
Bibliographical note
Publisher Copyright:© 2019 The International Association for Chinese Management Research.
Keywords
- contextualised explanation
- institutional bridging
- institutional distance
- SME internationalisation
- UK/China
ASJC Scopus subject areas
- Business and International Management
- Strategy and Management