Organizational recipes and Management Practice in Multinational Corporations

In this paper we explore potential factors explaining how organizational recipes are spread within Multinational Companies. Implementation of organizational recipes has become a widespread phenomenon, but most current research have focused on diffusion between companies and not within companies. We distinguish between formal adoption and putting a recipe to use, i.e. whether the concept leads to changes in work processes and management practice. We develop a number of propositions, where we aim to explain spreading by the following factors: i) Role of the corporate center as a change agent, ii) Recipient units’ previous experience with organizational concepts, and iii) National culture of recipient units