Boundary Spanning: When Locals Articulate Locally Embedded Tacit Knowledge

The paper explores how locals span boundaries between corporate and local levels. The aim is to better comprehend potentialities and challenges when MNCs draws on locals’ culture specific knowledge. The study is based on an in-depth, interpretive case study of boundary spanning by local actors in the period of post-acquisition when their organization is being integrated into the acquiring MNC. The paper contributes to the literature on boundary spanning in three ways: First, by illustrating that boundary spanning is performed by numerous organizational actors in a variety of positions in MNCs, inclusively by locals in subsidiaries. Second, by showing that boundary spanning is ‘situated’ in the sense that its result depends on the kind of knowledge to be transmitted and the attitude of the receivers. A third contribution is methodological. The study illustrates that combining bottom-up grounded approach with pattern matching is a way to shed light on the tacit local knowledge that organizational actors cannot articulate and that an exclusively inductive research is not likely to unveil.