Geographies of Practice Transfer: A practice theoretical approach to the transfer of training practices within German multinational enterprises to China, India, and Mexico (Economic Geography) [1st ed. 2022] 9783030951849, 9783030951856, 3030951847

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Economic Geography

Judith Wiemann

Geographies of Practice Transfer A practice theoretical approach to the transfer of training practices within German multinational enterprises to China, India, and Mexico

Economic Geography Series Editors Dieter Kogler , UCD School of Architecture, Planning & Environmental Policy, University College Dublin, Belfield, Dublin, Ireland Peter Dannenberg , Geographisches Institut, Universität zu Köln, Cologne, Nordrhein-Westfalen, Germany Advisory Editors Nuri Yavan , Department of Geography, Ankara University, Ankara, Turkey Päivi Oinas , Turku School of Economics, University of Turku, Turku, Finland Michael Webber , School of Geography, University of Melbourne, Carlton, VIC, Australia David Rigby, Department of Geography, University of California Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA, USA

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Judith Wiemann

Geographies of Practice Transfer A practice theoretical approach to the transfer of training practices within German multinational enterprises to China, India, and Mexico

Judith Wiemann Ruhr University Bochum Bochum, Germany

ISSN 2520-1417     ISSN 2520-1425 (electronic) Economic Geography ISBN 978-3-030-95184-9    ISBN 978-3-030-95185-6 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-95185-6 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Springer imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

To the wise women in my life

Acknowledgments

More than a book, this dissertation has been a journey with many steps, detours, backward steps, and leaps forward. This journey would not have been possible without the continuous support of many. As we all know, funding is essential to research. I gratefully acknowledge the German Research Foundation (DFG) without whose financial support of the research project “Global strategies and local forms of technical vocational education and training in German multinational companies: A regional comparison in Emerging Economies” (Grant No. FU 424/16-1), this dissertation would not have been possible. In the same token, I thank the well over a hundred interview partners for giving their precious time to support this research. Secondly, I want to express my gratitude to Prof. Martina Fuchs (University of Cologne), my supervisor and “most critical ally” in this journey. You have supported me with your expertise and pushed me to develop my own “story-line” within the greater research project. I further thank my second supervisor Prof. Matthias Pilz (University of Cologne) and my research-project colleague Kristina Wiemann, who have been part of the research project this dissertation is based on. Both have opened up my perspective for comparative education studies and helped to reflect my work. Many thanks also go to Prof. Matthias Kiese and my colleague Simon Rohde (Ruhr-University Bochum) who have supported this dissertation in reaching its finish line. Your support has been invaluable! Furthermore, I want to thank my former colleagues in the Department of Economic and Social Geography at the University of Cologne: Thank you, Tatiana, for taking the time to reflect my conceptual ideas critically but always supportively. Thank you, Hans, for our countless inspirational discussions. Thank you, Phyllis, for always being there when I needed an ear. Thank you, Sebastian, for showing me that writing a dissertation “is not open-heart-surgery” and the importance of taking productive breaks. Thank you, Nico, for always keeping calm. Thank you, Natascha, for (though late in the game) coming on board supporting me. Thank you, Eugenia, without your daily smile, going to work would not have been the same. Thank you all for your friendship, our Tuesday salads, the laughter, and support!

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I also want to thank especially all my friends, who have been there for me every step of this journey. You know who you are. Thank you, Daniel R.V., for your genius and encouragement along the way. Endless thanks also go to “my Mexican family” who have shaped my personnel development since I was 16 years old and who have supported me during the fieldwork for this book. Muchísimas gracias, Estela y Daniel, Irma y Carlos, Luisa, Diego, Daniel y sus familias, Nona y Abuela y toda la bola de los Tovar y asociados. Gracias por estar conmigo en esta aventura! And, finally and most importantly, warmest thanks go to my amazing family, without whose support this book would have probably ended up an unfished manuscript lost in a data jungle somewhere on a hard drive: my wonderful mother Irmgard, for her endless emotional support and for her infinite patience while listening to and debating all my crazy ideas; my exceptional sister Anna, for reading and professionally commenting on the whole manuscript and for always being the first in line to fight for me; my aunt Birgitta, for her support and sparkling energy; my father Pit, for his support in this endeavor; my brother Daniel and his family, for cheering for me tirelessly. You are simply the best!

Contents

1 Introducing Relevance, Research Questions, and Structure of This Study��������������������������������������������������������������������    1 1.1 Empirical and Conceptual Relevance of the Study: Six Reasons for Reading This Book ������������������������������������������������    1 1.2 Central Research Interest and Derivation of Research Questions����������������������������������������������������������������������    6 1.3 Structure of This Book����������������������������������������������������������������������    8 References��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   11 2 Defining the Research Desiderates: Economic Geography, Practice Theories, and Practice Transfer����������������������������������������������   15 2.1 Defining Skill Formation Practices as a Research Object����������������   17 2.1.1 Current State of Research: Transfer of Technical Vocational Education and Training in German MNEs���������������������������   17 2.1.2 “Skill” in Skill Formation Practices��������������������������������������   20 2.1.3 Practices to Develop Skills “Purposefully”��������������������������   23 2.2 Research Desiderate Practice Transfer in Economic Geography ������������������������������������������������������������������   25 2.2.1 Shifting the Perspective from Knowledge Transfer to Practice Transfer������������������������������������������������   25 2.2.2 Practice Transfer in Economic Geography ��������������������������   31 2.2.3 The Research Field Practice Transfer ����������������������������������   37 2.2.4 Critical Reassessment of Institutional Distance as the Explanation for the Difficulty of Transferring Practices ������������������������������������������������������   39 2.2.5 Distance as an Interactional Effect and a Sociocultural and Time-Spatial Tension����������������������   43 2.2.6 Interim Conclusion���������������������������������������������������������������   46

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2.3 Introducing Practice Thinking: Practice Theories’ Common Ground������������������������������������������������������������������������������   46 2.3.1 Situating a Practice Theoretical View in Economic Geography ������������������������������������������������������   46 2.3.2 The Diverse “Family” of Practice Theories��������������������������   48 2.3.3 Practice Versus Theory, Action Versus Structure: The Ontological Alternative ��������������������������������   52 2.3.4 Defining Practices as Nexuses of Activities��������������������������   57 2.4 Research Desiderate Practice Transfer in Practice Theories������������   61 2.5 Summary of the Research Desiderates ��������������������������������������������   63 References��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   65 3 Discussing the Methodological Approach����������������������������������������������   77 3.1 Theorizing with Practice Theories—An Epistemological Approximation ������������������������������������������������������   78 3.2 Designing the Research��������������������������������������������������������������������   81 3.2.1 Professional Positionality: The Organizational Context��������������������������������������������������   82 3.2.2 Selected Research Regions: Geographical Scope of the Study������������������������������������������   84 3.2.3 Sampling Criteria for MNEs������������������������������������������������   88 3.2.4 Sampling of Interviewees Outside of Companies����������������   91 3.2.5 Overview of Generated Data������������������������������������������������   92 3.2.6 Using Semi-Structured Expert Interviews as a Method to Generate Data About Skill Formation Practices in MNEs��������������������������������������   93 3.2.7 Capturing the Material Element of Skill Formation Practices��������������������������������������������������   96 3.2.8 Summary: Implications of the Research Design for Theorizing ����������������������������������������������������������   96 3.3 Generating the Data��������������������������������������������������������������������������   97 3.3.1 Contacting of Interview Partners: Field Access��������������������   98 3.3.2 Differential Logical Positionality ����������������������������������������   99 3.3.3 Research-Evoked Positionality ��������������������������������������������  101 3.3.4 Summary: Implications of the Data Generation for Theorizing ����������������������������������������������������������������������  102 3.4 Analyzing the Data ��������������������������������������������������������������������������  102 3.4.1 First Phase: Exploring Different Lines of Inquiry����������������  103 3.4.2 Second Phase: Theorizing in Dialogue with the Data and Practice Theoretical Thinking������������������  104 3.4.3 Third Phase: Systematically Analyzing the Data with the Previously Established Conceptual Framework ��������������������������������������������������������  105 3.4.4 Summary: Implications of the Data Analysis for Theorizing ����������������������������������������������������������������������  109 References��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  110

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4 Developing a Practice Theoretical Approach to Practice Transfer Across Distance and Between Territories������������  115 4.1 Three Elements of a Practice������������������������������������������������������������  117 4.2 Practices “Travel” by Means of Their Elements������������������������������  119 4.3 Transferring Practices: Power in Practice Transfer��������������������������  123 4.4 MNEs as Media for Practice Transfer����������������������������������������������  126 4.5 Origin and Destination Contexts as “Fabrics of Interrelated Practices”������������������������������������������������  128 4.6 Degree of Complexity of Practices ��������������������������������������������������  133 4.7 Transfer Resistance: A Practice Theoretical Notion of Relational Distance����������������������������������������������������������  137 4.8 The Role of Territorial Institutions in the Destination Fabric of Interrelated Practices����������������������������  140 4.9 Reflecting on the Conceptual Contributions of This Study��������������  147 References��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  154 5 Comparing Transfer Resistances of Three Skill Formation Practices to the Chinese, Indian, and Mexican Research Regions��������������������������������������������������������������  159 5.1 Comparing the Degrees of Complexity of the Three Skill Formation Practices ��������������������������������������������  161 5.1.1 Onboarding ��������������������������������������������������������������������������  162 5.1.2 Shop Floor Inducting������������������������������������������������������������  166 5.1.3 Dual Apprenticeship Training ����������������������������������������������  172 5.1.4 Three Degrees of Complexity in Comparison����������������������  183 5.2 Fitting the Practices into the Destination Fabrics: Availability/Integrability and Territorial Institutions������������������������  188 5.2.1 Transferring Onboarding������������������������������������������������������  189 5.2.2 Transferring Shop Floor Inducting ��������������������������������������  194 5.2.3 Transferring Dual Apprenticeship Training��������������������������  202 5.3 Comparing the Transfer Resistances of Three Skill Formation Practices Between Three Research Regions�������������������  235 5.4 Reflecting on the Empirical Contributions of This Study����������������  238 5.4.1 Asking Two Additional Questions����������������������������������������  243 References��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  244 6 Threading Everything Together: Conclusion����������������������������������������  247 6.1 Answering the Four Research Questions: A Summary��������������������  248 6.2 Final Reflections ������������������������������������������������������������������������������  253 References��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  256 Name Index������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  257 Subject Index����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  261

List of Figures

Fig. 1.1 The problem of reader guidance according to different research designs. (Source: Own representation, developed on the basis of Reuber and Pfaffenbach 2005: 25–33; Dunne 2011; Paltridge 2002)����������������������������������������������������������   10 Fig. 2.1 Mapping this study’s research desiderates: a reader’s guide through this chapter. (Source: Own representation)��������������   16 Fig. 2.2 Definition of “skill”. (Source: Own representation) ����������������������   21 Fig. 2.3 Different spatial settings for performances of practices in communities of practice. (Source: Own representation)������������   31 Fig. 2.4 Publications on practice transfer in Web of Science database. (Source: Data obtained from Web of Science search, all databases, April 2019)����������������������������������������������������������������   32 Fig. 2.5 Visualization of literature on organizational practice transfer and diffusion. (Source: Corpus 955 publications, Web of Science Search: TS = (organi* AND (practice NEAR/5 diffus*)) OR (organi* AND (practice NEAR/5 transfer*)), Web of Science Core Collection. Own |representation visualized with VOS Viewer, overlay visualization with scores here in different colors by publication year; weights: links)������������������������������������������������   34 Fig. 2.6 Difference between institutional distance and issue-specific institutional distance. (Source: Own representation; ideas Fortwengel (2014) and Kostova and Roth (2002))����������������   42 Fig. 2.7 Mapping this study’s research desiderates. (Source: Own representation) ��������������������������������������������������������   63 Fig. 2.8 Conceptual and empirical desiderates in a nutshell. (Source: Own representation) ��������������������������������������������������������   64

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List of Figures

Fig. 3.1 Heuristic of connected practices in the research process (The three elements of a practice (material, competence, and meaning) and the graphical representations used for them in this study will be further discussed in Sect. 4.1. Reasons for the different sizes of the elements lie in the in Sect. 4.6 developed concept of “degree of complexity of a practice.”). (Source: Own representation)��������������������������������   80 Fig. 3.2 Sample diversity in industry sectors. (Source: Own representation) ��������������������������������������������������������   90 Fig. 3.3 Examples of the development of diagrams during the data analysis. (Source: Own representation, see Figs. 4.4 and 4.6)����������������������������������������������������������������������  105 Fig. 4.1 Elements shape each other. (Source: Own representation, following Shove et al. 2012: 32) ����������������������������������������������������  118 Fig. 4.2 Heuristic of connected practices relevant to this study. (Source: Own representation) ��������������������������������������������������������  125 Fig. 4.3 Destination fabric of interrelated practices. (Source: Own representation) ��������������������������������������������������������  132 Fig. 4.4 Degree of complexity of a practice. (Source: Own representation) ��������������������������������������������������������  134 Fig. 4.5 Transfer resistance of a practice in transfer. (Source: Own representation) ��������������������������������������������������������  139 Fig. 4.6 Role of territorial institutions in the destination fabric of interrelated practices. (Source: Own representation) ��������������������������������������������������������  147 Fig. 4.7 Conceptual contributions of this study in a nutshell. (Source: Own representation) ��������������������������������������������������������  148 Fig. 5.1 Mutual validation of concepts relayed in Chap. 4, and empirical example discussed in this chapter. (Source: Own representation) ��������������������������������������������������������  160 Fig. 5.2 Reader guidance for this chapter. (Source: Own representation) ��������������������������������������������������������  161 Fig. 5.3 Terminologies used in relationship to each other. (Source: Own representation) ��������������������������������������������������������  162 Fig. 5.4 Multi-use room used for onboarding at a Mexican production plant (M25). (Source: Photograph by J. Wiemann; stylized by author to ensure anonymity of the company) ��������������  165 Fig. 5.5 The ILUO idea in skill matrixes. (Source: Own representation, Interview M4, and production plant visit)��������������  168 Fig. 5.6 Technical instructions at the working station, M5. (Source: Photograph by K. Wiemann; stylized by the author to ensure anonymity of subject and company)��������������������  170 Fig. 5.7 Manual metalworking for dual apprenticeship training. (Source: Photograph by K. Wiemann; stylized by the author to ensure anonymity of subjects and company)������������������������������  174

List of Figures

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Fig. 5.8 Training center in Central Mexico (above) and China (below). (Source: Photograph by J. Wiemann (above) and K. Wiemann (below); stylized by the author to ensure anonymity of subjects and organizations) ������������������������������������������������������������  180 Fig. 5.9 Materiality for metalworking at a training workshop. (Source: Photograph by J. Wiemann; stylized by the author to ensure anonymity of company) ��������������������������������������  181 Fig. 5.10 Typical arrangement of workbenches for dual apprenticeship training at a joint dual apprenticeship training center of two MNEs in the Greater Shanghai Area. (Source: Photograph by K. Wiemann; stylized by the author to ensure anonymity of company)����������������������������������  181 Fig. 5.11 Curriculum for dual apprenticeship training in the Greater Shanghai Area. (Source: Own representation based on photography of a poster)��������������������������������������������������  183 Fig. 5.12 The complexity of competence in comparison. (Source: Own representation) ��������������������������������������������������������  185 Fig. 5.13 The complexity of meaning in comparison. (Source: Own representation) ��������������������������������������������������������  186 Fig. 5.14 The complexity of material in comparison. (Source: Own representation) ��������������������������������������������������������  187 Fig. 5.15 The complexity of practice-time profiles in comparison. (Source: Own representation) ��������������������������������������������������������  187 Fig. 5.16 Degrees of complexity of three skill formation practices. (Source: Own representation) ��������������������������������������������������������  187 Fig. 5.17 Comparing availability and integrability of onboarding between the research regions. (Source: Own representation) ��������  193 Fig. 5.18 Comparing availability and integrability of shop floor inducing between the research regions. (Source: Own representation) ��������������������������������������������������������  202 Fig. 5.19 Spread of Mexican Model of Dual Formation. (Source: Wiemann and Fuchs (2018: 382); data compiled by COPARMEX at the end of 2016)������������������������������  213 Fig. 5.20 Comparing availability and integrability of dual apprenticeship training between the research regions. (Source: Own representation) ��������������������������������������������������������  232 Fig. 5.21 Transfer resistances of onboarding, shop floor inducting, and dual apprenticeship training in the three research regions. (Source: Own representation) ����������������������������  235 Fig. 5.22 Empirical contribution of this study in a nutshell. (Source: Own representation) ��������������������������������������������������������  242

List of Tables

Table 2.1 Two ontological notions of knowledge ������������������������������������������   27 Table 3.1 Typology of vocational education systems of selected countries for fieldwork��������������������������������������������������������������������   86 Table 3.2 List of company cases ��������������������������������������������������������������������   89 Table 3.3 Number of interviews, interviewees, training center visits, and plant visits��������������������������������������������������������������������������������   91 Table 5.1 Quality categories for dual apprenticeship training outside of Germany by the AHK-IHK-DIHK network ������������������������������  176

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Chapter 1

Introducing Relevance, Research Questions, and Structure of This Study

Abstract  This chapter introduces the conceptual and empirical relevance of the presented study by showing how practice transfer in MNEs is an under-researched phenomenon in economic geography and an important real-world problem. It additionally argues for studying the transfer of production-related training practices in German MNEs. Furthermore, the chapter derives the four research questions guiding the study: 1 . What is the spatiality of “knowing” in practice transfer? 2. Why are practices transformed when they are transferred across space? 3. Why are some practices “more difficult” to transfer across space than others? 4. What role do institutions play in the transfer of practices between territories (e.g., nations, regions)? When and how do institutions impact practices in transfer? The chapter ends by presenting the structure of the book. Keywords  Introduction · Relevance of study · Central research interest · Research questions · Structure of book

1.1  E  mpirical and Conceptual Relevance of the Study: Six Reasons for Reading This Book In our globalized world, manufacturing companies continuously internationalize production. The ramp-up processes for new production lines at international locations require considerable efforts from manufacturing multinational enterprises (MNEs). Indeed, difficulties in producing high-quality products in foreign locations sometimes even lead to so-called back-shoring of manufacturing to the origin countries (Fratocchi et al. 2015, 2016).

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 J. Wiemann, Geographies of Practice Transfer, Economic Geography, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-95185-6_1

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Essential for high-quality production is the technical skills of the production personnel. Manufacturing MNEs therefore face the problem of securing production personnel with the necessary skills for high-quality industrial production at their worldwide branches (Fuchs et al. 2016). One way to ensure the rightly skilled personnel for manufacturing MNEs at their international subsidiaries is the transfer of production-related training practices to these locations. Employing a practice theoretical approach, this study centers on how German MNEs transfer three selected production-related training practices to their subsidiaries in emerging economies: onboarding of new employees, shop floor inducting of machine operators, and German-style dual apprenticeship training for specialized technicians. Empirical findings are drawn from three research regions: Greater Shanghai Area (China), Metropolitan Areas Mumbai-Pune-Bangalore (India), and Central Mexico (Mexico). Now, why is the transfer of training practices in German MNEs to emerging economies a relevant phenomenon to research? Or asked from a reader’s perspective (especially readers with an interest in economic geography and/or practice theories): Why read a book about the Geographies of Practice Transfer? The answer to this question can be broken down into six arguments: 1. Practice transfer is an “understudied phenomenon” in economic geography. Firstly, practice transfer is an inherently spatial phenomenon since it implies a transfer across geographical space. Secondly, practice transfer is an inherently economic phenomenon, especially in the context of practice transfer within MNEs. Since economic geography’s research interest lies in questions surrounding economy and space, practice transfer would seem an obvious research field for the sub-­ discipline. So far, however, economic geographers have left research on the phenomenon mostly to international business studies (Chiang et al. 2016; Fortwengel and Jackson 2016). While Bathelt et al. (2018: 1002) attest that scholars in international business studies and economic geography are more frequently in dialogue concerning knowledge transfer, practice transfer has received little attention in economic geography (for an extensive discussion of the research on practice transfer in the sub-discipline, see Sect. 2.2.1). 2. This study “expands practice theoretical thought” by developing a practice theoretical approach to explain the social phenomenon of practice transfer across distance. The practice theoretical approach employed in this study provides deep insights into the fundamental nature of practices as “nexuses of activities.” These can be defined as “forms of bodily activities, forms of mental activities, ‘things’ and their use, a background knowledge in the form of understanding, know-how, states of emotion and motivational knowledge” (Reckwitz 2002: 249). So far, practice theories have only very superficially theorized the phenomenon of practice transfer (for a further discussion see Sect. 2.4 and the introduction of Chap. 4). On the basis of extensive empirical findings, this study expands practice theoretical thought by

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developing a practice theoretical notion of “distance” in practice transfer in terms of “transfer resistance.” Such a fine-grained practice theoretical perspective of practice transfer enables this study to grasp aspects of practice transfer that existing approaches based on institutional theory cannot (see Sects. 1.2 and 2.2.4). 3. “Practice transfer in MNEs” is an important real-world problem. As the two previous arguments state, practice transfer has neither received much attention in economic geography nor in practice theoretical writings. However, the fact that a specific topic has not been sufficiently studied does not alone justify researching it. The topic should also have relevance for the world outside of pure academic interest. There are two main reasons for studying practice transfer within MNEs: first, practices contain indispensable organizational knowledge and skills. Thus, the ability of companies to replicate these practices across different territorial contexts is one of the “main constituents of competitive advantage” (Boschma and Frenken 2009: 152) for MNEs in a globalized market. Second, MNEs are in a unique position to foster change in the different cultural, social, and political environments in which they operate, since they have access to practices of various origins and can function as media or vehicles for practice transfer (Cantwell et  al. 2010; Faulconbridge 2008; Wrana and Diez 2016). Both reasons make practice transfer in MNEs a relevant phenomenon outside of academia, which leads to the next three arguments for studying the empirical phenomenon of the transfer of (4) production-­ related training practices, by (5) German MNEs, to (6) emerging economies. 4. The transfer of “production-related training” practices is a key challenge for MNEs as they internationalize production. Transferring production technology to international production plants is not sufficient to effectively produce high-quality industrial goods at a new location. The production personnel need to know how to operate the machinery and how to run the production processes (Krzywdzinski and Jo 2020). MNEs therefore also have to transfer the skills necessary to use the specific production technology. In this sense, technology transfer is inseparable from skill transfer. In most cases, confronted with employee fluctuation, MNEs make systematic efforts not only to transfer skills to a specific location but also to develop and maintain these skills sustainably at that location. They achieve this through production-related training practices (Jürgens and Krzywdzinski 2015; Schamp and Stamm 2012), referred to as skill formation practices in this study. Skill formation practices are purposeful qualifications of the workforce during which new and experienced employees acquire new skills. These practices are part of the regular activities in MNEs and are often structured through year-long training calendars. Thus, the capability of MNEs to successfully transfer skill formation practices to other cultural, political, and economic contexts is a key aspect of their internationalization (Fuchs et al. 2016), and presents them with a central challenge regarding globalization (Okada 2004: 1265).

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5. Regarding the transfer of skill formation practices to international destinations, “German MNEs” are a unique research field. As mentioned under point three, MNEs are in a unique position: due to their multinationality they have access to practices originating in different regional contexts. In Germany (and the other two German-speaking countries), historical events have led to the development of a specific skill formation approach: dual apprenticeship training, whereby manufacturing companies train apprentices in a technical occupation over a period of three to four years, on the basis of official state-approved curricula and a systematic integration of learning periods at vocational schools (for a more extensive elaboration of dual apprenticeship training in Germany, see textbox). MNEs originating in Germany are familiar with generating and maintaining the skills of their production personnel through dual apprenticeship training (Pilz and Wiemann 2020). The idea of “exporting” the practice to subsidiaries in other regional and national contexts does not therefore seem to be farfetched. In fact, German MNEs such as Volkswagen, Bosch, and Siemens are known to have exported dual apprenticeship training to their international subsidiaries (Aring 2014; Bosch Media Service 2017; Wiemann and Fuchs 2018). Even though dual apprenticeship training is not the only skill formation practice that German MNEs transfer to their international subsidiaries—as this study shows by focusing on two other skill formation practices (onboarding and shop floor inducting)—the specific German-origin context makes the transfer of skill formation practices by German MNEs to their international subsidiaries a unique research field. 6. The transfer of skill formation practices to “emerging economies” is of high relevance to MNEs as well as for local politics. Emerging economies are characterized by growing rates of industrial manufacturing. As co-authors and I have more extensively elaborated elsewhere (see Fuchs et al. 2016: 142–143), this growth in manufacturing translates into a growing need for qualified production personnel. However, vocational education systems in emerging economies are often poorly equipped to satisfy these growing needs. They lack technical vocational education institutes, and graduates from their existing vocational schools are often insufficiently qualified, especially regarding practical skills. It appears particularly difficult to find qualified personnel for the programming, repair, and maintenance of production robots and other high-tech equipment (Jürgens and Krzywdzinski 2013, 2015). These predicaments indicate just how vital the transfer of skill formation practices is to MNEs operating in emerging economies.

1.1  Empirical and Conceptual Relevance of the Study: Six Reasons for Reading This…

Dual Apprenticeship Training in the German Skill Formation System Dual apprenticeship training is so called since apprentices usually attend both a vocational school (German Berufsschule) and a company where they are additionally trained by “craft masters” (German Meister), and where they are contractually employed as apprentices for a period of three to four years. Dual apprenticeship training courses have a wide thematic range. In total, over 300 apprenticeship courses exist in Germany (e.g., toolmaking, mechatronics, hairdressing, and baking) (GOVET 2020). Dual apprenticeship curricula aim at imparting generic skills as well as technical competencies in real working situations with up-to-date equipment. The Vocational Education Legislation (German Berufsbildungsgesetz) functions as the legal basis for the dual apprenticeship training system, while employers’ federations, trade unions, industry chambers, and German state authorities work together to continuously renew content for the apprenticeship curricula. The industry chambers ensure the examination process and award the state-approved certificates (Pilz 2009). Such cooperation in the apprenticeship system is why Busemeyer and Trampusch (2012) regard the German skill formation system as “corporatist” in nature—in contrast to other skill formation systems where the involvement of the state or companies dominates skill formation. About half of all German school graduates choose to take part in a dual apprenticeship scheme, instead of attending a university or polytechnic. It is a very common professional path not at least because dual apprenticeship graduates have a good social reputation in Germany and are often part of the middle-income class. Since dual apprenticeship graduates are a broadly available workforce in the German labor market, and since they often develop an affinity with their training companies, the fluctuation of these well-trained personnel is low. Additionally, industry-wide wage agreements make job changes less attractive (Barabasch and Wolf 2009). Thus, the considerable net investment of over 5000 € per dual apprentice per year on average (Jansen et al. 2015: 3) remains appealing for companies, since they often expect their apprentices to stay within the company well beyond the completion of their apprenticeship. The dual apprenticeship system, resulting as it does in a technically welltrained workforce and strong manufacturing base (Gessler 2017), is therefore considered to play a key role in Germany’s international competitiveness.

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1.2  C  entral Research Interest and Derivation of Research Questions Within economic geography, there has been a keen interest in understanding the transfer of knowledge. This stream of research is mainly concerned with the development of innovation through the transfer of different types of knowledge (Asheim 2011). A practice theoretical perspective has already found its way into these debates, establishing a practice view of knowledge as “knowing in practice” from a “communities of practice” approach (Ibert 2010; Lave and Wenger 2011 [1991]). Nevertheless, the literature limits itself to the question of how knowledge is transferred; it does not shift the perspective completely toward the transfer of practices. We would therefore expect that if practice theoretical definitions of practice show practices (in addition to knowledge/knowing) to contain materials, feelings, motivations, and bodily and mental activities (Reckwitz 2002: 249), such a shift in perspective would entail answers to the question: how are all these practice elements transferred? However, the existing “knowing in practice” approach focuses on the localization and movement of knowledge in space. This knowledge is transferred between individuals through interaction in practice. For the purpose of this study, I switch this idea around and concentrate on the localization and movement of practices in space. This conceptual alternative enables me to understand how knowledge moves in space, and to consider practices as vehicles for the transfer of knowledge (for a more extensive discussion see Sect. 2.2). That said, the practice theoretical perspective I develop in the following chapters goes beyond understanding practices “only” as vehicles for the movement of knowledge in space; it regards knowledge as inseparable from practice. I follow the practice theoretical understanding that neither practice without knowledge nor knowledge without practice exists (Ibert 2007). All constituents of a practice require knowledge or knowing in the form of bodily and mental activities, the knowhow to use things, motivations, and so forth (Reckwitz 2002: 249). Additionally, as will be discussed in detail in Sect. 2.1.1, studies on knowledge transfer typically emphasize the importance of academic knowledge as a regional source of innovation and as a competitive advantage in the global market (Beaverstock et al. 2012; Faulconbridge 2010; Ibert 2011). In contrast, the role of practical skills in successful industrial production—another indicator of competitiveness in the global market—has until now been under-researched in economic geography (Boschma et al. 2013; Fuchs et al. 2016). This might be due to the paramount interest of economic geography in the creation of new knowledge, which often leaves the issue of the transfer of existing knowledge stranded. Nevertheless, the skill formation of the production workforce is a key challenge for companies in times of globalization (Okada 2004). In sum, this study simultaneously confronts two research desiderates regarding the relationship of “knowing” and “space”: the lack of a practice theoretical framework to understand practice transfer across space, and the still under-researched area of the transfer of skills and non-academic knowledge in production processes. Both, the idea of transferring “knowing” through practice transfer, and the question

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of skill formation (as a form of transferring “knowing”) lead to the first research question of this study: 1. What is the spatiality of “knowing” in practice transfer? To emphasize the conceptual advantage of following practices instead of knowledge or knowing across distance, one persistent practice transfer puzzle illuminates the close relationship practices have with geographic space: Empirical evidence shows that a practice cannot be transferred on a one-to-one basis. From a wide variety of research (Bathelt et  al. 2018; Cagliano et  al. 2011; Canato et  al. 2013; Fortwengel 2017; Jensen and Szulanski 2004; e.g., Kostova 1999; Kostova and Roth 2002) we know that practice transfer is a difficult endeavor (see also Sect. 2.2.3). However, it is in fact commonplace in practice transfer research that transferring a practice to another location is also to varying degrees a “re-invention” of the practice itself (Shove and Pantzar 2005: 60). As Gessler (2017) points out: Transfer is transformation. This has also been realized by management practitioners, as shown in a study by Ansari et al. (2014: 1313) who analyze how practices are “engineered to vary for allowing a better fit with diverse contextual specificities.” In sum, existing literature on the matter concludes that practices transform when being transferred from one geographical context to another. This transformation is also evidenced by the empirical findings of this study. Additional to these insights, this study empirically shows that some practices are “easier” to transfer than others and that some transferred practices are more influenced by national institutions than others (see Sect. 5.2). While studies on practice transfer (Batt and Hermans 2012; Fortwengel 2017; Kostova and Roth 2002) and vocational education transfer (Gessler 2017; Pilz et al. 2018) consider institutional factors as principal causes for the difficulty to transfer a practice from one geographical context to another, this argument does not provide a satisfying answer to the question of why some practices are “more difficult” to transfer than others, or why some practices are more influenced by national institutions than others (see Sect. 5.2). Under the assumption of institutional environments as the explanatory factor for the difficulty to transfer practices, the following hypothesis should hold: If the same MNE from institutional environment X sends two different practices, practice A and practice B, to the same institutional environment Y, both practices should be equally difficult to transfer because the difference between the institutional environments is the same. This hypothesis is, however, not confirmed by the findings of this study (this will be further discussed in Sect. 2.2.4). Instead, the empirical findings indicate that the transformation practices experience when being transferred has as well to do with the nature of the practice itself (see Sects. 4.6, 4.7, and Chap. 5). From this, I draw two conclusions. First, institutions cannot count as the only explanation for the transformations of practices when transferred to a different geographical context. Second, different transformations of the two practices, A and B, can be explained by the different nature of these practices. Consequently, this study aims at answering the following research questions: 2. Why are practices transformed when they are transferred across space? 3. Why are some practices “more difficult” to transfer across space than others?

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4. What role do institutions play in the transfer of practices between territories (e.g., nations, regions)? When and how do institutions impact practices in transfer? This study addresses these research questions by employing a practice theoretical approach. While building on existing practice theoretical notions of “distance” from economic geography, it develops these ideas further to understand what needs to be overcome in practice transfer, thereby contributing to theory-building in the field of practice theories (see Sect. 2.2.1). These theorizations of practice transfer from a practice theoretical perspective are largely based on the empirical findings of this study—as is common in practice theoretical work. This will be discussed further in the following chapter.

1.3  Structure of This Book In writing this dissertation, I was presented with a challenge that complicated the reader guidance of an assumed “linear reader,” that is, one who might approach this book from front to back. The challenge was the positioning in the flow of the text both theory-building derived from empirical insights and conceptual work with practice theories. For the theory-building, I draw on existing notions within practice theories and human geography, and on insights from the empirical data, in order to effectively develop a practice theoretical approach. My aim is to explain the social phenomenon of practice transfer across distance, and to achieve an abstraction level that goes beyond a mere description of the phenomenon reaching the theorization level of a “middle-range theory,” or theory with a limited scope (Bongaerts and Schulz-­ Schaeffer 2018; Esser 2002; Merton 1968). There is a strong tradition in social science research—including human geography (Geiselhart et al. 2019)—to see theory and empirical findings as separate. Practice theories were developed, at least in part, as a conceptual alternative to this view (Nicolini 2013: 23–40). Their stance is that all theorizing should be based in practice, and that no theory can encompass all the intricate details and complex workings of practice. Thus, a strict formal separation of empirics and theory in writing is neither suitable if this interrelatedness is to be visible, nor valuable for the validity of the research presented (Joas et al. 2009; Schmidt 2016). This practice theoretical stance will be discussed in more detail in Sect. 2.3.3. The conscious mixing of empirical insights and theorization is not particular to practice theories, but is found in many research traditions, most prominently those working with qualitative research designs (Flick 2011: 511–531). One such tradition emphasizing the circular process between empirics and conceptual work is grounded theory (Corbin and Strauss 2014). For reader guidance, however, such theorizing, largely based on empirical findings, resists integration into the traditional structure of a dissertation. The traditional structure demands a succession of introduction → literature review, culminating in a theoretical framing of the research (in form of hypotheses, models, heuristics, typologization, or others)  →  methodology section → findings and discussion →

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conclusion (Dunne 2011: 120). Traditionally, empirical insights are separated from conceptual considerations in academic writing (Paltridge 2002). As described above, the theorizing in this study does not fit into this traditional academic writing structure because it is based on a combination of empirical and theoretical insights rooted in practice theoretical tradition and thinking. The challenge of writing in this context is comparable to that of writing grounded theory-based research (Geiselhart et al. 2019). Dunne (2011: 120–121) describes the task in the following way: Indeed, given that the grounded theory research process is non-linear, it is understandable that attempts to present it in a linear [traditional] format should prove problematic. Conversely, the decision to wait until after the findings have been presented to engage with extant literature might be met with confusion by examiners or reviewers […]. Equally, weaving the introduction and discussion of theoretical concepts into the presentation of research findings may lead to excessively long chapters peppered with tangential explanations of diverse theories, and again detract from the flow and thrust of the study. As such, the decision on how to structure the written thesis in a manner which best reflects the focus and natural development of the study is often problematic.

While this dissertation is not undertaken with grounded theory methodology, it does borrow techniques from grounded theory in working with the empirical data (for a more detailed account of how the theorizing in this chapter came into being, see Sect. 3.4.2, in the methodology section). Thus, it encounters the same reader guidance problem Dunne (2011) describes. In this dissertation, the structuring problem is solved by presenting the theorizing in Chap. 4 with frequent references to specific empirical findings as the basis for the theorizing passages, and by discussing the empirical findings in Chap. 5. The presentation of the empirical findings in Chap. 5 serves to underpin the theorization in Chap. 4 and provide empirical validation (for a detailed discussion of the cross-­ referencing between Chaps. 4 and 5, see the introduction of Chap. 5). With this frequent referencing of empirical findings in the theorizing section, however, a secondary reader guidance problem arose: Traditional academic writing structures have conditioned readers to the positioning of the theorizing (conceptual framework) of a study after the presentation of the research gaps and research objectives, and before the methodology discussion. Such a positioning, however, is not suitable when referencing empirical findings in the theorizing sections—as is the case in this study—because an assumed linear reader has not yet been informed about the methodology used, while already reading about the findings. This would impede the reader’s understanding of the scope of the empirical insights presented, as well as their ability to critically reflect on the findings. This secondary structuring problem is solved in this dissertation by placing the theorizing in Chap. 4 after the methodology Chap. 3, instead of integrating it into Chap. 2, which consists of a thorough literature review. Though in conflict with the traditional academic writing structure, this positioning allows the reader to be informed about the applied methodology before being confronted with the theorizing, which is in part the result of my conceptual work with empirical findings. Of course, the possibility to read Chap. 4 (theory-building) before Chap. 3 (methodology) is left up to the reader (Fig. 1.1).

Searching for explanation in existing literature not possible, since the literature review established a the research gap in the first place.

This study

Searching for explanations and conceptualizations in empirical data.

Searching for possible explanations and conceptualizations in existing literature.

(hypothesis, models, typologies, heuristics, etc.)

Establishing a conceptualizaon

1. 1 22. 33. 4. 4

What role do institutions play in the transfer of practices between territories (e.g., nations, regions)? When and how do institutions impact practices in transfer?

Why are some practices “more difficult” to transfer across space than others?

Why are practices transformed when they are transferred across space?

The conceptual framework requires an underpinning of how the conceptualizations are based in the data. This underpinning can be integrated in the section of the conceptual framework or be discussed in a separate section. Depending on the extent of the empirical insights used to develop the conceptualizations, it can be useful to discuss these empirical insights (at least in part) in the conceptual section to rise the awareness where the conceptualizations originate. If the extent of the empirical insights used to develop the conceptualizations is high, a previous discussion of the used methodology can be helpful for the understanding of a reader. Without the information on the methodology, it could be otherwise very difficult for the reader to adequately judge the origin of the conceptualizations and their validity.

The reader guidance in the conceptual framework section should not, (or at most very peripherally) mention the empirical data. The empirical data is discussed in a separate section.

What is the spatiality of “knowing” in practice transfer?

Research questions (Sect. 1.3):

The derivation of the conceptual framework (often explanations, patterns, “stories”), is based in empirical data. Existing conceptual and theoretical ideas from literature are used to ground the conceptual framework in existing discourses in the literature. The empirical evidence serves to derive the theory building, and to illustrate and give depth to the conceptual frame (the conceptual framework cannot be falsified using the data from which it is derived). Goes along well with qualitative research designs.

The from the literature derived conceptual framework (often hypothesis) are tested using the data. To conduct valid research, the in the derivation of the conceptual framework, should not be influenced by the the data used to test it. This would imply a bias, and negate the possibility of a falsification of the conceptual framework. Goes along well with quantitative research designs.

Securing validity

Fig. 1.1  The problem of reader guidance according to different research designs. (Source: Own representation, developed on the basis of Reuber and Pfaffenbach 2005: 25–33; Dunne 2011; Paltridge 2002)

Reader guidance in the section of the derivation of the research gap requires a thorough discussion of the literature that establishes the research gap within the literature. It is not necessary to mention the empirical evidence.

1

Finding a research gap in existing knowledge through literature review.

Reader guidance in the section of the derivation of the research gap requires a thorough literature review that shows where existing concepts cannot (sufficiently) explain the empirical phenomenon. The empirical phenomenon has to be described to a degree that allows the reader to understand what cannot be explained.

2 3 4

Finding of an empirical phenomenon that cannot (sufficiently) be explained through existing knowledge (in scientific literature).

Deriving a research gap

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References

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Thus, as already mentioned, Chap. 2 systematically analyzes the three relevant research streams: economic geography, practice theories, and the multidisciplinary research field practice transfer. The literature review detects conceptual and empirical research desiderates (see Fig. 2.8). Following this, Chap. 3 provides a critical discussion on this study’s methodological approach first by addressing practice theories’ epistemological stance, and second by giving a detailed critical account of the research design, the data generation, and the data analysis. After providing the reader with an understanding of how the conceptual ideas were formed, in Chap. 4, I develop the notion of “transfer resistance” as what has to be overcome in practice transfer. Furthermore, I elaborate the notion of “territorial institution” to further understanding of what influences practice transfer between territories. In the empirical discussion in Chap. 5, I analyze the transfer of three skill formation practices (onboarding, shop floor inducting, and dual apprenticeship training) to three research regions: the Greater Shanghai Area, the Metropolitan Areas Mumbai-­ Pune-­Bangalore, and Central Mexico. Chap. 5, thus, provides an extensive empirical underpinning to Chap. 4 and also contributes to the empirical research desiderates this study addresses. In Chap. 6, I conclude by answering the four research questions and by critically reflecting on empirical and conceptual contributions of this study.

References Ansari S, Reinecke J, Spaan A (2014) How are practices made to vary?: managing practice adaptation in a multinational corporation. Organ Stud 35:1313–1341. https://doi. org/10.1177/0170840614539310 Aring M (2014) Innovations in quality apprenticeships for high-skilled manufacturing jobs in the United States: at BMW, Siemens, Volkswagen. ILO, Geneva Asheim B (2011) The changing role of learning regions in the globalizing knowledge economy: a theoretical re-examination. Region Stud 46:993–1004. https://doi.org/10.1080/0034340 4.2011.607805 Barabasch A, Wolf S (2009) Die Policy-Praxis der Anderen. Policy-Transfer in der Bildungsund Berufsbildungsforschung. Zeitschrift für internationale Bildungsforschung und Entwicklungspädagogik 32:22–27 Bathelt H, Cantwell JA, Mudambi R (2018) Overcoming frictions in transnational knowledge flows: challenges of connecting, sense-making and integrating. J Econ Geogr 18:1001–1022. https://doi.org/10.1093/jeg/lby047 Batt R, Hermans M (2012) Global human resource management: bridging strategic and institutional perspectives. In: Martocchio JJ, Joshi A, Liao H (eds) Research in personnel and human resources management. Emerald, Bingley, pp 1–52 Beaverstock JV, Faulconbridge JR, Hall S (2012) Executive search. In: Ritzer G (ed) The Wiley-­ Blackwell encyclopedia of globalization. Wiley Blackwell, Chichester/Malden, pp 615–621 Bongaerts G, Schulz-Schaeffer I (2018) Theorie, soziologische. In: Kopp J, Steinbach A (eds) Grundbegriffe der Soziologie, 12th edn. Springer VS, Wiesbaden, pp 455–465 Bosch Media Service (2017) Wachstumslokomotive Indien: Bosch erfolgreich im lokalen Markt. http://www.bosch-­presse.de/pressportal/de/de/wachstumslokomotive-­indien-­bosch-­ erfolgreich-­im-­lokalen-­markt-­44909.html. Accessed 3 Nov 2017

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Boschma R, Frenken K (2009) Some notes on institutions in evolutionary economic geography. Economic Geography 85:151–158. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1944-­8287.2009.01018.x Boschma R, Iammarino S, Steinmueller E (2013) Editorial: geography, skills and technological change. Region Stud 47:1615–1617 Busemeyer MR, Trampusch C (2012) The comparative political economy of collective skill formation. In: Busemeyer MR, Trampusch C (eds) The political economy of collective skill formation. Oxford University Press, Oxford/New York, pp 1–34 Cagliano R, Caniato F, Golini R, Longoni A, Micelotta E (2011) The impact of country culture on the adoption of new forms of work organization. Intl J Operat Prod Manage 31:297–323. https://doi.org/10.1108/01443571111111937 Canato A, Ravasi D, Phillips N (2013) Coerced practice implementation in cases of low cultural fit: cultural change and practice adaptation during the implementation of six sigma at 3M. Acad Manag J 56:1724–1753. https://doi.org/10.5465/amj.2011.0093 Cantwell J, Dunning JH, Lundan SM (2010) An evolutionary approach to understanding international business activity: the co-evolution of MNEs and the institutional environment. J Intl Bus Stud 41:567–586 Chiang FFT, Lemański MK, Birtch TA (2016) The transfer and diffusion of HRM practices within MNCs: lessons learned and future research directions. Int J Hum Resour Manag 28:234–258. https://doi.org/10.1080/09585192.2016.1246461 Corbin JM, Strauss A (2014) Basics of qualitative research: techniques and procedures for developing grounded theory, 4th edn. SAGE, Thousand Oaks Dunne C (2011) The place of the literature review in grounded theory research. Int J Soc Res Methodol 14:111–124. https://doi.org/10.1080/13645579.2010.494930 Esser H (2002) Theorien mittlerer Reichweite. In: Mayntz R (ed) Akteure: Mechanismen; Modelle; zur Theoriefähigkeit makro-sozialer Analysen. Campus-Verlag, Frankfurt am Main, pp 128–150 Faulconbridge JR (2008) Negotiating cultures of work in transnational law firms. J Econ Geogr 8:497–517. https://doi.org/10.1093/jeg/lbn013 Faulconbridge JR (2010) Global architects: learning and innovation through communities and constellations of practice. Environ. Plann. A 42:2842–2858. https://doi.org/10.1068/a4311 Flick U (2011) Rororo Rowohlts Enzyklopädie, vol 55694. rowohlts enzyklopädie im. In: Qualitative Sozialforschung: Eine Einführung, 5th edn. Rowohlt Taschenbuch Verlag, Reinbek bei Hamburg Fortwengel J (2017) Practice transfer in organizations: the role of governance mode for internal and external fit. Organ Sci 28:690–710. https://doi.org/10.1287/orsc.2017.1135 Fortwengel J, Jackson G (2016) Legitimizing the apprenticeship practice in a distant environment: institutional entrepreneurship through inter-organizational networks. J World Bus 51:895–909. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jwb.2016.05.002 Fratocchi L, Ancarani A, Barbieri P, Di Mauro C, Nassimbeni G, Sartor M, Vignoli M, Zanoni A (2015) Manufacturing back-reshoring as a nonlinear internationalization process. In: van Tulder R, Verbeke A, Drogendijk R (eds) The future of global organizing. Emerald Group Publishing Limited, pp 365–403 Fratocchi L, Ancarani A, Barbieri P, Di Mauro C, Nassimbeni G, Sartor M, Vignoli M, Zanoni A (2016) Motivations of manufacturing reshoring: an interpretative framework. Intl J Phys Distrib Logist Manage 46:98–127. https://doi.org/10.1108/IJPDLM-­06-­2014-­0131 Fuchs M, Schamp EW, Wiemann J (2016) Duale Aus- und Fortbildung goes global?: Zur Internationalisierung von Wissen in der industriellen Fertigung durch global-lokale Qualifizierungsstrategien multinationaler Unternehmen. Geogr Z 104:140–157 Geiselhart K, Hoppe-Seyler A, Werner C (2019) Vom Absetzen theoretischer Brillen und der Öffnung des eigenen Blicks – Reflexionen über praxeologische Methodologien. In: Schäfer S, Everts J (eds) Handbuch Praktiken und Raum: Humangeographie nach dem Practice Turn, 1st edn. Transcript, Bielefeld, pp 361–390

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Gessler M (2017) Educational transfer as transformation: a case study about the emergence and implementation of dual apprenticeship structures in a German automotive transplant in the United States. Vocat Learn 10:71–99. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12186-­016-­9161-­8 GOVET (2020) Vocational education and training in Germany: PowerPoint-Präsentation. https:// www.bibb.de/dokumente/pdf/govet_praesentation_dual_vet_Nov_2019_en.pdf. Accessed 16 Oct 2020 Ibert O (2007) Towards a geography of knowledge creation: the ambivalences between ‘knowledge as an object’ and ‘knowing in practice’. Reg Stud 41:103–114. https://doi. org/10.1080/00343400601120346 Ibert O (2010) Relational distance: sociocultural and time–spatial tensions in innovation practices. Environ Plann A 42:187–204. https://doi.org/10.1068/a4247 Ibert O (2011) Dynamische Geographien der Wissensproduktion  - Die Bedeutung physischer wie relationaler Distanzen in interaktiven Lernprozessen. In: Ibert O (ed) Räume der Wissensarbeit: Zur Funktion von Nähe und Distanz in der Wissensökonomie. VS, Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften, Wiesbaden, pp 49–69 Jansen A, Pfeifer H, Schönfeld G, Wenzelmann F (2015) Ausbildung in Deutschland weiterhin investitionsorientiert  – Ergebnisse der BIBB-Kosten-Nutzen-Erhebung 2012/13. Bibb Report 9:1–15 Jensen R, Szulanski G (2004) Stickiness and the adaptation of organizational practices in cross-­ border knowledge transfers. J Int Bus Stud 35:508–523 Joas H, Knobl W, Skinner A (2009) What is theory? In: Joas H, Knöbl W, Skinner A (eds) Social theory: twenty introductory lectures. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, pp 1–19 Jürgens U, Krzywdzinski M (2013) Breaking off from local bounds: human resource management practices of national players in the BRIC countries. Int J Automot Technol Manag 13:114–133. https://doi.org/10.1504/IJATM.2013.052996 Jürgens U, Krzywdzinski M (2015) Competence development on the shop floor and industrial upgrading: case studies of auto makers in China. Int J Hum Resour Manag 26:1204–1225. https://doi.org/10.1080/09585192.2014.934888 Kostova T (1999) Transnational transfer of strategic organizational practices: a contextual perspective. Acad Manag Rev 24:308–324. https://doi.org/10.2307/259084 Kostova T, Roth K (2002) Adoption of an organizational practice by subsidiaries of multinational corporations: institutional and relational effects. Acad Manag J 45:215–233 Krzywdzinski M, Jo HJ (2020) Skill formation, automation and governance: comparing German and Korean automotive manufacturers in Central-Eastern Europe. Crit Perspect Intl Bus (ahead-of-print). https://doi.org/10.1108/cpoib-­02-­2020-­0007 Lave J, Wenger E (2011 [1991]) Situated learning: legitimate peripheral participation. Learning in doing. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge Merton RK (1968) Social theory and social structure. The Free Press, New York Nicolini D (2013) Practice theory, work, and organization: an introduction. Oxford University Press, Oxford Okada A (2004) Skills development and interfirm learning linkages under globalization: lessons from the Indian automobile industry. World Develop 32:1265–1288. https://doi.org/10.1016/j. worlddev.2004.01.010 Paltridge B (2002) Thesis and dissertation writing: an examination of published advice and actual practice. English Spec Purp 21:125–143. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0889-­4906(00)00025-­9 Pilz M (2009) Initial vocational training from a company perspective: a comparison of British and German in-house training cultures. Vocations Learn 2:57–74. https://doi.org/10.1007/ s12186-­008-­9018-­x Pilz M, Wiemann K (2020) Does dual training make the world go round? Training models in German companies in China, India and Mexico. Vocations Learn 3:66–87. https://doi. org/10.1007/s12186-­020-­09255-­z Pilz M, Gessler M, Fuchs M (eds) (2018) Konzepte und Wirkungen des Transfers Dualer Berufsausbildung. Springer VS, Wiesbaden

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Reckwitz A (2002) Toward a theory of social practices. Eur J Soc Theory 5:243–263. https://doi. org/10.1177/13684310222225432 Reuber P, Pfaffenbach C (2005) Methoden der empirischen Humangeographie: Beobachtungen und Befragung, Das Geographische Seminar, 1st edn. Westermann, Braunschweig Schamp EW, Stamm A (2012) New trends in an old sector: exploring global knowledge and HR management in MNCs and the North–South divide in human capital formation. Innovat Develop 2:285–302. https://doi.org/10.1080/2157930X.2012.713201 Schmidt R (2016) Theoretisieren: Fragen und Überlegungen zu einem konzeptionellen und empirischen Desiderat der Soziologie der Praktiken. In: Schäfer H (ed) Praxistheorie: Ein soziologisches Forschungsprogramm. Transcript, Bielefeld, pp 245–263 Shove E, Pantzar M (2005) Consumers, producers and practices: understanding the invention and reinvention of Nordic walking. J Consum Cult 5:43–64. https://doi. org/10.1177/1469540505049846 Wiemann J, Fuchs M (2018) The export of Germany’s “secret of success” dual technical VET: MNCs and multiscalar stakeholders changing the skill formation system in Mexico. Camb J Region Econ Soc 11:373–386. https://doi.org/10.1093/cjres/rsy008 Wrana J, Diez JR (2016) Can multinational enterprises introduce new institutions to host countries? An explorative study about MNEs’ training programs with educational institutes and their potential influence on Vietnam’s vocational education sector. Geogr Z 104:158–182

Chapter 2

Defining the Research Desiderates: Economic Geography, Practice Theories, and Practice Transfer

Abstract Chapter 2 fulfills two purposes. First, it defines the research desiderates this study addresses in three streams of literature: economic geography, practice theoretical thought, and the multidisciplinary research field practice transfer. Each stream of literature is carefully examined and research gaps regarding practice transfer are derived. Discussions in economic geography regarding knowledge transfer and practice transfer are taken up and reasons for the necessity of a concept of “distance” as what needs to be overcome in practice transfer are elaborated. Practice theories’ conceptual lack of addressing practice transfer as a research object is shown, and the state of the art in the multidisciplinary research field practice transfer is examined. Especially, existing approaches to practice transfer stemming from institution theories are critically discussed on the background of the empirical findings of this study. Second, the chapter introduces practice theoretical thought—which is still not coherently understood in economic geography. Furthermore, it defines “practices” as nexuses of activities and thus gives the theoretical groundwork for the following chapters. Keywords  State of the art · Skill formation practices · Knowledge transfer · Practice transfer in economic geography · Institutional distance · Distance as socio-cultural and time-spatial tension · Introduction to practice theoretical thinking This second chapter fulfills three purposes. First, it provides a literature review of relevant debates about practice transfer across distance. Second, it gives an introduction to practice theoretical thinking and elaborates definitions. And third, the chapter outlines the research desiderates that are addressed in this dissertation. A challenge for consistent reader guidance in this chapter was the bringing together of argumentation strands from economic geography and practice theories, with this study’s research focus on practice transfer. The different argumentation strands are braided together to form an argument that evidences and outlines the research desiderates (Fig. 2.1). © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 J. Wiemann, Geographies of Practice Transfer, Economic Geography, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-95185-6_2

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Pracce theories

Economic geography

Knowledge transfer

Research desiderate

Proximity/ distance 2.1 Defining Skill Formaon Pracces as a Research Object (2.1.1 – 2.1.3) 2.2.1 Shiing the Perspecve from Knowledge Transfer to Pracce Transfer

Pracce transfer

2.4 Research Desiderate Pracce Transfer in Pracce Theories 2.3 Introducing to Pracce Thinking: Pracce Theories’ Common Ground (2.3.1 - 2.3.4) 2.2.5 Distance as an Interaconal Effect and a Sociocultural and Time-Spaal Tension 2.2.4 Crical Reassessment of Instuonal Distance as the Explanaon for the Difficulty to Transfer Pracces

2.2.3 The Research Field Pracce Transfer 2.2.2 Pracce Transfer in Economic Geography

Fig. 2.1  Mapping this study’s research desiderates: a reader’s guide through this chapter. (Source: Own representation)

This chapter consists of five main sections. The first, Sect. 2.1, outlines skill formation practices as a research object, defines “skill” in skill formation practices, and elaborates on the purposeful formation of skills. In Sect. 2.2, I outline on the conceptual contribution this study aims to make to economic geography by critically reflecting on the existing literature in economic geography and related fields that addresses the issue of practice transfer. To this end, Sect. 2.2.1 discusses debates within economic geography concerning knowledge transfer. I point out how, through changing the perspective and following practices across space instead of knowledge, this study contributes to these debates by providing a new understanding of how “knowing in practice” is localized in space. Sections 2.2.2, 2.2.3, 2.2.4 and 2.2.5 consist of a literature review regarding what remains to be learnt about practice transfer in MNEs across distance, from the research fields of economic geography, international business studies, and international human resource management studies. Here, I critically reassess existing concepts of distance—used in studies about practice transfer—as what has to be overcome when a practice is transferred. This literature review provides the reader with an overview of the current state of research into practice transfer and points out blind spots this study addresses. In Sect. 2.3.1, I situate a practice theoretical view in economic geography. In the course of Sect. 2.3, I continue with an introduction to the conceptual and

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philosophical roots of practice theoretical thinking, and outline recent discussions and developments in the field of practice theories. These discussions serve to lay down the understanding of practice theoretical thinking I work with in this study. Additionally, it delivers a conception of practices as “nexuses of activities,” which helps to provide a sound underpinning to the conceptual deliberations about practice transfer from a practice theoretical perspective in Chap. 4. Section 2.4 points out how practice transfer across distance is still a conceptual blind spot in practice theoretical thinking, and how the connections between practices play a decisive role in the transfer process. The chapter ends with a summary of the research desiderates in Sect. 2.5.

2.1  Defining Skill Formation Practices as a Research Object This dissertation is interested in the transfer of skill formation practices across distance. In the following paragraphs, I first position my study in the current state of research on the transfer of technical vocational education and training in MNEs from different disciplinary backgrounds. Second, I elaborate what is meant by “skill” in skill formation practices in this study. I then define skill formation practices as “purposeful,” in order to get a concise understanding of what skill formation practices are as a research object.

2.1.1  C  urrent State of Research: Transfer of Technical Vocational Education and Training in German MNEs A (still) small body of literature is concerned with how technical vocational education and training is transferred within MNEs between countries and regions from different disciplinary fields (Pilz and Wiemann 2020: 1–3). Since this study centers on the transfer of production-related training practices within MNEs, or here called skill formation practices, it is necessary to take a closer look at these debates to narrow down the research object of this study. There are a couple of research fields that are predestined to be interested in transfer of training within MNEs: (1) comparative vocational education studies (because of the inherent educational aspects); (2) organization-­studies-based research fields such as international business and management studies (because of their interest in the functioning of MNEs in general); and (3) economic geography (because of its interest in the globalization of knowledge) (Fuchs et al. 2016). In the following sections, I characterize the insights provided by these three research approaches and point out the aspects to which this study contributes. (1) In comparative vocational education studies, educational transfer is mostly discussed—in the context of German-speaking countries—as the sending party in

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the transfer. This is mostly because these countries, as a unique feature, have established vocational education studies as their own sub-discipline, presumably due to the importance of the dual vocational education system in Germany. An important strand of discussion here is educational transfer from Germany in the context of development cooperation (Lauterbach 2003; Wiemann et  al. 2018b). There is a growing corpus of studies embracing this line of thought (Adams 2010; Barabasch et  al. 2009; Euler 2013; Faßbender and Pilz 2020; Graf et  al. 2014; Pilz 2017; Stockmann 1999, 2018; VETnet 2015). One strand of studies in the field of comparative vocational education focuses on German MNEs’ training practices at their transnational subsidiaries. These studies often look at the transfer of dual apprenticeship programs in German MNEs to their subsidiaries outside of Germany. One prominent example is the study on the transfer process of a dual apprenticeship program by the German automotive company Mercedes-Benz to Alabama in the United States (Gessler 2017). Other studies examine apprenticeship program transfers to the United States (Aring 2014), to Japan, India, and China (van der Burgt et al. 2014), to China, India, and the United States (Pilz and Li 2014), and to six emerging economies (Körbel et al. 2017). In this line of research, again, the transferability of dual apprenticeship is the point of departure. What these studies usually have in common is that their research interest lies with the question of the success of an educational transfer (Barabasch and Wolf 2009)—though what counts as “successful” is defined differently from one study to another. This research interest often means that they ask whether the same positive effects (e.g., low youth unemployment, a well-trained technical workforce) associated with the dual apprenticeship system in Germany are achieved in the receiving country. It can thus be said that this research strand has a strong systemic interest that is usually not framed in terms of practice transfer. In contrast to the literature in comparative vocational education described above, in this study, I frame the transfer of dual apprenticeship training in MNEs not as an educational transfer but as a practice transfer on a more general level. Moreover, this study comprises the transfer of two more skill formation practices (onboarding and shop floor inducting) and does this from a practice theoretical perspective.1 (2) In the literature from comparative vocational education studies, the focus is explicitly on so-called blue-collar workers. In comparison, the research fields of international business studies and its sub-discipline of international human resource management studies concentrate on the transfer of training practices of high-profile, academically trained employees.

 There are studies in the research field of education working with a practice theoretical perspective; see especially Lave and Wenger (2011 [1991]) and writings based on their idea of “legitimate peripheral participation.” Newer work also includes, for instance, Kemmis et  al. (2014); for an example from vocational education studies, see Hordern (2019, 2020). However, this practice view is not yet explored for the question of educational transfer. 1

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There are only a few studies on the transfer of training practices that focus on intermediately skilled workers. One rare example is Jürgens and Krzywdzinski’s (2013, 2015) study on skill formation practices in automotive companies in the BRIC2 countries, in which they associate skill formation practices with a general orientation toward global lean manufacturing concepts in the automotive industry. However, their study focuses only on the adoption of lean manufacturing by home-­ grown automobile manufacturers from BRIC countries. Hence their study does not deal with practice transfer within MNEs in a strict sense, but rather within an industry as a whole. Another exception is the work of Johann Fortwengel (2014, 2017; Fortwengel and Jackson 2016) on the transfer of two German-style dual apprenticeship programs by German MNEs to the United States. Fortwengel presents two cases of the successful transfer of a dual apprenticeship practice across “great institutional distance.” This research—based on the author’s dissertation project in management studies—frames the transfer of a dual apprenticeship program to the United States in terms of a practice transfer. Since Fortwengel studies practice from a theoretical perspective informed by institutional theory, he does not take on a practice theoretical view in the sense that he does not use concepts developed by practice theory authors. In contrast, taking a practice theoretical perspective of practice transfer is the explicit aim of this study. Furthermore, the inclusion in this study of the transfer of different skill formation practices, and not just dual apprenticeship practices, makes it possible to think about the nature of practices, their spatiality, and their transferability in a more differentiated way. In particular, the possibility to compare the transferability and spatiality of skill formation practices has proven to be key to developing a better understanding of the phenomenon of practice transfer in this study. (3) In economic geography, similarly to international business and international human resource management studies, the interest in the transfer of practices is more inclined to the topic of knowledge transfer between different actors. This interest is rooted in the tacitness and therefore locally “sticky” quality of certain types of knowledge (this will be discussed more extensively in Sect. 2.2). The skills of production workers and not white-collar engineers, however, are mostly left out in these studies and need further theorization (Boschma et al. 2013: 1615; Fuchs et al. 2016). One exception is a study on the training practices of international MNEs in Vietnam, which explores the possibility for MNEs to become “institutional entrepreneurs” (Wrana and Diez 2016). However, this study does not explore practice transfer by MNEs in particular, but is more generally interested in how MNEs can potentially change their host environment. There are also publications on the transfer of skill formation practices to Mexico, India, and China resulting from the greater research project this dissertation has been part of (Fuchs 2020; Fuchs et al. 2016, 2017a, b; Li et al. 2019; Pilz et al. 2016;

 Brazil, Russia, India, and China.

2

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Pilz and Wiemann 2017, 2020; Vogelsang and Pilz 2020; Wiemann 2017; Wiemann et al. 2018a, b; Wiemann and Pilz 2017). These publications have been written from the perspective of economic geography combined with a perspective from comparative vocational education research. In this context, this dissertation develops a practice theoretical view and elaborates ideas about practice transfer within MNEs further. In sum, as we can see, the transfer of skill formation practices by German MNEs is an empirically significant phenomenon, which leans far into political debates on the transfer of the German dual apprenticeship “idea” to other countries, especially in the context of development cooperation. However, these studies are not informed by a practice theoretical perspective and mostly do not frame this transfer as a practice transfer, but as an educational transfer. Framing the transfer of training in terms of a practice transfer opens up a new conceptual perspective on the matter, which draws attention to the nature of the practices that are transferred. As will be further explained in the Sect. 2.2.4, this makes it possible to find explanations for the difficulties to transfer practices, which recently developed institutional perspectives on the matter could not.

2.1.2  “Skill” in Skill Formation Practices In order to reflect on skill formation practices and how they are transferred across geographical space, it is necessary to think about the term “skill” itself. What exactly is developed in a skill formation practice, and why does this group of practices represent a relevant empirical phenomenon to study? The word “skill” is used in many different everyday contexts, as well as—often without much reflection—in academic literature. Terms like “high skilled” or “low skilled,” “cognitive skills,” “communication skills,” “social skills,” and others are used without much consideration (Brockmann et al. 2008). Interestingly, the concept “skill” is often defined—though rarely, if at all—by political institutions in their attempts to structure the system of vocational certification issued by state authorities (Winch 2011). The term is sometimes very narrowly defined and at other times extensively broad. Narrow definitions tie “skill” to one specific (mostly) manual task such as that of knitting or tying one’s shoes. For this study, we need a more inclusive definition of the term. In accordance with the European Center for the Development of Vocational Training (CEDEFOP), I define “skill” as “[t]he ability to perform tasks and solve problems” (CEDEFOP 2008: 164). While manual dexterity is at the core of the skill definition used in this study, social and cognitive skills are also included in the concept (see Fig. 2.2).3

 Self-competences, such as intrinsic motivation and self-reliance, are also seen as skills, but are not mentioned as a separate skill type, for reasons of simplification. 3

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carving

screwing

metal working

manual dexterity welding

team working

intrinsic motivation

social

numeracy literacy problem solving

cognit ive

communicating

project managing

Fig. 2.2  Definition of “skill”. (Source: Own representation)

As pointed out above, there is a broad stream of literature in economic geography on the relation of knowledge and space. Here, the most important distinction is made between codified and tacit knowledge, which also relates to the here given definition of “skill.” The idea of tacitness of knowledge was substantially developed in The Tacit Dimension, by Michael Polanyi (1966), and was quickly adopted by different disciplines. Polanyi departed from the idea “that we can know more than we can tell” (Polanyi 1966: 4), which raises the question of the codifiability of tacit knowledge. The ability to tell, describe, or explain means expressing knowledge in a code. Thus, codified knowledge is knowledge that can be expressed in the form of documents, blueprints, prototypes, demonstration objects or software, and various others.4 This knowledge is typically considered to be easy to transport or transfer within space, while tacit knowledge—non-codified or non-codifiable knowledge—is difficult to transfer from one place to another and spatially rather sticky (Dicken 2015: 108). Skill then, in the understanding used in this study, is the ability to use codified and tacit forms of knowledge in order to perform tasks or solve problems. An important reason for the central use of the term “skill” in this study, as opposed to “know-how” or “tacit knowledge,” is that “skill” is closely linked with manual tasks (Winch 2011: 89) and is therefore quite useful when writing about production-related topics. The definition of “skill” proposed here permits the maintenance of the strong connection of the concept “skill” with “tasks,” while at the same time making clear that skills do not equal a profession or occupation, such as,

 Codification of knowledge is often expressed in the form of language since it is, maybe, the most common kind of code humans use to convey knowledge; nevertheless, it is by far not the only one. 4

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for instance, a toolmaker: one cannot have the skill of a toolmaker but one can possess the set of skills a toolmaker requires for her or his work (Winch 2011: 91). This fine-grained definition opens up the possibility of studying the transfer of a skill formation practice for a single skill as well as the transfer of a skill formation practice for a set of skills. It is important to note that the understanding of the term “skill” differs according to the national language context in which it is used. The definition of “skill” outlined here is closer to the British understanding of the concept than to the German one (Brockmann et al. 2011: 180; Winch 2011). When writing about the transfer of skill formation practices within German MNEs to their international subsidiaries, this might seem odd at first glance. However, the decision not to employ the German understanding and concepts in this study is a conscious one. The German understanding of “skill,” “competence,” and many other terms related to vocational education is highly influenced by the German skill formation system, which is based on the concept of “Beruf” (occupation or profession in English) (Hanf 2011). Since occupations are defined through standards in national contexts and local labor markets, using such a context-dependent terminology would make the analysis of the skills transferred to the three vastly different skill formation systems in Mexico, India, and China rather problematic. The “British” concept of skill—though stemming from the British skill formation system and the specific conditions of the British labor market—is more neutral and can be more readily used in different national contexts, as defined above, without losing its explanatory power. At the same time, the concept does not strip us of the ability to talk about occupations, since an occupation can be defined as a bundle of specific skills embodied in one person (Brockmann et al. 2011: 180). Another important remark that has to be made when looking at skills is that they cannot be codified and they cannot be transferred to another region via a code. Skills can travel across space within a human being. Otherwise, skills have to be learned by individuals at the destination in question. For that, MNEs need skill formation practices. For these enterprises, which are the focus of this study, transferring skills to a new location—without “transporting” these skills in the personnel who already possess them—means the transfer of skill formation practices to their foreign subsidiaries. When searching for scholarly articles on “skill,” one is immediately confronted with the terms “high-skilled,” “low-skilled,” and, in some cases, “intermediately-­ skilled” workers or employees. High-skilled personnel are typically associated with the completion of higher educational programs, masters’ degrees, etc., while low skilled or unskilled workers are associated with factory workers and manual labor. For the purpose of this study, I want to refrain from these categories and rather employ the different positions the personnel in question hold within production. These positions might entail “production operator,” the “supervisor or team leader,” or the “specialist for machine maintenance.” I understand these employees/working positions to require different sets of skills. Some of the positions require more or less complex sets of skills. Methodologically, I include all employees working in

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the subsidiaries in order to keep the production running. Not included in this study are those positions that seek to improve the production by inventing new ideas, developing machines, etc.

2.1.3  Practices to Develop Skills “Purposefully” Skill formation practices aim at developing a skill in a person (e.g., a worker). For the purpose of this study, I, therefore, define “skill formation practice” as an ongoing recurrent collaboration with the purpose of enabling a person or a group to acquire a skill or a certain set of skills. This definition makes it methodologically possible to study skill formation practices that aim at imparting one specific skill such as drilling, but also practices such as dual apprenticeship training that impart a complex set of skills. For the shop floor scenario of this study including a changing (in varying degrees) workforce, skill formation practices have enormous importance for keeping the production running. It is important for the efficiency of the production that workers are fast and at the same time maintain the quality of the product. This requires a lot of repetition of the tasks in order for them to become efficient routines (see Chap. 5). For the development of skills, it is therefore necessary to establish practices that enable new workers to learn as fast as possible in order to become efficient in the production process. The focus of this study, however, is not the “skill” itself or how it is learned. Nor is it the question to what degree a practice is efficient in imparting the learning required, since the process of learning, in terms of what really happens in a person while learning, remains a difficult subject to tackle, even in educational studies (Alic 2008: 431). Instead, the focus here is on the practice, the elements it consists of, and how it is enacted, organized, and understood. Specifically, this study focuses on skill formation practices that serve a purposeful qualification of the workforce. These practices include formal learning (with documented proof of proficiency) and non-formal learning (without proof, but planned and structured). For methodological reasons, unplanned learning processes, which also characterize the working world (Colardyn and Bjornavold 2004), are left aside. There is a threshold as to what kind of skills can be acquired in structured skill formation practices. Some skills might only be acquired in constant non-planned practice (Alic 2008: 433). This type of learning is conceptualized in the literature about “communities of practice” (Lave and Wenger 2011 [1991]), which has been widely received in different research fields, including economic geography (Gertler 2003: 86; Jones and Murphy 2011: 375). This form of unstructured learning, however, is difficult to measure, though it is undoubtedly an important part of keeping production efficient and running. Nevertheless, these are not skill formation practices, since these practices are not primarily organized around the goal of forming skills but around other goals and purposes, such as the accomplishment of a specific task, or the solving of a problem.

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The transfer of purposeful skill formation practices is an interesting and important research subject to study for two reasons. Firstly, skill formation practices affect the capabilities of a company as a whole (Proff and Proff 2017). Secondly, they typically have a strong link to local skill formation systems. What companies do in terms of skill formation has a strong influence on national economies, as the literature on “varieties of capitalism” shows (Busemeyer and Trampusch 2012; Hall and Soskice 2001). When transferred from one geographical context to another, this link of skill formation practices to the local skill formation system makes them more likely to influence national territorial institutions than purely organizational practices (for a definition of organizational practice see Sect. 2.2.3) with less interaction with the local environment. As Fortwengel (2014: 16) aptly puts it: Education and training practices should be particularly difficult to transfer, because of their strong embeddedness in country-specific institutional support structures. Apprenticeship thus is a case of an organizational practice which really is not purely organizational, as it is highly dependent on institutional inputs and the provision of legitimacy granted by the environment.

As will be further explained in Chap. 5, this is especially true for dual apprenticeship practices, since their very nature is to combine learning at the company with learning in vocational schools (Fortwengel and Jackson 2016: 898). How and why MNEs affect their host environments is an important research topic in economic geography and other disciplines (Cantwell et al. 2010; Wrana and Diez 2016). This study aims to contribute to these discussions from a different perspective by developing a practice theoretical concept of practice transfer; and in this way opening up new perspectives on the elements characterizing the transfer process, including materialities, meanings, competences, and time usage. After defining the skill formation practices that are at the center of the research interest in this study, in the following section I take up the debate in the field of economic geography on the transfer of knowledge, in order to discuss the conceptual contribution of this study to these debates. The debate is connected to the empirical case of this study (regarding the transfer of skill formation practices) on two levels. The first, as elaborated above, is that when skill formation practices are transferred, skills are transferred within them. Thus, since skills are a form of knowledge, the transfer of a skill formation practice can be considered a knowledge transfer. The second level is that a skill formation practice is (as all practices are) imbued with knowledge, in this case the knowledge how to organize and perform a skill formation practice (not the skill it transfers, as in level one, but the competences needed to impart training). This can therefore also be seen as a knowledge transfer. As I discuss in the following chapter, the conceptual debate about knowledge transfer in economic geography also has a strand that takes up practice theoretical ideas about “knowing in practice.” I aim to contribute to this research strand.

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2.2  R  esearch Desiderate Practice Transfer in Economic Geography In this section, I first discuss current debates in economic geography on knowledge transfer. Building on a strand of literature that takes a practice theoretical view of this phenomenon, I propose a shift in perspective, from looking at knowledge transfer from a practice perspective to conceptually focusing on practice transfer instead. In a second step, I critically debate the current state of research on practice transfer within economic geography. Since the research on practice transfer is still rather rudimentary within economic geography, the chapter then continues with an overview of the research on practice transfer from different fields, especially international business studies and international human resource studies, which have a special inclination to study the empirical phenomenon of practice transfer within MNEs. Additionally, this section critically discusses the notion of “institutional distance” that is mainly used in international business literature to conceptualize what has to be overcome in practice transfer. To reflect this concept on a deeper level, the chapter relates what is understood under different types of distances and proximities in economic geography—especially with regard to debates on knowledge transfer—and outlines some ideas of a concept of relational distance developed in the field. This concept includes a practice theoretical perspective.

2.2.1  S  hifting the Perspective from Knowledge Transfer to Practice Transfer It is commonplace to refer to the current period of the global capitalist development as a knowledge-based “learning” economy (Gertler 2003: 75). Within economic geography, this is reflected in a strong interest in the geographies of knowledge organization and creation (Asheim 2011; Bathelt and Cohendet 2014; Faulconbridge 2006). Nevertheless, what knowledge actually is, is not as easy to grasp as one might think at first glance. As Oliver Ibert (2007: 104) puts it: “[k]nowledge is one of those words: one knows exactly what it means – until one is forced to define it.” Therefore, in the following chapter, the different conceptualizations of knowledge in the context of research on knowledge transfer in economic geography are discussed. Ibert (2007) identifies two ontologically different approaches to conceptualize knowledge and knowing in human geography: a rationalistic approach that conceptualizes knowledge as an “object” and a performative approach that conceptualizes knowledge in terms of “knowing in practice.” The rationalistic approach understands knowledge as a “phenomenon that has the status of an object” (Ibert 2007: 105). Hence, this understanding implies the existence of an external reality that is true at all times and in all places. From this

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2  Defining the Research Desiderates: Economic Geography, Practice Theories…

point of view, knowledge creation is just a form of “uncovering” an always true and present knowledge. As an object, knowledge can be possessed and it represents a tradable commodity or resource. It can be “bought, sold, transferred and partially stored” (Fuchs 2014: 11) and accumulated—being knowledgeable entails having a large number of knowledge entities (Amin and Cohendet 2004). The rationalistic approach also involves the notion that knowledge consists of “commensurable quanta.” This ontological conception of knowledge implies that new knowledge expands and advances old knowledge (Ibert 2007: 105). Ibert (2007) and Orlikowski (2002) follow Tsoukas (1996) in describing studies using this rationalistic concept of knowledge as “taxonomic” due to their tendency to map out different types of knowledge. Maybe the most influential taxonomy of knowledge types is the distinction between explicit and tacit knowledge dating back to the seminal work of Michael Polanyi (1966) (for a more extensive definition see Sect. 2.1.1). Due to its situational nature, tacit knowledge has a close relation to specific geographic contexts (e.g., clusters, organizations) and is thought of as being locally sticky, in contrast to codified or explicit knowledge, which can be relatively easily stored and transported (Gertler 2003; Johnson 2002). Another widely used (see for instance Moritz 2018; Neij et al. 2017; Pugh 2017) taxonomy of knowledge types has been developed by Asheim (2011), who differentiates between analytic, synthetic, and symbolic types of knowledge combined in regional knowledge bases in learning regions. The performative approach, in contrast, conceptualizes knowledge as “knowing in practice.” This notion has been less explored in the field of economic geography, although there is a growing body of literature taking up this perspective (newer, see Hautala and Höyssä 2017; Ibert 2007: 104; Ibert and Kujath 2011b: 26–31). Here, the emphasis on “knowing” in contrast to “knowledge” indicates that what is known is more accurately described as the “ability to act” instead of a thing or a static property like the rationalistic view of knowledge claims. From this ontological perspective, knowing is performative in nature (Amin and Cohendet 2004: 63–82) and as such has a collective character (Ancori 2000) as opposed to the individualistic slant favored by the rationalistic approach. We might therefore say that knowing is seen as being situated in social practices. For instance, Vallance (2011: 1098) refers to a “distinctive relational and practice-­ based understanding of knowledge.” This implies a “holistic understanding of intelligible action” (Ibert 2007: 105). Knowing in this sense cannot be split up into different entities—individual bits of information cannot be understood without relation to their knowledge architecture or the social practices in which they are of use (Orlikowski 2002). Consequently, the taxonomic differentiation between explicit and tacit knowledge cannot be upheld from this perspective, since tacit knowing is an irreplaceable part of all knowledge (Ibert 2007; Polanyi 1966; Tsoukas 1996). Knowing cannot be accumulated in the form of commensurable entities. Instead “elements of knowledgeability derived from different practices or cultures only inconsistently fit together and partly may even rest on contradictory assumptions” (Ibert 2007: 106). This performative understanding of knowing emphasizes its distinctive procedural character (Table 2.1).

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Table 2.1  Two ontological notions of knowledge Ontological status Form of existence Temporary boundaries Content boundaries

Rationalistic approach to knowledge Object Absolute reality Fixed, factual Segmented, commensurable

Performative approach to knowing Performative Situated in practice In flux, provisional Holistic, incommensurable

Source: Ibert (2007: 106)

Nevertheless, both ontological notions of knowledge, the rationalistic and the performative, are valid intellectual efforts with different theoretical and analytical strengths. While the rationalistic account of knowledge is more sensitive to the “mechanisms of modernity to dis-embed consuetudinary ways of knowing from local and traditional contexts” (Ibert 2007: 106), the performative notion pays more attention to the socially constructed character and contextual embeddedness of knowledge/knowing (Fuchs 2014). These two different ontological positions on knowledge have distinct implications for how the relation between knowledge and space is conceptualized and empirically analyzed (Ibert 2007). Ibert (2006, 2007) explores these differences in regard to the production or creation of new knowledge and the implications these two ontological positions have for spatial explanation. From the ontological perspective of knowledge as an object, learning, and with it innovation, occurs through the exchange of existing knowledge between actors from different professional groups and organizations (Lawson and Lorenz 1999). This “argument of agglomeration” explains that knowledge, especially tacit forms of knowledge, circulates more easily within geographic proximity, which leads to spatial agglomeration in territorial innovation systems (Asheim et al. 2015; Edquist 2011). These ideas have found wide reception in economic geography resulting in extensive debates on geographies of economic change (Boschma 2012; Boschma and Frenken 2018) and implications of the local stickiness of tacit knowledge for knowledge creation (Bathelt and Cohendet 2014; Bathelt and Henn 2014; Howells 2002; Malmberg and Maskell 2006). Even though studies using the agglomeration argument stress the necessity of exchanging knowledge beyond localized innovation systems (e.g., through “global pipelines”; Bathelt et al. 2004) as a condition for competitiveness, they still emphasize the advantages of proximity. Some conceptual problems, however, cannot be resolved. The capacity of receivers of circulating knowledge to understand and decode the knowledge in question is often assumed without too much reflection, and it is frequently insufficiently recognized that knowledge changes when transferred (Ibert 2006: 102; Nooteboom 1992). The literature using the performative approach to knowledge, on the other hand, arrives at a different conclusion regarding how the creation of knowledge is localized. Ibert (2007: 106) calls this the “argument of place,” which is inspired by science and technology studies and actor-network-theory, both of which are considered part of the wider cannon of practice theories (Callon et  al. 1998; Knorr-Cetina 2001a; Knorr-Cetina and Harré 1991; Latour 1999 [1987]; Latour and Woolgar

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1979) (see more extensive discussion in Sect. 2.3). Whereas the agglomeration argument is more concerned with the structural conditions for the coordination of diverse knowledge pools, the argument of place stresses human agency and the situatedness of human activity in the process of knowledge creation. Places of learning “structure and are structured by the learning activities of the involved researchers and entrepreneurs” (Ibert 2007: 108). They enable learning and provide the infrastructure as well as the artifacts necessary for the corresponding knowledge practices, such as a laboratory with equipment (Latour 1999 [1987]). At the same time the practices of knowledge creation continuously change places of learning. Places of learning are formed around an “epistemic object” (e.g., a new technological device or a pharmaceutical). As long as the process of development is not finished, the epistemic object is incomplete and it transforms and changes; these changes also affect the place of learning (Knorr-Cetina 2001a). At the same time, for knowledge production, different places of learning are connected, forming an “archipelago of situated knowledges” (Thrift 1999: 303). Of special importance for these connections between places of learning are the epistemic communities that form around the epistemic object. Professional knowledge workers for instance can change their working environment through visiting conferences or changes in employment. Compared to studies using the argument of agglomeration, empirical studies using the argument of place are less common in geography (Faulconbridge 2014: 75; Hautala and Höyssä 2017; Ibert et al. 2015: 323). Nevertheless, the body of literature taking up these ideas has been growing (Bathelt and Cohendet 2014; Brinks 2016; Grabher and Ibert 2014; Hautala 2018). Learning can be conceptualized as consisting of two basic directions: the creation of new knowledge, and the transfer or circulation of existing knowledge between humans, organizations, places, etc. However, knowledge creation and knowledge sharing (transfer, diffusion) cannot be easily separated. The transfer of knowledge requires previously existing knowledge in order to be unpacked and used. Nooteboom (1992: 290) stresses that the cognitive distances between actors have to be overcome for a successful transfer of knowledge. As a result, since every human being has different implicit knowledge structures due to their different experiences, it is necessary to enter into a longer interaction and communication process. Moldaschl (2011: 292–293) takes this argument a step further and reasons that the contextualization of knowledge in itself is already a form of knowledge production. Nevertheless, there is a difference between the purposeful organization of knowledge creation (practices that are arranged around an epistemic object, which are “epistemic practices” in that sense; Knorr-Cetina 2001a: 187) and, on the other hand, the transfer of knowledge, which is situated in practices without the purposeful idea of creating knowledge. Thus, the question of knowledge transfer in the latter sense has been studied less than knowledge creation in economic geography. The current study on the transfer of skill formation practices contributes to this less explored research field, as the skills transferred in skill formation practices are usually skills that already exist in some places. So, in this case, rather than speaking about the purposeful creation of knowledge, it is apt to speak about the diffusion of existing knowledge.

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Thus, it is important to stress that the literature on knowledge creation and the literature on the diffusion of existing knowledge cannot easily be differentiated from each other. This is because the division is fluid, as well as the fact that in the “argument of agglomeration” the transfer of existing knowledge is seen as a precondition for the creation of new knowledge (see above in this chapter). Furthermore, the creation of knowledge is of paramount importance for regional economic growth, which might explain the focus of interest in economic geography on this aspect in particular (Malmberg and Maskell 2006). So far, knowledge transfer has been studied at different levels: within the supply chain (Ivarsson and Alvstam 2005, 2009), in clusters (Bathelt et al. 2004), in “global spaces of learning” (Faulconbridge 2006), or as forms of “technology transfer” (Glückler 2009; e.g., Ivarsson and Alvstam 2009). In their article, The Geographies of Knowledge Transfer Across Distance: Toward a Typology, Bathelt and Henn (2014) systematize the ideas developed in economic geography on knowledge transfer. They paint a picture where digital translocal communication, in combination with temporary face-to-face contact, links different production, research, and other locations together into settings that “form distinct ‘geographies’ that connect local, regional, national, and international production contexts and generate linkages across them” (Bathelt and Henn 2014: 1404). Bathelt and Henn (2014) find three particularly relevant configurations of knowledge transfer across distance: temporary face-to-face interaction in the form of international community gatherings; international business travel; and transnational network relations. These linkages provide “the architecture for flows of goods, people, and knowledge, and generate the basic conditions for globalization processes in current capitalism” (Bathelt and Henn 2014: 1404). However, the questions of how existing tacit—usually in combination with explicit—forms of knowledge are transferred or diffused across distance have mainly been explored from an ontological perspective of knowledge as an object, not from a knowing in practice view. Reasons for the dominance of the rationalistic approach to the research subject of knowledge transfer lie in the ontological perspective of knowledge as an object itself. While the rationalistic approach to knowledge has at its center the idea that knowledge can be transferred, from this ontological perspective, its transferability is precisely what makes knowledge an object, since an object can be moved as can knowledge. There are two exceptions where a performative approach is applied to knowledge transfer: the transfer and circulation of knowledge in spatially dispersed communities of practice (also sometimes as epistemic communities; Faulconbridge and Grubbauer 2015; Heeg and Bitterer 2015) and the transfer of best practices (Gertler 2001; Neumayer and Perkins 2005). From the knowing in practice perspective, knowing is always situational. It is different in every situation and there is no one universally true knowledge, but only situationally bound different knowledges. From this point of view, knowledge cannot be decontextualized, but is always transformed through the transfer. The notion of “knowing in practice” has its roots in practice theoretical thinking (see Sects. 2.3.4 and 4.1).

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But if knowledge is situational how can we explain how “knowing in practice” is transferred across distances? This seems a paradox at first glance. Nevertheless, there are two approaches to looking at how knowing in practice spreads across space: first, follow the spatialities of the often multilocal “communities of practice,” second, follow the spatiality of practices and their performances. The “communities of practice” perspective explains how the knowledge or knowing required for a specific practice is circulated and maintained within a group of practitioners. For this, Lave and Wenger (2011 [1991]: 27; Wenger 1998) develop the notion of “legitimate peripheral participation” that newcomers engage in, and through which they gradually become experts in the practice in question. The idea of the circulation of knowledge in communities of practice has received substantial academic attention (Faulconbridge 2010; Faulconbridge and Grubbauer 2015; Müller and Ibert 2015). This idea has been used to explore for example how “temporary clusters” (Comunian 2017) are built through conferences and trade fairs and how the creation of knowledge works in geographically dispersed communities of practice (Sapsed et  al. 2005). Communities of practice have also been used to explain the mobility of policies between cities and regions (Bok and Coe 2017; Bulkeley 2006; Peck 2011; Peck and Theodore 2010). Ibert and Kujath (2011a: 24) call this relatively new movement in geography “from long-term co-location to temporal co-presence.”5 Here, the community of practice concept serves well to explain how knowing in practice can circulate between sometimes distant places. While the focal points of the community of practice approach are the practitioners and their spatial spread, another stance is available for study, which has been far less explored: the adoption of a “knowing in practice” perspective to follow the practice across space, not the practitioner. The difference between the two perspectives becomes especially evident when looking at the spatiality of the performance of a practice. This can be multilocal, meaning that the performance occurs at various places. The performance of other practices might be restricted to just one place, though this restricted practice might be performed at various places at the same time. An example of the differences between the two possible settings could be a conference call versus a face-to-face meeting. Conference calls are performed at multiple places at once, while face-to-face meetings occur at one and the same place. Following the practice and its spatiality opens up a different conceptual lens to see how knowing in practice is localized. The concept of communities of practice does not differentiate between the two settings, as shown in Fig. 2.3, but regards both constellations as multilocal communities of practice. Following the practice and not the community of practice also has distinct consequences for conceptualizing how knowing in practice circulates. From this point of view, we can look at how practices get to be transferred between places or sets of places. The concentration on practice transfer implies a conceptual maneuver taking the focus from how knowing circulates in communities to what is done with the knowledge—in other words, the practices in which the knowing is used. This means shifting from a

 Translated by author. German original: „Von dauerhafter Ko-Lokation zu temporärer Ko-Präsenz.“

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2.2  Research Desiderate Practice Transfer in Economic Geography

Mult ilocal performance

Local performance in multiple places

31

Pract it ioner

Place Pract ice performance

Fig. 2.3  Different spatial settings for performances of practices in communities of practice. (Source: Own representation)

performative view of knowing in practice to a practice view of (performative) knowing. This shift entails leaving behind the discussions of knowledge transfer to some degree and—since knowing is always permeated with, and expressed in, practice—focusing on practice transfer instead. Especially when dealing with knowledge/knowing that is commercially used, following the practice is a promising approach, since what is put into economic value is typically not the knowledge that is transferred itself but what can be achieved with that knowledge (Moldaschl 2011). This discussion about a necessary shift in perspective to “a practice view on (performative) knowing” enables the formulation of the first research question of this study on the nature of the spatiality of “knowing” in practice transfer (see Sect. 1.2). In order to further narrow down this research gap, in the following section, I tackle the question of what has so far been studied in economic geography with regard to the empirical phenomenon of practice transfer. I show that existing research is limited to a rather small bundle of only very loosely connected studies. I then open up the perspective and take into account research on practice transfer in MNEs from different research fields (especially international business studies) and discuss the current conceptual understanding of practice transfer critically.

2.2.2  Practice Transfer in Economic Geography Compared to the rich body of literature on knowledge transfer in human geography depicted above, the idea of practice transfer across distance has so far not comprehensively been explored within this field. This is especially true with regard to organizational practices, or practices that are transferred by or within MNEs. Figure 2.4 shows the number of publications on the transfer of practices in the Web of Science Database.

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2  Defining the Research Desiderates: Economic Geography, Practice Theories…

Literatur search practice transfer in organizations/MNE Number of publications per year 1991 - 2019 (April)

Web of Science

hps://apps.webofknowledge.com

80 71

Search funcon: TS = (organi* pracce NEAR/5 transfer) combined with TS = (mulnat ional* AND pracce NEAR/5 transfer)

65 55 44 39

Total = 799 items

3

2

2

2

3

31 32

28 22

21 6

9 11 9

59

12

16

54 44

35 25

16

2

Fig. 2.4  Publications on practice transfer in Web of Science database. (Source: Data obtained from Web of Science search, all databases, April 2019)

Since the 1990s, the Web of Science database shows an increasing number of publications on practice transfer as can be seen in the figure above. Nevertheless, only 1.5% of the nearly eight hundred publications are part of the Web of Science category “Geography.” The most prominent category includes literature from the area of international business studies (for a further detailed overview about this literature, see the following: Sect. 2.2.3 and especially Fig. 2.5). This finding is also confirmed when qualitatively reviewing the existing literature in economic geography on practice transfer, which will be done in the following paragraphs. Still, when taking a closer look, we can find different ideas and concepts that are thematically related. One such thematically related strand of literature in economic geography—not the most closely related strand but the densest, which makes it important to discuss in this section—is the field of evolutionary economic geography. It is here we find a concept that underlines the importance of practices for companies: this strand of literature usually uses the term “organizational routine” (Frenken and Boschma 2007: 637) instead of “practice.” It is a concept in which we can also detect a strong connection to the literature on knowledge organization as outlined in the previous section. The generation of ideas and arguments within the evolutionary economic geography literature can be traced back to Polanyi’s (1966) idea of tacit knowledge, which was later taken up by Nelson and Winter (1982) as they developed their evolutionary theory of economic change. From an evolutionary economic perspective, companies rely on “organizational routines” for their production and decision-making processes. These routines are built up over time and differ between companies. Organizational routines have strong roots in experience-based tacit knowledge (Becker 2004) and are seen as organizational skills “which cannot be reduced to the sum of individual skills” (Boschma and Frenken 2006: 277). Since this organizational knowing is difficult to

2.2  Research Desiderate Practice Transfer in Economic Geography

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imitate for other firms or organizations, organizational routines are seen as idiosyncratic to the companies (Frenken and Boschma 2007: 637). Herein lies perhaps the biggest difference to the concept of “practice,” which provides the basis for the conceptualizations of practice transfer in this study. The concept of “practice” encompasses all kinds of nexuses of activities within and outside of companies and organizations (as will be discussed in detail in Sect. 2.3.4). The idiosyncrasy of a practice, then, might only mean that we are dealing with a particularly local practice or a practice that is strongly bound to a particular organization or company. Consequently, an organizational routine can be understood in terms of a particular kind of practice. Using the term “routine” instead of “practice” also hints at the more standardized and repetitive notion of practice in this literature compared to other concepts, which leaves more room for variation (e.g., Knorr-Cetina 2001a). Additionally, differences between the organizational routines of companies lead to a persistent heterogeneity between organizations. This variety of organizations and organizational behavior “fuels the selection process as an open-ended and out-­ of-­equilibrium process of economic development” (Boschma and Frenken 2006: 278). In evolutionary economic thinking, organizations are characterized by bounded rationality and routinized behavior, instead of the neoclassical conception of utility maximization. Routines are seen as the metaphorical “genes” of organizations and manifest in the division of labor within organizations, which is based on the division of skills in the workforce of the firm. Competition from this perspective therefore requires not only technical innovation but also new routines. Often cited examples of this stream of literature in evolutionary economic geography are Boschma and Frenken (2006; 2009), Bathelt (2005), Hodgson (2003), and Martin and Sunley (2006, 2007). Acknowledging the importance of organizational routines and their characteristic local stickiness, this literature—in sync with the literature on the organization of knowledge described in Sect. 2.1—uses the concept of locally sticky organizational routines mostly for the explanation of the clustering of industries in space, the evolution of networks in space, and unequal patterns of growth across geographic space (Boschma and Frenken 2018). Evolutionary economic geography traditionally works quantitatively (Boschma and Frenken 2006: 280) and is comparatively less interested in the specific characteristics and dynamics of single organizational routines and how they are transferred in MNEs, as is the main focus of this study. When practice transfer is addressed in economic geography—also outside of a specific evolutionary economy framework—it is typically with regard to the transfer and diffusion of so-called best practices (Gertler 2001; Neumayer and Perkins 2005). However, as opposed to the communities of practice literature, these studies often do not really follow much of a “knowing in practice” understanding of knowledge, but only look at practice transfer in a rather strategic-technical way. Gertler (2001: 6) describes how best practice is seen in these discourses: [Best practice] reflects the idea that there is one universal standard against which all firms (anywhere) can – and should – measure their operational performance. Moreover, best practice is applied to both outcomes (e.g. defect rates per thousand; labour hours per vehicle assembled) and processes (e.g. ISO 9000 and ISO 14000 standards for quality management

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Fig. 2.5  Visualization of literature on organizational practice transfer and diffusion. (Source: Corpus 955 publications, Web of Science Search: TS = (organi* AND (practice NEAR/5 diffus*)) OR (organi* AND (practice NEAR/5 transfer*)), Web of Science Core Collection. Own representation visualized with VOS Viewer, overlay visualization with scores here in different colors by publication year; weights: links)

2.2  Research Desiderate Practice Transfer in Economic Geography

Visualization: Scope and Thematic Variety of Studies on Organizational Practice Transfer The discussion on the transfer and diffusion of practices in organizations (usually MNEs) can also be visualized. Figure 2.5 represents the corpus of publications generated from a search for “transfer and diffusion of organizational practices” in the Web of Science Core Collection. Of the 955 publications in this corpus, around 280 are closely linked within one cluster. Links in this network are formed by citations between the represented publications. The size of the bubbles for each publication shows the centrality of that publication in the network, that is, not just how much the publication in question is cited but also how much it cites other publications in the cluster. Beyond indicating which publications are cited most, the bubbles make it possible to visualize the ongoing conversation and referencing in the publication network. Consequently, younger publications that refer to others within the cluster appear larger than they would if only outside citations were counted. The colors from blue to yellow represent the publication year. The close-up in Fig.  2.5 shows a strong conversation—or reciprocal referencing—with organizational practice transfer and diffusion at its core, which has been continuing for the last 20 years. Central texts about transfer of organizational practices by Kostova (1999) and Szulanski (2000) have sparked the discussion and still seem to be important to the debates. Newer publications still maintain this conversation as we can see in publications by Gamble (2010) and Fortwengel (2017). On the right side of the graphic appears a smaller sub-cluster with central publications on the diffusion of practices by Strang and Soule (1998), Fiss and Zajac (2004), and more recently Ansari et al. (2010). Between the transfer and the diffusion sub-clusters a lot of cross-­referencing can be observed. Thus, while these clusters are not very clearly outlined, they are still distinguishable. The studies depicted in the visualization on practice transfer in MNEs show a wide thematic variety. Examples range from total quality management (David and Strang 2006; Jarrar and Zairi 2000; Kennedy and Fiss 2009; Kostova and Roth 2002), Six Sigma (Canato et al. 2013), manufacturing best practice programs (Love and Cebon 2008), telemedicine (Nicolini 2010), strategic planning (Whittington 2006), to corporate social responsibility (Höllerer et  al. 2013) and diversity management (Boxenbaum and Battilana 2005).

35

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2  Defining the Research Desiderates: Economic Geography, Practice Theories… and environmental practices; as well as specific techniques and modes of production organization). Not surprisingly a whole industry of benchmarking of firms’ practices, processes and achievements has arisen, led by international management consultancies such as McKinsey, Boston Consulting Group, KPMG, PricewaterhouseCoopers and others.

Here, the finding and following of best practices is seen as a matter of competition that leads to global convergence. Practices are not regarded as complex nexuses of human activities that include “forms of bodily activities, forms of mental activities, ‘things’ and their use, a background knowledge in the form of understanding, know-­how, states of emotion and motivational knowledge” (Reckwitz 2002: 249; for a more extensive definition of practices see Sect. 2.3.4) but as mere benchmarks to which companies are supposed to aspire. Even though the studies focusing on best practices conceptualize practices as containing tacit forms of knowledge (Gertler 2001; Jensen and Szulanski 2004; Klofsten et al. 2009: 793), the concepts remain rather superficial. In part, this might be because the central interest in this literature is typically the transferred knowledge and not the transferred practice in all its complexity—practices are conceived as mere vehicles for the transfer of knowledge, not as research objects in their own right. Furthermore, the concentration on “best practices” neglects the fact that all kinds of practices are transferred by and within companies, not just those deemed as “best.” Literatures from the field of international business and management studies show the wide array of practices transferred within MNEs (this will be further discussed in the next section). As part of the evolutionary economic geography debate, Radwan and Kinder (2013) use a practice theoretical perspective to unpack organizational routines. Specifically, they take a closer look into organizational routines and how they interact with the organization and the organization’s environment (Kinder and Radwan 2010; Radwan and Kinder 2013). Extending the spatial perspective on organizational routines, they include the possibility of routines being influenced not only by the organization itself but also by the organization’s greater context. Still, they fail to develop a deeper understanding of what that context looks like in a practice theoretical understanding. Particularly, in terms of their ontological assumptions they maintain an institutional perspective that views the micro and macro as distinct, separable levels, with institutions located on the macro and practices on the micro level. In contrast, practice theories’ flat ontology dissolves these distinct levels into one “flat” level (see Sect. 2.3.3). In this way, Radwan and Kinder (2013) maintain a strong link to the evolutionary economic perspective but miss the opportunity to think about the context of organizational routines from a practice perspective as well. As I will show in the course of the following chapters, analyzing the organizational context through the lens of a practice theoretical perspective can provide a deeper understanding of what happens in practice transfer. Radwan and Kinder (2013) are also more interested in a practice diffusion process between organizations at the same geographical unit than in the question of how practices “travel” across geographic space and what implications follow from this for the transfer of different practices. To theoretically grasp practice transfer without losing the understanding of knowledge as knowing in practice, a compatible understanding of practice is

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required. The concept of communities of practice that provides a substantial notion of knowing in practice and how it circulates, however, does not provide a concise notion of practice capable of supporting a framework of practice transfer. Neither does the communities of practice approach provide the conceptual tools to differentiate between practices (German Pratiken), taking instead a more general understanding of practice (German Praxis) (Lave and Wenger 2011 [1991]). In Sect. 2.2.4, I discuss at length why the conceptual distinction between different practices is important for understanding why some practices are “easier” to transfer than others—while at the same time critically reflecting on the previous conceptual approaches to this topic. For now, it shall be only hinted that just as transporting a brick stone to a different location is much easier than transporting a whole building, transferring a less complex practice might be easier than transferring a more complex one. Thus, distinguishing between differently complex practices seems a meaningful exercise. Therefore, in order to develop a concise and reliable concept of practice transfer across geographic distance from a practice theoretical perspective, in the course of Chap. 4, this study refers to recent practice theoretical writings, especially by Theodore Schatzki (1996, 2001, 2016a, b) and the author-team Elisabeth Shove, Mika Pantzar, Matt Watson, and Alison Hui (Hui et al. 2017b; Hui 2017; Shove 2009; Shove et al. 2012; Shove and Pantzar 2005; Watson 2017), though the chapter also cites publications by a wider cannon of practice theorists (e.g., Nicolini 2013; Reckwitz 2003). Before this, however, let us take a step back and look at what we know about the empirical phenomenon of practice transfer so far, and in doing so widen the perspective to include research fields outside of economic geography.

2.2.3  The Research Field Practice Transfer As we have seen in the previous section, practice transfer has been studied in economic geography. Nevertheless, there is a far bigger body of literature treating this topic that is not part of the disciplinary cannon in geography and which has been continuously growing since the 2000s (see Fig. 2.4). Especially in the area of international human resource management,6 practice transfer is an important and widely studied issue (Chiang et al. 2016; Edwards et al. 2007). One could even go so far as to say that international human resource management research is in its core a study of practice transfer, since human resource management can always be conceptualized as a practice, while the “international” aspect hints on a transfer dynamic. So, it is not surprising that there is an impressive body of literature on the topic in international human resource management.

 I consider international human resource management as a research strand in international business studies. 6

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There is a long-standing tradition in organization studies to think about practices and their functions in organizations (e.g., March et al. 1993 [1958]; Selznick 1949). This literature departs from the idea that organizations such as MNEs strongly depend on practices to achieve their organizational goals. Different theoretical perspectives have approached this subject: most prominently that of evolutionary economics, led by the seminal work of Nelson and Winter (1982), whose ideas have found their way into the above-depicted discussions of organizational routines, and the institutional perspective, spearheaded for instance by works of Selznick (1949) and Meyer and Rowan (1977). With regard to practice transfer within MNEs, Szulanski (1996) and Kostova (1999) made significant contributions to sparking the discussion going on until today. In her seminal work on the transnational transfer of strategic organizational practices, Kostova (1999: 309) defines organizational practices as: (…) particular ways of conducting organizational functions that have evolved over time under the influence of an organization’s history, people, interests, and actions and that have become institutionalized in the organization. Practices reflect the shared knowledge and competence of the organization; they tend to be accepted and approved by the organization’s employees and to be viewed as the taken-for-granted way of doing certain tasks.

This concept is congruent with the notion of organizational routines in the evolutionary economic perspective as introduced above. Again, organizational practices have a strong link to concepts of knowledge and knowing: They are seen as visible manifestations of possessed organizational knowledge that are believed to be the most valuable asset for contemporary MNEs (Kogut 2005). Organizational practices can be explicitly outlined in written form, but usually they have tacit components that in part depend on individual skills and collaborative social arrangements within the organization. Parallel to the concept of organizational routines, organizational practices are seen as important drivers for company performance embodying companies’ capabilities (Grant 1996; Prahalad and Hamel 1990; Szulanski 1996). Also, organizational practices are idiosyncratic to an organization to some degree, as are organizational routines (see Sect. 2.2.1), and they are thus important for competition between companies. Even though the concept of organizational routine in evolutionary economics and the concept of organizational routine in organization-­studies-­ based international business studies are similar, the research interest in both streams of literature differs. The primary focus in evolutionary economics is not so much on organizational routines/practices themselves, but, for example, on questions about how “populations” of companies from the same sector evolve over time using organizational practices or routines as part of the explanatory framework. On the other hand, the focus in international business and international human resource management literature is on the transfer of organizational practices. This literature concretely provides answers to the questions of (1) why practices are transferred within MNEs in general, or why some practices are transferred while others are not, and (2) why, as empirical evidence shows, it is difficult to transfer practices within MNEs. The first (1) strand of literature on the reasons for practice transfer concludes that to be internationally successful it is essential for MNEs to transfer their

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organizational practices to other locations. The transfer of organizational practices is a potential source of enhanced efficiency and thus imperative for MNEs (Kostova 1999; Szulanski 1996). However, the justifications for practice transfer vary according to the underlying theoretical perspective (Chiang et al. 2016: 238). Resource-­ based theories, for example, regard practices as a source of ownership advantages (Dunning 1980) or as firm-specific capabilities (Hymer 1977). Internationalization theories, on the other hand, find reasons for why practices are transferred in the tensions between global standardization and local responsiveness (Dickmann et  al. 2008; Pudelko and Harzing 2007). Answers to why some practices are transferred while others are not have been developed for example against the background of resource dependency approaches. These approaches suggest that the more dependent a subsidiary is on its parent company, the more likely it is to adopt a practice (Kostova and Roth 2002). Additionally, transaction cost perspectives focus on organizational efficiency and rely on cost-benefit analyses of transfer. From this point of view, practice transfer is believed to enhance coordination and organizational learning (Chiang et al. 2016: 239). Finally, institutional theory departs from the notion that parent companies and their international subsidiaries are subjected to different sets of institutional pressures that influence which practices may be more or less effective or suitable for a specific institutional environment (DiMaggio and Powell 1983; Scott 2014 [1995]). As can be seen from these approaches and perspectives, the different aspects of why a specific practice is transferred or not are manifold and can certainly influence practice transfer itself. The second (2) strand of literature on why practices are difficult to transfer is also where the research interest of this study lies (see research question in the introduction, Sect. 1.2). Reasons for the difficulty of transferring practices across geographic distances in this stream of literature are mostly found in differences in institutional (or sometimes also cultural) settings between countries. This will be discussed in detail in the following section.

2.2.4  C  ritical Reassessment of Institutional Distance as the Explanation for the Difficulty of Transferring Practices As already mentioned in the introduction, empirical findings of studies on the transfer and diffusion of practices suggest practices undergo change (to varying degrees and of varying kinds) when being transferred to another location. To explain these empirical findings in analytical terms, institutional-theory-based research developed the concept of “institutional distance” as a way to conceptualize differences between institutional environments. The basic argument of this conception is that the greater the institutional distance between environments, the unlikelier a “successful” practice transfer becomes. The concept of institutional distance is a

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prominent perspective in international business and international human resource management literature (Fortwengel 2014: 37–46). This section reassesses the notion of institutional distance as the cause of the transformation process a practice undertakes when transferred. For this reassessment, different notions of institutional distance are first presented and then critically discussed, using insights from evolutionary economic geography and practice theories. Institutional theories argue that institutions have a strong enabling as well as constraining impact on organizational practices through the provision of collective inputs (such as standards and collective regulating entities) and by giving legitimacy to some practices but not to others (Gertler 2004: 1–18; Scott 2014 [1995]: 47–70). Based on these arguments, studies on practice transfer and diffusion have conceptualized differences between institutional environments primarily as institutional distance. The concept of institutional distance was introduced into the debates about practice transfer in international business studies and international human resource management literature by Kostova (1999). Studying the effect of country-specific institutional profiles on practice transfer, and drawing on Scott’s (2014 [1995]) idea of the three pillars (regulatory, cognitive, and normative) of institutional frameworks, Kostova (1999: 316) defines her notion of institutional distance in terms of: [T]he difference between the institutional profiles of the two countries—the home country of the practice and the country of the recipient organizational unit. Institutional distance is based on [country institutional profiles] and is, therefore, a three-dimensional construct with a regulatory, cognitive, and normative dimension. Each of these dimensions reflects the difference between the corresponding dimension in the institutional profiles of the two countries.

Institutional distance is supposed to matter in the transfer and diffusion of organizational practices because a “fundamental interdependence of organizational practices and institutional context” (Fortwengel 2014: 39) is assumed, which explains why transferred practices may not fit into their host institutional environment. Institutional distance is also suggested to be a matter of degree: Two countries can be more or less institutionally distant to one another—the greater the institutional distance between them, the greater the “misfit” between the transferred practice and the receiving institutional environment (Kostova 1999: 315). In a later paper, Kostova and Roth (2002) apply this concept to the analysis of a quality management practice transfer in a US-based MNE to subsidiaries in ten different countries. They develop country-specific numeric variables for the institutional distance (in the regulatory domain of quality management) between the sending institutional environment (the United States) and the ten receiving institutional environments.7

 Canada, the United States, Argentina, the United Kingdom, The Netherlands, France, Spain, Australia, Portugal, and Malaysia. 7

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They found that the general level of practice adoption depends on the degree of institutional distance (Kostova and Roth 2002: 227–230). This concept of “institutional distance in degree” has been well received in international business studies and international human resource management literature concerned with the transfer of organizational practices (Jackson and Deeg 2008: 541). However, the concept is also criticized because of its simplification of institutions as variables rather than as complex cases. Other critiques of the concept refer to its disregard for regional institutional differences, the development of institutional environments over time, and the possible agency of MNEs when confronted with institutional distance (Fortwengel 2014: 39–40). An alternative view of institutional distance has been developed based on ideas from comparative capitalism, especially from the “varieties of capitalism” approach (Hall and Soskice 2001). The research strand on comparative capitalism provides “thick” descriptions of national institutions, which are seen as complementary nested configurations. Such institutional configurations are seen not only as constraints but also as resources for solving central problems of the economic coordination of companies. The comparative capitalism approach can be seen as “an institutional theory of the supply side of the economy that examines how institutions shape the supply of inputs (e.g., skills, capital) collectively available to firms and the legitimate forms of coordination or governance that determine their usage” (Jackson and Deeg 2008: 541). In this sense institutions are providers of collective inputs. This gives the concept of institutional distance a different spin, rendering it less about a relative difference in degree than “complex qualitative differences between institutional frameworks as configurations” (Fortwengel 2014: 44). One might therefore regard institutional distance as a distance in kind rather than in degree, when the degree of institutional distance implies a merely one-dimensional understanding of distance. The idea of distance in kind, on the other hand, suggests that the distance between two national institutional environments might be multidimensional (Fortwengel 2014: 26), and that institutional distances should be treated as cases and not variables (Jackson and Deeg 2008: 541). For the question of practice transfer across geographic space, and why practices are transformed and necessarily adapt to their destination environment, both conceptualizations of institutional distance (in degree and in kind) locate the cause for the transformation of a practice in the institutional distance between the sending and receiving institutional environments. This implies that institutions have a substantial effect on practices in general. However, empirical evidence from economic geography shows that there are vast differences between the practices of companies subject to the same territorial institutions (Boschma and Walter 2007; Giuliani 2007; Morrison 2008). In order to make sense of this, Boschma and Frenken (2009: 152) conceptualize institutions as “nonbinding and so general that specific effects at the firm level can still vary greatly.” They go on to say that “organizational routines and territorial institutions are orthogonal to one another” (Boschma and Frenken 2009: 153). Kostova and Roth (2002: 217) and Fortwengel (2014: 39; Fortwengel 2017) address the variation in the influence of institutions (in their case on transferred

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practices) by defining institutional distance as issue or domain specific. In their study on the transfer of a quality management practice, Kostova and Roth (2002: 217) empirically base their measure for institutional distance on the “relevant institutions” for quality management and do not include institutions that do not touch the “issue” of quality management. However, they stick with a conception of institutional distance in degree, as described above. Considering comparative capitalism literature on institutional distance in kind, Fortwengel (2014) takes the term “issue-­ specific” to mean that territorial institutional frameworks are not equally distant to each other, regardless of the issue. The basic idea here is that for two different issues the distance between the same two territorial institutional frameworks can be different, as Fig. 2.6 shows. In his case study, Fortwengel (2014: 86) refers to the “issue-specific domain of vocational education and training,” in which the transfer of a dual apprenticeship training practice from Germany to the United States takes place. The idea of “issue-­ specific institutional distance” implies that practices within the same domain (e.g., vocational education) should be equally difficult to transfer across this particular issue-specific distance. The data gathered for the research presented in the present study, however, show that, to the contrary, different skill formation practices belonging to the same institutional domain of vocational education and training are transferred, but that some of these practices are much easier to transfer than others. This evidence is illustrated in greater detail in Chap. 5. Consequently, the concept of issue-specific institutional distance does not possess the explanatory power to account for the differences in the difficulty to transfer different practices. Since Fortwengel (2014) only looks at one type of practice in transfer, namely, dual apprenticeship training, he might not have been confronted with this paradox in his study. Since the design of the current study allows me to look at three transferred skill formation practices (onboarding, shop floor inducting,

Institutional distance

Institut ional prof ile country A Domain 1 Domain 2 Domain 3 Inst itutional prof ile country A

Inst itut ional prof ile country A Issue-specif ic inst itutional distance

Domain 1

Domain 2 Domain 3 Inst itut ional prof ile country B

Fig. 2.6 Difference between institutional distance and issue-specific institutional distance. (Source: Own representation; ideas Fortwengel (2014) and Kostova and Roth (2002))

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and dual apprenticeship training), the contrary evidence is unavoidable. Based on the empirical findings of this study, Fortwengel’s notion of “issue-specificness” dissolves into a sort of “practice-specificness.” In other words, for every transferred practice, the distance it must overcome when transferred differs. I, therefore, argue that the notion of issue-specific institutional distance cannot explain differences in the conditions of transfer for different practices belonging to the same issue. Furthermore, I contend that the focus should be on the practices that are transferred instead. In concordance with these findings, Chap. 4 develops a notion of “complexity of practices” that locates the difficulty of transferring a practice not just in the institutional distance between the sending and receiving environments, but also within the transferred practice itself (which—of course—is formed by historical processes at its origin context; see Sects. 4.5 and 4.6). Also, I critically reassess the centrality of the effect of institutions on practices and develop an alternative practice theoretical understanding of territorial institutions and their effect on practices (see Sect. 4.8). As a conceptual starting point, I revisit the question of what has to be overcome in practice transfer by discussing concepts of distance and proximity from the field of economic geography. In the following section, based on the notion of distance from a knowing in practice perspective, I give this notion of distance a conceptual twist in order to make it accessible for understanding what needs to be overcome in practice transfer. To develop these ideas properly, however, I first discuss the concept of distance and proximity in economic geography more extensively.

2.2.5  D  istance as an Interactional Effect and a Sociocultural and Time-Spatial Tension The notion of “institutional distance” is not only used in international business studies but can also be found in economic geography. However, this notion is part of a much larger debate on the different dimensions of distance and proximity.8 To begin with, this debate typically distinguishes between “relational” and “physical” distance or proximity. The above-discussed institutional distance is seen in these debates as one type of relational distance. The general interest in the proximity/ distance debates lies in the question how physical or relational proximity/distance between two entities (e.g., people, organizations, or regions) can foster or hinder innovation through the exchange of knowledge that is necessary for knowledge creation. In comparison to the literature in international business on institutional distance in practice transfer (discussed in Sect. 2.2.4), in economic geography, the  Both expressions, proximity and distance, are used in these debates. They are the two sides of the same coin and refer basically to the same kind of circumstances differing in regard to the “intensity and sharpness which they ascribe to the respective distinction: ‘proximity’ thereby denotes a smaller, whereas ‘distance’ means a greater, degree of divergence along the same, gradually increasing, scale” according to Ibert (2010: 188). 8

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concept of distance/proximity is not applied to the question of how practice transfer works. Instead, this proximity/distance concept is usually part of the discussion on knowledge transfer (discussed in Sect. 2.2), e.g., in the form of the proximity/distance between two entities that share/transfer knowledge. In the knowledge transfer debates in economic geography the main focus is to understand how innovation works. Thus, the focus of these research fields is rather different. Nevertheless, it is possible to learn from the discussion of knowledge transfer in economic geography when thinking about practice transfer, especially from those strands of the debate that already show a practice theoretical perspective. Debates in economic geography on proximity/distance with regard to knowledge transfer most prominently seek to answer the question to what degree spatial proximity has an effect on interactive learning (Malmberg and Maskell 2006; Maskell and Malmberg 1999). Here, the argument is that knowledge (especially tacit knowledge) is more easily exchanged in spatial proximity. Furthermore, studies in economic geography examine learning across physical distance. In this context, relational proximity is seen as a means to enable collaboration and learning across physical distance (Bathelt and Henn 2014). Newer discussions are also interested in the importance of relational distance for processes of innovation (Ibert and Kujath 2011b: 33). Bathelt et al. (2018: 1008), for instance, conceptualize the distance (to be overcome in knowledge transfer) through interaction in form of “connecting, sense-making, and integrating” as “frictions.” These “frictions” are seen as being rooted in institutional differences, but also include aspects such as forces of competition, power plays, and difficulties of establishing trust in knowledge communities (Bathelt et al. 2018: 1005). In their conceptualization of “frictions,” Bathelt et al. (2018: 1003) especially focus their attention also on spatial aspects of these frictions, such as the urban and regional scale. Throughout the different strands of debate, we can find taxonomies of proximity/ distance. Boschma (2005), for example, has developed a widely cited taxonomy of four types of relational proximity (cognitive, organizational, social, and institutional) that influence innovation in different ways and are measured against the background of “physical” proximity. Boschma’s taxonomy is not the only one. Others have been developed (e.g., Torre and Rallet 2005) and are also constantly scrutinized. In this context, it has been widely discussed whether additional dimensions of proximity should be appended to those already established (Ibert and Kujath 2011b: 32–33). Trippl and Tödtling (2011), for example, argue for adding the dimension of “functional” proximity, while Bouncken (2011) establishes the dimension of “emotional” proximity. The exact differentiation between the different types of proximity or distance in these taxonomies, however, is often problematic. Also, their—sometimes established—hierarchical categorizations and the subsequent substitutional effects between these dimensions are still heatedly debated (Reum 2019). Ibert (2010) argues that even the distinction between “physical” (measured in form of metric distance between two entities) and “relational” types of distance is problematic. Physical proximity/distance cannot be seen as an

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independent variable from relational proximity/distance (as it is often done; e.g., Boschma 2005). Physical proximity can cause trust between two entities, for example, the trust between neighbors. Since trust represents a form of relational proximity, both dimensions—the relational and physical proximity/distance—can hence not be considered independent from each other. One can conclude that establishing an exhaustive and commensurable taxonomy of proximity/distance dimensions seems somewhat impossible, since cultural differences—as the differences on which these taxonomies are based—are potentially innumerable (Ibert 2010; Ibert and Kujath 2011b: 33). Ibert, therefore, proposes the notion of relational distance/proximity as a “heuristic device which helps in the detection of situations of cultural difference without predefining them” (2010: 190), while especially acknowledging its multidimensionality. He develops a practice perspective of relational distance by establishing a notion of relational distance as an interactional effect, arguing that multidimensional cultural differences only become relevant when people interact with one another, since “[w]ithout interaction, cultural differences can easily coexist without any effect” (Ibert 2010: 190). By applying a practice theoretical perspective of culture, emphasizing that culture is done in practice, Ibert establishes a notion of relational distance as a “cultural dissimilarity instantiated in social interaction or, in short, a sociocultural tension” (Ibert 2010: 190). He especially emphasizes that relational distance is enacted in practice and can therefore not be separated from the materiality of physical space (Ibert 2010: 194) and therefore defines relational distance as a “sociocultural and time-spatial tension.” The concept of relational distance as a sociocultural and time-spatial tension is compatible with the central notion of “transfer resistance” of a transferred practice that will be developed in the course of Chap. 4 to conceptualize distance in practice transfer. Nevertheless, Ibert’s practice theoretical notion of relational distance still regards the tension between interacting people (though possibly also between interacting organizations or regions). His concept does not give analytical priority to practices as being what is transferred or needed to cross the distance in question. In sum, Ibert’s focus is on knowledge transfer and innovation processes, not on practice transfer. Regarding practice transfer, such a notion of distance as a sociocultural and time-spatial tension has not yet been explored. What this “sociocultural tension and time-spatial”—as a practice theoretical approximation of relational distance— means for practice transfer will be summed up in the notion of transfer resistance I develop in Chap. 4. The discussions in Sect. 2.2.4 and this section on what needs to be overcome in practice transfer open up the second and third research questions of this study: why practices are transformed when transferred across space, and why some practices are “more difficult” to transfer across space than others. Moreover, these discussions also provide the opening for the fourth research question: the role and impact of territorial institutions in practice transfer (see Sect. 1.2).

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2.2.6  Interim Conclusion As we have seen in reviewing the related strands of literature in the previous sections, the ability of MNEs to transfer practices between their business locations is of paramount importance for their successful international operations. However, economic geography has only provided a rather peripheral assessment of this phenomenon so far. Insights from international business and international human resource management literature provide a more substantial picture. Still, their concept of “institutional distance” as the basic explanation for the difficulty of transferring practices within MNEs lacks the explanatory power to account for a specific phenomenon found in the empirical data in this study: the varying degrees of difficulty/ resistance displayed in the transfer of different practices between the same two contexts. Ideas on proximity/distance in economic geography, especially those employing a practice perspective, provide an alternative view on what has to be “crossed” in order to transfer a practice. However, these concepts are not adapted for thinking about practice transfer but are mostly interested in knowledge transfer (which is a significantly different point of departure as depicted in detail in Sect. 2.1). A concept for grasping “distance” in practice transfer will be developed in the course of the following chapters with the notion of “transfer resistance” of a practice. For this, it is important to first unpack the notion of practice from a practice theoretical perspective and to develop an understanding of the ontological implications of applying a practice theoretical perspective to practice transfer. This will be done in the following chapters after first discussing how practice theoretical thinking is situated within economic geography.

2.3  I ntroducing Practice Thinking: Practice Theories’ Common Ground 2.3.1  S  ituating a Practice Theoretical View in Economic Geography In order to provide a disciplinary background, this section characterizes the influence and handling of practice theoretical thinking in economic geography, before taking a deeper look into what practice theoretical thinking and researching entails, and where recent practice theoretical developments have led us. In economic geography, practice-oriented approaches have been applied to a diverse range of empirical and theoretical questions since the beginning of the 2000s (Faller 2016: 41–42). Jones and Murphy (2011) argue that practice-oriented research represents an important basis for the development of economic geographical thinking. They especially emphasize the usefulness of practice as an epistemological framework, as a “general philosophy” (Jones and Murphy 2011: 378). Jones and Murphy (2010) identify a significant shift within relational and cultural

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approaches in economic geography toward a practice view, yet they refrain from the idea that there has been a “practice turn” in economic geography. They see the reasons for this shift toward a practice orientation in the dissatisfaction with individualist and structural approaches. Even though there has been a lot of engagement with practice in economic geography over the last decades, the “idea that practice can serve as a central organizing concept in economic geography is a very recent one, and thus is not explicitly prevalent in the literature (unlike references to cultural, institutional or relational ‘turns’)” (Jones and Murphy 2010: 308). Jones (2013: 606) recognizes that it is sometimes difficult to identify the practice view as a “school of thought within economic geography.” Nevertheless, he believes practice thinking has a strong influence. In fact, practice has been studied in economic geography with respect to diverse themes ranging from governmentality to relational and communitarian approaches. The writings of Bourdieu (1984 [1977]) and Giddens (1984) have been particularly well received in this research field (Wiemann et al. 2019). Precursors of the current discussions on practices and geographical inquiry can be found in publications by Nigel Thrift (1996, 2008), who conceives of a “non-representational theory” emphasizing—in concordance with the idea of “practical understanding” in practice theories—that thinking and doing go beyond what can be represented through symbols, texts, pictures, etc. Another precursor in German-speaking geography is Werlen’s (1999) concept of “everyday regionalization,” which describes how regions are made through “everyday” actions. Newer publications in economic geography show a wide range of thematic variety and are often closely related to relational approaches. Jones and Murphy (2010) systematize this literature into four bigger categories: institutional approaches (Glückler and Lenz 2016; Hess 2004; Jones 2008), political-economic approaches (e.g., Palmer and O’Kane 2007), diverse-economy approaches (e.g., Davies et al. 2017; Gritzas and Kavoulakos 2016; Lee et al. 2003), and “relational” and communitarian approaches9 (Faller 2016). Nevertheless, one needs to take a careful look at these studies, since they show varying degrees of practice theoretical orientation, some leaning more into institutional theory than into practice theory. As co-authors and I have argued more extensively elsewhere (Wiemann et  al. 2019), a coherent and systematic dealing with practice theories’ characteristic ontological “flatness” (see Sect. 2.2.3) is still somewhat lacking in this literature. This might be part of the reason why practice thinking is often not identified as a clear-cut “school of thought” within economic geography, even though the engagement with practice theories is extensive. In this study, I therefore intensively discuss practice theories’ common ground to provide  According to Jones and Murphy (2010: 311) “relational” and communitarian approaches in economic geography “[i]n taking social relations as [their] […] central concern, […] [have] a strong conceptual and methodological emphasis on social practice as it seeks to identify, interpret and explain the dynamic nature of interpersonal relations that shape economic outcomes. For relational economic geographers, practices serve: as ‘a source of coherence in a community.’” 9

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a strong theoretical anchoring of my research in practice thinking, and to contribute to a more differentiated and coherent handling of practice theoretical thinking within the research field.

2.3.2  The Diverse “Family” of Practice Theories Emerging from a bundle of writings authored over more than a century ago, practice theories have deep intellectual roots. Practice has become of increasing interest in both social and human sciences at large since the 1970s. Phenomena such as policy-­ making, culture, production, consumption, learning, and language have all been studied through the lens of practice theoretical approaches. Nevertheless, there is a reason why practice-oriented writings often refer to practice theories in plural. This strand of theoretical writings encompasses the work of a very diverse range of authors—from Pierre Bourdieu’s “praxeology” (1984 [1977]), Anthony Giddens’s “theory of structuration” (1979, 1984), Bruno Latour’s “actor-network-theory” (1986, 1999), to Theodore Schatzki’s version of “practice theory” (1996, 2002)—to name but a few. Needless to say, practice theories can hardly be perceived as a unified social theory. This is for two reasons (Everts et al. 2011; Nicolini 2013: 8–11; Reckwitz 2002). First, practice-oriented approaches and studies were developed mostly independently from each other over five decades, with many of them still being hotly debated. Second, practice theoretical approaches are skeptical of too much systematization—and even advise against it. They warn that too much systematization could lead to a turning away from the object of practice theories, namely practice itself (Hillebrandt 2014: 9). However, the diversity of the group of theories counted under the label of “practice theories” can lead to discussions about the question if the work of a particular author should be counted into this group or not. Bourdieu as well as Giddens have been counted among the practice theorists ever since the label “practice theories” was first coined by Sherry B. Ortner in 1984. For other theorists, though, the designation as “practice theorist” is more controversial. One example is Bruno Latour, whose “actor-network-theory,” Schatzki assigns to “theories of arrangement” (2002: XII) and does not perceive as part of the practice theoretical canon. Reckwitz (2002: 243), on the other hand, sees Latour’s actor-network-theory as an important element of practice theoretical thinking. For the sake of this study, Latour will be counted as part of the wider canon of practice theories in the following sections. Occasionally, Bourdieu and Giddens and some other practice theoretical authors are counted as “first generation” practice theorists. The German sociologist Reckwitz (2003) as well as the British-Finnish author team Shove, Pantzar, and Watson (see Shove et al. 2012) are counted as “second generation.” Whether this generational distinction can be maintained goes beyond what can be discussed here. However, it is important to point out that in the writings of the so-called first generation, the question of social practices has a prominent positioning. However, it is only one of

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many other interests; one horizon of explanation among others. The second generation, on the other hand, centers more specifically on practices as the parting point from which the social world is to be explained (Everts and Schäfer 2019: 9). Nevertheless, a number of scholars have recently made considerable efforts to make practice theories’ common ground more visible, and strive to build a coherent and systematic research program (for an early proximation, see Reckwitz 2002, 2003; more recently, Hillebrandt 2014; Hui et al. 2017b; Schäfer 2016b). Reckwitz (2002: 244; Reckwitz 2003: 284) characterizes practice theories as a bundle of theories with a “family resemblance,” which in turn enables the use of a common label. In the following sections, this common ground of practice theories is depicted as a basis for further theorizing about practice transfer from a practice theoretical perspective. Building blocks for this practice theoretical understanding of the social can be found in diverse strands of literature. I will also briefly outline a selection of often-cited examples of these strands of literature. This outline is, however, not an all-encompassing account. Instead, the given approximation tries to develop a basic understanding of the diversity of practice theoretical thinking, while building the ground for comprehending its commonalities. A number of authors (Everts et al. 2011: 325; Nicolini 2013: 29–40; Reckwitz 2003: 283; Schatzki 1996) attempt to draw out the commonalities in the diverse practice theoretical writings. These authors attest for practice theories’ common philosophical roots to be found in the writings of the social philosophers Heidegger and Wittgenstein. In Sein und Zeit (Being and Time), Heidegger (1967 [1927]), by starting his discussion with outlining the “usable” (German Zuhandenheit) as an ontological-categorical determination of “being,” positions practice as the basis of explaining intelligibility and rationality, and offers some insights into the fundamental nature of practice (Heidegger 1967 [1927]: 66–77). According to Nicolini (2013: 35–37), three aspects of Heidegger’s phenomenological and existential thinking have especially influenced current practice theoretical thought: Heidegger has a (1) super-individual conception of practice (though maybe not exactly social); he considers (2) being-in-the-world from a solely mental perspective but emphasizes its affectiveness and active existential condition; and (3) he gives centrality to the temporal dimension of practices by viewing time as an existential part of being. Nevertheless, during his career, Heidegger “moved towards granting a primacy of one type of practice—discursive—over all others” (Nicolini 2013: 37), which in turn gave impulses to discourse theoretical thinking. However, discourse theory differs somewhat from the practice theoretical perspective, which considers discursive practices as only one type of practice—though an important one. Reckwitz (2003: 283) identifies Ludwig Wittgenstein’s late work (1969) on language games (German Sprachspiele) as influential for practice theoretical thinking. Wittgenstein develops a non-representational and non-rationalist perspective on language and meaning based on a “practical understanding.” Nicolini (2013: 39) explains this Wittgensteinian concept of practical understanding in the following way:

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2  Defining the Research Desiderates: Economic Geography, Practice Theories… According to Wittgenstein, attempting to follow a rule solely on the basis of a set of explanations (e.g. how to follow a street signal) would raise the possibility of misunderstanding: should I look at the shape, at the text, or at the position of the sign on the road? No matter how detailed the explanation, there would always be further opportunities for misunderstandings that would lead to an infinite regress. However, this runs against our experience and against the fact that we can and do learn how to follow road signs. This is because the understanding of how to follow a rule is always against the background of what is taken-for-granted.

According to Johannessen (1996), Wittgenstein’s work gives us the insight that practices as a given in human life are the “regular ways of acting.” They have a day-­ to-­day performance dimension and at the same time a long-term characteristic. Moreover, they have an aspect of training and are something that people find themselves conforming to. Practices are fundamental to sociability by constituting signs as meaningful mediums for communication through their active dimension and they depict the fundamental contextual character of sense-making (Johannessen 1996). However, Wittgenstein, like Heidegger, is mostly focused on linguistic practices, though he also never denied that his argumentations might also apply to other kinds of knowledge (Nicolini 2013: 40). Following Wittgenstein, Theodore Schatzki (1996), the US-American “philosopher by training,” develops his systematic practice theoretical outline in his book Social Practices. A Wittgensteinian Approach to Human Activity and the Social. Schatzki takes Wittgenstein’s late remarks on mentality and develops a systematizing interpretation in order to develop an account of mind/action. Even though Marxian thought differs substantially from practice thinking in its ontological preposition of the social as the societal whole (see a more extensive discussion in Sect. 2.3.3), Nicolini (2013: 29–33) as well as Hillebrandt (2014: 31) identify another important impulse for practice theoretical thinking in Marx’s version of materialism. Marxian materialism maintains that the material world, though perceptible to the senses, has an objective reality independent of mental processes while not denying the reality of mental processes but affirming that ideas could arise as products and reflections of material conditions. Nicolini (2013: 39) points out that “[o]ne enduring legacy of Marx’s work is the successful attempt to challenge centuries of Western rationalist and mentalist tradition, and to legitimate real activity, what ‘sensuous’ people actually do in their everyday life, as an object of consideration and as an explanatory category in social sciences.” What is different in Marx’s account of materialism in comparison to previous authors is his notion of the unity of thinking and activity, neither of which can be understood apart from their “relationship to a system of social practices” (Nicolini 2013: 31). As part of the “grand theories” in sociology, the work of Pierre Bourdieu and Anthony Giddens is an important milestone for practice thinking (Nicolini 2013: 44–70; Reckwitz 2003: 282–283). Both authors focus on overcoming the dualism of structure and agency and establish practice as the central organizing principle of the social.

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Further building blocks of practice theoretical thinking are the so-called science and technology studies (sometimes also called laboratory studies (Knorr-Cetina 2001b). Science and technology studies are interested in how knowledge is literally “fabricated” through research practice in laboratories. With this new perspective on the production of knowledge, the sociology of knowledge takes an important turn. Instead of focusing on the epistemological and methodological rules of science, here the practical—often depending on chance and mistakes—is emphasized (Hillebrandt 2014: 16). A famous example of this tradition is Bruno Latour’s post-­ humanistic theory of the social as networks that are interpreted as interactions between human and non-human actors (Latour 1999 [1987], 2005). Another important inspiration for practice theoretical thinking comes from post-­ structuralism, which, at first glance, may not be such an obvious catalyst due to its ultimately anti-praxeologic positioning in favor of a text-oriented semiology. Post-­ structuralism has, in its development of an alternative to classical subject theory, given impulses for specific versions of practice theory. Reckwitz (2003: 283) cites Michel Foucault’s late work as an example, where discourse is viewed as constitutive for the definition and structure of the lived world, which is inherently material and heterogeneous. Foucault (1978) regards discourse as tying together the exercise of power to an array of discursive and non-discursive practices with contingent subject-less encompassing effects. This view translates well “into a set of tools for understanding practice” (Nicolini 2013: 197). Not so much at the scale of a general social theory, but rather as a specific research program, cultural studies, performance studies (theories of the performative), and ethnomethodology have further contributed to practice thinking. The British post-Marxist cultural studies establish everyday culture as a legitimate object for sociological inquiry and propose a different concept of culture. This new style of cultural sociology focuses on the practical accomplishment and production of symbolic and cultural forms through actors (Hillebrandt 2014: 18–26). The theory of the performative is based on speech act theory stemming from cultural and literary studies and provides a framework for the analysis of subjects as well as texts. According to Judith Butler (2006 [1990]), speech acts or articulations are understood as acts of public production of meanings that find their paradigmatic case in the production of gender identity through public performances. Ethnomethodology based on Harold Garfinkel (1967) developed a conception of the social as an ongoing accomplishment of context reflexive, skillful practices. Within these practices manifest an everyday methodological knowledge and an intersubjective competence for action (Nicolini 2013: 134–144; Reckwitz 2003: 283). As we have seen here, the family of practice theories has quite a diverse background, which makes it sometimes difficult to grasp resemblances between them (Nicolini 2013: 214). In the following three sections, the common ground of practice theories is discussed, which leads to the definition of practices as nexuses of activities—the understanding of practices used in this study.

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2.3.3  P  ractice Versus Theory, Action Versus Structure: The Ontological Alternative A key departure for the formation of practice theories is the fundamental challenge in social and economic research (of any kind) to adequately match what happens in “practice” (German Praxis) with more or less abstract theorization in social research. On the one hand, we have a need for abstraction to understand the fundamental workings of the “social” or the “economic.” As the economist Joan Robinson so eloquently puts it: “A model which took account of all the variegation of reality would be of no more use than a map at the scale of one to one” (1962: 33). Nevertheless, this “zooming out” requires abstraction in concepts and theorizing. Both abstraction and formalization, however, risk distorting what is going on in practice, especially when theorizing leads to all-encompassing generalizations. Nicolini (2013: 23) identifies a strong tendency in Western academic thought to value abstraction and formal-logicalness over a sound anchoring in—sometimes messy and unpredictable—practice. He furthermore makes an effort to trace the tendency to value formal knowledge—derived from philosophical inquiry over practice/practical knowledge—back through the great modernist thinkers (he names, e.g., Kant, Newton, and Descartes), Western tradition, and Christian thought, to the writings of the Greek philosophers Plato and Aristotle. Nicolini argues that the reinterpretation of Aristotle and Plato meant that the notion of practical wisdom (praxis) had value in its own right and “was eventually displaced by the notion that praxis is simply the practical application of a-practical, purely theoretical insights” (Nicolini 2013: 28). Hillebrandt (2014: 7) claims that even though this problem has been present in social sciences since its beginnings, now more than ever one could get the impression that the quality of descriptions in social sciences is often not valued by how adequately they represent what happens in practice. Instead, the quality of descriptions seems to be valued for how abstract and formal-logical they are. This overvaluation of the abstract and formal, leads to “abstract theorizations to which social reality then has to adapt itself to”10 (Hillebrandt 2014: 7). Hillebrandt argues that the “job” of social researchers is to depict what happens in everyday practice and not to construct abstract theoretical conceptions of how the social works (Hillebrandt 2014: 7–9). This argument has gained a lot of ground in social research through the popularity of the work of Pierre Bourdieu and Anthony Giddens, as will be further discussed in the following. Practice theories have emerged as a conceptual alternative to the classical paradigms in social theory focusing on abstraction, formalization, and structure as the basis for theorizing (Schatzki 2016b). Behind the above-portrayed discussion about

 Translation by author. Original German: “abstrakte Theoriegebäude […] denen sich dann die soziale Wirklichkeit anzupassen habe.” 10

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abstraction versus the particular, we find fundamental ontological11 conceptualizations about the “social” and “action.” Practice theories develop a modified view of both and build on this basis a distinct practice theoretical research program. Skeptics might be perplexed by the interest of practice theoretical writings in social practices and the attempt to establish a social theory and research program on this basis. They may also doubt the novelty of practice theories and ask if they are not just a clever remake of classic action theories, and question in what way social practices are more than regularities in actions or patterns of actions that have been of central interest to social research since its beginnings. However, Reckwitz (2003: 282) points out that critics underestimate the innovativeness of practice theories, which aim to develop a modified understanding of action/acting (and therefore as well for “actor” and “subject”), and especially a modified understanding of the social, by putting practices center stage in terms of a “flat ontology,” which dissolves “structure” and “agency” into one single flat level—or no level at all. One common denominator of the heterogeneous practice theoretical approaches can be found in what they are not (Alkemeyer and Buschmann 2016: 116). Schatzki (1996) explains this from an ontological perspective, whereby social ontologies are understood as sources of ideas about the fundamental nature of social life or social phenomena (Schatzki 2016c). Schatzki points out that most modern social theorists have considered either the (1) individual or the (2) society as a whole “as the fundamental ontological phenomenon” (Schatzki 1996: 1). Giving some historical context, Schatzki goes on to say that this division was “solidified in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries with the association of the divergent political ideals and agendas of liberalism and socialism” (Schatzki 1996: 1). Today, the antagonism between the two opposing ontological-­political schools of thought has faded, but the separation in ontological inclination “still deeply rends social thought” (Schatzki 1996: 1). Positioning society as an ontological-categorical “whole” implies that the total of society is more than the sum of its parts. This view conceptualizes lesser social phenomena, such as family or rituals, as parts of society (Schatzki 1996: 2). For this view, Schatzki identifies a diverse range of authors, for example, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Karl Marx,12 Emile Durkheim, Bronislaw Malinowski, Talcott Parsons, and Niklas Luhmann (1996: 2). Against this conception, post-modern and practice theorists tend to paint an image of a society as less systematic and argue against the conception of society being more than the sum of its parts (without discarding the tangled interconnectedness of the social). In turn, theorists taking the individual as their ontological starting point have “sought to comprehend the social world as consisting somehow in interrelations among individuals alone” (Schatzki 1996: 6). According to Schatzki, schools that  Schatzki defines ontologies as “accounts, or simply ideas, explicit or implicit, about the fundamental nature, structure, dimensions, or elements of some phenomenon or domain thereof” (2016b: 28). 12  Marx’s version of materialism has given an important impulse for practice theoretical thinking as discussed in Sect. 2.3.2. 11

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take this position include neoclassical economics, game theory, or symbolic interactionism. This ontological position, however, has earned criticism from social constructivist and poststructuralist positions. For social constructivists, the construction and formation of the individual, its psyche and identity, presupposes social structures. Poststructuralist theories additionally argue that the individual is internally fragmented. Therefore, from these points of view, the individual cannot be taken as an ontological category (Schatzki 1996: 6–8). As we have seen, it is not unique for practice theorists to critique the two above-­ described opposing ontological positions. What is unique about practice theories is the kind of alternative to these opposing ontological positions practice theorists develop. Schatzki (2016b: 28) emphasizes the uniqueness of practice theories by pointing to its distinctive version of a flat ontology: Practice theories are not the only theories to advance flat social ontologies. Nonetheless, their version of this idea is unique and has significant implications for investigation and explanation.

Practice theorists develop an ontological alternative for these two opposing positions of taking the “individual” or the “society as a whole” as the fundamental ontological category of the social. They position practice(s) as the fundamental category/nature of the social. In both of the mentioned strands of social theory, this ontological move dissolves the notion of conceptualizing “structure” and individual “agency/action” on two levels. Instead of seeing practices as mere points of passage between human subjects and social structure, practice theorists place practices center stage. Structure is seen as constructed through practice, while agency/action is part of practice—making practice an ontological category, while structure and agency are social phenomena based on practice. Most prominently, this overcoming of the duality of structure and agency has been followed by Pierre Bourdieu and Anthony Giddens. Bourdieu with his Outline of a Theory of Practice (1984 [1977]) has very explicitly pursued his project of “praxeology” based on the concepts of “habitus,” “social field,” “practical reason,” and the “incorporation of knowledge.” In his notion of “habitus,” social order as well as individual action are simultaneously grounded without being separable from each other. Anthony Giddens (1979, 1984), in his framework of a “theory of structuration,” develops his version of practice theory in a similar manner with the intention to overcome the dualism of structure (social order) and practice (individual action). He understands agency and structure as recursively constituting dimensions, whereby the actors reproduce the conditions for their actions in practice. Schatzki (2016b: 28–29) describes the commonalities of practice theories’ version of flat ontology in the following terms: A first, lexical commonality [of practice theories] is that the term ‘practices’ is central to their theories and analyses of social phenomena. A second commonality is that they understand practices as social in character, at least in the sense of being something carried out by indefinitely many people. A third commonality is the thesis that (important) social phenomena such as organizations, power, science, education, and transportation are understood as constellations of, aspects of, or rooted in practices. The second and third of these

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c­ ommonalities are ontological ideas about the fundamental nature of something. The unity that defines practice theory as demarcated above is, thus, ontological.

Schatzki emphasizes the uniqueness of practice theories’ flat ontology by pointing out that practices span over time and space, which distinguishes practice theories’ version of flat ontology from “interactional, ethnomethodological, and phenomenological ones, which highlight interactions or local situations” (Schatzki 2016b: 33). At the same time, Schatzki (2016b: 29) also stresses the strong pluralism that practice theories adopt with regard to their understanding of practice and social phenomena, which are constellations or aspects of practices (Schatzki 2016b). For instance, according to Reckwitz (2003: 282–283), Giddens has in comparison a more “structuralist” perspective and Bourdieu a more “actor theoretical” perspective. Andreas Reckwitz establishes an additional way of distinguishing practice theories’ unique characteristics in his widely cited articles on practice theoretical thought. The above-described ontological effort of conceptualizing “the social” as located in practice differs from other strands of cultural theories. According to Reckwitz (2002, 2003), cultural theories explain and understand “[…] actions by reconstructing the symbolic structures of knowledge which enable and constrain the agents to interpret the world according to certain forms, and to behave in corresponding ways” (Reckwitz 2002: 245–246). Cultural theories can be distinguished by what they consider these “symbolic structures of knowledge” to consist of. Reckwitz proposes that all practice theories are cultural theories in this sense, but not all cultural theories are practice theories (Reckwitz 2003: 288). Other strands of cultural theories locate the social in, for example, the mind (culturalist mentalism), chains of signs, symbols and discursive communication (textualism), or in social interaction (intersubjectivism). In “cultural mentalism” culture/ the social is regarded as an ideational phenomenon located in the human mind. In a metaphorical way it is in the head of the actor. Cultural analysis, from a cultural mentalism perspective, is consequently supposed to work out these cognitive-­mental patterns. “Textualism” can be described as the radical form of hermeneutics as well as the radical constructivist system theory that has been developed in close proximity with post-structuralism since the 1960s. The social, and with it the order of knowledge, is located in this case at the level of texts, discourses, public symbols, and communication (Reckwitz 2003: 288). On the other hand, “intersubjectivism” locates the social in interactions. The use of ordinary language is the paradigmatic case for this. Reckwitz describes this, stating that: “In their speech acts, the agents refer to a non-subjective realm of semantic propositions and of pragmatic rules concerning the use of signs. Sociality can be nowhere other than in a constellation of symbolic interactions between agents” (Reckwitz 2002: 249). In sum, in practice theories, social practices are seen as the central lens through which the social can be understood (Reckwitz 2002: 244–248). The dualism of structure and agency and their ontological separation into two separate levels is resolved into one single level of the plenum of practices. Larger social phenomena

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with a structuring nature (laws, social rules, language, power constellations) have to be done in practice (usually in multiple interrelated practices) in order to exist. They are therefore not ontologically separable from practice. Schatzki (2016b) establishes this “flat ontology”13 as a common and unique characteristic for practice theories.14 Regarding this fundamental conceptual debate, a whole series of discussion threads, which are sometimes only loosely connected, provide conceptual building blocks for such a practice theoretical style of thinking and corresponding research program. These common inspirations and building blocks will be discussed in the following section.

Excursus: Scale in a Flat Ontology A cursory glance might suggest practice theories’ flat ontology is at odds with scalar categories, such as the local, regional, national, or global scale. If in a flat ontology there are no ontologically different levels, then this can seem irreconcilable with scalar levels. Scale, however, is an important working category and concept in geographic writing. Therefore, in this excursus, this seeming irreconcilability is addressed. In human geography, scholarly positions regarding “scale” are extremely divergent. Conceptions of scale range from vertical notions and hierarchical conceptions of socially produced scale to those who propose to dissolve the notion of scale completely (Marston et al. 2005). There is a strong tendency in human geography to see scale from a constructivist perspective. The important point in these debates is that scale is not a given ontological category (Marston 2016: 220); that is, scales do not exist per se, they are constructed. What is especially questionable is the hierarchical ordering of the world into the local being at the base and the global being at the apex of a pyramid of scales. For Brenner (2001), processes of scalar structuration are “better understood as a mosaic of unevenly superimposed and densely interlayered scalar geometries” (Brenner 2001: 606). There are conceptions of scale that go along well with practice theories’ flat ontology. For example, Doreen Massay, in her political project to recapture agency in order to address the impact of globalization on connected places, insists that just as the local is concrete, real, and grounded, so is the global. She emphasizes that practices that construct places simultaneously connect them to others. Scale-making in (continued)

 Schatzki is not the first to see flatness as a characteristic of the social (see for instance Latour (2005: 165–172); Marston et al. (2005)). 14  There is some disagreement if a flat ontology applies to all practice theoretical writings (see Nicolini (2017)). 13

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this way is a form of entangled politics of connectivity that exploits and makes use of webs of relations (Massey 2005). Furthermore, socially constructed framings of scale have “rhetorical and material consequences” (Marston 2016: 221). Hierarchical framings of scale are used, for instance, in political discourses to enhance one’s own position. This in turn can have material effects. Scale can in this sense be seen as an epistemological ordering frame (Marston et al. 2005: 420). In this interpretation, scales from a practice theoretical perspective can be perceived as social phenomena (of different spatial-temporal extents, densities, and complexities) that are slices or aspects of the plenum of practices (Schatzki 2016b). In this way, the national scale connects multiple practices while at the same time being constructed by practices within a national territory. Scale is not an ontological category, in the sense that their existence is pre-assumed. In contrast, practice is an ontological category in this interpretation. However, scales as aspects or slices of the plenum of practices can be of epistemological importance in empirical analysis. That means that practice theories’ flat ontology does not impede us from using scalar concepts in empirical analysis. A practice theoretical perspective allows for empirical scales and scaling processes to exist and be conceptualized. The only thing it does not presume is their existence (on an ontological level) per se (Schmid et al. 2019). From this interpretation of scale, we can see that the use of scales as an analytical category is by no means irreconcilable with practice theories’ flat ontology.

2.3.4  Defining Practices as Nexuses of Activities According to Giddens (1979: 216), the problem of what social order consists of is—in its essence—the question of how space and time are bound together in the social world; in other words, how actions are relatively reproducible and repetitive across time and space. The answer, from a practice theoretical perspective, is that actions are not discrete or isolated but always embedded in practices. However, if we look at different performances of a practice, no one performance is exactly the same as another. Following Reckwitz, practices are patterns that “can be filled out by a multitude of single and often unique actions” (2002: 250). If we take, for example, car assembling as a practice—albeit the process of assembling a specific car model is a highly standardized process (at least in the same production plant)— no two cars will be produced exactly in the same manner. Differences can be minute—two screws may be used in a different order—but there will be a difference.

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Variation in performance is in fact a basic feature of practices (Hui 2017), and there are far less routinized practices than car assembling. This tension between the stability and change in social practices is a central topic of theoretical debates in the field of practice theories since it is also the prerequisite for social change from a practice perspective (Shove et al. 2012; Southerton 2012: 339). Nevertheless, some practice theorists tend to emphasize the rule-based, habitual nature of practices (see for instance Bourdieu 1984 [1977]; Giddens 1984; Schatzki 1996) while others stress the openness, variability, and creativity in the performance of practices (e.g., Hui 2017; Knorr-Cetina 2001a; Postill 2010). However, practice theorists from both sides—those who emphasize the stableness and those who stress the variability—agree that practices include both aspects to some degree. So, how can we make sense of this constant variation in practices and what holds practices together in order to be identified as such? How does one performance of a practice relate to another? Or, in other words, what connects a collection of activities in order to become one practice? One way of looking at this problem is to ask the question how the same practice is reproduced over time. Taking this perspective, Giddens (1984: 191) develops the concept of “reproductive circuits.” For Giddens, reproduction includes loops of feed-back and feed-forward between actors monitoring the continuous flow of activity and between the structural properties of social order. Based on Giddens, Shove et al. (2012) develop the distinction between practices-as-performances and practices-as-entities to better understand the paradox of variation and stability. Practices-as-performances are carried out at a certain time in a certain place. This performance in the totality of its details is always unique, such as the assembling of a specific car in one specific production plant in the course of 6 h on October 15, 2020. This makes even highly routinized practices “the site of ongoing reproduction and change” (Hui 2017: 53). Practices-as-entities, on the other hand, consist of three elements (material, competence, and meaning) in the approach of Shove et  al. (2012). These three elements are linked through the instances of performance of a practice in order to become an entity. Practices-as-entities are therefore the sum of what practitioners do to enact a practice. Consequently, practices-as-entities are shaped, reproduced, re-informed, and sometimes changed by all instances of performance (e.g., all instances of car assembling). There are feedback loops between every enactment of a practice and the practice as an entity. Every performance is informed by the practice as an entity, while at the same time the practice as an entity is informed by every performance. This way, there is a constant cross-referencing in which the possibility of change is anchored (Shove et al. 2012: 97–105). For Reckwitz, a practice is a “routinized type of behavior” (2002: 249). If taken in isolation, this can be misleading because it opens up the interpretation of practices as the “habits of individuals” overlooking the recursive and especially intersubjective character of practice. Practices are the doing and saying, thinking, and feeling that we share with others. That we share them is crucial for our understanding of the world. Practices exist before the individual acts, and they enable, structure, and limit their action. Not only are they executed by us, but also they exist around us and historically before us. They circulate independently of individual

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subjects and yet depend on being performed by them (Schäfer 2016a: 12). Individuals thus are conceptualized as “carriers” of a practice. In this way, understandings, knowing-hows, or meanings are not seen as personal attributes of actors but as constituent elements of a practice (or qualities of a practice)—of which a particular individual is a carrier (Reckwitz 2002: 250; Shove et al. 2012: 63–80). Another way of approaching the problem of what makes up the nexus or glue that huddles different activities together into one practice is to ask how we can make sense of practices. In practice theories, it is common to see practices as bound by tacit, methodological, and interpretative knowledge (implicit knowledge schemes)15 into socially understandable bundles or nexuses of activities (Reckwitz 2003: 289). Here, Wittgenstein’s notion of “practical understanding” comes in. Schatzki (2001) develops a systematic account of the notion of “practical understanding” grounded in existential and phenomenological philosophy. He formulates three characteristics of practices that draw collections of activities into one identifiable practice: understandings, rules, and teleoaffectivity. To understand how these characteristics are linked, it is important to understand three aspects: First, Schatzki’s conception of the mind—which is derived from Wittgenstein, and which is where understandings, rules, and teleoaffectivity are mediated—establishes the psyche as a medium “through which the activities that compose a practice are noncausally organized” (2001: 50). What is important to note here is that the mind is not an ontological category causing practices, but the medium through which they are organized. Understandings, for Schatzki, entail the know-how to identify doings or sayings; to prompt as well as to respond to such doings or sayings. Consequently, the doings and sayings that compose a given practice are “linked by the cross-referencing and interdependent know-hows that they express concerning their performance, identification, instigation, and response” (Schatzki 2001: 51). Second, practices contain sets of rules (that practitioners are supposed to observe) that link individual doings and sayings together. Rules are “explicit formulations that enjoin or school in particular actions” (Schatzki 2001: 51). Third, teleoaffective structures link activities to one practice. Teleoaffectivity is composed of teleology (the orientation toward ends) and affectivity (how things matter; Schatzki 2001: 52). Teleoaffective structure is in Schatzki’s words “a range of acceptable or correct ends, acceptable or correct tasks to carry out for these ends, acceptable or correct beliefs (etc.) given which specific tasks are carried out for the sake of these ends, and even acceptable or correct emotions out of which to do so” (2001: 53). With these considerations, Schatzki stresses the directedness of feelings and emphasizes that human activity is goal oriented. Even though practice theories differ considerably in their vocabulary and conceptual definitions, the implicit knowledge schemes and practical understanding are common themes for practice theoretical writings. Strongly linked with the idea of

15  Practices also contain forms of “codified” knowledge. However, the notion of “practical understanding” is seen as what holds practices together.

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practical understanding are the notions of affect/emotion and materiality: Practical understanding cannot be separated from doing. Doing on the other hand is a bodily affair that usually involves all sorts of materials, things, artifacts, and bodily experiences (Reckwitz 2016). Emotions, or affects, are conceptualized from a practice point of view as “embodied understandings” (Everts et al. 2011: 327). Reckwitz (2016) elaborates a practice theoretical perspective on affects,16 defining them as social and non-subjective, in the sense that they are not a characteristic or property but an activity. They are physical, bodily pleasure-aversion excitations (German Lust-Unlust Erregungen) that are directed to specific subjects, objects, or ideas (Reckwitz 2016: 170). Affects are seen as part of social practices. As soon as an individual carries out a practice, it realizes the affects that are part of the practice in question. To give us a better grasp of this conceptualization, Reckwitz gives the example of falling in love in the twenty-first century. If a human falls in love, this is not an individual feeling but part of the practice of falling in love as it has developed in Western culture since the eighteenth century. Falling in love in the eighteenth century was composed of a set of activities and cultural understandings that in turn were interwoven with a specific set of affects (longing, joy, fascination for another human being, etc.). Bound up with the practice of falling in love are the stories of falling in love we encounter in novels and films, in which the codes and affects of falling in love are represented and through which their meaning is influenced (Reckwitz 2016: 170). It is important to note that all practices have an affective component, not just the most obvious ones such as falling in love. Even the practices of scientific inquiry in chemistry or biology cannot be seen separated from feelings of curiosity and wonder. We might say that a practice needs to include specific motivations to be carried out. From a practice theoretical perspective, an individual does not approach a practice with their own motivation; the motivation is an integral part of the practice itself (Reckwitz 2016: 172). Similar to affects, materials are an integral part of practices and their enactment. In the conception of materiality, we can detect the influence of the above-mentioned science and technology studies, especially Bruno Latour’s actor-network-theory. While there are different approaches to including materiality into practice thinking, one important attempt has been formulated by Schatzki in his “site of the social” (see Schatzki 2002). Schatzki calls the material dimension of practices “material arrangements.” In his conception, material arrangements and practices form bundles: By a material arrangement, incidentally, I mean linked people, organisms, artifacts, and things. To say that practices and arrangements bundle is to say (1) that practices effect, use, give meaning to, and are inseparable from arrangements while (2) arrangements channel, prefigure, facilitate, and are essential to practices. (Schatzki 2015: 1)

 Reckwitz favors the term “affect” over “emotion” since emotion is more easily understood as a property of an individual. 16

2.4  Research Desiderate Practice Transfer in Practice Theories

61

This quote underlines that practices are inseparable from materials. Even thinking practices, such as solving mathematical problems, require physical-chemical processes in the brain of the individual in question. In sum, the practical understandings (or tacit knowledge schemes) that glue the nexuses of activities that practices consist of together are inseparable from materials or affects. Shove et al. (2012), in a simplifying move, take these ideas together into three elements of practices: material (material arrangements in Schatzki’s terminology), competence (tacit knowledge schemes and codified knowledge types), and meaning (affects and motivations, etc.) (for a more extensive discussion of the elements of a practice see Sect. 4.1). This consolidation does brush over some of the more intricate details of practice theoretical thinking, but it opens up a conceptual framework we can use to look at how practices interconnect and form larger social phenomena, and how, through interconnectedness, social change is spurred. The theoretical approach of Shove et al. (2012) regarding the dynamics of practice will be used in Chap. 4 as the conceptual basis for the practice theoretical deliberations on practice transfer through organizations. Since the transfer of a practice across geographical space also always requires a degree of change in the interconnected tissue of practices at the transfer destination, this approach is most useful. This section has discussed what makes up the nexus—the glue—which huddles different activities together to form a practice. When working with empirical data, a question that almost always comes up is how to differentiate one practice from another. A common variation or other aspect of this question is to ask if a “smaller” activity such as engine manufacturing should be seen as a practice in its own right, or as an activity within the “larger” practice of car assembling. These methodological questions will be further addressed in the methodology chapter (Sect. 3.4.3) of this study, and also in the empirical analysis chapter in the introduction of Sect. 5.1.

2.4  R  esearch Desiderate Practice Transfer in Practice Theories One often-heard criticism of practice theories is that they best apply to small or local phenomena and only very poorly to larger phenomena such as international finance systems, markets, institutions, or power. Recent practice theoretical writings have increasingly addressed this criticism. Especially important to highlight here is the anthology edited by Allison Hui, Theodore Schatzki, and Elisabeth Shove (2017b) on The Nexus of Practices: Connections, Constellations, Practitioners (see also Kemmis et  al. 2014; Schatzki 2016a, b; Shove et  al. 2012; Shove and Trentmann 2019).

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In order to engage with the practice theoretical take on larger social phenomena, Hui et al. (2017a) conceptualize connections between different practices as “threading through” and “suffusing.” They define “threading through” as connecting various practices through an object (or through another practice) by moving or advancing “through the nexus of practices, thereby linking the practices through which they pass or to which they are connected” (Hui et al. 2017a: 4). “Suffusing” is more elusive and means to “spread over or through as with a liquid or gas – suggesting that certain phenomena can pervade practices and complexes thereof, providing a kind of atmosphere in which actions are performed and practices carried forward” (Hui et al. 2017a: 4) (one example given for an element that connects practices by suffusion are the above-mentioned “affects” conceptualized by Reckwitz (2016)). The idea and metaphor of “threading through” is conceptually linked to the term “connective tissue” used by Shove et  al. (2012: 36) used to describe what holds larger social phenomena together. Intersections or connections between practices can thus be either material or abstract. For a better visualization of this idea, Hui et al. (2017a, b: 53) cite the examples of a laptop (material) used for work and leisure practices, and clock time (abstract), which is a shared category in multiple different practices. Through their connections, practices form different types of constellations (Schatzki 2015). In the terminology developed by Shove et  al. (2012: 84)—which is mostly used in  this study—practices form bundles or complexes. Bundles are “loose-knit patterns based on the co-location and co-existence of practices” (Shove et al. 2012: 81), while complexes are “stickier and more integrated combinations, some so dense that they constitute new entities in their own right” (Shove et al. 2012: 81).17 Even though connections between practices and constellations of multiple practices as bundles or complexes are an important object of recent theorization in the field of practice theories, they “have so far received relatively limited discussion and empirical investigation” (Hui 2017: 53). This dissertation adds to the recent practice theoretical discussions on the interconnected constellations of practices by integrating the element of geographic space into the discussion; asking how bundles of practices span over geographic distance and how practices can travel to other places via their interconnections to other practices. This question has not been addressed so far, as the intensive discussions of existing literature in the previous sections show. In this study, practice transfer is examined within one MNE across national boundaries. More specifically, the study focuses on skill formation practices that are transferred from Germany to the three research regions in China, India, and Mexico. This setting enables a closer look at how the transfer or the change of place affects the practice as well as the context to which the practice is transferred. Especially when taking into account the importance of MNEs for globalization (Dicken 2015), but also on a more general note when considering how practices diffuse in space,

 A more extensive discussion of large social phenomena from a practice theoretical perspective will follow in Sects. 4.5 and 4.8, in relation to the conceptualizations on practice transfer. 17

63

2.5  Summary of the Research Desiderates

this practice theoretical view on practice transfer also opens up a perspective of globalization or “globalizing” as the “traveling of practices.”

2.5  Summary of the Research Desiderates As I have discussed in the previous sections, this study aims to contribute to economic geography and practice theoretical thinking by taking up a research object— the transfer of skill formation practices in MNEs—which is still somewhat empirically and conceptually underexplored in both fields. Multidisciplinary studies on practice transfer have empirically made headway in the research field. However, conceptual explanations of what has to be overcome in practice transfer have proven insufficient to account for the findings in the empirical analysis of the data of this study (see Sects. 2.2 and 2.4). Figure 2.7 graphically maps the research desiderates of this study and outlines the blind spots in the three research fields: economic geography, practice theories, and practice transfer. In Fig. 2.8, the research desiderates that have been detected and extensively discussed in this chapter are summarized according to the three research fields. The research desiderates are divided into “conceptual desiderates” and “empirical desiderates.” This distinction is of a thematic nature. The conceptual desiderates must be addressed through theory-building. The empirical desiderates, on the other hand, can be tackled by studying a specific empirical phenomenon. In this dissertation, the here outlined research desiderates are approached in Chaps. 4 and 5. A synopsis of how this study fills these blind spots can be found in Sect. 4.9, in the case of the conceptual desiderates, and in Sect. 5.4, in the case of the empirical desiderates. First, however, I discuss the methodological approach of this study in the following chapter, in order to give the reader an understanding of how the theorizing undertaken in Chap. 4 and the findings discussed in Chap. 5 came into being.

Economic geography

Practice theories

Research desiderate Knowledge transfer Proximity /distance

Practice transfer

Fig. 2.7  Mapping this study’s research desiderates. (Source: Own representation)

Conceptual desiderates

Despite important discussions in economic geography on practices as important carriers of tacit forms of knowledge and on the global diffusion of practices, practice transfer within MNE has received very little attention (Sect. 2.2.1).

1

Technical skills needed in production are still mostly left out in debates on the international organization of knowledge in economic geography (Sect. 1.2).

Existing institutional insights on practice transfer cannot sufficiently explain the differences of practices in transfer (Sect. 2.2.4). 4

The notions of proximity/distance in economic geography are not yet fully equipped to address “what needs to be overcome” in a practice transfer across distance (Sects. 2.2.4 and 2.2.5). 2 3

Debates on knowledge transfer in economic geography although applying a practice perspective tend to stay with this focus on the transfer of knowledge within communities of practice. The transfer of practices—seen as containing knowledge—across space is not yet explored (Sects. 2.2.1 and 2.2.2). 1

Economic geography

The transfer of training practices in MNEs is still an underexplored research field (Sect. 2.1.1). The transfer of various practices in a similar field and the differences between their transfer has so far been insufficiently researched (Sect. 2.2.4).

Institutional distance as an explanation for the “what needs to be overcome” in practice transfer has proven insufficient as an explanation for explaining the empirical findings of this study (Sect. 2.2.4).

A practice theoretical perspective on the topic of practice transfer has hardly been explored so far (Sects. 2.2.3 and 2.2.4).

Research field pracce transfer (muldisciplinary)

4. What role do institutions play in the transfer of practices between territories (e.g. 4 nations, regions)? When and how do institutions impact practices in transfer?

3. 3 Why are some practices “more difficult” to transfer across space than others?

2. 2 Why are practices transformed when they are transferred across space?

1. 1 What is the spatiality of “knowing” in practice transfer?

Research questions (Sect. 1.3):

How practices are transferred across geographic distance has only been sparsely empirically studied from a practice theoretical perspective (Sect. 2.4).

A practice theoretical view on MNEs as multilocal complexes of practices is still underexplored (Sect. 2.3.1).

This study contributes to recent debates in practice theoretical writings on larger constellations of practices. In these debates the transfer of practices is not yet thoroughly conceptualized (Sect. 2.4)

Pracce theories

Fig. 2.8  Conceptual and empirical desiderates in a nutshell. (Source: Own representation)

Empirical desiderates

64 2  Defining the Research Desiderates: Economic Geography, Practice Theories…

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Whittington R (2006) Completing the practice turn in strategy research. In: Organization studies 27(5), S. 613–634. https://doi.org/10.1177/0170840606064101 Wiemann J (2017) Export of German-style vocational education: a case study in the automotive industry in Puebla, Mexico. Int J Automot Technol Manag 17:208–222 Wiemann K, Pilz M (2017) Berufliche Ausbildung durch deutsche und mexikanische Unternehmen in Mexiko – ein Home-International Vergleich. Tertium Comparationis 23:217–245 Wiemann J, Wiemann K, Pilz M, Fuchs M (2018a) Duale Ausbildung im Ausland: Ein “Heimspiel”?: Zur Qualifizierung von Produktionsbeschäftigten in deutschen Unternehmen in China, Indien und Mexiko. In: Pilz M, Gessler M, Fuchs M (eds) Konzepte und Wirkungen des Transfers Dualer Berufsausbildung. Springer, Wiesbaden, pp 359–388 Wiemann K, Li J, Wiemann J, Fuchs M, Pilz M (2018b) Lost (in) VET: Zum Stand der Forschung in der internationalen Berufsbildungszusammenarbeit aus Sicht verschiedener Wissenschaftsdisziplinen. In: Pilz M, Gessler M, Fuchs M (eds) Konzepte und Wirkungen des Transfers Dualer Berufsausbildung. Springer VS, Wiesbaden, pp 13–58 Wiemann J, Schäfer S, Faller F (2019) Praxistheorie in der Wirtschaftsgeographie. In: Schäfer S, Everts J (eds) Handbuch Praktiken und Raum: Humangeographie nach dem Practice Turn, 1st edn. Transcript, Bielefeld, pp 299–315 Winch C (2011) Skill – a concept manufactured in England? In: Brockmann M, Clarke L, Winch C (eds) Knowledge skills and competence in the European labour market: what’s in a vocational qualification? Routledge, New York Wittgenstein L (1969) Über Gewissheit. Blackwell, Oxford Wrana J, Diez JR (2016) Can multinational enterprises introduce new institutions to host countries? An explorative study about MNEs’ training programs with educational institutes and their potential influence on Vietnam’s vocational education sector. Geogr Z 104:158–182

Chapter 3

Discussing the Methodological Approach

Abstract Chapter 3 discusses the methodological approach. Based on epistemological considerations to understand “researching” as a practice which studies other practices, in this chapter the scope of the study is critically reflected. First, it provides a short epistemological underpinning of methodologically work with practice theories, followed by a discussion of the three phases of the research: research design, data generation, and data analysis. Special attention is paid to the question how these research phases affect the theorizing presented in this book. Keywords  Methods · Epistemological approximation · Research design · Geographical scope of study · Critical reflections The central research interest of this study is to understand the phenomenon of practice transfer in MNEs across distance. To make the validity and significance of a study accessible and assessable for the reader, it is paramount to put the conceptual and empirical contribution into context, for without a critical and reflexive discussion of the methods used in a study to generate new knowledge, the generated knowledge cannot be fully understood and evaluated by the reader (Reuber and Pfaffenbach 2005: 12–15). This chapter therefore discusses the epistemological positioning of practice theories in Sect. 3.1. On this basis, I then discuss the research design of this study (Sect. 3.2), the data generation (Sect. 3.3), and the data analysis (Sect. 3.4). Meanwhile, I especially focus on how the methods used influence the conceptual and empirical contributions of the study.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 J. Wiemann, Geographies of Practice Transfer, Economic Geography, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-95185-6_3

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3.1  Theorizing with Practice Theories—An Epistemological Approximation [P]ractice is perfectly happy to stay in the background, supporting our daily commerce with the world without the need to come under the spotlight. In this sense, practice always needs to be brought to the fore, to be made visible or, more precisely, it needs to be turned into an epistemic object in order to enter discourse. This, in turn, requires work and activity: another practice. When we study practice we thus always and necessarily scrutinize two practices at the same time: our epistemic practice, and what concerns us. (Nicolini 2013: 217)

As the citation above states, from a practice theoretical perspective, doing research is considered a practice. Here, practice theories insist on the intricate entangledness of practice and theory (see Sect. 2.3.3). Theorizing is understood as part of the epistemic practice of researching—or even as a practice in its own right (Schmidt 2016: 245–250). That researching is also a practice is present throughout the different strands of practice theory (Geiselhart et al. 2019a). The emphasis on theorizing as a practice implies that practice theoretical epistemologies can be roughly categorized as following the constructivist paradigm (for the categorization of paradigms see Glesne 2011: 7) and thus do not claim that “good science” is as objective and impartial as the positivistic and neo-positivistic paradigms suggest. Equally, there is a broad strand of research within the field of human (and economic geography) that works under the umbrella of a constructivist paradigm (Mattissek et  al. 2013). Practice theories, however, take a particular outlook on the constructivist view that knowledge is a social construct: they see the construction of knowledge happening in and through practices. As all practices include (or are based in) materiality (see Sect. 2.3.4), this materiality in turn has a substantial influence on the process of knowledge construction as well as the knowledge (contained in practices) itself. This specific form of constructivism has also been taken up in human and economic geography, especially in studies on non-representational theory (Amin and Thrift 2000; Thrift 2008) and in the German-speaking literature where we can find the concept of everyday regionalization (Werlen 1999). But how does this particular constructivist epistemological stance translate into “how to do good science” when parting from a practice theoretical framework? According to Nicolini (2013: 215) the Belgian philosopher of science Isabelle Stengers provides “possibly the strongest available version [of the argument] to date.” Following Stengers et al. (1997), good science (in all disciplines—Stengers is a chemist by training herself) makes us more articulate about the world, as it leads us to an appreciation of the differences that matter. To be articulate entails the possibility to make new connections between different entities in the world. Being able to make new connections in turn enables us to act in a more informed way (Stengers et al. 1997). Furthermore, as with every practice, researching contains meanings and motivations. Consequently, researching is considered part of the social fabric it aims to understand and analyze as an epistemic object. Thus, no neutral observation is

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possible. Every analytical endeavor, in consequence, has a standpoint or position, as well as an impact (Geiselhart et al. 2019b: 58). As a result, it is methodologically advised to be explicit about the intentions guiding one’s research.1 An open and critical reflection of the research process, and the conclusions and concepts derived from that researching process, is prerequisite. The relationship between researched practice(s) (epistemic object) and researching as a practice can be conceptualized as interconnected practices (in parallel to the heuristic of connected practices relevant to this study in Fig. 4.2). A researching practice is composed of “component practices” (for a definition of “component practice” see Sect. 4.6). The differentiation between the component practices that form part of the researching practice is a conceptual one, since theorizing and the other component practices of researching—designing a study, generating data, and analyzing data—are profoundly intertwined. Nevertheless, this conceptual distinction is a useful tool for making the effects these component practices have on theorizing visible and accountable. Accountability is vital, since it is methodological transparency and rigor that differentiates science from non-science in regard to the production of new knowledge (through theorizing) (Schmidt 2016). Which component practices have a significant effect on the component practice of theorizing is something that has been reflected on intensively in manuals and handbooks on research methods—even though this is mostly undertaken without conceptualizing researching as a practice from a practice theoretical perspective. In fact, the claim that researchers should reflect on their perceptions and the implications of their actions on the product of their work, that is, their theories and concepts, is nothing new. Nor is it restricted to practice theoretical work. It has become firmly established as a quality criterion for “good” qualitative social research throughout the disciplines (Flick et al. 2017: 23). In this study, critical junctures between component practices of researching and theorizing are the designing of the research, the data generating, and the data analyzing (see Fig. 3.1). These three component practices are not chosen randomly; the selection is based on insights of handbooks and manuals on qualitative research in human geography and other related fields (Flick 2011; Glesne 2011; Hay 2008; Mattissek et al. 2013; Reuber and Pfaffenbach 2005). Designing the research entails making fundamental decisions regarding the scope of the study: the aim of the study is defined and methods are chosen and calibrated—all while considering the resources available and the organizational context of the study (Flick 2011: 121–172). During the data generating, the field access is determined and the positionality of the researcher/research team is established (Glesne 2011: 139–161). In the course of the data analyzing, in the case of qualitative studies, the data is typically systematically coded and insights are generated on their basis (Kuckartz 2012).

 One form of making the intentions and stance behind the research presented in a text semantically explicit and visible is by using the first person “I” instead of passive forms. This is the reason why I decided to use this pronoun consequentlyin this book. 1

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Researched practices (epistemic object)

Researching “Component” practice of researching with significant effect on theorizing:

Designing the research Generating data Analyzing data

Material

Competence

Meaning

“Component practice” of researching which produces new knowledge that has to be methodologically accounted for:

Theorizing

Practice-time profile

Fig. 3.1  Heuristic of connected practices in the research process (The three elements of a practice (material, competence, and meaning) and the graphical representations used for them in this study will be further discussed in Sect. 4.1. Reasons for the different sizes of the elements lie in the in Sect. 4.6 developed concept of “degree of complexity of a practice.”). (Source: Own representation)

The following sections give an account of how these three critical junctures connect the researched practice with the theorizing and discuss the junctures’ implications for the theorizing and resulting concepts presented in this text.

Excursus: Practice Theories’ Epistemology Conceptualizing and empirically exploring researching as a practice (in all fields—natural sciences and social sciences equally), and exploring the epistemological consequences of such a stance has been most explicitly taken up by the science and technology studies (STS are an important point of departure for the current bandwagon of practice theoretical thinking; for further explanations see Sect. 2.3.2). While exploring the (social) construction of scientific facts, Latour and his colleagues found themselves confronted with the finding that it is not only human actors that shape the construction of knowledge, but also non-human actors. For instance, the behavior of bacteria or gravitational forces significantly influences what human actors can learn about them. This exploration led Latour to an ontological shift in how to define the social—emphasizing the role of non-human actors as mediators in the network of associations that form the basis of actor-network-theory (Latour 2005: 87–109). Latour thus goes back and forth between epistemological and ontological conclusions. (continued)

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Another important contribution within the diverse family of practice theories that captures what a practice theoretical epistemological stance might entail has been undertaken by Bourdieu (Nicolini 2013: 61–66). Bourdieu argues for a critical and reflexive epistemological program: if social situations are consistently understood as practices in progress, they must also be understood from the production of meaning immanent in practices. This means that only from the respective situations it emerges what is thematically interesting or problematic about practices. And consequently, only here can it become clear what the object of research is. Bourdieu’s epistemic approach therefore aims to describe practice in the field, and, at the same time, to reflexively explore the researching and theory-building practices in order to better understand their specific relationships and the effects associated with those relationships (Bourdieu 1976: 228–317). What both Latour’s and Bourdieu’s approaches have in common is an emphasis on the connection between ontology and epistemology, between our ideas about the fundamental nature of a phenomenon (in this case the social), and how we can know something about it. Practice theorists generally see practice and theory as being in a reciprocal relationship, that social theory is not possible without empirical research about practice and vice versa (Hillebrandt 2014: 118; Schäfer and Daniel 2015). The emphasis on this connection can even be found in the very label that lumps this family of theories together: practice (as the fundamental phenomenon of the social) theories (as what we know about this phenomenon).

3.2  Designing the Research One critical juncture between the researching practice and theorizing is the research design. The research design connects the research interest with a plausible methodological approach. Here decisions on the selection of research field and research regions/areas, sampling (e.g., interviewees or other possible data sources) and the methods of data generation and data analysis are taken. These decisions should consider the research interest (see Sect. 1.2), epistemological concerns (see Sect. 3.1), and methodological questions, and ask how what we want to know can be obtained through the use of methods while taking into account material and time resource restrictions (Flick 2011: 172–192). In this study, a comparative qualitative research design is used. The comparison is between three selected research regions in China, India, and Mexico. The main method for gathering data was semi-structured expert interviews with human resource managers and other employees in charge of training within German MNEs. These took place in the research regions and in some headquarters in Germany.

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Furthermore, interviews with experts within the local skill formation systems were conducted. All interviews were fully transcribed and analyzed with MAXQDA software. In the following sections, the selection of the geographic scope of this research, the criteria and strategies of sampling (interview partners in MNEs and other experts), the usage of semi-structured interviews to generate data about practices, the composition of the interview guide, and the documentation methods for plant and training center visits are discussed. Finally, a short summary of the implications for theorizing of these strategic decisions is given.

3.2.1  Professional Positionality: The Organizational Context To critically reflect on the research design, it is helpful to understand the organizational context in which this dissertation was produced. Not only does this give important insights into the material and time resources which were available—and used—for this study, but such an understanding is also vital for a critical reflection of the professional positionality within the research project. The professional positionality is one of three dimensions of positionality that Geiselhart et al. (2019b) see as essential to a sound critical reflection of research methodology when using a practice theoretical approach. The concept of professional positionality is influenced by Bourdieu’s epistemological considerations elaborated above (see Sect. 3.1). Professional positionality describes the professional frameworks, for example, professional or disciplinary requirements, in which the researcher’s work is integrated. It discusses the positionality that results from socialization in a specific field of work. However, it is important to specify that this dimension does not refer to an individual positioning of the researcher—such as the researcher’s individual professional imprinting and any associated (unconscious) preferences, dislikes, or personal attitudes and emotions. Instead the professional positionality reflects the researcher’s own structural integration (e.g., in the system of higher education and science) (Geiselhart et al. 2019a: 372–373). This dissertation was part of the research project titled “Global Strategies and Local Forms of Technical Vocational Education and Training in German Multinational Companies – A Comparison in Emerging Economies” (short: global-­ strategies project) which took place from April 2015 until August 2018 and was financed by the German Research Foundation (DFG—Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft). The research assignment here was to undertake basic research, not contract or applied research. Consequently, there were no expectations of the funding organization on the content of the project’s resulting theorizing. However, there were explicit expectations on the quality and (to a lesser degree) quantity of the output generated, especially in the form of academic articles in peer-­ reviewed national and international scientific journals, and other appropriate media. The current dissertation is therefore not the only result of theorizing within the global-research project: within the research team we produced a number of

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publications in academic journals as well as book chapters. Some of these publications were produced with the whole research team, some in pairs or individually. This dissertation differs from the other publications in that it takes a very explicit practice theoretical perspective. However, it is important to stress that this perspective was developed in context with these other lines of inquiry, and thus is influenced by them. Furthermore, the global-strategies project was a collaborative effort between the Chair of Economics and Business Education (Matthias Pilz (senior researcher) and Kristina Wiemann (doctoral student)), the Department of Economic and Social Geography (Martina Fuchs (senior researcher), and the author of this dissertation, Judith Wiemann2 (doctoral student)), all of whom were located at the Faculty of Management, Economics, and Social Sciences at the University of Cologne, in Germany. It should therefore be noted that the global-strategies project was developed in an interdisciplinary setting between economic geography on the one hand and (comparative) vocational education studies (German Vergleichende Berufsbildungsforschung) on the other. The research tradition of comparative vocational education studies in Germany is strongly interested in educational transfers from Germany to other countries (Wiemann et al. 2018a). Consequently, these studies have had a decisive influence on the global-strategies project. In addition, the (educational) transfer—in this dissertation framed as a practice transfer—studied in the global-strategies project was also from Germany to three other countries, China, India, and Mexico. The innovative spin in the case of the global-strategies project was to look at MNEs and the internal transfer of training practices, not on educational transfer at the scale of educational systems (Wiemann et  al. 2018b). Economic geography, on the other hand, has a long standing research interest in the internationalization of companies (Dicken 2015).3 This is where the two research traditions have found a fruitful encounter in the global-strategies project. Nevertheless, the combination of two disciplinary perspectives required constant exchange about research perspectives and calibration of the methods and instruments (such as the interview guide). This exchange and calibration was done in regular meetings of the whole research team. The data analyzed for this dissertation was generated as part of the global-­ strategies project. The material consists of 183 interviews and additional numerous plant and training center visits, also documented. How this data gives a substantial insight into the transfer of skill formation practices within MNEs is shown in the following sections. In a nutshell, this dissertation (and thus its resulting theorizing) was part of a bigger research project where different lines of inquiry, mostly from two different disciplinary backgrounds (economic geography and vocational education studies)  Please note that the two project members, Kristina Wiemann and I, only coincidentally share the same last name. 3  The research interest this dissertation in particular has followed and the different disciplinary and thus professional positioning taken up are discussed with great detail in the introductory chapter and the theory chapter of this book. 2

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formed the research design. The different design choices taken within this context and their impact on the theorizing are further discussed in the following sections. The following section describes the geographical scope of the global-strategies project, in order to give insight into the selection criteria for the research areas. Then the methods used in data generation are described and critically scrutinized.

3.2.2  S  elected Research Regions: Geographical Scope of the Study To understand the research design developed in the global-strategies project, it is important to take a closer look at the selected national and regional contexts, and the arguments for their selection. The research design of the global-strategies project compared the three selected emerging economies and was therefore a “comparative case study design” (Bartlett and Vavrus 2017). The project was interested in the skill formation strategies and practices of German MNEs manufacturing in emerging economies. Such entities face special challenges in securing sufficiently and suitably skilled personnel for their production facilities. Therefore, growth in industrial production in emerging economies can lead to shortages in well-trained workers. In addition, there is often a general lack of experience-based skills and problem-solving skills. This lack becomes especially evident in comparison to the workforce in Germany, which consists of high numbers of technically trained personnel educated in the dual apprenticeship system. Moreover, training certificates are difficult to compare internationally, further hindering the location of suitably trained employees. The competition for well-trained personnel in emerging economies can also result in high levels of worker fluctuation (Fuchs et  al. 2016; Fuchs and Pilz 2014—unpublished). In the global-strategies project, the three research regions were selected as part of a most-similar, most-different qualitative case study design—as is often used in comparative vocational education studies to assess differences in vocational education systems (Georg 2005). China, India, and Mexico were selected, as all three countries are important locations for German direct investments in different industry sectors (chemical, electro, automotive, and machine industry sectors) (Statistisches Bundesamt 2019: 450). This ensured that an appropriate number of German MNE subsidiaries producing in these different industrial sectors could be found in all three countries. In other words, all three selected emerging economies (here seen as territories, for the definition of “territory” in this study see Sect. 4.8) are similar—without neglecting that there are vast differences within these economies—in that they show the conditions for industrial manufacturing practices. From studies on MNEs and insights from the generated data of this study, we know that the MNEs often manufacture the same products, such as the same car models, or the same pharmacological product, in different territories (Morgan et al. 2003). Demonstrating the possibilities for industrial manufacturing is by no means

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a precondition met by all territories (e.g., in territories that are natural reserves industrial production is even explicitly forbidden). Industrial manufacturing practices need certain infrastructural, labor market related, and business conditions to be put into action at a new location (or speaking in terminology developed later in this study: Industrial manufacturing practices require a specific kind of texture or composition of the fabric of interrelated practices at their enactment locations). Other factors might not be a necessary precondition but have an enabling effect for the occurrence of industrial production practices in a territory, such as international trade agreements or national labor laws (Dicken 2015; Gertler 2004). Even more specifically, all three emerging economies not only demonstrate industrial manufacturing practices, but practices that can also be found in German MNEs. So again, the territorial institutions in these countries allow for manufacturing practices undertaken through German MNEs. This precondition is by no means possible in all territories—for instance, to my knowledge, there are no “German” manufacturing plants in North Korea. In sum, all three selected emerging economies are similar in that manufacturing practices utilized by German MNEs are found many times over in these territories. Moreover, they are similar in that they are emerging economies where the training of production workers is an issue of great importance. China, India, and Mexico differ in how the training of production workers is organized. They have substantially different vocational education systems, or, in the terminology developed in Chap. 4, they differ with regard to their territorial institution aiming to influence skill formation practices. Pilz (2017) developed a typology of how to differentiate vocational education systems on the basis of four indicators: skill formation, stratification, standardization, and practice of learning. Based on Busemeyer and Trampusch (2012) with skill formation, Pilz refers to a distinction of vocational education systems considering a stakeholder perspective. There are potentially three stakeholders involved in skill formation: employers, the state, and the employees themselves. Busemeyer and Trampusch (2012: 12) distinguish four types of skill formation systems: statist (high state involvement, low employer involvement), segmentalist (low state involvement, high employer involvement), collective (high state involvement and high employer involvement), and liberal (low state involvement and low employer involvement; here employees get involved in their skill formation individually). In Pilz’s typology, China appears as a statist skill formation system (state dominance) while India and Mexico fall into the category of liberal skill formation systems with individualized skill formation and involvement by the employees. “Stratification” describes the differentiation and separation between general education and vocational education and training, as well as the possible existence of a hierarchical order or permeability between the respective career tracks. It is associated with the value that is attributed to vocational education since there is a tendency to regard vocational education as inferior to general education. A high degree of stratification in a vocational education system means, for instance, that it is rather difficult for students to change from a vocational track to a general education track and vice versa. In Pilz’s typology, all three emerging economies show a high degree

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Table 3.1  Typology of vocational education systems of selected countries for fieldwork

Skill formation

Stratification

Standardization Practice of learning

China

State dominance

high

high

low

India

Individualized (low state, high low employer activity)

low

high

Mexico

Individualized (low state, high low employer activity)

low

high

high

high

Germany State and company dominance

high

Source: Pilz (2017: 481), shortened by the author

of stratification, making it difficult for vocational students to change to non-­ vocational educational tracks. The three selected emerging economies show more differences regarding their degree of standardization, referring to the structures and processes of vocational education and to what degree these are subject to unifying mechanisms. This includes, for example, the standardization of curricula and certification processes, the resources available to vocational schools, and the qualification of the education and training teachers and professors. Here, China shows a high degree of standardization, while India and Mexico account for only a low degree (Table 3.1). Furthermore, Pilz differentiates the practice of learning4 including the vocational-­ pedagogical perspective. Here, the typologization is especially focused on the concrete relevance of vocational practice and the roles of teaching and learning processes within the employment system—in other words, to what degree is the teaching process oriented toward the real vocational practice, or kept at an abstract theoretical level? To assess this, learning contents are analyzed with regard to their theoretical and practical content. India and Mexico account for a high degree of practice of learning within Pilz’s classification (as does Germany) while China is categorized as low. In Pilz’s typology, India, and Mexico fall into the same categories according to these four indicators. Nevertheless, in the last decade, Mexico has developed a Mexican model of dual education (MMFD—Modelo Mexicano de Formación Dual),  Please bear in mind that Pilz does not work with a practice theoretical understanding of practice.

4

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inspired by the German dual vocational education (Wiemann and Botello Ramírez 2018: 23). Since 2015, the MMFD has been an official option for students at the high school level in vocational schools (SEP 2015), although coverage of this vocational option was far from available in all vocational schools within Mexico at the time of the fieldwork of the global-strategies project (SEP 2017; Wiemann and Fuchs 2018). Nevertheless, the MMFD constitutes a significant difference between India and Mexico, especially regarding the transfer of dual apprenticeship practices by German MNEs. In conclusion, all three countries were chosen for showing substantial differences between each other regarding these territorial institutions (see also Wiemann 2020: 112). Another pragmatic reason for the country selection was the previous connections and thus access to the field within the research team. As discussed in more detail in Sect. 4.8, territory is “necessarily porous, historical, mutable, uneven” (Painter 2010: 1094). Because of this unevenness, industrial manufacturing practices undertaken by German MNEs are not found everywhere within the three emerging economies. Therefore, in the global-strategies project, urbanized areas within these countries with high intensity of industrial manufacturing were purposefully selected, because in these “hot spots” special localized skill formation dynamics were expected (Fuchs and Pilz 2014—unpublished). Skill formation is a highly localized phenomenon as skills are rooted in communities of workers and labor is highly place-bound (Coe et al. 2008: 284) or as David Harvey (1989: 19) famously noted “labor-power has to go home every night.” The urbanized industrial area within China that we chose was the Greater Shanghai Area, due to its unrivaled importance for China’s international business relations. Besides Shanghai itself, the municipalities of Changshu, Suzhou, and Taicang were also part of the sample. The occasional interview in Beijing was conducted, especially with non-company experts. In India, the geographical scope of the fieldwork included industrial production in and around Mumbai, Pune, and Bangalore. A small number of interviews with non-company experts from Delhi were undertaken via telephone conference. In Mexico, the geographical spread of our fieldwork focused on Central Mexico, especially the industrial belt around Mexico City (including Toluca and different municipalities in the north of the capital) and the industrial conurbation in and around the cities Puebla (State of Puebla de Zaragoza) and Querétaro (State of Querétaro de Arteaga). Occasional interviews were conducted in Guadalajara and Saltillo. To summarize, the research regions were selected on the basis that they demonstrated industrial manufacturing practices by German MNEs, and that they were substantially different with regard to their territorial skill formation institutions. This made it possible to look at the influence the territorial institutions have on the transferred skill formation practices. The study design therefore is a most-similar, most-different qualitative case study design (Georg 2005). In the next section, the sampling criteria for the MNEs is further discussed.

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3.2.3  Sampling Criteria for MNEs Another important decision that impacts the structure of the data generated for this study was the sampling of the MNEs. As the first step in the sampling process, the selection of companies within the global-strategies research project was based on two criteria: the companies had to be German MNEs, and they had to operate in the production sector in the research regions in China, India, and Mexico. MNEs were considered as being German if their headquarters and founding history was located in Germany. Germany as the country of origin of the MNEs was selected because of its particular vocational education system, with the dual apprenticeship system as a core feature (see textbox in Sect. 1.1). Furthermore, only MNEs that also had one or more production plants in the respective research regions entered the sample. In addition to these two strict sampling criteria, the aim of the selection was to produce a diverse sample regarding company size and industrial sector (automotive, chemical, electronic, and other industry sectors) in order to get a wide picture of the training activities on the shop floor at the production plants. In the industry sectors diversity was achieved, as can be concluded from the following figure. There is a strong representation of companies from the automotive industry (suppliers as well as original equipment manufacturers (OEMs)). This can be explained due to their strong presence in the selected research regions. Regarding the company size, a diverse sample was also achieved. The sample includes global players with over 500,000 employees worldwide as well as middle-­ sized German multinationals and smaller industrial companies with only a few international subsidiaries and under 100 employees worldwide. Also, the size of the production plants in the destination regions varies between small numbers of around ten employees, to productions sites of over 12,000 employees (see a more detailed list of the sample in Table 3.2). The diversity in the MNE sample affects the theorizing in so far as a variety of production practices in the data is achieved. These production practices are linked to the skill formation practices I identified within the data (see Fig. 4.2). Through this variety, the influence of different production practices on the transfer of the three analyzed skill formation practices can be made apparent. A secondary aim of the sampling process was to interview branches of the same MNE within the three countries in order to be able to create MNE cases. Though only a limited number of companies have production facilities within the selected research regions within all three emerging economies, we were nevertheless able to conduct interviews with subsidiaries belonging to eleven MNEs in all three emerging economies, and eight MNE in two of the three countries. On the basis of this, the second step of the sampling process involved contacting the headquarters of these companies in Germany for an interview to capture their insights into the internationally focused strategies for skill formation practices they employ in their worldwide production facilities, and the process of transferring skill formation practices to their subsidiaries in China, India, and Mexico, with whom we had already had interviews.

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Table 3.2  List of company cases

Anonymized name of MNE

Germany

China

India

GerCIM1 GerCIM2 GerCIM3 GerCIM4 GerCIM5 GerCI1

1 1 1 1 1 1

1 1 1 1 2 1

1 1 1 1 1 1

GerCI2 GerCI3 Total

1 1 8

1 1 9

1 1 8

1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1

1 1 1 1 1 1

CIM1 CIM2 CIM3 CIM4 CIM5 CIM6 CM1 CM2 CI1 CI2 IM Total

10

1 1 2 10

Mexico

Total

2 2 2 1 1

Industry sector CH AS AS AS OEM Other EL CH

8

33

2 1 1 1 2 2 1 1

1 12

AS MA MA AS Other AS CH AS MA OEM Other 32

OEM Original Equipment Manufacturer, AS Automotive supplier, MA Machine engineering/construction, CH Chemical industry, EL Electronic industry. GerCIM indicates: Ger Interview in Germany, C Interview in China, I Interview in India, M Interview in Mexico Source: Own representation.

We were able to interview five MNE headquarters whose subsidiaries we had previously visited and interviewed in all three countries, and three of the eight German headquarters we interviewed in two of the countries within the sample. The MNE cases within the larger sample were made to further the understanding of the strategies MNEs have regarding their shop floor skill development worldwide. Also, on the basis of these cases, it was possible to assess the impact of company-­specific factors such as production technology and practices, while considering that the same types of products were produced in different countries by the MNEs (though not in all cases).

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MNE company units interviewed by industry sector and country Automotive OEM Automotive Supplier Machine engingeering/construction Chemical industry Electronic industry Others China

0

10

India

Mexico

20

30

40

50

60

Germany

Fig. 3.2  Sample diversity in industry sectors. (Source: Own representation)

Since this dissertation is focused on MNE practice transfer from the German headquarters to the subsidiaries in the emerging economies, the eight MNE cases including interviews with the German headquarters are the main basis of the qualitative data analysis, while the other eleven MNE cases without interviews in the German headquarters, as well as the other material from single interviews (non-­ MNE case material), were analyzed more selectively, though all the interviews were scanned for text passages that could give special insight into the topic of practice transfer. As can be seen reflected in Fig. 3.2 and Table 3.2, the sample size in terms of MNE cases is quite large and contains a high degree of variety between the different interviewed companies. To ask how practices travel across geographic space to different regional contexts, it is in fact necessary to grasp more than one instance of such a transfer in order to provide the grounds to speak about a practice. This would make a smaller sample of only one or two instances of transfer less suitable. Furthermore, in this research, I am very much interested in the question of how differences between transferred practices can be accounted for (see research question (3), Sects. 1.2); this could only be achieved by looking at different practices at the same time, and requires a larger sample in terms of how many practices to look at. Nevertheless, the relatively large sample in this study also has some drawbacks. In some cases, it would have been good to have had more than one interview within an MNE subsidiary, though this would have resulted in an unmanageable amount of generated data. Thus, the account of the transferred skill formation practices as well as the transferring practices is sometimes limited. The variety of companies and the wide range of transferring instances, however, make up for this deficit to some degree. Additionally, the 57 interviews with non-company experts (“other experts” see Table 3.3) from all four countries were also a primary source for the data analysis of this study.

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3.2  Designing the Research Table 3.3  Number of interviews, interviewees, training center visits, and plant visits

Within MNE

Type of interviewed organization Production plant Company level organizational units (e.g., headquarters within the country)

China

India

Number per country Mexico Germany Total

21

28

40

5

6

1

Training center units in the production plant

4

6

7

Apprentices

1

10

Other experts

Worker groups

2

Educational institution

1

2

6

Training providers

5

5

3

National experts (e.g., representatives of national governments)

2

German organizations (e.g., GIZ1, AHK2, German embassy) Total of interviews / total number of interview partners) Additional data gathered

8

3

6

6

2

3

45/73

53/67

74/105

11/14 183/259

Documented plant visits

10

11

23

44

Documented in-plant training centers visits

9

6

14

29

Source: Own representation

3.2.4  Sampling of Interviewees Outside of Companies A substantial number of experts external to the companies were also interviewed, which provided significant insights into the practice transfer destination-contexts. Here, the selection process for the relevant organizations and interview partners was guided by two criteria. The first was to select organizations identified a priori as relevant for skill formation processes in the area of industrial production within the selected geographical contexts. These organization types were: vocational schools

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or polytechnics; local and international (especially German) commercial training companies with establishments in the selected regions; German organizations abroad (such as German Chambers of Commerce Abroad (AHK— Außenhandelskammer), German embassies, German foundations); regional industry associations; and representatives of local educational politics. However, the aim within this sampling process was not to forcibly fill every organizational category with one or more interviews. This is where the second selection criterion played its role: The selected organizations had to be relevant to the skill formation practices of the German MNEs we interviewed. Thus, the selection was based on the information gathered in the interviews with German MNEs. In regard to the shop floor training practices of German MNEs, getting a satisfying picture of what was going on in the field was key. This resulted in a somewhat disproportionate number of interview partners outside companies in Mexico, in comparison to those in India and China. In Mexico, the Mexican dual apprenticeship model (MMFD—Modelo Mexicano de Formanción Dual) was found to be a relevant social phenomenon to better understand the destination fabric of interrelated practices (see Table 3.3). A small subset of experts (three interviews in total, see Table  3.3) within Germany, though not employed by a German MNE, were also interviewed. These experts specialized in transferring dual apprenticeship practices from Germany to other countries, and mostly worked on educational transfer within the political realm. Nevertheless, they were usually well connected and informed about what German MNEs do in terms of transferring dual apprenticeship practices to other countries.

3.2.5  Overview of Generated Data The data generation for the global-strategies project was undertaken in several phases between 09/2015 and 10/2017. The pilot studies (09/2015  in Mexico and 02/2016  in China and India) were conducted with the whole research team. The main fieldwork in China, India, and Mexico (03/2016–12/2016) was undertaken by the PhD students of the research team, my colleague Kristina Wiemann (mostly India and China) and me (mostly Mexico). This fieldwork phase included mutual visits in the respective regions. During these fieldwork phases, we conducted interviews with company employees and also visited production plants whenever we were allowed to, and training centers if they existed. In the last fieldwork phase, we interviewed selected German headquarters of companies whose employees had previously been interviewed in China, India, or Mexico. Table 3.3 shows an overview of the 183 interviews conducted with over 250 interviewees and further gathered data. The interviews were recorded and the 217 hours of material were fully transcribed. The plant and training center visits

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were documented and used as additional material in the data analysis. Furthermore, when allowed, photos of production facilities, training centers, and training materials were taken.

3.2.6  U  sing Semi-Structured Expert Interviews as a Method to Generate Data About Skill Formation Practices in MNEs Due to practice theories’ insistence that practices—including discursive practices— go beyond what can be said through discourse (see Sect. 2.3.4 for a more detailed account), there is skepticism about using primarily discursive based methods—such as interviews—to gather data about practices (Nicolini 2013: 219–223). Researchers following this line of argument insist on the usage of methods that are well suited to capturing the non-discursive aspects of practices, and especially the moment of their enactment through observation, participant observation, and the like. Some prominent practice theorists dispute this line of thought, arguing for methodological openness (Shove 2017). These discussions in practice theory are echoed by broader discussions within human geography about the “perceived tyranny of ‘representation’ in the discipline” (Hitchings 2012: 61). The common reliance on interviews within economic geography as a primary data source is criticized here, since they usually only relate to what happens after the fact, and thus can only give unsatisfactory accounts (Thrift and Dewsbury 2000: 424). With regard to concrete methodological recommendations, wide differences exist between the argumentations of practice theoretical writers. In particular, the question whether certain methodologies are more suitable for practice theoretical inquiry than others is at the center of these debates (Practice Theory Methodologies 2020). Nicolini (2013: 213–243) argues for a close approximation of what is studied—the practice—using methods that are best able to approach the practice in action (e.g., ethnography and participatory observation). In Shove’s terminology, as introduced in Sect. 2.3.4, this would amount to gathering data of practices-as-­ performances. Nicolini’s methodologic approach—what he calls “zooming in and out” also allows for other methods to complement the insights gathered through the “zooming in” on the practice-as-performance, but he insists on the importance of including such observational and participatory methods. Shove on the other hand argues for a much more open starting point to the question of the relationship between practice theories and methods. Her standpoint is that: Taking ‘practice’ as a central conceptual unit of enquiry generates a range of distinctive questions. The choice of methods depends on which of these questions you want to take up and pursue. Using practice theory is thus not directly tied to certain methods, but the choice of methods is – as always – dependent upon your specific research question. (Shove 2017: 1)

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Shove insists that there is no easy link between theory and method. For her, it is instead essential to ask: “what is it about practices that […] researchers want to study: what is it that practice theories have sensitised them to?” (Shove 2017: 2). Following this line of argumentation, this study is interested in exploring the specific relationship practices have with space; how they travel, or more specifically, how MNEs transfer skill formation practices to different national and regional contexts. As mentioned above, the research design of this study mainly consists of semi-structured interviews with experts from German MNE subsidiaries within the three emerging economies and their headquarters in Germany. In this study, access to the analysis and understanding of practices (the transferred skill formation practices, the transferring practices and other related practices) is through what practitioners tell about these practices within the interviews. Thus, only a discursive and somewhat intentional and conscious facet of the practices in question was captured. This is a limitation of the study and has to be borne in mind when considering the reach of the analysis. The question here is, to what degree does this access to practices through interviews enable or prevent us from getting an understanding of how practices travel, or, more specifically, how skill formation practices transfer across a distance within MNEs. As is discussed at length in Sect. 4.2, practices-as-performances are locally bound instances of the enacting of a practice and thus do not travel. Practices-as-­ entities, however, can transfer across space. Through the interviews it was possible to trace skill formation practices as entities, but only indirectly as performances through what interviewees explained about the performances. However, as already mentioned, since practices-as-performances do not travel across geographic space, it is appropriate to concentrate instead on the practices-as-entities-aspect of practices. Consequently, the important criterion for validating the suitability of the methods used to gather data about the pursued line of inquiry would be to ask if the respondents were in fact able to talk about the practices in question (Hitchings 2012). In the case of this study, the interviewees proved to be able to deliberately talk about various aspects of the skill formation practices and other related practices. Skill formation practices are often rather structured: there is usually some type of documentation on the specific requirements, time sequencing, and other aspects of these practices, and there was often an explicit understanding of the purpose and strategic value of these practices within the MNE (see Chap. 5). This made it possible for the interviewees to talk at length and in great detail about these practices. The same can be said for transferring and other related practices, such as the production practices. Furthermore, the conducted interviews were designed as expert interviews in which interview partners are not sought out because of their personal characteristics, but in their capacity as experts in a specific action field (Flick 2011: 214); in the case of this study, their expertise about skill formation practices within German MNEs. The expert interviews conducted were also semi-structured (Longhurst 2010), which is a typical practice in such cases, due to time limitations of interview

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partners (Flick 2011: 214). For this semi-structure, we developed interview guides with specific questions about how the companies organized their skill formation practices and how they were transferred. Within the research team, we used three fully formulated interview guides: one guide for interviews in MNE subsidiaries in emerging economies (versions in German, English, and Spanish), another guide for headquarters of the MNEs in Germany, and a third guide for occasional interviews with apprentices, students, or workers who took part in the skill formation practices. The principal research interest in the global-strategies project in the interviews with MNE subsidiaries in the emerging economies and headquarters in Germany were: • the structure of the subsidiary and production practices (e.g., number of employees, products, production processes); • the skill formation practices (e.g., number and kind of participants, motives of participants, objectives, timely organization and design of the skill formation practices, exams and certifications, costs and benefits, training personnel); • the motivation for initiating the skill formation practice (e.g., fit with other skill formation practices, influences of production practices); • the “transferring story” of the skill formation practices; • cooperation in the skill formation practice (e.g., with vocational schools, commercial training providers, other companies); • fit of the skill formation practices in the subsidiary with the local labor market and skill formation system. Interviews with experts outside of MNEs (in local vocational schools, training providers, representatives of the national education systems, etc.—see Sect. 3.2.5, Table 3.3) were less structured. Depending on the organization, the interview questions were adjusted accordingly. For this, a less detailed, more general instrument was developed in form of bullet points summarizing our research interests, which could then be used as a basis for the more individual interview questions as required per interview situation. The use of interview guides made it possible to talk in a very detailed manner about the transferring practices and transferred skill formation practices, and also proved to be a suitable instrument to identify differences between skill formation practices, as well as their connections to other intersecting practices. Nevertheless, using interviews as the primary source of information in this study implies a considerable “zooming out” (Nicolini 2013: 228), in the sense that certain details of the practices, and especially the doing of the practices itself was not captured. However, the method of interviewing proved to be appropriate for generating the data needed for following the research interest of this dissertation on the transferring of practices across space. Another, though less extensive, data source generated within the global-­strategies project was the documentation of the plant and training centers visited during the fieldwork. How this contributes to a more precise representation of the practices studied is discussed in the following section.

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3.2.7  C  apturing the Material Element of Skill Formation Practices During the fieldwork, the global-strategies project research team aimed at visiting the plants and training centers within the MNE subsidiaries in order to access the physical spaces where the skill formation practices were enacted. When contacting possible interviewees for the arrangement of an appointment, we also asked to visit the production plants and training centers. It was not always possible to make production plant visits due to company restrictions of letting non-staff enter their facilities or the time limitations of interview partners. The restriction on letting non-staff visit training centers was usually less strict, however, not all companies had separate areas for their skill formation practices; many perform skill formation practices within the production plant itself. In total, we managed to visit 44 production plants and 29 in-plant training centers in the research regions in the emerging economies (for further details see Sect. 3.2.5, Table 3.3). These visits were documented by using observation sheets with open questions about the production facilities, processes and technology, and training material and equipment. The observation sheets were filled by hand during the plant or training center visits, or in some cases immediately after the visit. A general open description of the facilities was also part of the observation. Furthermore, photos were taken whenever allowed, to provide additional data. The data generated this way was paramount to the inclusion of the material element of the studied skill formation practices, which is an important dimension of practices, as discussed in detail in Sect. 4.1.

3.2.8  S  ummary: Implications of the Research Design for Theorizing In the previous sections, the strategic research design decisions of this study with regard to their impact on theorizing were critically discussed. As this dissertation was part of the global-strategies project, these decisions were substantially influenced by the project’s organizational context. In particular, the sampling of a relatively large and diverse sample of German MNEs, and the usage of semi-structured expert interviews as a primary data source, had a significant impact on the access to the practices this research focuses on, and therefore on the theorizing that is undertaken by using the generated data. As discussed at length in Sect. 3.2.3, the relatively large sample of MNE cases provides a good basis for the analysis of a variety of skill formation practices and transferring practices. On the other hand, this meant that it was impossible to dig deeper into each MNE case (for instance by conducting various interviews in each MNE subsidiary, or carrying out participant observation to capture skill formation practices

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as performances). However, this keeps the amount of data obtained at a manageable level, while at the same time giving access to tracing a variety of skill formation practices and their correspondent transferring efforts. Using semi-structured interviews as a method to generate data about practices, as discussed in Sect. 3.2.6, has proven to be a useful method to generate data about the transfer of skill formation practices within MNEs, even though the practices-as-performances, that is, in action, were not captured this way. Some of the methodological drawbacks of not capturing practices-as-­ performances were compensated through the systematic documentation of plant and training center visits. Here, data about the material element of the studied skill formation practices was generated. To put it in a nutshell, the research design permitted the tracing of the transfer of various skill formation practices within German MNEs to the research regions in the emerging economies. Nevertheless, the fact that a variety of skill formation practices and connected practices were captured, makes for a “mid range zoom” on the studied practices. A further “zooming in” on the intricate details of all studied practices-as-performances is not possible with this research design. This “mid range zoom” is, however, very apt at tracing connections between practices and providing insight into the relationship practices have with space when transferred. It was, therefore, suitable for meeting the aims of this study. In sum, the applied research design provided a substantial basis for the analysis of the research questions on the transfer of skill formation practices in MNEs, and thus the theorizing that is the result of this study.

3.3  Generating the Data The data generation process is an important juncture between researching practice and theorizing (see Fig.  3.1). Here, specific research situations can influence the theorizing that is later undertaken through analysis. During the data generation, specific research situations develop. These research situations are produced by, or come into being through, the way that the research field is accessed. In the case of this study, this is discussed in Sect. 3.3.1. Furthermore, within these research situations, the researcher (or research team in this instance) has the key position of influencing the generated data. As part of a handbook on practice theories in human geography, Geiselhart et al. (2019a) identify three dimensions of positionality which help to critically reflect on the impact of the researcher/research team on the research process (and the theorizing) when using practice theories for research in human geography: professional positionality, differential logical positionality, and research-evoked positionality. Professional positionality has been already discussed in Sect. 3.2.1, regarding the organizational context of this dissertation. The second and third dimensions of positionality especially come into play during the data generation in the fieldwork. These two dimensions are further discussed in Sects. 3.3.2 and 3.3.3.

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3.3.1  Contacting of Interview Partners: Field Access One important and defining moment for data generation is the way in which the contact with the field is established. The mode of entry into a field defines the roles the researcher ascribes to him/herself and is ascribed by the field. It also influences which information the researcher has access to and which s/he is denied (Flick 2011: 142–144). In the case of this study, the primary field access was established by contacting possible interview partners. Finding possible companies that fit into the pre-­ established sampling criteria was based on extensive desk research via the internet. For instance, when we obtained publicly available company overviews issued by the local AHKs, the companies were mostly approached via the contact addresses publicly available online. This approach permitted us to contact the companies directly, that is, without intermediaries who could have had a biasing influence on the interviewees due to expectations associated with the third party. However, direct contact also brought disadvantages, especially regarding the extensive time requirements for interview acquisition. The contacting strategy was not free from biases either; it is likely that companies with an active approach to skill formation practices were more inclined to give us the opportunity for an interview and respective plant and/or training center visits, since they consider themselves to have something to tell and to be a good example. Finding possible interview partners via email and phone calls proved to be more difficult in the Greater Shanghai Area than in the Indian or Mexican research regions. Therefore, in a couple of cases, we also contacted the headquarters in Germany and asked for the chance to be connected with the right person in Shanghai. This had three noticeable effects. First, the interview partners were often higher ranking within the companies and, second, in more cases, we had more than one interview partner (e.g., the department manager and the human resource manager). The third influence was that the interview partners felt the obligation to present their subsidiary activities in the best possible light, since we could potentially pass information to our contacts in the German headquarters. The choice of interviewees within the selected companies was based on a case-­ by-­case decision. We sought to identify the person with the most knowledge and involvement in the vocational education and training within the production plants. Nevertheless, the interviewees varied substantially in function and rank within the companies and their closeness to the skill formation practices in question. At the time of the interview, most of the interviewees were working in the production plant. However, some were part of more centralized business units organized on a regional or even national level. In the process of obtaining relevant interview partners within the companies, the companies’ websites were consulted, and in many cases, phone calls were made asking for the right person within the company. The process usually also included sending out a cover letter via email, which described in detail our research interest and preferred characteristics for interview partners. Despite these intensive preparations,

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it was not always possible to find the right expert for an interview. Sometimes interview partners could only partially answer the questions within our interview guide or the answers were rather general and without much detailed insight. Especially when working with a practice theoretical analytical framework, as is the case in this study, the sometimes deficient quality of the data has to be taken into account in the data analysis. Therefore, I have carefully assessed the information given in each interview case-by-case and considered it in the interpretation of the findings. In a couple of cases, when it was possible, further information was gathered through follow-up phone calls. Thus, in some cases, the closeness of the interview partners to the practices-as-­ performances is not given. However, when considering the “zooming out” this study undertakes, it becomes clear that the practices-as-entities can very well be captured. During the fieldwork, it became evident that the point of view of the trainees and production workers was also very valuable to getting a better picture of the skill formation practices they participated in. Thus, given the opportunity, interviews with trainees and workers were included in the sample. The process of finding experts for the national skill formation systems (outside of companies) as well as in German organizations within the emerging economies (with often helping functions for the transfer of skill formation practices) was undertaken in a similar manner through desk research and later direct contacting via email and phone calls. Overall, the field access, in this case the contacting process of prospective interview partners, had a significant influence on our established roles as German researchers, and influenced the generated data and consequently the theorizing. In the following, the influence of the established researcher roles and their influence on the theorizing is further discussed.

3.3.2  Differential Logical Positionality Differential logical positionality refers to differences between the researcher and people within the research field and regards social categories such as gender, sexual orientation, class, education level, ethnicity, or religion. These categories are often associated with structural disadvantages or advantages. Differences between the researching party and the researched can and often have a significant impact on the generated data in all kinds of qualitative methods, especially since differences in these categories can lead to power asymmetries (Geiselhart et al. 2019a: 373–375). Differences in these categories can also have a significant impact on the generated data. The sample of interviewees working for German MNEs in the research regions includes experts with a local background and socialization as well as German expatriates. In some cases, employees from other national contexts (e.g., Brazil) were also responsible for vocational education and training. As German researchers, talking to interviewees working for German MNEs in the three emerging economies

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had a special impact on the generated data. Here, ideas of Germany as a “successful industrialized country” and its, therefore, assumed leading edge in production knowledge came in. The expectation of interview partners was very often that the research team, as German researchers, considered the German way of skill formation, especially dual apprenticeship training, as superior to local training practices (Fuchs 2020; Wiemann and Fuchs 2018). This impacted the generated data, as the interviews revealed socio-culturally anchored interpretive patterns (Fuchs and Schalljo 2016), some of which expressed a perceived superiority of German dual apprenticeship training in comparison to other (often more local) skill formation practices. These perceptions are taken carefully into account in the interpretation of the data, and thus in the theorizing. Nevertheless, it is important to state that in this dissertation dual apprenticeship training is not perceived as superior to other skill formation practices. The research interest is not whether dual apprenticeship practices are more effective than other skill formation practices; it concerns the process and transformation these practices undertake when they are transferred to a different geographic context. Another factor that had an impact on the differential logical positionality in fieldwork situations was that the interviews from the pilot studies (see Sect. 3.2.5) were conducted with the whole research team of four people, including two senior researchers. In comparison, the interviews in the main fieldwork phases were conducted usually by one or in some cases two doctoral students. The fact that four researchers were present during these interviews meant that we often also had more than one interview partner (possibly to match the numbers), in which case the interviews occasionally took on the character of a conversation between the different parties. In some cases, higher-ranking employees were present. In these interviews there was a certain tendency to present the skill formation practices enacted within the company in a very positive light. As mentioned above, power differences can have an especially significant impact during the data generation. However, in this study, the perceived differences in power status between researchers and interviewees were relatively low. The interview partners in China, India, Mexico, and Germany generally had a university degree and a varying degree of professional experience (this was also true for the interviews conducted with experts outside of companies). This positionality of the interviewees leads to the perception of a more or less equal status between interviewee and interviewer, though there were differences in age and gender that sometimes played a role with regard to differential logical positionality. That said, it was also clear that the interviewees were doing the research team/researcher the favor of giving their time and expertise for our research. This gave the interview partners a certain positional advantage. On balance, these influencing factors depended on every individual interview situation. As such, they cannot be discussed in depth here, but they have been taken into account in the interpretation of the interview material and thus the theorizing.

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3.3.3  Research-Evoked Positionality Research-evoked positionality reflects how the contact of the researcher with the research field can change the researcher’s understanding of the field as well as the researcher’s understanding of themselves. Doing fieldwork brings researchers into contact-situations within their research field (in the case of this study mostly interview situations and plant and training center visits). Research-evoked positionalities are formed in specific fieldwork situations and are thus diverse, even ambiguous and ambivalent. In finding one’s own role as a researcher, previously self-evident ways of thinking can be effectively broken down, which is when the researchers learn something about their personal imprint. This experience of learning is especially likely to open up new insights relevant to a broader academic readership (Geiselhart et al. 2019a: 375–377). Since this dimension of positionality is an individual positionality, and its effect on the theorizing can be found in the researcher’s writing (I am the single author of this dissertation, even though the research project was conducted in a team), in the following paragraphs, I reflect on my personal experience in the field. The most important research-evoked change in my positionality and understanding of the research field were elicited by the visits of production sites. Prior to the pilot studies, I had never visited a production plant. These visits became a key experience for my understanding of the research field. They were an important factor contributing to my understanding of why production companies have a constant need to train their personnel, even so-called low-skilled workers. Physically being in the spaces and observing blue-collar workers performing tasks I would not be able to do myself (even with a university degree and what I consider to be good motor skills), drove home the point that skill formation practices are necessary for these companies to keep their production running. Otherwise, no one would know how to work the production lines. I was also fortunate to have the opportunity to visit production sites in a variety of different industries, producing all kinds of different products. Observing different production processes—for cars, electronic parts, cables, chemical products, etc.— gave me an additional insight into the question of why certain skill formation practices are used for different production practices. For example, I witnessed how, on a car production line, if only one production robot in a line breaks down, the whole production comes to a standstill, since the cars are put together in a continuous assembly line where every production step has to be completed in order to keep on producing. Seeing this, and not only having it explained to me, gave me a whole new appreciation of car production processes. This made me understand why car production plants in many cases maintain rather expensive dual apprenticeship training programs for mechatronics at their facilities, in order to have the personnel available to repair and maintain the machinery and robots at all times. These insights have influenced my thinking and theorizing about the transfer of skill formation practices at a profound level. Coming into contact with production

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sites also gave me a deep personal appreciation for the hard, complex work that goes into producing all the big and little things that surround us every day.

3.3.4  S  ummary: Implications of the Data Generation for Theorizing Field access is vital for setting the stage for the later process of data generation. Differentiating and analyzing the dimensions of positionality as part of a practice theoretical research has proven to be a useful tool to account for the ways in which the researching practice in the activity of data generation influences the theorizing. One very important element that links the researching practice and the theorizing is the researcher, that is, the practitioner of the research practice. The direct contacting of interview partners (following the sampling criteria) meant that field access was possible without intermediaries. This put our research team in a relatively neutral position. As discussed with regard to the differential logical positionality, as a German research team interviewing employees in German MNEs, it was inevitable that the relationship would have a critical impact on the data, provoking a certain bias of presenting dual apprenticeship training in an especially positive light through our interview partners. Furthermore, the research-­ evoked positionality—specifically the personal experience of visiting production plants of different industries—deepened my personal understanding of production processes, and influenced my thinking and theorizing on this topic in a substantial way.

3.4  Analyzing the Data In this section, I discuss how the data analysis and theorizing have intersected in the course of the research presented in this dissertation. Special attention is given to the effect of the data analysis on the theorizing. In qualitative research designs, the data analysis and the theorizing are typically highly intertwined (Joas et  al. 2009; Kuckartz 2012: 54). In the case of this study, I can identify three principal phases of working with the data that are connected to the theorizing. These phases were not clear-cut steps that were undertaken one after the other; they overlapped and were sometimes interspersed. These phases are discussed in the course of this section. The data analysis of this study was completed with the help of MAXQDA software. For the terminology of the different coding methods described in this section, I chose Saldaña’s (2009) coding manual for qualitative researchers in order to avoid the sometimes differing terminologies in other manuals and handbooks.

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3.4.1  First Phase: Exploring Different Lines of Inquiry In this first phase of the data analysis, the research team and I worked with an explorative attitude. Some of the empirical material was even analyzed when the data generation was not yet complete. In this phase, I first used initial coding on a large portion of the data. Initial coding is characterized by the breaking down of the data into discrete parts, and by assessing and comparing them for similarities and differences. This coding method leaves possible theoretical directions open that one can read within the data (Saldaña 2009: 81–85). During the explorative coding, different lines of inquiry emerged from the analyzed data. Some of these lines of inquiry were then followed for the elaboration of publications by using appropriate second cycle coding methods that were chosen according to the line of inquiry followed (Saldaña 2009: 149). Several publications emerged from this phase of the data analysis. Within the research team of the global-strategies project, we have published a number of papers regarding different research questions, such as: the context-factors influencing the implementation of skill formation practices at the individual company level and the transferability of the German dual apprenticeship training (Pilz and Wiemann 2017, 2020; Wiemann 2020); reasons for, and ways to export dual apprenticeship training from German MNEs (Fuchs 2020; Wiemann 2017; Wiemann and Fuchs 2018); and the adaption of dual apprenticeship training to local contexts (Wiemann et al. 2018b). Though this is not an exhaustive list of all the publications resulting from the global-strategies project, it does represent the general ideas and research questions derived from and developed within the project. These lines of inquiry are important to take into account in order to understand the context in which this dissertation has been developed. During this data analysis phase, I also gained insight into interviews conducted by other members of the research team. One observation became increasingly evident during the data analysis: Institutional approaches cannot account for differences between the observed three transferred skill formation practices. As I have elaborated in Sect. 1.2, it is a valuable to explore (2) why practices—skill formation practices, in the case of this study—are transformed when they are transferred across geographic space; (3) why some skill formation practices are more easily transferred to a different geographical context then others; and (4) what role territorial institutions play in the transfer of practices between two geographic contexts. These are three of the four leading research questions of this dissertation. To address these research questions, a conceptual shift to a practice theoretical framework has proven to be a fruitful approach (see Sect. 2.3).

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3.4.2  S  econd Phase: Theorizing in Dialogue with the Data and Practice Theoretical Thinking In the second data analysis phase, I followed a line of inquiry conceptualizing the transfer of training activities in German MNEs as practice transfer that emerged from the first phase. My main concern was to develop a conceptual framework that could answer the research questions  that emerged from the first phase of data analysis namely (2) why practices transform when transferred, (3)why some skill formation practices were more difficult to transfer than others, and  (4) what role territorial institutions played in the transfer (see also Fig. 1.1). This phase was characterized by systematically thinking about the insights from the data and consulting established theoretical and conceptual ideas about practice transfer. In particular, the insight that differences between the various transferred skill development practices were shown to have an impact on their transferability drove my conceptual thinking to a practice theoretical approach in order that I could better grasp “what” was transferred. Initially using coding techniques such as structural and descriptive coding (Saldaña 2009: 66), I identified relevant social phenomena in the data. I then worked with memos and diagrams—an analytical technique central to grounded theory, which enables the derivation of concepts from the description of raw data (Corbin and Strauss 2014: 106–132), and which is also used in qualitative data analysis (Kuckartz 2012: 55). Memos are thoughts, ideas, and hypotheses that are written down by the researcher during the analysis process. They can be short sentences or longer elaborations (Kuckartz 2012: 55). In comparison to field notes, memos represent analysis and include in-depth thinking about a concept (Corbin and Strauss 2014: 120). In memos, I sketched out important aspects I found in the data and conceptual ideas about the relationships between them. The memos were written in the form of notes on paper, which were then rearranged and edited by transcribing them into a Word document (Fig. 3.3). Diagrams are conceptual visualizations of data. They enable the keeping of records about concepts, and organize the relationships between ideas. Diagrams “force the researcher to think about the data in ‘lean ways’ – that is to reduce the data down to its essence” (Corbin and Strauss 2014: 123). Memos and diagrams evolve during the different stages of the analytical process and conceptual thinking with and about the data (Corbin and Strauss 2014: 106–125). In my conceptual thinking, in dialogue with the data, diagrams were even more important than memos. Usually these were first made by hand on DINA 4 laid crosswise. I passed the most important diagrams into a digital format. A number of these visualizations made their way into several scientific presentations, where I discussed my conceptualizations with other researchers. The final versions of the diagrams became figures in the conceptual framework in Chap. 4 (see Figs. 4.2, 4.3, 4.4, 4.5 , and 4.6). This phase of the dialogue with the data and practice theoretical writings was how I undertook the theorizing in this dissertation. The result of this phase is especially manifested in Chap. 4 on the developing of a practice theoretical notion of practice transfer across distance and between territories.

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Fig. 3.3  Examples of the development of diagrams during the data analysis. (Source: Own representation, see Figs. 4.4 and 4.6)

3.4.3  T  hird Phase: Systematically Analyzing the Data with the Previously Established Conceptual Framework In the third phase of the analysis, I used the developed conceptual framework to systematically code and interpret the data. I organized the data in MNE cases (see Table 3.2) and coded the interview material, documentations of company and training center visits, and photographic material (when existing) case by case. Additionally, I chose to systematically study and compare three transferred skill formation practices: onboarding, shop floor inducting, and dual apprenticeship training. The interviews with experts outside of companies were coded and interpreted for each research region. These interviews especially helped to achieve a clear picture of the destination contexts and to get a further understanding of the territorial institutions in play in these destination contexts.

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The applied coding techniques were a mixture of descriptive coding on the basis of the established conceptual notions, and process coding. Process coding is characterized by looking for action within the data and using gerunds, “-ing words,” to make observable activity visible (Saldaña 2009: 77–81). Since practices are nexuses of activities, as I have previously discussed in Sect. 2.3.4, process coding is a method well-suited to identifying the activities that are part of a practice, and to lumping them together with the practice-nexus one is looking for, as is further explained in the following. Selecting Three Transferred Skill Formation Practices Practices cannot be fully observed. With all their varying performances, myriad different meanings, materials, and competences, they cannot be observed in their entirety. Only fragments of a practice and its spatially and temporally bound variants can be empirically recorded and then analyzed (Wenzel et al. 2019: 343). In this study, the data was mainly gathered through semi-­structured expert interviews. I have discussed the implications of this when working with a practice theoretical perspective in Sect. 3.2.6, where I concluded that practices-as-entities can be accessed through interviews, and that the interview partners in this study were able to talk about the and other related practices in a differentiated manner. Nevertheless, when opening interview transcripts and trying to code the material with the intention of identifying different practices, one is confronted with a not so trivial problem, especially with practices within MNEs. When looking for different practices and their connections to other practices—required for the interpretation of the data in this study—it is sometimes not easy to clearly differentiate if a particular activity is part of one practice or already part of another practice. As Pentland and Feldman (2005: 798) point out: [O]rganizations are a sea of interdependent actions, interpretations and artifacts. Identifying a particular routine [practice] is a bit like trying to isolate the Gulf Stream from the Atlantic Ocean.

In order to tackle this problem, it is important to think back to the definition of a practice. We defined practices as nexuses of activities in Sect. 2.3.4. When identifying a specific practice while coding, the question is then: What makes the nexus and how can this nexus be identified in empirical data? Answering this question is a challenge, especially when considering that practices-as-performances can show vast differences. “Researching” as a practice can contain doing experimentation in laboratories for researching in chemistry, as well as participatory observation for researching in anthropology. Despite this vast variation between different researching performances, however, we can “understand” that they are in fact part of the same practice-as-entity; that what is going on in both cases is, in fact, researching (Knorr-Cetina 2001). This “understanding” is key to making up the nexus that holds a practice together through space and time. If we go back to what was discussed in Sect. 2.3.4, Schatzki establishes the mind as a medium “through which the activities that compose a practice are noncausally organized” (2001: 50). He clarifies that the mind is not

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causing practices, but is the medium through which they are organized. Answering the question of how to identify a practice in data, Schatzki gives an important clue: “People […] are almost always – though not necessarily – aware of, and also have words for the integrative practices in which they participate” (Schatzki 1996: 104). One very important and obvious way to identify a practice within the data is to look at what people/practitioners say. If they identify a set of activities as a distinct entity, this can be seen as the basis for outlining and describing the nexus. The fact that there is a term, such as “cooking,” “shopping,” or “researching,” indicates that these may be practices. The description or identifying of a practice in terms of an organized nexus is, however, a constructional achievement that is empirically based on the activities that are part of the nexus (Wenzel et al. 2019: 343). These constructional achievements can be principally made by practitioners in the field, but also by the researcher interpreting the data. Typically, the understanding of a practice is undertaken by both the practitioners in the field and the researcher, whose understandings are intersubjective, as discussed in Sect. 2.3.4. When coding the data while looking for practices and differentiating between them, however, the researcher has the responsibility for carefully defining the delimitations of the practices s/he is looking for. One recurring difficulty here is that practices can often be split into several component practices, as Shove and co-authors show, using car driving as an example. Car driving can be studied as a distinct practice, although different activities that are part of car driving, such as steering, indicating, or changing gear, could also be seen as separate “component” practices (Shove et al. 2012: 25–41). The decision to look at car driving or at changing gear as a distinct practice lies with the researcher. However, the decision should not be arbitrary, but based on the research interest. And there must be a significant empirical basis in the data to claim the existence of the nexus that holds the practice together (Shove 2017). To study practice transfer in MNEs, in this study I carefully identified three distinct skill formation practices that were transferred in the selected MNEs: onboarding, shop floor inducting, and dual apprenticeship training. Not all MNE subsidiaries engage in all three skill formation practices. Dual apprenticeship training, for example, was comparatively less reported. Nevertheless, in the MNEs that were engaging in dual apprenticeship training we obtained solid information about the inner workings of this practice and also about its transferring practice. A detailed discussion of the “understanding” of these three selected skill formation practices is provided in Sect. 5.1. It would have been possible to study other skill formation practices, such as the further training practices or “train the trainer” practices. However, in the data these practices were much more difficult to clearly outline as distinct practices, since too few MNEs engaged in these practices, making it impossible to get a clear “understanding” of what holds them together as distinct practice-entities. Having a clear understanding of a practice is especially important when studying practice transfer, because, as discussed in Sect. 1.2, practices transform in transfer. This makes it even

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more important to identify these practices which are transferred to a destination fabric of interrelated practices. The combination of skill formation practices at an MNE subsidiary is usually adjusted to fit the subsidiary’s needs and adapted to the subsidiary’s environment (Wiemann et al. 2018b). Moreover, the combination also includes other skill formation practices, as discussed above. Since this dissertation is focused on questions regarding the transfer of skill formation practices within MNEs, the combination of skill formation practices within the subsidiaries in the global-strategies project are not at the center of the investigation. To get a deeper insight into the combination of skill formation practices at different MNE subsidiaries and the factors influencing the combination in the global-strategies project, I recommend the work of Kristina Wiemann (2020) on the qualification practice of German MNEs in China, India, and Mexico. Furthermore, it is important to note that the time when the MNEs were engaging in the transfer of one of the skill formation practices in question varied between the subsidiaries. For the three selected skill formation practices, I found enough relatively recent transfers within the data that our interview partners could provide in-­ depth insight into the transferring practices involved. What is more, I am also interested in practices that were transferred further in the past. Practices that were transferred some years ago are especially relevant to take into account since elements such as meaning might take time to become established. Also, the integration of the elements of a practice is not something which is undertaken once; it is an ongoing process (Shove et al. 2012: 21–39). Onboarding, shop floor inducting, and dual apprenticeship training also show clearly distinguishable degrees of complexity (see Sect. 5.1.4). This was not a criterion for selecting these three skill formation practices, however. On the contrary, it was an important impulse in the course of the development of this study and corresponding theorizing (see also Sect. 1.2). In the first phase of analyzing and working with the data, it became apparent that there were significant differences between the practices that were having an important impact on their transfer and integration at the transfer destination. Nevertheless, it is important to critically reflect on how to compare degrees of complexity of practices, and with it transfer resistances. I address this theoretical and methodological question in the following paragraphs. Methodological Remarks on Comparing the Degree of Complexity of Practices The transfer of the three selected for this is compared along two dimensions: their degree of complexity, and their availability/integrability into the destination context in the three research regions (see Sect. 4.7, especially Fig. 4.5). I have already addressed the methodological issue of the comparison between the research regions in Sect. 3.2.2, which is based on a most-similar/most-different research. What is left to methodologically discuss is the comparison of the degrees of complexity of the three selected. Making comparisons is always a challenge, especially when working with a qualitative research design. How can one compare such different entities as

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practices? This is not a trivial question. Vogelpohl (2013: 61) states that comparing is one of the most used and, at the same time, less reflected methods in geography. She goes on that to compare in a methodologically accurate manner it is important to take into account that all well-made comparisons are grounded in theoretical reflections. The important questions to answer, that is, those that link the theoretical reflections with the used methods, are: Why compare? What is comparable? And how to compare? (Vogelpohl 2013: 63–64). I have extensively discussed why it makes sense to compare practices transferred across distance in Sects. 1.2 and 2.2.4. Essentially, while analyzing the data of this study it became apparent that there was something specific about practices, an intrinsic quality, which made them more or less easy to transfer to the research regions of this study. The questions of what is comparable about practices and how we can compare them need some more consideration. First, it is important to bear in mind the purpose of the comparison. In this study, I compare practices between each other in order to address the question of their differences in transferability. Second, to ask what is comparable about such different entities as practices, it helps to refer to ideas about the comparing of rather different objects on a more general note. Pilz (2011) gives the proverbial example of comparing apples with pears, which can be undertaken only by using an appropriate criterion of comparison, known in scientific terms as tertium comparationis. Apples and pears can be very well compared by considering their juice content for instance. What then is an appropriate tertium comparationis for the meaningful comparison of practices in transfer? In Sect. 4.6 (see especially Fig. 4.4), I propose the concept of the “degree of complexity of a practice” as the tertium comparationis—which compares different practices along the dimensions of the complexity of materials, meanings, competence, and time profile. Now the question remains: How can we compare the complexity of meaning, the complexity of material, the complexity of competence, and the complexity of the time-profile of the selected skill formation practices with each other? In this study, this is undertaken by carefully identifying these dimensions for each of the three skill formation practices, and then discussing their differences in complexity (see Sect. 5.1).

3.4.4  S  ummary: Implications of the Data Analysis for Theorizing Data analysis is an important link between researching and theorizing. In this study, the first two phases of analysis had a particularly formative influence on the theorizing. In the second phase especially, thinking with and about the data drove the theoretical thinking in a substantial way. Most notably perhaps, the theorizing relayed in Chap. 4—the concept of “degree of complexity of a practice” and the understanding of “transfer resistance” of practices—have been gained from analyzing the data.

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That said, this conceptual thinking and theorizing was also very much guided by existing theories, in particular practice theoretical work. In the third phase, these previously established ideas and their applicability to the entire data set were tested, confirmed, and in some cases adjusted according to the newly gained insights. In this chapter, I have discussed the three links between the researching practice and the theorizing that resulted from it: the designing of the research, the generating of the data, and the analyzing of the data. All three junctures between researching and theorizing show significant influences on the ideas, arguments, and storyline, which are presented in the form of this dissertation. These influences have been openly and critically discussed in this methodology chapter in order to provide the reader with the tools to evaluate the significance, validity, and reach of this study. In the following chapter, I present and discuss the conceptual framework developed in the above-described second phase of working with this study’s empirical data.

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Practice Theory Methodologies (2020) Propositions for discussion. https://practicetheorymethodologies.wordpress.com/propositions-­for-­discussion/. Accessed 14 Feb 2020 Reuber P, Pfaffenbach C (2005) Methoden der empirischen Humangeographie: Beobachtungen und Befragung, 1st edn. Das Geographische Seminar, Westermann/Braunschweig Saldaña J (2009) The coding manual for qualitative researchers. SAGE, Los Angeles Schäfer F, Daniel A (2015) Zur Notwendigkeit einer praxissoziologischen Methodendiskussion. In: Daniel A, Hillebrandt F (eds) Methoden einer Soziologie der Praxis. Transcript, Berlin/ Bielefeld, pp 37–55 Schatzki TR (1996) Social practices: a Wittgensteinian approach to human activity and the social. Cambridge University Press, New York Schatzki TR (2001) Practice minded orders. In: Schatzki TR, Knorr-Cetina K, EV S (eds) The practice turn in contemporary theory. Routledge, New York, pp 50–63 Schmidt R (2016) Theoretisieren: Fragen und Überlegungen zu einem konzeptionellen und empirischen Desiderat der Soziologie der Praktiken. In: Schäfer H (ed) Praxistheorie: Ein soziologisches Forschungsprogramm. Transcript, Bielefeld, pp 245–263 SEP (2015) ACUERDO número 06/06/15 por el que se establece la formación dual como una opción educativa del tipo medio superior. In: Diario Oficial de la Federación. Online verfügbar unter http://www.dof.gob.mx/nota_detalle.php?codigo=5396202&fecha=11/06/2015 SEP (2017) Avances y ubicación del MMFD. http://www.sems.gob.mx/es_mx/sems/avances_ubicacion_mmfd. Accessed 20 July 2017 Shove E (2017) Practice theory methodologies do not exist. https://practicetheorymethodologies. wordpress.com/2017/02/15/elizabeth-­shove-­practice-­theory-­methodologies-­do-­not-­exist/. Accessed 10 Jan 2020 Shove E, Pantzar M, Watson M (2012) The dynamics of social practice: everyday life and how it changes. SAGE, London Statistisches Bundesamt (2019) Statistisches Jahrbuch Deutschland 2019: Deutschland und Internationales, 1st edn. Statistisches Bundesamt, Wiesbaden Stengers I, Latour B, Bains P (1997) Power and invention: situating science. Theory out of bounds, vol 10. University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis/London Thrift N (2008) Non-representational theory: space, politics, affect. International library of sociology. Routledge, London Thrift N, Dewsbury J-D (2000) Dead geographies—and how to make them live. Environ Plann D 18:411–432. https://doi.org/10.1068/d1804ed Vogelpohl A (2013) Qualitativ vergleichen: Zur komparativen Methodologie in Bezug auf räumliche Prozesse. In: Rothfuss E (ed) Raumbezogene qualitative Sozialforschung: Perspektiven der Humangeographie. Springer Fachmedien, Wiesbaden, pp 61–82 Wenzel C, Werner C, Molitor K, Hornung M, Rohminger S, Faller F (2019) Soziale Praktiken in der Forschungspraxis – empirisch forschen mit Schatzkis site ontology. In: Schäfer S, Everts J (eds) Handbuch Praktiken und Raum: Humangeographie nach dem Practice Turn, 1st edn. Transcript, Bielefeld, pp 341–360 Werlen B (1999) Sozialgeographie alltäglicher Regionalisierungen, 2nd edn. Steiner, Stuttgart Wiemann J (2017) Export of German-style vocational education: a case study in the automotive industry in Puebla, Mexico. Int J Automot Technol Manag 17:208–222. http://doi.org/10.1504/ IJATM.2017.10005767 Wiemann K (2020) Qualifizierungspraxis deutscher Produktionsunternehmen in China, Indien und Mexiko. Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden, Wiesbaden Wiemann K, Botello Ramírez JA (2018) Mexiko. Internationales Handbuch der Berufsbildung, vol 49. Bundesinstitut für Berufsbildung, Bonn Wiemann J, Fuchs M (2018) The export of Germany’s “secret of success” dual technical VET: MNCs and multiscalar stakeholders changing the skill formation system in Mexico. Camb J Reg Econ Soc 11:373–386. https://doi.org/10.1093/cjres/rsy008

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Wiemann K, Li J, Wiemann J, Fuchs M, Pilz M (2018a) “Lost (in) VET”: Zum Stand der Forschung in der internationalen Berufsbildungszusammenarbeit aus Sicht verschiedener Wissenschaftsdisziplinen. In: Pilz M, Gessler M, Fuchs M (eds) Konzepte und Wirkungen des Transfers Dualer Berufsausbildung. Springer VS, Wiesbaden, pp 13–58 Wiemann J, Wiemann K, Pilz M, Fuchs M (2018b) Duale Ausbildung im Ausland: Ein “Heimspiel”?: Zur Qualifizierung von Produktionsbeschäftigten in deutschen Unternehmen in China, Indien und Mexiko. In: Pilz M, Gessler M, Fuchs M (eds) Konzepte und Wirkungen des Transfers Dualer Berufsausbildung. Springer VS, Wiesbaden, pp 359–388

Chapter 4

Developing a Practice Theoretical Approach to Practice Transfer Across Distance and Between Territories

Abstract  This chapter presents theorizations derived from the findings in this study in form of the conceptualizations at the level of a “middle-range theory” of practice transfer across distance. To this aim, the chapter systematically presents theorizations obtained from working with the extensive data collection and thinking with and through existing practice theoretical work. The chapter first shows how practices “travel” via their elements (material, competence, and meaning), then it develops the notion of transferring practices as “what moves practices across space” and elaborates the concept of “transfer resistance” as the distance “which needs to be overcome” in practice transfer—consisting of two dimensions: the degree of complexity of the transferred practice, and the availability of the elements of the transferred practice in the transfer-destination context. This is followed by a discussion of territorial institutions as larger social phenomena in the transfer-destination context. The chapter ends with a critical reflection of the conceptual contributions of the presented theorizations with regard to the research desiderates presented in Chap. 2. Keywords  Theorizations derived from findings · Practice theoretical approach to practice transfer · Origin and destination context · Degree of complexity of practices · Transfer resistance · Distance in practice transfer · Territorial institutions Practice theories have not yet paid enough attention to how practices travel across geographic space, though this is an important research subject in international business studies, international human resource management literature, and in economic geography, as shown in Chap. 2. One exception is the study by Elisabeth Shove and Mika Pantzar (2005), concerning the transfer of Nordic Walking from Norway to England. However, the authors do not conceptualize what space means for the traveling of practice, nor what role connections between practices play in a practice transfer across distance. In a later publication, leaving behind the question of practice transfer, Shove and Pantzar together with Matt Watson (2012)—a geographer by training—elaborate a substantial framework over 164 pages on The dynamics of © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 J. Wiemann, Geographies of Practice Transfer, Economic Geography, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-95185-6_4

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social practice, asking how social practices change over time through their interconnections to other practices. Their version of practice theory is a main constituent for the theorizations lain out in the following chapter. Another exception is an empirical study by Rabadjieva and Butzin (2019) on how emerging practices (social innovations) can diffuse via their connections to other practices. However, this study also fails to give a comprehensive conceptual frame of the “distance” which has to be overcome in practice transfer. Taking up the idea of the connections and links between practices, I return to the question of practice transfer across distance to ask how and why transfers take place through their interconnections with other practices. In this theorizing chapter, based on the concept of three elements of a practice by Shove et al. (2012) that circulate and connect different practices, I develop a conceptual framework to capture the social phenomenon of practice transfer across distance. Herein lies the theoretical contribution to practice thinking this study sets out to achieve. To this aim, I first discuss the concept of how practices connect through the three elements of a practice as defined by Shove et  al. (2012), and point out how this concept can be used to understand the way practices “travel” (see Sects. 4.1 and 4.2). Following this, I develop a heuristic based on empirical insights and ideas on power in practice thinking and I establish a conceptual distinction between “transferring practice” and “transferred practice” (Sect. 4.3). Furthermore, I elaborate a perspective on MNEs as “translocal bundles of practices” which function as media/ vehicles for practice transfer (Sect. 4.4) and I develop the idea of a “fabric of interrelated practices” at the transfer destination into which a transferred practice has to be integrated (Sect. 4.5). I then introduce the idea of different “degrees of complexity” practices can have (Sect. 4.6), which is combined with the notion of a “destination fabric of interrelated practices,” as a basis to understand the “transfer resistance” of a practice in transfer (Sect. 4.7). In the last two sections of this chapter, I develop a notion of “territorial institutions” as constellations of practices, which influence the fabric of interrelated practice at the transfer destination (Sect. 4.8). This elucidates the implication of practice transfer across national territorial boarders. In other words, this study provides a conceptual explanation to answer and empirically analyze the four research questions of this study: (1) What is the spatiality of “knowing” in practice transfer? (2) Why are practices transformed when they are transferred across space? (3) Why are some practices “more difficult” to transfer across space than others? (4) What role do institutions play in the transfer of practices between territories (e.g., nations, regions)? When and how do institutions impact practices in transfer? In this chapter, I build on existing theories and concepts from practice theory and geography as well as findings from the empirical data in order to effectively elaborate a practice theoretical approach that explains the social phenomenon of practice transfer across distance. The aim is to achieve an abstraction level that goes beyond a description of the phenomenon, accomplishing instead a level of theorization of a “middle-range theory,” or theory with a limited scope (Bongaerts and Schulz-­ Schaeffer 2018; Esser 2002; Merton 1968).

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The term “middle-range theory” was first coined by Robert K. Merton (1968) to describe theories with a depth of theorization that goes beyond detailed descriptions of an empirical phenomenon, but which are less general than the “grand social theories” (such as action theory, interactionism, system theory, or practice theories). Middle-range theories can be developed for social phenomena on all levels: micro, meso, and macro (Bongaerts and Schulz-Schaeffer 2018: 460)—or, expressed in a more practice theoretical terminology as smaller or larger social phenomena (Schatzki 2016b). Thus, middle-range theories’ explanatory scope can vary substantially according to the scope of the social phenomenon they address.1 An important characteristic of middle-range theories is that they are close enough to empirical phenomena to effectively test them. Since this dissertation used the empirical data of this study to develop the practice theoretical approach to practice transfer laid out in this chapter, this same data cannot be used to prove the concepts and explanations given here. To prove a concept or explanation, falsification must be possible, which is not possible in the case of this study because it would mean using the same empirical data to prove the explanations from which they were developed in the first place. This way, any hypothesis given could only be proven right, but not wrong. The scope of theorization given below will be reflected more deeply in Sect. 4.9. The practice theoretical approach developed in this chapter is concentrated on and limited to the social phenomenon of practice transfer across distance. The approach aspires to a level of theorization or abstraction that can be used in other empirical contexts to explain the social phenomenon of practice transfer across distance. Whether this is possible, however, can only be tested through further studies. For a more detailed account of how the theorizing in this chapter came into being, see Sect. 3.4.2 in the methodology discussion. The methodology of this study has used selected techniques from grounded theory, a theory that often engages (though not exclusively) in the development of middle-range theories or theories with a limited scope (Pidgeon and Henwood 2006).

4.1  Three Elements of a Practice As previously mentioned in Sect. 2.3.4 on defining practices as nexuses of activities, according to Shove et  al. (2012) practices are composed of three elements. The authors follow Reckwitz’ line of thought that a practice consists of interdependencies and connections between “forms of bodily activities, forms of mental activities, ‘things’ and their use, a background knowledge in the form of understanding, know-­ how, states of emotion, and motivational knowledge” (2002: 249). However, they  Merton himself has developed middle-range theories for deviant behavior, bureaucracy, and role models (Bongaerts and Schulz-Schaeffer (2018: 460)). Other examples of middle-range theories relate, for example, to the phenomenon of nursing (Smith and Liehr (2018)), and divorce rates (Esser (2002). 1

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simplify these elements to just three: material, competence, and meaning (see Sect. 2.3.4 for a broader discussion of the conceptual basis of the three elements of a practice in practice theoretical thought). “Material” includes objects, tools, infrastructure, hardware, things, and—most importantly—the human body itself. Multiple forms of understanding (know-how, being able to evaluate a performance) and practical knowledgeability (possessing the skill to perform a practice) are summarized under the term “competence.” Shove et al. (2012) then lump mental activities, emotions, and motivational knowledge together into one broad element of “meaning” (Shove et  al. 2012: 22–23). The simplification of a practice to being composed of these three elements is a bold conceptual move, especially when taking into account conceptual discussions on the nature of practices as outlined in Sect. 2.3.4 (practices as nexuses of activities). Nevertheless, their conceptual move to “zoom out” this way provides the possibility to see connections between different practices that would otherwise be more difficult to spot. Since it is especially the connections between practices that allow for practice transfer across distance, understanding these connections is of utmost importance. Furthermore, focusing on these connections makes the conceptual framework by Shove et al. (2012) a solid basis for understanding practice transfer. The three elements of a practice are integrated when a practice is enacted. But links between these elements can also be broken again if the practice disappears or changes significantly over time. The three practice-elements shape each other in the course of time. Shove et al. (2012: 29–32) explain this with the example of the history of driving as a practice. The first cars were mechanically very fragile and broke down a lot, so repairing a car was part of the competence of driving. With time, the vehicles became ever more robust, so the repairing skill as part of the car-driving practice became less important and finally vanished. Thus, the elements of a practice are not only interdependent; they also mutually shape each other (Fig. 4.1). Practices emerge, persist, and disappear when connections between their defining elements are made and broken. However, elements of practices can persist even if a practice ceases to exist. From this perspective, it can be said that we humans are surrounded by bits and pieces of elements from practices that are no longer present. Elements are also often shared between practices which entail a certain dynamic between practices (Shove et al. 2012: 29–33). For instance, following the example

Material Competence Meaning Practice-time profile

Fig. 4.1  Elements shape each other. (Source: Own representation, following Shove et al. 2012: 32)

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above, a car is also a material in the practice of producing cars. When a car-­producing practice evolves making cars more robust and reliable, it shapes the car-driving practice in turn, in the sense that repairing a car drifts out of the competence of the car-driving practice. This approach by Shove et  al. (2012) consists of following the elements of a practice. In typical practice theoretical fashion, it decenters the human actor to some degree, even though the human actor is the integrator of a practice. This is consistent with the view that an actor in the moment of enacting a practice is at the same time reproducing the practice (and the elements it consists of). This approach allows the analysis of the change and stability of practices (and therefore of the “social”) over time without prioritizing agency or overemphasizing structure (Shove et al. 2012: 21–23). Moreover, the approach proves to be suitable when studying practice transfer, as is shown in the following sections.

4.2  Practices “Travel” by Means of Their Elements One very important point of departure for understanding how practices move across distance lies in the previously discussed distinction—as outlined by Shove et  al. (2012)—between practices-as-performances and practices-as-entities (see Sect. 2.3.4). Practices-as-performances are by their very nature bound to a specific geographic setting (this can be one place or multiple places in the case of practices that span various locations). Therefore, practices-as-performances themselves cannot “travel.” They are singular situated events. Only practices-as-entities may “travel.” Since practices-as-entities consist of their elements, practices “travel” by means of these elements (for a substantial empirical example of the traveling or diffusion of practices via their elements see Rabadjieva and Butzin 2019). If all three elements are transferred to a different location where they had not previously existed, then the practice can be—and in order to be a complete practice transfer, have to be—enacted at that new destination. So, how can the elements of a practice “travel”? Material, competence, and meaning, it turns out, “travel” in rather different ways, as is discussed in the following paragraphs. “Traveling” Materials Many practices depend on the availability of consumables and/or more durable goods such as infrastructure, tools, or even the human body. Materials can travel through transportation by foot, boat, airplane, motorized vehicle, or even horseback. Or they can be produced at the site of the enactment. In any case, for the enactment of a practice, access to the required materials is key. There are complex geographies of access to materials: material characteristics such as heaviness, fragility, or durability constrain transportability and therefore access to materials; power dynamics can impede the access to materials; and inequality can make the affordance of materials impossible. In some cases, it is possible to substitute the materials required for

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a practice (Shove et al. 2012: 45–47). For example, it is possible to open up a wine bottle without using a corkscrew by using a knife to push the cork inside of the bottle. It is important to note, however, that many practices require an array of interrelated materials. Material arrangements configure each other. One needs a wine bottle with a cork as its closing mechanism in order to open it with a corkscrew. So, the substitutability of materials used for a specific practice has its limits. For practice transfer, this means that the materials that are part of the transferred practice, if not previously existing at the destination, have to be organized to be there. In this study, these might be bench vices for the activity of filing, as required for the dual apprenticeship training of toolmakers. Many material arrangements, such as classrooms for dual apprenticeship training, can be relatively easily accessed since they already exist in form of conference rooms that are part of other related practices (see Sects. 5.1.3 and 5.2.3). It is important to note that many objects integral to a practice may be already present or at least readily available at the transfer destination. Still, these objects and materials may have to be rearranged in order to fit the new practices’ requirements. “Traveling” Competences “Knowing in practice” (see Sect. 2.2.1) needs to be abstracted from a specific local situation in order to travel. This process has to be reversed when the knowledge arrives at its destination. Thus, knowledge transfer is a rather complicated endeavor: One needs to distinguish between local understanding and universal cognitive structures, which means competence needs to be packed or decontextualized in order to travel—there has to be a certain infrastructure to make it move, and it then needs to be recontextualized in its new location. The competence of a practice can be codified to a degree (e.g., the manual for using a CNC machine), transported (via internet or as a printed copy), and subsequently realized using corresponding local know-how in a different context (Shove et al. 2012: 48–53). This recontextualization of the codified competence can only occur if the practitioners already have prior local practice-based experience (e.g., previously existing programming skills, basic mathematical concepts). In the abstraction of knowledge from a specific context, there is always a moment of standardization of knowledge in whatever form is suited. As we also know from the previously discussed communities of practice approach (Lave and Wenger 2011 [1991]), forms of competence can also be transferred between people (Shove et al. 2012: 51). This can be undertaken in a variety of ways, including skill formation practices. In that sense, a skill formation practice is always also a carrier of another practice or multiple practices. In our case, this would imply the various practices related to industrial production (for more details see Fig. 4.2). Then again, in order to transfer a skill formation practice across geographic space, the three elements for that practice need to be transferred, including the competence needed for the skill formation practice. Additionally, competences can be shared between practices if they are common, or at least common enough. For instance, basic mathematics, such as counting, can be part of paying at a café as well as children’s play. This potential of competences

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to accumulate and travel “sideways” is dependent on the degree to which different practices match (Shove et al. 2012: 51). Departing from these considerations, Shove et  al. (2012: 52) go on that “[…] certain elements of know-how bridge between practices not by means of abstraction and reversal but by somehow constituting – and potentially changing – the texture and the quality of the social fabric in which many such practices are rooted.” So, the sharing of common competences between practices is a very important dimension to consider. For the transfer of skill formation practices, the existing competences at the receiving location considerably influence the transferred practices, as is revealed later on in this study. In a nutshell, competence can be transported by abstraction and reversal, can be transferred between people, and can be shared between practices. But what does this mean for practice transfer across distance? To convey the necessary competence for a practice to a location where this competence does not previously exist, this competence needs to be “packed” at the origin of the practice and must be “unpacked” at the destination. Packing can principally occur through abstraction, by codification in different forms (textbook, videos, manuals), or by transporting (at least temporarily) a practitioner in possession of the required competence to the destination of the practice transfer. This knowledgeable practice carrier can then transfer the competence to newly recruited carriers of the practice at the destination. In both cases of transfer via codification or carrier embodiment, some sort of unpacking, a reversal or contextualization to the new location has to be made in order to fit the local context. This unpacking can also mean that locally available competences get reused as substitutes or reshaped in order to fit the needs of the practice to be transferred. The travelling of competence also gives us a first understanding of the spatiality of “knowing” in practice transfer, which is the first research question of this study (see Sect. 1.2). “Traveling” Meanings The idea that meaning “travels” is more difficult to grasp than the “travel” of materials and competences. New material arrangements for a practice can be observed and even counted with quantitative methods, and competences can at least be witnessed in the performance of a practice. Meaning is harder to observe. In congruence with the analytic approach of following and distinguishing the elements of a practice, Shove et  al. (2012: 53) ask what is distinctive about the way meaning-elements “move.” This is a huge topic that is widely discussed in many strands of literature (often from a perspective inspired by Bourdieu (1984 [1977]) that associates the meaning of a practice directly with the social status of the participants). Since this is such a complex matter, Shove et al. simplify and downplay the relativity and situatedness of meaning. This downplaying is a bit of a stretch. Nevertheless, it’s a valuable tool for getting a better understanding of how meanings “travel.” Meanings “travel” via their semiotic repositioning, that is, by association and classification. For example, walking sticks were typically associated with age, but in the wake of Nordic Walking as a new practice they had to be re-associated with

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images of fitness and wellbeing (Shove and Pantzar 2005). Meanings, therefore, move between practices and can also be shared by a range of practices. What’s more, meanings can merge: youth and modernity, for example, can simultaneously be part of practices like using a smartphone, maintaining a social media account, wearing jeans, and driving a certain kind of car. Shove et al. (2012: 55) frame this in terms of “processes of semiotic convergence.” What does this mean for practice transfer across distance? Transferring the meaning of a practice to a transfer destination where it has not previously existed is a difficult matter. Since meanings cannot be transported like materials, nor abstracted and recontextualized like competences, previously at the transfer destination existing meanings merge into a new storyline that fits the transferred practice. The creation of a new storyline implies a process of sense-making of the new practice, by classifying and associating it with locally available understandings, motivations, and emotions. These new kinds of semiotic arrangements of previously available but in this way unstructured meanings then constitutes the element of meaning of the transferred practice. This new structuring of existing meanings has certain similarities with the material arrangements described above, where possibly all tools, objects, and infrastructure for a practice already exist at the transfer destination, but they have to be rearranged in a manner which fits the transferred practices’ needs. Following the Elements It is important to notice at this point that to complete a practice transfer it might not be necessary to transfer all three elements. One or two of the elements may already exist at the transfer destination. In this case, in order to transfer a practice, “only” one or two of the three elements need to be transferred. It is also crucial to note that for all three elements, sometimes a transfer is not a physical transport but more of a rearrangement of already existing elements. Accordingly, the important question to ask is: What part or quality of the element needs to be transported to the transfer destination, and what can be rearranged from using already existing parts of other practices’ elements? When the elements of a practice are transferred, already existing elements can be absorbed, redefined, or rearranged for the “traveling” practice at the destination. In addition, new parts of the elements have to be brought to the “traveling” destination. For instance, the perception that dual apprenticeship training is a valuable endeavor worth the financial expense needs to be constructed at the three emerging economies targeted for practice transfer as part of this study. Also, even though the transfer of the three elements was discussed separately, a practice’s material, competence, and meaning are very closely related so that their transfer is entwined (Shove et al. 2012: 57). Following the elements offers a significantly different perspective of practice transfer to those that focus on the performance part of a practice, as typically applied in international business studies and international human resource management literature (as discussed in Sect. 2.2.4). The advantage of the here-developed perspective is that it allows a detailed view of the contextual conditions at the transfer destination and how they influence the practice in its enactment. It also allows the idea of “different types of practice transfer,” some of which are more complicated than others, depending on the complexity of a practice’s elements. Furthermore,

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scrutinizing the elements develops a new perspective of the spatiality of “knowing” in practice transfer (see Sect. 2.2.1), which addresses the first research question of this study (see Sect. 1.2). Yet, the transfer of practice elements across distance to a place where the fabric of existing interrelated practices is substantially different, typically transforms the elements in different ways and to different degrees. A readjustment of transferred elements in order to fit into the fabric of interrelated practices at the destination is inevitable, and can in turn have a significant modifying effect on the practice itself. One could argue here that the practice, since it has been transformed through the transfer, did not in fact travel, but that a new practice was created. However, if the similarities between the transferred practice and the practice at its origin context are still significant and the practice as an entity can be, and is still, identified as the same practice by its practitioners, for the purpose of this study, this is defined as a practice transfer (not the emergence of a new practice), despite the varying degrees of transformation of the practice. Departing from these considerations, some practices might not be transferrable to all places. If the degree of change a practice undergoes in a transfer is so high that the similarities of those practices to the practice from the original context are obfuscated, then the practice is not thought to have been transferred. Theoretically, this understanding of practice transfer sounds plausible, yet methodologically it is difficult to determine. Defining what is similar enough, and what is too different to still be considered an element of the same practice lies within the researcher’s definition. Therefore, defining what is similar enough should be a carefully argued part of the analysis of every study dealing with practice transfer. This is undertaken in Chap. 5.

4.3  Transferring Practices: Power in Practice Transfer In this section, I elaborate a heuristic distinction between transferring practices and transferred practices based on ideas of power as an effect from a practice perspective. The idea of practices hanging together in bundles and complexes, which in turn hang together and form a “plenum” of practices (Schatzki 2016b) might seem rather chaotic and lacking a sound political economy in comparison with other strands of social theory such as neo-Marxist theory or system theory. However, Reckwitz (2016: 164) does not consider practice theories competing with such strands of theory, but as a heuristic that stimulates fieldwork and empirical analysis, and as a conceptual and terminological network which makes certain phenomena and relationships visible. From a practice theoretical perspective, social phenomena such as power are not ontological categories, but they are socially constructed through practices. Power has been conceptualized in practice theoretical writings, and even been an important point of departure for practice thinking, especially for the early generations of practice theorists such as Bourdieu, Giddens, or Latour (Everts et al. 2019).

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Bourdieu emphasizes the bodily incorporation of power through trained, deeply engrained patterns of thinking and behaving, for instance in the continuing social dominance of masculinity (Bourdieu 2017). Giddens’ take on power differs from Bourdieu’s in that he is more focused on the ability to access and employ allocative and authoritative resources through the construction of societal positions of power, such as politicians or judges (Giddens 1984). Latour (1986) conceptualizes power, especially from a relational perspective. This can be seen in his idea of “centers of calculation” where information comes together and is processed (Latour 1999 [1987]). Some of the more recent practice theoretical writings do not treat power as explicitly as the above-mentioned authors. Watson (2017) recently elaborated understandings of power that fit well with the flat ontology of practice theories. First, he distinguishes two differing views on power: power as an object, and power as an effect. He shows that both views have found their application in practice theoretical debates. Power as an object can be understood as the “capacity of a person” often entwined with the idea of the “capacity to direct or purposively influence the actions of others” (Watson 2017: 170). This conception aligns with Weber’s (1922) definition of power.2 Departing from the conception of power as an object, power is considered as a resource (similarly to Giddens see above). Furthermore, Watson shows how the conception of “power as an object” has been used as the “capacity to act with effect” (Watson 2017: 171) in practice theoretical approaches. A different angle on this is to see power not as an object or a property but as an effect itself. Watson (2017: 170–171) continues, stating that at least since Foucault the conception of power as an effect has become increasingly used in social theoretical thinking. According to him, this notion goes well with practice theories’ ontological positioning. Foucault sees power as governance (or control) but also as the empowerment to act. At the same time, Foucault’s conception of power is relational in nature and thus similar to Latour’s. Latour describes this conception of power in the following manner: […] when an actor simply has power nothing happens and s/he is powerless; when, on the other hand, an actor exerts power it is others who perform the action. It appears that power is not something one can possess – indeed it must be treated as a consequence rather than as a cause of action. (Latour 1986: 264)

Consequently, the possibilities to wield power depend on the relational positioning in dynamic constellations (Everts et  al. 2019: 3). For Watson (2017: 174–180), Foucault’s wide conception of governmentality, where governance is seen as pre-­ structuring and influencing individuals’ activities, can be used to broaden the conceptualizations of power in practice theoretical thinking. Watson develops the idea that not all practices are the same, but that there are practices that in their very core exist to influence other practices. These practices, “while made of the same stuff as other practices, [have] distinctive characteristics not least resulting from the ways in

 Weber defines power in Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft the following way: “Macht bedeutet jede Chance, innerhalb einer sozialen Beziehung den eigenen Willen auch gegen Widerstreben durchzusetzen, gleichviel worauf diese Chance beruht” (Weber (1922). 2

4.3  Transferring Practices: Power in Practice Transfer

Transferring practice

Material

Transferred skill formation practice

Competence

Meaning

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Producing practice

Practice-time profile

Fig. 4.2  Heuristic of connected practices relevant to this study. (Source: Own representation)

which they are aligned over time” (Watson 2017: 180). Focusing on practices that influence other practices and the specific mechanisms that evoke those influences is a promising way to study power from a practice theoretical perspective. Examples of such practices could be parliamentary sessions, managing practices, or the setting of technical standards. Though there are other concepts that look at power in practice theories (e.g., the idea of “dominant projects” developed by Shove et al. (2012: 77)), the concept of “governing practices” is very useful to understand matters of power in practice transfer. Departing from the idea of governing practices, I develop a heuristic distinction for the analysis of practice transfer between “transferring practices,” which are governing practices in the sense that they influence other practices that are to be transferred across geographical distance, and “transferred practices” (see Fig. 4.2). The transferring practice is organized around the purpose of transferring the transferred practice, that is, overcoming the distance. Since practices “travel” via their elements, the transferring practice in its core consists of activities to make the three elements of a practice available at the destination fabric. In this study, I focus on three connected (types of) practices: transferring practices, transferred practices (skill formation practices), and producing practices. Producing practices are strongly linked to the transferred skill formation practices, since skill formation practices provide at least part of the necessary skills for their enactment. For the purposes of precise differentiation, I have decided to use “skill formation practice” instead of “competence formation practice” when choosing the name for the kind of transferred practices analyzed in this study. “Competence” is the term used by Shove et al. (2012) to designate one of the three elements of a practice, also used in this study. Using the term “competence formation practice” would easily be interpreted as a practice that develops the entire element “competence” for another practice. I, therefore, use the term “skill formation practice” to indicate that parts of

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other (mostly producing) practice competences are developed, but not the whole element (see Fig. 4.2 and Sect. 2.1.2). That is to say, the skill developed within skill formation practices overlaps with the competence of the producing practice, but they are not congruent—training for a specific producing practice does not mean that the trainee will have all the necessary “competence” for the enactment of said producing practice. There might still be a portion of the competence for the producing practice that can be achieved, not via training, but only through doing the producing practice itself. The major focus of this study is the connection between transferring practices and transferred practices. Nonetheless, it considers the connection to producing practices as well. All three practices—transferring practices, transferred skill formation practices, and producing practices—are part of the translocal bundles of practices forming MNEs, which function as vehicles for the transfer of skill formation practices in this study.

4.4  MNEs as Media for Practice Transfer This section looks at MNEs as social phenomena from a practice theoretical perspective to better conceptually grasp their role in practice transfer. For this, I define MNEs as media for practice transfers. Hereinafter, I draw on insights from organization-­studies-based international business and management literature, as well as on literature from economic geography to give some insights on MNEs as the context for practice transfer in this study. From a conceptual viewpoint, MNEs are typically considered organizations. Organization studies have made major headway in conceptualizing what organizations are and how they function. MNEs match the characteristics of a narrow definition of an organization: they have members (e.g., employees), are organized around a purpose or an end (e.g., making profits), show internal hierarchization (e.g., CEO is highest ranking), and they have the autonomy to decide on matters of membership, purpose, and hierarchy (Kühl 2011: 17–22). Since MNEs fit into this definition of organizations and this section aims to develop a practice theoretical notion of MNEs, a look at how organizations studies have already worked with a practice theoretical perspective is in order. In the field of organization studies, there was a shift in research interest in the 1990s from viewing organizations as entities to the examination of organizations as theoretical discourses and the study of organizing as a social process. This shift has “created a fertile ground for practice theories especially due to their capacity to provide a processual view of organizational matters and to foreground the central role of mundane activities” (Nicolini 2013: 11). According to Corradi et al. (2010), the origin of the current bandwagon of practice-based organizational studies can be found in three research streams: the research on learning and knowing as situated in practice (e.g., Lave and Wenger 2011 [1991]), the study of technology as practice (e.g., Orlikowski 1992), and the study of strategy as practice (e.g., Whittington 1996).

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Each stream contributes to an established practice view on organizations in organization studies. Taking a specific look at what organizations are, a practice theoretical perspective sees organizations as the site and the result of work activities. Organizations in this tradition of literature are understood as “bundles of practices” (Nicolini 2013: 2) or in Schatzki’s terminology (2016a: 1863): “an organization, like any social phenomenon, is a bundle of practices and material arrangements.” There are two aspects of MNEs which play a major role in how these MNE-­ practice-­bundles are organized, or in other words how the different practices are connected, overlap, complement, and influence each other within the bundle: (1) power relations and (2) the spatiality of the MNE-practice-bundle. (1) When focusing on the aspect of power relations, organization theories-based business and management studies typically refer to the structures, functions, and strategies of companies (Kieser and Ebers 2014). From a practice theoretical perspective, these aspects of companies are part of the bundle of practices that constitute the company. Schatzki (2005: 477) describes this the following way: Like any organization, a rational organization[3] bundles a variety of practices, including executive board practices, managerial decision-making practices, communication practices between managers and employees, practices of design, construction, supervision, shop-­ floor activity, advertising, and upkeep, as well as dispersed practices of giving orders, asking questions, and reporting problems. Any decision made, say, by a manager is part of managerial decision-making processes, just as many actions assembly line workers perform are components of shop-floor practices.

(2) Regarding the spatiality aspect of the MNE-practice-bundles: MNEs are by definition multinational, that is, they have subsidiaries in different national contexts around the world. In this study, I therefore conceptualize MNEs as national boundary-­crossing translocal bundles of practices. The notion of translocality is often used to grasp “complex social-spatial interactions in a holistic, actor-oriented and multi-dimensional understanding” (Greiner and Sakdapolrak 2013: 376). Therefore, by employing this notion here, I emphasize the focus on local-to-local dynamics and the tensions between mobility and locality of the MNE-practice-­ bundles which goes beyond “mere” boundary-crossing of activities. Putting the two aspects of the inner organization of the MNE-practice-bundles discussed in the previous paragraphs together, additional aspects come up regarding the spatial structuring, functioning, and strategizing. These issues of spatial control and conflict in MNEs are a highly relevant and complex matter, as the persistence of this topic in international management and business literature and economic geography shows (see, for instance, Bartlett and Ghoshal 1986; Beugelsdijk et al. 2010; Beugelsdijk and Mudambi 2013; Bjerregaard et al. 2016; Dunning 1980; Heenan and Perlmutter 1979; Jones 2007, 2008; Kostova 1999; Meyer et al. 2010; Perlmutter 1969; Stendahl et al. 2021).

 With “rational organization” Schatzki refers to the conception of organizations developed in an individualistic rational choice approach for instance by Simon (1947). 3

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In this context, as discussed in the previous section, “transferring practices” play an essential role in how power and control are exercised across space in MNEs. However, transferring practices are not the only practices within the MNE-practice-­ bundles whose activities span between different international locations. Examples of such MNE-practices are international accounting and financing or even production practices. Nevertheless, as presented in Chap. 5, transferring practices are of crucial importance in the MNE-practice-bundles. In particular, transferring practices are indispensable for establishing and maintaining the spatial structuring and functioning of the MNE-practice-bundles. One could go so far as to state that having transferring practices in a translocal bundle of practices is a key feature of an MNE-practice-bundle. Without this feature MNEs are hardly thinkable. This is also reflected in the extensive literature on practice transfer in MNEs discussed at length in Sect. 2.2. As typically tightly knit bundles of practices spanning large distances, MNEs are social phenomena which are in an essential way channels or media through which practices are transferred between different geographic contexts. However, it is important to bear in mind that MNEs are very different in terms of their organizational geographies. MNEs show a wide variety in their internal and external networks and organizational structures (Dicken 2015: 115–172). This variety is also reflected in this study’s sample of German manufacturing MNEs. Insights from the data material of this study show that transferring practices have an especially crucial role when it comes to the establishing of new international subsidiaries for example (see Sect. 5.2.2). The role of transferring practices in the MNE-practice-bundles, however, were not an explicit focus in the data analysis of this study. Instead, the focus here was to produce a better understanding of the spatiality of practice transfer, that is, the distance to be overcome in practice transfer. The role of transferring practices within MNE-practice-bundles, however, could be a worthwhile line of inquiry for further studies. To sum up, this section provides a practice theoretical understanding MNEs as boundary-crossing translocal bundles of practices with one key practice of this bundle being transferring practices. On a more general note, when taking into account the importance of MNEs for globalization (Dicken 2015), this practice theoretical approximation of MNEs also opens up ground for understanding MNEs as social phenomena which drive globalization through practice transfer. Here, a practice theoretical view could provide new insights into questions of global convergence or divergence through globalization, which are a highly debated topic in economic geography (Gertler 2001).

4.5  O  rigin and Destination Contexts as “Fabrics of Interrelated Practices” MNEs as translocal bundles of practices, serving as the channel or medium for a practice transfer, connect the origin context of the transferred practice and the destination context. Consequently, MNEs have an influence on both the origin and the

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destination context of a practice transfer. Nevertheless, origin and destination context also entail related practices that are not explicitly part of the translocal bundle of practices that compose the MNE. In the following paragraphs, I therefore develop an understanding of the origin and destination contexts in terms of “fabrics of interrelated practices.” I do so by discussing practice theoretical thinking about space and place. Space has been taken into account in practice theoretical writings. One good example is Schatzki’s “site ontology,” which offers means of engaging with human geography (Everts et al. 2011: 323). Developing his ontological concept of the “site of the social” Schatzki works toward a “dynamic and activity-oriented understanding of space and place” (Everts et  al. 2011: 327). The centerpiece of Schatzki’s concept of social order is his idea of practice-arrangement-bundles. Arrangements are the material contexts for practices including artifacts, living organisms, things, and people.4 Schatzki (2002: 21) believes the first three entities compose and determine the layout of social life as much as people do. The arrangement is how these entities hang together (Schatzki 2002: 18): Order is the hanging together of things, the existence of nexuses. Ordering, furthermore, is the hanging together of things, the establishment of nexuses. Another way of capturing this is to equate orders with arrangements of things and ordering with arranging.

For Schatzki (2002: 22), social orders are therefore “the arrangements of people, artifacts, organisms, and things through and amid which social life transpires, in which these entities relate, occupy positions, and possess meanings.” Artifacts, living organisms, things, and people hang together through social relations. Schatzki further elaborates on four principle sorts of social relations which are not exclusive but “pervasive and crucial” (Schatzki 2002: 41): causal relations, spatial relations, intentionality, and prefiguration. In this section, my interest lies with Schatzki’s conceptualization of spatial relations. In his definition of spatial relations, Schatzki departs from the idea that all entities which compose an arrangement are physical, even though they exhibit qualities (position or meanings) that transcend their physicality (Everts et al. 2011: 326). As physical entities, they constitute “an objective spatial ordering embracing diverse relations, such as further from, closer to, in the vicinity of, next to, between, inside, and outside”5 (Schatzki 2002: 42–43). As the discussion on relational and physical distance in Sect. 2.2.5 shows, physical and relational distance, or the physical and relational hanging together of two entities, can only be separated on an abstract conceptual level, since empirically, they are entwined (e.g., physical proximity can cause relational proximity). Furthermore, Schatzki develops the notion of

4  By “people” Schatzki refers to living, sentient members of the Homo Sapiens species to whom actions and mental conditions as well as self-consciousness and identity are attributed. Artifacts are products of human action. Living organisms are life forms other than humans, including plants, animals, microorganisms, etc. Things are nonliving entities whose being is not the result of human activity (Schatzki (2002: 22). 5  Schatzki does not elaborate on if this is better analyzed in absolute or relative terms.

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“spatialities of nonphysical sort” (Schatzki 2002: 43). For Schatzki, physical space underlies other objective spaces, for example human activities in physical space: An activity-place space is a matrix of places and paths where activities are performed. These places and paths are invariably stationed, furthermore, at particular entities. Insofar, consequently, as these entities are physical beings, places and paths are anchored in physical space. (Schatzki 2002: 43)

Consequently, a specific geographical location such as a company’s production hall, anchors a variety of activity-places, for example, places to assemble, places to press metal, places to repair, etc. The activities that happen in a specific locale are interdependent, sequential, and nested, while the places where these activities occur are similarly interdependent, sequential, and nested. Places are often designed with regard to activity-places (e.g., a production hall is designed for production). The notion of spatiality of arrangements, which is a building block of Schatzki’s interpretation of social order, “can be usefully complemented with geographical notions of the relationality of places and space” (Everts et al. 2011: 332) in human geography. For instance, Massey, in her seminal book For space (2005), develops a notion of space as a product of interrelations and as “the sphere of the possibility of the existence of multiplicity in the sense of contemporaneous plurality” (Massey 2005: 9). In fact, Schatzki’s account of arrangement is strongly influenced by actor-­ network-­theory developed by scholars such as Michel Callon, John Law, and especially Bruno Latour.6 Latour’s account of space and time as a consequence of how particular heterogeneous elements are related to each other has received wide attention in human geography. Renowned geographical thinkers have been inspired by his attribution of social agency to “actants,” which can be human and non-human alike (Latour 1999 [1987]). Examples can be found in Nigel Thrift’s (2008) non-­ representational theory and Marston et al.’s (2005; Marston 2016) thoughts on geographical scale (see textbox in Sect. 2.3.3). From this point of departure, Shove et al. (2012) come to a characterization of the relations between space and practice as a “co-constitution” (Shove et al. 2012: 133). Here, geographic space is seen as a prerequisite for practices and as the outcome of practices. This is not a purely social constructivist conception of space, where space is constructed through its perception, since practices always also include a material element. As discussed above, practices are organized through the mind as a medium, but their organization is not caused by the mind (see Sect. 2.3.4). Another way of thinking about the relation between practices and space is, for instance, that practices can include multiple places (Beauregard 2013: 14) and in this way make connections across geographical space. At the same time, places have an influence on who participates in a practice, which can have wide ranging effects on practice and its possible diffusion (Beauregard 2013: 12). But what does all this mean for the travelling of practices — the major concern of this study? Returning to the concept of traveling elements developed by Shove  Reckwitz (2002: 243–244) counts Latour as a practice theorist, while Schatzki (2002: XII) identifies him as an arrangement theorist). 6

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et al. (2012), we can conclude that since practices travel via their elements, and elements cannot travel everywhere, practices cannot travel everywhere. There is thus a distinct locality of practices. The travel of practices is restricted by the “social geography of pre-existing practices” (Shove et al. 2012: 132) that create “uneven landscapes of possibility” (Shove et  al. 2012: 132) across geographical space. In the conceptual framework by Shove et al. (2012), practices share as well as compete for elements and collaborate in maintaining the elements they require. Nevertheless, what constitutes a fabric of interrelated practices goes beyond competition: It is common to think about practices as consumers, simply competing for resources, but the conclusion that understandings of space and time are usefully understood as outcomes of such relations complicates this analysis. It does so by suggesting that in competing and collaborating with each other, certain practices establish the terms and conditions on which others interact. (Shove et al. 2012: 90–91)

Furthermore, the co-location of practices underpins potentially important patterns of association between practices (Shove et al. 2012: 81). The physical location of material elements of a practice can influence the accumulation of practices at one place. Practices that need steady supplies of running water, for instance, tend to gather around taps and drains (similarly, though maybe to a lesser degree, skill formation practices tend to gather around training facilities). Co-location of practices, however, allows, but does not ensure mutual influence between those practices— going beyond their mere co-location (Shove et al. 2012: 84). In conclusion, when a practice is transferred to a place where it has not been before, one needs to take a close look at the practices that co-locate at that particular destination-place and to pay special attention to the question if and how this practice relates to other practices at that location. Mutual influence between practices can lead to innovations in both the practice that is transferred and the practices co-­ habiting that particular location. The idea that co-location of practices can facilitate innovation has also received attention in geographical thought. For example, Amin and Thrift (2007) bring these ideas together in their analysis of a cultural economy, in which cities serve as an example of a co-locational space facilitating the flow and intersection of moral sentiment, passion, knowledge, trust, and power. Shove et al. (2012: 87) conceptualize the dynamic relational interaction between practices in a fabric of interrelated practices in the following terms: Any one practice cuts into and cuts through multiple registers of interaction, often figuring in several overlapping sequences and cycles at once. Sometimes merely co-existing, sometimes co-depending, the resulting patterns of cross-practice connection are inextricably interwoven.

For the mutual influence between co-located practices, time is a key factor. The arrangement of practice bundles and complexes, therefore, has a strong temporal moment. For instance, the production of a car in an assembly line requires a complex temporal sequencing of interrelated practices such as welding, painting, and quality checking. Thus, in the same production space, skill formation practices and socializing practices take place simultaneously.

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Material Competence Meaning Pracceme profile Transferred pracce

Fig. 4.3  Destination fabric of interrelated practices. (Source: Own representation)

According to Schatzki (1996: 89), practices are “temporally unfolding,” which means that they have a chronological character. Shove (2009: 25) refers to the time-­ based character of practices as “practice-time profiles,” which can be characterized by a practice as having: 1 . its own time period or duration that is appropriate for its enactment; 2. points in time at which its enactment is common; 3. chronological sequencing of actions for a competent enactment (Shove 2009: 25). Practice-time profiles of interrelated practices, though they may be interrelated through co-location or otherwise, need to be coordinated in some way. It might be possible to enact some at the same time; others might be mutually exclusive. This coordination results in patterns of sequenced or overlapping activities that, as a whole, form the rhythm of social life in general (for a more detailed conceptualization of the link between practices and rhythm, see for instance Blue and Spurling (2017) or Stephan and Wiemann (2019)) (Fig. 4.3). Summarizing what I have discussed so far in this chapter: Practices are interwoven with their surrounding fabric. When a practice is transferred to a new destination-­ place, where it did not exist previously, it inevitably makes new connections with the fabric of interrelated practices at that destination-place. For the purpose of this study, I define the “destination fabric of interrelated practices” as: the section of the fabric at the transfer destination-place that directly intersects with the transferred practice or indirectly intersects with the transferred practice but still has a discernable influence on the transferred practice. This destination fabric is consequently different for every instance of transfer of a practice to a new destination-place (since every place shows a different texture of practices, as discussed above). However, there can be larger social phenomena that stretch across the destination fabrics and intersect with the transferred practice at different places of its enactment. An important type of large social phenomenon is included in Sect. 4.8: territorial institutions.

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Now, what elements are needed by a practice to be effectively transferred to a new location with its specific fabric of interrelated practices? I argue that what is needed for the “successful” transfer of a practice depends on the practice itself, as discussed in Sect. 2.2.4. In order to get a better understanding of what transferred practices require from their destination fabric of interrelated practices, and how these requirements differ between different practices, I develop the notion of degree of complexity of practices, to which we now turn.

4.6  Degree of Complexity of Practices In the empirical findings of this study on skill formation practice transfer, two aspect stand out: practices differ substantially between each other, and these differences appear to have an impact on their transfer. However, in the literature on practice transfer and diffusion, these phenomena have not yet been captured, due in part, perhaps, to the fact that most of the studies do not treat the transfer of more than one practice, or if they do, the studies are conducted on a very high aggregate quantitative level. In consequence, these studies cannot empirically capture differences between practices in transfer. They typically ascribe differences in the transfer of practices not to the practices, but to the issue specificness of institutional distance (see Sect. 2.2.4). In this section, I develop the idea of a “degree of complexity of a practice” in order to better grasp the differences between practices. I do this on the basis of the conceptualization of practices by Shove et al. (2012). It is important to note that this does not amount to a general categorization of practices, but rather an account of what has proven to be empirically important for the differentiation between practices when analyzing practice transfer. To be exact, the four dimensions in the degree of complexity of a practice that I develop (see Fig. 4.4) first arose from findings gained through data analysis of this study, without previously grounding the categorization of the data analysis in Shove and her two co-authors’ concept. During the first stage of the data analysis, these four dimensions emerged from the data as “legitimacy, resources, knowledge, and time.” Coming back to the literature on practices afterwards, I realized that for a more in-depth analysis of practice transfer, a more precise conceptualization of the nature of practices was necessary. This brought my reading and theorizing to the works of Shove et al. (2012). Here, I discovered that my established dimensions “legitimacy, resources and knowledge” fit the three elements of a practice by Shove and colleagues very well (legitimacy=meaning, resource=material, knowledge=competenc e). This conceptual fit validates my analytical work with the data (see Sect. 3.4 for a further detailed discussion about the methodology used to analyze the data), and gives credit to Shove et al.’s practice theoretical approach. However, what is new about my conceptualization is:

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Competence

Elements of a practice

Meaning

low

high Material

Practice-time profile

Componentelements

practice-time profile

Fig. 4.4  Degree of complexity of a practice. (Source: Own representation)

1 . I use the concept of three elements of a practice for analyzing practice transfer; 2. I combine them with the concept of practice-time profiles—elsewhere developed by Shove et al. (2009)—to cover for the dimension of “time”; 3. I use the three elements in a manner that confers on them the character of dimensions by understanding how the elements differ in complexity, and thus render them comparable in terms of degree of complexity. The notion of the elements having a dimensional character is a useful one when differentiating between practices (the notion is not part of the original concept by Shove et al. (2012)). To differentiate between transferred practices, the idea of different degrees of complexity of practices is plausible. For example, a two-week induction skill formation practice for a new working station on the shop floor is easily identified as less complex than a three-and-a-half-year dual apprenticeship training for toolmakers. However, a conceptual underpinning of this concept is necessary. For this, ideas from the works of the practice theorists Shove, Pantzar, Watson, and Schatzki are first discussed to shed light on what complexity might entail. Then, the concept of the degree of complexity of a practice is developed based on empirical findings. For Shove et al. (2012: 82), practices are “whatever actual and potential practitioners recognize as such.” This means that the demarcation of the limits between one practice and another lies in the eyes of the beholder. Where one actual or potential practitioner identifies multiple practices, another might see only one. Shove et al. (2012) take the example of car-driving to explain this. Car-driving entails the “component practices” of checking the mirror and signaling, speeding up and slowing down, steering the vehicle, etc. Nevertheless, over time these components have merged in the understanding of the practitioners to what is understood as car-driving (Shove et al. 2012: 83). This way “component practices” can integrate an array of different practices to be perceived as a single entity, that is, as one new practice. In

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this sense, a practice can be more complex if it encompasses more component practices, which theoretically can be separated but are integrated in that practice.7 From these considerations, we can conclude that practices in fact also have different degrees of complexity from a conceptual point of view. Following the idea of practices-as-entities, composed of three elements developed by Shove et al. (2012), I argue that a more complex practice implies that the practice in question is more element-complex, since it needs to integrate the elements of the “component” practices. For the material-element this is easy to imagine. There is a difference between a practice that only requires a hammer and a nail in order to be performed, to a practice such as making a car that would entail a whole assembly line and multiple practitioners. A greater complexity of material can also mean that more human beings are involved in the practice, which makes the coordination substantially more complex (Radwan and Kinder 2013: 2447). The competence-complexity of a practice manifests in the time and dedication it requires for the practitioners to learn to perform the practice. Meaning-complex practices are a little harder to conceptualize. For instance, one could imagine component-meanings which are part of a more general idea, such as the overall habitus of a social class or milieu. Additionally to the three elements of a practice developed by Shove et al. (2012), one important element which constitutes the complexity of a practice that has been very prominent in the empirical analysis of the data for this study is time; more precisely: practice-time profiles as defined above (Shove 2009: 25). The duration a practice needs to be completed can vary immensely: A typical dual apprenticeship training practice takes an apprentice around three years to complete, while shop floor inducting to a new workplace varies from a couple of hours to a week (see Chap. 5). Hence, practices can vary vastly in the time they require from one practitioner or a group of practitioners. Practices also have different points in time when their enactment is common. They additionally require specific internal sequencing—including pausing and resumption of activities. These patterns of activities, the interrelations of different “component practices” can also differ immensely between practices. Thus, the time profiles of practices can be more or less complex. For onboarding, shop floor inducting, and dual apprenticeship training the degrees of complexity of their time-profiles are discussed and carefully compared in Chap. 5. For now, the degree of time-profile complexity can be illustrated with a  Schatzki (1996: 91–110) develops a different terminology in regard to the question of how practices are interrelated. He differentiates between “dispersed” and “integrative” practices. Dispersed practices are a “set of doings and sayings linked primarily, usually exclusively, by the understanding” (Schatzki 1996: 91) of the practice in question, and not by the other important characteristics of a practice that are rules and teleoaffective structures (see Sect. 2.3.6 on practices as nexuses of activities). For Schatzki, this understanding has three components: the ability to carry out the practice, the ability to identify and attribute the practice, and the ability to prompt or respond to the practice. Dispersed practices are, for example, describing, following rules, explaining, or imagining. They form nexuses and are part of other practices. Integrative practices, on the other hand, are defined as “more complex practices found in and constitutive of particular domains of social life” (Schatzki 1996: 98). Examples are cooking, industrial or religious practices (or in our case skill formation practices). Integrative practices usually “integrate” dispersed practices. 7

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short example. Dual apprenticeship training requires complex sequences of activities of a number of participants who may be within the company or in vocational schools. Furthermore, these participants may often be working in cooperation with the AHKs and other organizations during the year. Onboarding practices, on the other hand, have a less complex time profile. In such sequences, companies inform their new employees about the company, thereby transmitting the company values. This practice is typically performed when new employees begin their work, and varies in duration between two hours and a week, depending on the company. The four dimensions of the degree of complexity of a practice are not exhaustive. There might be other dimensions that could potentially make a practice more or less complex. However, these are the dimensions that have been shown to be important by the empirical data analysis of this study. It is crucial to note here that for the four dimensions represented in Fig. 4.4 complexity is not necessarily equal to size, though it might often be the case. For example, in Fig. 4.4 the smallest material is the most complex, containing as it does a greater number of interconnected component elements. These elements are part of the above-defined component practices, and are represented by the connected and overlapping triangles, circles, and squares inside the dark grey symbols. One can imagine a very complex piece of technology being smaller than a less complex one. The same goes for the other elements and, as explained above, for practice-time profiles as well. For instance, the time sequencing of a particular practice can be complex, as with laboratory work where strict time sequencings (e.g., exact numbers of seconds to do certain tests or experiments) have to be upheld, while other practices might take longer in total, but not show such a complex time sequencing. In addition, the degree of complexity of a practice is not absolute, but always relative to other practices. Section 5.1 provides the empirical underpinning for this conception of the degree of complexity of practices. But where does the complexity of a practice come from? It is important to note that practices are formed through the historical trajectory of the fabric of interrelated practices at their geographical origin. In this sense, historical processes have molded practices through their connections with other practices and with elements of past and present practices. Shove et al. (2012: 114) describe this process in the following way: [W]e have built on the idea that if practices are to endure, the elements of which they are made need to be linked together consistently and recurrently over time (circuit 1). How this works out is, in turn, limited and shaped by the intended and unintended consequences of previous and coexisting configurations (circuit 2). Our third step has been to suggest that persistence and change depend upon feedback between one instance or moment of enactment and another, and on patterns of mutual influence between co-existing practices (circuit 3). It is through these three intersecting circuits that practices-as-entities come into being and through these that they are transformed.

These ideas correspond well with ideas stemming from time geography. The notion that geographic space can only be analyzed when taking into account both its historical construction and the inseparability of time and space has been advocated for by geographers, among others by Nigel Thrift (1977) and Milton Santos (2009).

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Thus, the complexity of a given practice is not “just there”; it is the result of a historical process at its geographic origin. When a practice is transferred, it is encoded by its original geographical context, and takes this encoded complexity with it when it is transferred. Based on these considerations, it is intuitive to say that a practice with a higher degree of complexity is more “difficult” to transfer because more complex material, competence, and meaning are needed to transfer and rearrange—complex elements are more difficult to transfer than less complex elements. Performing such a practice requires more time from the practitioners. Consequently, the degree of difficulty to transfer a practice depends on the degree of complexity of the practice itself—even though this is not the only influencing factor, as is discussed in the next section. The degree of complexity, however, is a product of the practice’s geographical origin and the historical processes in the fabric of interrelated practices there. In the following section the relationship between a practice’s complexity and its transfer is further explored.

4.7  T  ransfer Resistance: A Practice Theoretical Notion of Relational Distance Similar to the previous Sect. 4.6 on the degree of complexity of a practice, the theoretical conceptualizations I develop in this section are based essentially on empirical findings. In this section, I take up the discussion from Sect. 2.2.5 on proximity and distance in knowledge transfer within economic geography, in order to elaborate a practice theoretical understanding of distance in practice transfer. Building on Ibert’s notion of distance as an interactional effect (Ibert 2010: 190), I develop a notion of distance suited to understanding what has to be overcome for a “successful” practice transfer. In the previous sections, I have referred to this in a rather nonchalant way as the “difficulty of transferring a practice.” To get a better grasp of the difficulties which need to be overcome, the ideas developed in the previous sections are here woven into the notion of “transfer resistance.” As discussed more extensively in Sect. 2.2.5, Ibert establishes a notion of relational distance as a “sociocultural and time-spatial tension” (Ibert 2010: 187). This tension necessarily comes into being through interaction, since culture has to be done in practice in order to be relevant for a knowledge transfer. Ibert, as shown in Sect. 2.2.1, conceptually follows the knowledge/knowing across distance, not the practice—as this study does. Nevertheless, his conception of relational distance not only works with the transfer of knowing (in practice) but also the transfer of practices across space. Based on Ibert’s conception of distance, I establish that the sociocultural and time-spatial tension of which the relational distance in a practice transfer consists only comes into being when a practice is transferred or is intended to be transferred. Ibert also stresses that relational distance is enacted in practice (which includes material arrangements) and can therefore not be seen as separate

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from the materiality of physical space. Consequently, the conceptualization of relational distance in practice transfer as “transfer resistance” that I develop in this study cannot be considered as independent from the materiality of physical space. In Sect. 4.2 on the “traveling” of the three elements of practices, I elaborated on how the elements of a practice can be transferred across geographic space, and what difficulties this implies. Section 4.5 developed a notion of the fabric of interrelated practices into which a transferred practice needs to be integrated in order to be transferred to a destination. In Sect. 4.6—the degree of complexity of practices—another aspect of the “difficulty” of a practice transfer was revealed. In sum, that practices can be more or less complex does affect their transfer across geographical space. Both the degree of complexity of a practice as well as the texture or composition of the fabric of interrelated practices at the transfer destination affect how difficult it is to transfer a practice to a specific destination. Conceptual reasoning implies that if the fabric of interrelated practices is structured in such a way that the three elements of a practice are already at the destination, but are not yet integrated, a practice transfer should be relatively easy in comparison to a practice whose elements are not easily available at the destination fabric of interrelated practices. However, for the active integration of the practice into the destination fabric of interrelated practices, the practice also needs to be integrable into the time sequencing or rhythm of practices in the destination fabric. Correspondingly, a practice that is more complex will be more difficult or resistant to transfer than a less complex one. Both aspects merge into the transfer resistance of a practice in transfer (Fig. 4.5). Based on this concept, a practice in transfer has a low transfer resistance when it has a low complexity and the elements in the composition of the destination fabric are easily available. The integrability into the time-sequencing must also be good. Respectively, a practice in transfer has a high transfer resistance when it is more complex and the availability and integrability into the destination fabric is poor. The important word in these two phrases is the “and.” When a practice in transfer has a high degree of complexity but its elements are available at the transfer destination, the transfer resistance is neither high nor low but on a medium level. This could be, for instance, the practice transfer of dual apprenticeship training from one German subsidiary to another subsidiary of the same company also located in Germany.8 The destination fabric in case of a transfer within Germany can readily provide the necessary elements for the practice, since, in Germany, the meaning of dual apprenticeship training is widely known, and the competences and materials needed to enact the practice are also readily available. If the transfer takes place within the same company and if the production system is comparable, dual apprenticeship training might also be integrable into the time sequencing of other practices at the subsidiary, which would be similar to the subsidiary “sending” the practice. Nevertheless, dual apprenticeship training is not an easy feat to organize. On the  This is not an unrealistic scenario since even though the dual apprenticeship for toolmakers is a practice that is well known in German companies, not all companies have such an apprenticeship. Also, subsidiaries of the same company tend to help when such projects are initiated at another subsidiary. This constitutes a practice transfer. 8

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+

poor

High transfer resistance

Texture/composition of the destination fabric: Availability/ integrability

Low transfer resistance

_

good low

high

Degree of complexity of a practice

Fig. 4.5  Transfer resistance of a practice in transfer. (Source: Own representation)

contrary, considerable effort is required to make the complex practice work in the “receiving” subsidiary. Of course, we can turn this situation on its head and envisage a practice in transfer with a low degree of complexity, but, when transferred to a destination fabric of interrelated practices, it is only integrated with great effort since the necessary elements are either absent or hardly available, and it is problematic to integrate the practice into the time sequencing of the destination fabric. The notion of the “transfer resistance” of a practice transfer can be understood as a conceptualization of distance from a practice perspective. As such, it is also a vantage point from which one can approach the question of how practices are anchored or localized in geographic space (relational and physical, as discussed in Sect. 2.2.5). Asking if a specific practice can be moved, and how it can be moved to a different place, reveals the fundamental relationship that practice has with geographic space. Some practices reveal themselves as being locally sticky—difficult to move—while others might prove easy to diffuse to different geographic contexts. The concept of transfer resistance also includes both the texture and composition of the practice, as well as the texture of the context to which it is transferred. Thus, the relationship of the transferred practice with the destination fabric is examined. Hypothetically a practice can be transferred to any number of places. Between these places, the transfer resistance of the same practice differs. The transfer resistance is thus a characteristic of the practice in relation to space. This is one aspect of the spatiality of a practice. Other spatialities of a practice can be found in the

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relationship a practice has with a space unrelated to practice transfer, for example, the extent of space a practice occupies, or in the way a practice interacts with a specific place. The important aspect here is that transfer resistance is a characteristic; a relationship that the practice has with space. The notion of “transfer resistance” is a heuristic device serving to analyze and compare the sociocultural and time-spatial tension that accompanies practice transfer. The concept of transfer resistance developed here differs significantly from the explanation of institutional distance as the reason for the difficulty of transferring a practice to a different geographical space. It locates the difficulty not in the abstract notion of two institutional environments but—to a considerable degree—in the constitution of the transferred practice itself (which in turn is influenced by historical processes at its geographical origin). This explanation is the answer to the second research question of this study: (2) Why—apart from differences in institutional environments—are practices transformed when they are transferred across space? Furthermore, the four dimensions of the degree of complexity of a practice can help us approach and systematize empirical data without predefining what these dimensions are composed of in specific cases. The degree of complexity also offers the possibility to understand differences between practices in transfer. Consequently, by integrating the notion of the degree of complexity, the concept of transfer resistance also provides the answer to the third research question of this study: (3) Why are some practices “more difficult” to transfer across space than others?

4.8  T  he Role of Territorial Institutions in the Destination Fabric of Interrelated Practices Until now, the conceptualization of the destination fabric of interrelated practices has stayed relatively unspecific and abstract. While every transfer destination has been treated as different, which is certainly logical since no place is exactly the same, there are significant differences between territories such as regions and national states. In this section, I elaborate a conceptualization of these differences from a practice theoretical perspective grounded in the empirical findings of this study. In the previous section, I developed an idea of the context at the destination of a practice transfer as a fabric of interrelated practices. Within this fabric, one might also find influences of larger social phenomena or constellations of practices at the destination. Since this study analyzes the transfer of skill formation practices by German MNEs to specific research regions in China, India, and Mexico, we therefore need a concept which is in line with the so far discussed ideas on practice transfer that grasp what it means for a practice to be transferred to a different national/regional territory. Specifically, to be able to analyze what affects a transferred practice at its destination context, it is necessary to rethink both what constitutes a national or regional scale from a practice theoretical perspective, and what

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on this scale affects practices (see also the textbox on scale from a practice perspective in Sect. 2.3.3). According to Gertler (2004, 2018) effects associated with the national or regional scale on the behavior of organizations or companies are typically attributed to institutions (see also Sect. 2.2.4). Hence, in this section, I discuss a practice theoretical view on institutions and develop a notion of institutions that works with the insights gathered from the data analysis of this study. Furthermore, institutions are often associated with the regional or national scale, especially the “formal” institutions in form of national legislation or regional regulations. Nevertheless, “informal” institutions are also often studied on a regional or national scale. Thus, there is a link between institutions and scales that is further explored in the following. Institutions as “Governing” Practice Constellations Practice theories and the interests of institutional theories research meet in questions concerning stability and change of the social over time and across space. The economic geographers Jones and Murphy (2010: 314) see a lot of potential in combining institutional theories with a practice-oriented approach, and in this way improving institutional theories’ “ability to show how routines (i.e., practices) emerge and become institutionalized such that they shape the evolution of regional economies and industries.” Therefore, in this section, a practice theoretical understanding of institutions is discussed, taking into account practice theories’ flat ontology in order to provide a theoretical underpinning when answering the research question (4) on the role of institutions in the transfer of practices between two territories. In economic geography and related fields, there is no single definition of institutions that everyone agrees on. Nevertheless, an especially influential definition of institutions is the one developed by the economist Douglass North (Gertler 2018). North (1990) conceptualizes institutions as legislation, laws, rules, and regulations. Here, institutions are seen as “any form of constraint that human beings devise to shape human interaction” (North 1990: 4). These constraints can be formal or informal in nature and are typically compared to the “rules of the game” in sports (North 1990: 4). Alternative conceptions of institutions emphasize different other aspects of institutions. From a capitalist perspective, for instance, institutions are seen as resources for a certain kind of economic behavior, as opposed to constraints (Hall and Soskice 2001). Other approaches stress that institutions are patterns of behavior (Meyer and Rowan 1977), “those collective frames and systems that provide stability and meaning to social behaviour and social interaction and take on a rule-like status in social thought and action” (Djelic and Quack 2008: 299). The notion of institutions as stabilizers of patterns of behavior is reminiscent of the stability and variation of practices themselves (see Sect. 2.3.4 on practices as nexuses of activities). Practices change and transform over time, as we have learned from Shove et al. (2012). However, they can also be surprisingly stable. This is also true for larger social phenomena consisting of constellations of practices.

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Nevertheless, there are ontological differences between a practice view and an institutional perspective. Institutional theories conceptualize the social in levels: usually the micro (where practice happens) and the macro (where institutions are located). According to Scott (2014 [1995]: xii), the most useful aspects of institutional theories are precisely the answers they provide to questions concerning how institutions span connections between micro and macro approaches, thereby explaining how the macro influences the micro and vice versa. Practice theories on the other hand are characterized by their “flat ontology” which in contrast to institutional theories dissolve the micro/macro distinction into one “flat” level (Schatzki 2016b). Practice ontologies9 are flat in the sense that they consider practices to be the central element in the constitution of social phenomena, and that they see the plenum of (interrelated) practices as lain out on one single level (Schatzki 2016b: 31). Institutions as well as the activities of individuals, at both macro and micro levels, are from this perspective “product, elements or aspects of practices” (Schatzki 2016b: 33). But what exactly can we understand as an institution when thinking of a flat ontology? Schatzki (2016b: 33) conceptualizes large social phenomena such as institutions or economies as “constellations” of practices or as “slices or features” of those constellations. He prefers not to differentiate between micro and macro level phenomena, but between larger and smaller social phenomena, and sees the difference between large and small depending on the “relevant universe of comparison” (Schatzki 2016b: 33). Now, if institutions are relatively large constellations of practices, this is also true from a practice theoretical perspective for any other relatively large social phenomena such as markets, or nations. How then can we differentiate institutions from other larger constellations of practices? To accomplish this, I want to highlight one aspect that is central to the different definitions of institutions discussed in the previous paragraphs: institutions influence action. This aspect is consistent with all of the above-discussed conceptualizations of institutions as constraints or rules of the game, as resources, and as patterns of behavior. For constraints or rules of the game this is maybe most obvious, since rules by definition aim to influence action. But it can also be concluded from the conceptualization of institutions as resources: The existence of resources nudges actions to use the resources, and thus influences the actions. Again, the conceptualizations of institutions as patterns (of behavior) shows that institutions influence action, since, in their pattern-character, that is, by being patterns, they influence action. From a practice theoretical perspective, actions are part of practices. For the conception of institutions, I develop in this study, I take the aspect of institutions as influencers of action/practices as the central element to differentiating constellations of practices that are institutions from other constellations. Here the ideas on power in practice theories discussed in Sect. 4.3 come into play.

 Schatzki (1996: 31) claims this flatness of practice theory as being fundamental to the writings of such various author’s as Bourdieu, Giddens or Shove. 9

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Thinking back to Watsons concept of “governing practices” which in their very core have the purpose of influencing other practices (Watson 2017), this idea can be applied to the constellations of practices that are institutions. Thus, I define institutions as large constellations of practices that aim to influence a specific set of other practices in a specific way. The important part of this definition is the “aim to” because all constellations of practices surely influence other practices to some degree through their connections. Nevertheless, there are some constellations that have at their core the function or meaning of influencing specific other practices. An example for such a constellation of practices from this study is the ISO-standard-­ constellation (see Sects. 5.1.2 and 5.2.2). The definition of institutions as constellations of practices aiming to influence specific other practices agrees with practice theories’ flat ontology, while at the same time making it possible to connect to the debates about the role of institutions in practice transfer discussed in Sects. 2.2.3 and 2.2.4. It is also the theoretical basis for the answer to the last research question (4) on the role of territorial institutions in the transfer of practices between two territories, the impact of institutions on practice transfer, and the possible impact of transferred practices on the receiving environment (see Sect. 1.2). It is important to note that the practice theoretical definition of an institution developed above is by no means merely a one-to-one translation of other definitions into a practice theoretical terminology. Social phenomena framed as institutions in other studies and contexts need to be carefully reevaluated on the basis of the definition used in this study. Nevertheless, the principal element of the different definitions of institutions from institutional theory—namely the influence of institutions on other practices—is at the core of the here-developed definition. This core connects to definitions from institutional theory and works as a bridge between these conceptions and debates. One aspect of institutions, however, remains excluded from this definition: The connection institutions show with territories. This spatiality of institutions is further discussed in the following section, and provides an understanding of what it means for a practice to be transferred to another national (or regional) territory. Territorial Institutions: Institutions with a Territorial Spatiality In this section, the spatiality of institutions—how institutions and territories connect—is further explored. First though, we need a better understanding of territory from a practice perspective. The debate about the conceptualization of territory in human geography has been long and controversial. While biological approaches describe territorial behavior as an instinctive human drive (e.g., Ardrey 1968), constructivist perspectives emphasize the socio-political character of territories (e.g., Gottmann 2010). The connections between territories and states in the context of changing political-­economic conditions are an important focus of the debates (Sassen 2013). This focus, however, has also been criticized. John Agnew (1994: 53) warns that conventional thinking about the hegemonic relationship between territory, state, and sovereignty has led to “the territorial trap,” without giving enough credit to the practical everyday

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construction of territory. This tendency in the territory debate, however, is softened with the increasing occurrence in geographic studies of addressing questions of socio-spatial territorialization and everyday demarcations of territory beyond the state (Schmid et al. 2019: 117). The concept of territory also has significant importance in economic geographical writings. In the light of globalization processes, especially from a network perspective on the economy, the role of territories for economic developments has been critically reflected (Dicken et al. 2001; Dicken and Malmberg 2001; McCann and Ward 2010). To arrive at a practice theoretical notion of territory, it is first necessary to have a common understanding of territory. A frequently used definition10 of territory in human geography is: […] land or space that had something done to it – it has been acted upon. Territory is land that has been identified and claimed by a person or people [...]. It is a bounded space which there is a compulsion to defend and secure – to claim a particular kind of sovereignty – against infringements by others who are perceived to not belong. (Cowen and Gilbert 2008: 16)

A typical expression of territory is the territorial nation state, but it is by no means the only expression; other examples are national parks, school districts, and police precincts, even residential lots and micro-spaces of workplaces (Delany 2009: 196). Based on the definition of territory as “land that has been acted upon,” we can conclude two important aspects for a practice theoretical conception of territory: First, territory is made in practice. Second, it has a material-spatial component, which is part of its social production (Schmid et al. 2019: 117). Furthermore, in his discussion of the definition of territory in the International encyclopedia of human geography, Delany (2009: 196) stresses the strong connection between social space, meaning, and power: A territory is a bounded, meaningful social space the ‘meanings’ of which implicate the operation of social relational power. It is, in a sense, an expression of the fusion of meaning, power, and social space.

To understand this connection between meaning, power, and social space from a practice theoretical perspective, it is necessary to recall the practice theoretical ontological standpoint that all social phenomena are done in practice. Thus, territory also has to be done. Drawing on insights from actor-network-theory and ideas about state power as an effect (see Sect. 4.3 for a more detailed discussion of power as an effect), Painter (2010) develops these ideas further, arguing that territory should be treated as an effect as well. He emphasizes how territory is made in the course of multiple practices, such as practices of border control or asylum practices. However, he does not limit this making of territory to such practices of state power. As an empirical example, Painter analyzes practices of regional economy governance in England, showing that practices of regional economy governance are a key moment in the making of an administrative region as a territory. Furthermore, Painter criticizes the frequent assumption that territory is a space where (state) 10

 For an analysis of the definitions of territory in human geography see Painter (2010).

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power is exercised uniformly. He stresses that “territory is necessarily porous, historical, mutable, uneven and perishable. It is a laborious work in progress, prone to failure and permeated by tension and contradiction. Territory is never complete, but always becoming” (Painter 2010: 1094). Bearing these practice theoretical perspectives in mind, we can now revisit the spatiality of institutions. From human geographic literature, we know that institutions can show a territorial spatiality (Boschma and Frenken 2009). In the literature on institutions and territories, one can even find conceptions of territories as institutions (Branch 2017). Branch (2017: 132) defines his notion of territory-institutions “as a linked set of spatial ideas, practices, and technologies that, together, constitute territory.” Even though this conception of a territory-institution is not a practice theoretical one, it is compatible with a practice theoretical view, since technologies, as well as linked sets of spatial ideas, are part of practices from a practice theoretical perspective. Furthermore, since all social phenomena in a practice theoretical perspective are considered as being established through practices, conceptualizing territory as a constellation of practices is not such a big leap. However, with the aim of developing a meaningful heuristic, for this study it is necessary to differentiate between institutions and territory. In this study, I treat both as relatively large constellations of practices. Institutions are large constellations of practices that aim to influence other practices. Some institutions aim to influence other practices in a specific territory; I define these institutions as territorial institutions. Territorial institutions contribute to the making of the territory in question. Furthermore, I am aligned with Painter (2010) in defining territory as an effect, more specifically as an effect of the sum of all territorial institutions. However, it is important to keep in mind that not all institutions have a territorial spatiality. We can think about constellations of practices without such a link, such as the constellation of practices of International Standard Organization (ISO) standards (see Sect. 5.2.2). ISO standards show an international orientation, and thus have a different spatiality than territorial institutions. Territorial institutions can have an effect on practices located within the geographical boundaries of the territory in question. However, this effect is not a given everywhere within the territory, but has to be empirically proven. Just because there is a national or regional institution does not mean “this constellation of practices which aims to influence other practices with a territorial spatiality” automatically has an influence on all practices located within the geographic boundaries the territory in question encompasses. Only if a practice is sufficiently connected to the institutional constellation, is influence likely.11 Now, it is time to get back to the reason why we are exploring the question of the spatiality of institutions: We need to understand practice transfer between countries, here treated as territories. As shown in the previous sections, the fabric of  This conception is competible with insights from the research field of evolutionary economic geography which tell us to be skeptical about the generality of the effect of institutions on organizational routines, as institutions are often “too loose to determine the behavior of firms and industrial dynamics” (Boschma and Frenken 2009: 152–153). 11

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interrelated practices varies between each transfer destination. However, in this destination fabric, we can empirically find various large social phenomena, some of which are territorial institutions. If we want to understand what is particular about practice transfer between the territories—in comparison to practice transfer between places or other socio-spatial phenomena—I propose we focus on the role of national and regional territorial institutions within the transfer destination fabric. As discussed above, in territorial institutions territory is produced and maintained. Thus, looking at the role of national or regional territorial institutions in the destination fabric of interrelated practices gives us the conceptual tools to understand the effect of a practice transfer to a different national or regional territory. In the case of this study, one example for such national territorial institutions are national/regional “skill formation systems”12 (Busemeyer and Trampusch 2012). Territorial skill formation systems aim to influence the formation of skills in a specific territory, typically skills that are required in multiple work-related practices (in different areas manufacturing, service, or even agriculture). Thus, these territorial skill formation constellations aim to influence other practices, in this case mostly work-related practices,13 by producing or providing the skills necessary for them. Thus, territorial institutions can have an impact on the availability of the elements, the availability of meaning, material, and competence, and the integrability of the practices’ time profile which are a key factors for the transfer resistance of a practice (as discussed at length in Sect. 4.7). As revealed in Sect. 5.2, the data of this study shows that some of the three transferred skill formation practices are influenced by the national skill formation systems in the research regions while others hardly seem to register them. This empirical phenomenon, as shown in the findings of this study, cannot be explained by current institutional approaches, as I have extensively discussed in my critical reassessment of institutional distance as an explanation for the difficulty of transferring practices (see Sect. 2.2.4). This paradoxical finding is one of the main puzzles this study aims to solve. Doing so requires a close look at the fabric of interrelated practices at the destination of a practice transfer, and empirical evidence of what role institutions play in that destination fabric. In order to get a better grasp of this, we first need to cast our minds back to the transfer resistance of a practice in transfer, which I elaborated on in Sect. 4.7. The transfer resistance of a practice depends on the complexity of the practice (i.e., the complexity of a practice’s elements and the complexity of its time  My understanding of why Busemeyer and Trampusch use the term “skill formation system” in comparison to “education system” because they want to indicate that the skills “formed” in this system are not only formed through formal education in schools, but include training in companies, training through private training providers, etc. This is the reason why I take up their terminology here. 13  Skill formation systems do not exclusively aim to produce skills for work-related practices. Other practices might be also aimed to influence, such as civil-engagement related skills (e.g., skills to vote democratic governments). For the purpose of this study, the focus on work-related practices is, however, more prominent, since the transferred skill formation practices in this study provide skills that are used in production-work practices. 12

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Material Competence Meaning Practicetime profile

Destination fabric without direct connection to a territorial institution

Destination fabric with direct connection to a territorial institution

Transferred practice Territorial institution

Fig. 4.6  Role of territorial institutions in the destination fabric of interrelated practices. (Source: Own representation)

profile), the availability of these elements, and the integrability of the time profile into the destination fabric of interrelated practices. In Fig. 4.6, two different scenarios are shown. In the scenario on the right—the transfer destination fabric—the practices that are part of a territorial institution intersect directly with the transferred practice. Here, the territorial institution provides some of the elements for a transferred practice and intersects with the practice-­ time profile of the transferred practice. This direct connection is symbolized in Fig. 4.6 by the overlapping of the elements or the transferred practice with the elements that are part of the territorial institution. In the scenario on the left, the destination fabric of interrelated practices also contains a territorial institution. However, there is no direct connection between the transferred practice and the territorial institution. The connection to the transferred practice in this scenario is only through a chain of other practices. The data analysis of this study shows both scenarios (see Sect. 5.2).

4.9  R  eflecting on the Conceptual Contributions of This Study In this section, I build on existing theories and concepts from practice theories and geography, as well as substantial insights from the empirical findings of this study, in order to develop theorizations at the level of a “middle-range theory” (Esser 2002) of practice transfer across distance. For this, I elaborate a framework to address the conceptual research desiderates outlined in Chap. 2. By providing a practice theoretical understanding of practice transfer, I take up the four research questions formulated in the introduction (see Sect. 1.2): (1) What is the spatiality of "knowing" in practice transfer? (2) Why are practices transformed when they are transferred across space? (3) Why are some practices “more difficult” to transfer across space than others? (4) What role do institutions play in the transfer of

Existing institutional insights on practice transfer cannot sufficiently explain the differences of practices in transfer (Sect. 2.2.4)

4

This study shows how working with practice theories’ flat ontology is fruitful by bringing new insights where institutional perspectives are limited. Furthermore, the study develops a practice theoretically compatible notion of territorial institutions as relevant social phenomena which play a significant role in understanding the destination fabric of interrelated practices. This study provides an understanding of the role of territorial institutions in practice transfer (Sect. 4.8).

2 3

This study provides an ontologically and epistemologically consistent engagement with practice theories while developing a practice theoretical notion of distance as “transfer resistance” of a practice (Sect. 4.7). Thereby, this study gives reasons for the transformation of transferred practices and reasons for the differences practices show when transferred between the same two origin and destination.

This study contributes to theory building in economic geography by giving these discussions a conceptual twist. The study elaborates a spatial understanding of following practices across space instead of following the “knowing” in practice (Chap. 4). Thereby, the study makes the spatiality of “knowing” in practice transfer conceptually accessible through the practice element of “competence” (Sect. 4.2, 4.6). 1

Debates on knowledge transfer in economic geography although applying a practice perspective tend to stay with this focus on the transfer of knowledge within communities of practice. The transfer of practices—seen as containing knowledge—across space is not yet explored (Sects. 2.2.1, 2.2.2).

The notions of proximity/ distance in economic geography are not yet fully equipped to address “what needs to be overcome” in a practice transfer across distance (Sect. 2.2.5)

Contribuons

Economic geography

Desiderates

A view of MNE as translocal constellations of practices that function as media or vehicles of practice transfer is developed (Sect. 4.4).

By showing how MNEs can function as vehicles in practice transfer this study shows how constellations of practices can influence spatial dynamics. Furthermore, the distinction between “transferring practice” and “transferred practice” opens up a practice theoretical understanding of globalization or globalizing (Sects. 4.3, 4.4).

What role do institutions play in the transfer of practices between territories (e.g., nations, regions)? When and how do institutions impact practices in transfer?

Why are some practices “more difficult” to transfer across space than others?

2. Why are practices transformed when they are transferred across space?

This study develops a practice theoretical notion of distance in practice transfer, on the basis of empirical insights (Chap. 4).

This study develops a practice theoretical notion of practice transfer across distance (Chap. 4).

A practice theoretical perspective on the topic of practice transfer has hardly been explored so far (Sects. 2.2.3, 2.2.4). Institutional distance as an explanation for the “what needs to be overcome” in practice transfer has proven insufficient as an explanation for explaining the empirical findings of this study (Sect. 2.2.4).

Contribuons

Desiderates

Research field pracce transfer (muldisciplinary)

1. What is the spatiality of “knowing” in practice transfer?

1 2 3. 3 4. 4

Research questions (Sect. 1.3):

A practice theoretical view on MNEs as translocal constellations of practices is still underexplored (Sect. 2.3.1).

This study contributes to recent debates in practice theoretical writings on larger constellations of practices. In these debates the transfer of practices is not yet thoroughly conceptualized (Sect. 2.4)

Contribuons

Pracce theories Desiderates

Fig. 4.7  Conceptual contributions of this study in a nutshell. (Source: Own representation)

Conceptual desiderates/constribuons

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practices between territories (e.g., nations, regions)? When and how do institutions impact practices in transfer? For a comprehensive summary of the answers to the four research questions guiding this study see Sect. 6.1. Figure 4.7 locates the conceptual blank spots indicated in these research questions (outlined in Chap. 2, see Fig. 2.8). Figure 4.7 also summarizes the way these research desiderates are addressed in this fourth chapter, and addresses research desiderates from three streams of literature: economic geography, practice theories, and the multidisciplinary research field practice transfer. As Fig. 4.7 shows, this study conceptually contributes to economic geography in three ways: (1) Debates on knowledge transfer in economic geography so far have not made the spatiality of “knowing” in practice transfer conceptually accessible (first research question). The shift in perspective from a focus on knowledge transfer to the perspective of practice transfer laid out in Sects. 2.2.1 and 2.2.2 opens up a new way of looking at the spatiality of “knowing” in practice transfer. The perspective developed here can therefore be seen as part of the cannon of literature in economic geography treating knowledge/knowing as performative and situated in practice (Ibert 2007: 106). However, this new perspective—though by design—decenters the focus on knowledge or knowing to encompass the entire practice, where knowledge/knowing is understood as an intricate and inseparable element of practices. The link to the debates on knowledge transfer in economic geography is still ensured, however, through the conception of practices as consisting of three connected elements—material, competence, and meaning (Shove et al. 2012). The distinction of the three elements of a practice makes the spatiality of “knowing” in practice transfer conceptually accessible through the practice element of “competence” (see Sects. 4.2 and 4.6). By differentiating these elements, and adding the understanding of transferring practices as “what moves practices across space,” the moving—undertaken through the transferring practice—of the competence element (as an intricate but conceptually distinguishable part of practices) is made visible: the spatiality of “knowing” in practice transfer comes to the fore. This conceptual access is demonstrated in Chap. 5, where I discuss the transferring of the competence element for the three selected skill formation practices of onboarding, shop floor inducting, and dual apprenticeship training. The link between knowledge transfer and practice transfer also forms the basis for linking two research fields/disciplines: economic geography and international business studies. As Bathelt et al. (2018) discuss, the perspectives both fields have so far shown are fairly different. While research in economic geography has focused its attention on “the ways in which firms are at the same time embedded in existing territorial economic networks of varying geographic scales, while connecting to new ones” (Bathelt et al. 2018: 1001), international business literature has concentrated on how MNEs organize their activities and resources across borders. By studying practice transfer with a specific focus on MNEs (which is of substantial research interest to international business scholars) while maintaining a focus on knowledge transfer (which is of substantial research interest to economic

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geographers), this dissertation takes up threads of discussions from both research fields and carefully knits them together, forming a bridge between the disciplines. The completion of the shift in focus from knowledge transfer to practice transfer (discussed in Sect. 2.2.1) makes the connection to the international business literature possible. (2) The taken practice theoretical approach to practice transfer across distance contributes to debates in economic geography regarding conceptions of proximity and distance. As discussed in Sect. 2.2.5, the proximity/distance literature does not yet provide a conceptual understanding of what needs to be overcome in practice transfer across distance. To address this conceptual gap, in Sects. 4.6 and 4.7, I develop the notion of “transfer resistance,” which is composed of two dimensions: the availability/integrability of the practice’s elements into the fabric of interrelated practices at the transfer destination, and the degree of complexity of the transferred practice. The availability/integrability dimension makes it possible to conceptually approach an answer to the second research question of why practices are transformed through transfer: The quality of available elements for the transferred practice at the destination fabric of a practice transfer differs from the origin fabric. This triggers the transformation of the practice when it is transferred. Differences in the degree of complexity of a practice open pathways to understanding why some practices are more difficult to transfer than others (third research question): the more complex a practice, the more difficult it is to transfer in comparison to a less complex practice. These explanations are further substantiated in Chap. 5. Unlike the proximity/distance debates in economic geography, the notion of transfer resistance does not distinguish different types of proximity/distance such as cognitive, social, organizational, and institutional distance (Boschma 2005; see also Sect. 2.2.5). Instead, the concept of transfer resistance builds on ideas also existing in economic geography about proximity/distance as an interactional, sociocultural, and time-spatial effect which cannot effectively be separated into types of proximity/distance (Ibert 2010). What is new in this study is the particular attention paid to the aspect of interaction in conceptually making “the driving force behind the transfer” visible through the concept of “transferring practices.” The transferring practices will be further empirically explored in the sections on transferring onboarding, shop floor inducting, and dual apprenticeship training (see Sect. 5.2). (3) The study conceptually contributes to debates in economic geography on the link between institutions, practices, and space. Existing institutional insights into practices in transfer cannot sufficiently explain the differences between them (see Sect. 2.2.4). Addressing this conceptual blank spot in Sect. 4.8, I have shown that applying the flat ontology of practice theories to territorial institutions helps to understand institutions as relevant social phenomena and to assess the role they play in different destination fabrics of interrelated practices. Thus, I provide a conceptual framework to answer the fourth research question on the role and impact of territorial institutions in practice transfer. The concrete empirical findings regarding the role of territorial institutions in the transfer of the three selected skill formation practices are presented in Chap. 5 and critically reflected on in Sect. 5.4.

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At this point, it is worth stressing how working with practice theories’ flat ontology—as this study does—generates new insights where institutional perspectives are limited. Chief among these insights is the practice theoretical concept of territorial institutions as relevant social phenomena which play a significant role in understanding the destination fabric of interrelated practices. This conceptual view of territorial institutions enables this study to contribute to debates within economic geography on the importance of institutions and the relationship between practices and institutions. It also elaborates a specific view on the spatiality of institutions from a practice theoretical perspective. However, the notion of territorial institutions developed in this chapter is a very specific, practice theoretical understanding of institution, one that has been developed with the empirical insights from this study in mind. The usefulness of the term and its compatibility with differing understandings in economic geography remains to be explored. Nevertheless, by elaborating a practice theoretical notion of territorial institutions, this study encourages reflection on both practice theoretical thought and the rich literature on institutions, institution building, and practice in economic geography. With regard to practice theoretical debates, I contribute to new streams of literature looking at connections between practices (Hui et al. 2017). This study holds that MNEs can be understood as translocal constellations of practices which function as vehicles or media for practice transfer. This conceptualization is still underexplored in practice theoretical writings, though it has been touched upon in management literature working with a practice perspective (Nicolini 2013). In this conceptual chapter, I build on the concept of the three elements of a practice, and the notion of practices “travelling by means of these three elements” developed by Shove and Pantzar (2005). As discussed in Sect. 4.6, during the first stages of data analysis similar dimensions of practices emerged even before I was working with the practice theoretical approach by Shove et al. (2012). However, one additional dimension appeared in the data analysis which proved to be of empirical relevance: the dimension of time. Therefore, I added this dimension to the concept of transfer resistance, adopting the conceptual notion of a practice-time profile. This concept was developed by Shove (2009) in a different context previous to her and her co-authors work on The dynamics of social practice in 2012, where the practice-­ time profile concept is not mentioned. What is new in this study is, thus, not the idea of a practice’s elements, nor the practice-time profile, but the putting together of both and their understanding as dimensions for assessing the degree of complexity of a practice. These insights were derived from the empirical material of this study (how this is concretely put into effect is described in Sect. 5.1). The notion of fabrics of interrelated practices is also rooted in the version of practice theory developed by Shove et al. (2012). What is new in the approach to practice transfer developed in this study is the conceptualization of a specific section of a fabric of interrelated practices as the destination section of a practice transfer. On the basis of my empirical findings, I derived the idea of looking at both the availability of the transferred practice’s elements, and the integrability of the time-­ profile in the fabric of interrelated practices at the transfer destination. Combining

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the concepts of the degree of complexity of a practice with the availability/integrability dimension of the destination fabrics of interrelated practices, the concept of transfer resistance is rooted in existing practice theories. In its entirety, however, it gives a new consistent and self-contained practice theoretical understanding of distance. However, perhaps the most important new conceptual element this study introduces to practice theoretical thought is that of “transferring practices” as what moves practices across space. Though the concept of transferring practices was inspired by Watson’s (2017) ideas of power in practice theories, it was developed mainly from empirical insights generated from working with the data of this study. So far, practice theoretical writings have focused on the idea of the diffusion/ transfer of practices as the recruitment of new practitioners. Shove et  al. (2012: 63–77), for example, give conceptual answers to the question of how practices diffuse/are transferred through the “recruitment” of new practitioners. This recruitment according to the author team is caused by, or takes place through, social networks (constructed in the sway of the plenum of practices) and communities of practice (Lave and Wenger 2011 [1991]). With the development of the concept of transferring practices, this study puts forth an additional explanatory conception of the diffusion/transfer of practices caused by the purposeful transferring of practices to new geographic contexts. This concept of a type of practice that organizes activities for the purpose of transferring other practices to new practitioners, or recruiting new practitioners, could also be useful for understanding the diffusion of practices when not explicitly thinking about transferring practices across space. For instance, in the context of consumer practices advertising could be seen as a transferring practice within the same geographic context. The notion of transferring practices also gives us a new way to understand power in the diffusion/transfer of practices. Regarding the recruitment of new practitioners, an understanding of power in transferring dynamics cannot be effectively captured by conceptions of communities of practice—since these conceptions mostly focus on power constellations within the community (Roberts 2006), not on power dynamics between practices. On a more general note, especially when taking into account the importance of MNEs for globalization (Dicken 2015), and when considering how practices diffuse in space, this practice theoretical view on practice transfer also opens up a practice theoretical understanding of globalization or “globalizing” as the “travelling of practices” (see Sects. 4.3 and 4.4). With regard to large social phenomena recently becoming the focus of practice theorists, this could be an interesting research avenue to explore. In sum, the concept of transferring practices provides practice theoretical thinking with an additional explanatory idea for the diffusion of practices; it fosters conceptual clarity and makes it possible to think about questions of power in practice transfer that conceptual approaches were not previously able to grasp clearly. Moreover, it also provides a practice theoretical notion of the spatial phenomenon of distance.

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Regarding the multidisciplinary practice transfer research field, this study first and foremost develops a practice theoretical approach to practice transfer that so far has hardly been explored (see Sects. 2.2.3 and 2.2.4). Moreover, this study relativizes the notion of “institutional distance” as the major factor influencing the transformation that practices undergo when they are transferred. Institutional distance as an explanation of what needs to be overcome in practice transfer has proven insufficient for explaining the empirical findings of this study. This empirical observation has triggered my search for an alternative approach. By developing a fine-­ grained practice theoretical view of practice transfer, this study, therefore, looks at the empirical phenomenon from a new angle. That said, the differing ontological perspectives between the so-far predominant institutional perspective in the multidisciplinary research field practice transfer, and the practice theoretical approach developed in this study, might become an obstacle to the integration of these ideas into a research field dominated by institutional theory. As can be concluded from the discussions above, there are three particular aspects where the theorizations presented in this chapter go beyond existing ideas and concepts in the literature on economic geography, practice theories, and the research field practice transfer: (1) the conception of transferring practices as the driving force behind the practice transfer, (2) the notion of the degree of complexity of practices as an explanatory factor for the differences practices show when transferred, and (3) the notions of the destination fabric of interrelated practices and territorial institutions and their influence on transferred practices. Most importantly, these notions are not seen separately from each other but form a new comprehensive and consistent practice theoretical approach explaining the phenomenon of practice transfer across distance. As discussed in the introduction to Chap. 4, in this study, I have set out to achieve the level of abstraction of a “middle-range theory,” which has the potential to be used as a theoretical approach to the social phenomenon of practice transfer across distance. The here-developed explanatory concepts of “transfer resistance” and “transferring practices” have a level of abstraction sufficient for it to be applied to the social phenomenon of practice transfer, not only to skill formation practices and practice transfers organized through MNEs. Besides the transfer of practices within MNEs, an area that might be interesting to explore within economic geography is the transfer of practices in urban and regional politics (Peck 2011; Peck and Theodore 2010). Practices such as participatory budgeting—a process of democratic, deliberative decision-making, in which ordinary people decide how to allocate part of a municipal or public budget—are frequently transferred between cities and municipalities (Herzberg et  al. 2010). Insights from my previous work on the participatory budgeting practice in Mexico City, for instance, let me conclude that it would be very well possible to identify the “transferring practice” and the “transfer resistance” for the participatory budgeting practice in Mexico’s capital. Another area worth examining could be the transfer of consumer practices to fabrics of interrelated practices where they do not yet exist, such as the example of Nordic Walking given by Shove and Pantzar (2005), which was a precursor for the approach to practice transfer developed in this study.

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Moreover, in the face of climate change and loss of biodiversity, a further object of study may be the transfer of alternative economic practices across distance (Gibson-­ Graham 2008; Healy 2009; North 2005). However, whether the practice theoretical approach to practice transfer across distance presented here can in fact be applied to other empirical examples of practice transfer, cannot be confirmed in this study itself. As explained in the introduction of this chapter, confirming theoretical conceptions and hypotheses with the data they were derived from would not allow for a falsification of said theoretical conceptions and hypotheses. Consequently, only future research on practice transfer using the explanatory concepts developed here can effectively provide proof. For now, though, I will use the following chapter to empirically substantiate the insights discussed above.

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Chapter 5

Comparing Transfer Resistances of Three Skill Formation Practices to the Chinese, Indian, and Mexican Research Regions

Abstract  In the current chapter, the empirical findings are systematically presented. This chapter empirically underpins the theorizations developed for this study presented in Chap. 4. To this aim, three selected skill formation practices transferred by German MNEs are presented: onboarding of new employees, shop floor inducting of machine operators, and German-style dual apprenticeship training for technicians. The three skill formation practices are then compared with regard to their degrees of complexity. In a second step, the availability of the elements of the three practices in the three research regions (Greater Shanghai Area, Metropolitan Areas Mumbai-Pune-­ Bangalore, and Central Mexico) is systematically analyzed and compared. Here, especially the question of territorial institutions comes into play. Subsequently, the chapter critically reflects the empirical contribution of this study based on the research desiderates presented in Chap. 2, it discusses implications of these findings for managing practitioners in MNEs, and it shows new avenues for future research. Keywords  Empirical findings · Empirical validation of concepts · Comparison between skill formation practices (onboarding, shop floor inducting, dual apprenticeship training) · Comparison between research regions (Greater Shanghai Area, Metropolitan Areas Mumbai-Pune-Bangalore, Central Mexico) · Comparison of transfer resistances · Learnings for practitioners In this chapter, I present the results of the analysis of the empirical data through the lens of the above-developed practice theoretical notion of practice transfer across distance and between territories. The presented empirical findings are the result of the third phase of analysis (see Sect. 3.4.3), which consisted in analyzing the data with the help of the conceptual framework developed in this study, and in cross-­ checking for possible conceptual inaccuracies, and remedying them when deemed necessary. The analysis of the transfer resistances of onboarding, shop floor inducting, and dual apprenticeship training elaborated in this chapter empirically validates the © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 J. Wiemann, Geographies of Practice Transfer, Economic Geography, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-95185-6_5

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conceptualizations described in Chap. 4. Nevertheless, the analysis does not “prove” the concepts developed in Chap. 4 in the sense of “testing a hypothesis” or, more precisely, “testing a concept by applying it to an empirical example.” Since the development of the concepts in Chap. 4 was based on the same empirical material as the current chapter, a “falsification” of the concepts developed above would not be possible. As discussed at length in Sect. 3.1, from a practice theoretical perspective, theorizations and empirical insights cannot be separated, but build on each other. Thus, the separation of Chaps. 4 and 5, in terms of conceptualization and empirical insights, is undertaken for the purpose of reader guidance. In Fig. 5.1, the connections between the two chapters are represented. For example, the concepts of “practices traveling by means of their elements,” “transferring practices,” “MNEs as media for practice transfer,” and “destination fabrics of interrelated practices” relayed in Sects. 4.1, 4.2, 4.3, 4.4, and 4.5, are empirically validated and at the same time substantially inspired by the empirical insights discussed in Sect. 5.2. In this current chapter, I use the concept of “transfer resistance” of practices to compare the transfer of onboarding, shop floor inducting, and dual apprenticeship training between the three research regions: the Greater Shanghai Area, the Metropolitan Areas Mumbai-Pune-Bangalore, and Central Mexico. For this comparison, the two dimensions of transfer resistance, the degree of complexity of a practice, and the element-availability/time profile-integrability, are used (Fig. 5.2). In Sect. 5.1, I compare the dimension of the degrees of complexity of onboarding, shop floor inducting, and dual apprenticeship training with each other. In Sect. 5.2, I compare the availability/integrability dimension between the three skill

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

4.1 Three Elements of a Prac ce 4.2 Prac ces “Travel” by Means of Their Elements 4.3 Transferring Prac ces: Power in Prac cee Transfer 4.4 MNEs as Media for Prac ce Transfer 4.5 Origin and Des na on Contexts as “Fabrics of Interrelated Prac ces” 4.6 Degree of Complexity of Prac ces 4.7 Transfer Resistance: A Prac ce Theore cal No on of Rela onal Distance

4.8 The Role of Territorial Ins tu ons in thee Des na on Fabric of Interrelated Prac ces

5.1 Comparing the Degrees of Complexity of the Three Skill Forma on Prac ces 5.2 Fi‘ng the Prac ces into the Des na on Fabrics: Availability/Integrability and Territorial A Ins tu ons 5.3 Comparing the Transfer Resistances of TThree Skill Forma on Prac ces Between TThree Research Regions

4.9 Reflec ng on the Conceptual Contribu ons of This Study

Fig. 5.1  Mutual validation of concepts relayed in Chap. 4, and empirical example discussed in this chapter. (Source: Own representation)

5.1  Comparing the Degrees of Complexity of the Three Skill Formation Practices

Section 5.2

Texture/composition of the destination fabric: Availability/ integrability

poor

Section 5.3

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+

High transfer resistance

Low transfer

_resistance good low

high Degree of complexity of a practice

Section 5.1 Fig. 5.2  Reader guidance for this chapter. (Source: Own representation)

formation practices and between the three research regions. These two dimensions are put together in Sect. 5.3, where the transfer resistances of the three skill formation practices are compared between the three research regions.

5.1  C  omparing the Degrees of Complexity of the Three Skill Formation Practices In the following three sections, the three transferred practices under examination in this study—onboarding, shop floor inducting, and dual apprenticeship training—are characterized in detail. Comparing the detailed characterizations helps to define their different degrees of complexity. However, the characterizations do not include all possible variations that can be found in the different performances at the multinational enterprises’ (MNEs’) subsidiaries, but rather concentrate on commonalities in order to provide a comparable characterization of the skill formation practice. The characterizations of the practices are derived from the empirical findings. Thus, the skill formation practices are not represented in their entirety, which would be impossible in any case: The limitations of gathering data about practices and their representation in this study have been previously discussed in Sects. 3.2.6 and 3.4.3. Instead, the characterizations aim to describe what is generally understood by onboarding, shop floor inducting, and dual apprenticeship training in the field, and to some degree what I as a researcher understand these practices to be (while relying on the data to make my claims). For a critical discussion of the identification and selection of the three skill formation practices, see Sect. 3.4.4. To provide grounds for the discussion of the degree of complexity of the three skill formation practices, I describe their dimensions of complexity in the following

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order: competence, meaning, material, and practice-time profile. When I refer to the dimensions, I use bold typeface in Sect. 5.1. Comparing the degree of complexity of the practices represents the first step toward ascertaining the transfer resistances of the skill formation practices in Sect. 5.3. The current chapter, therefore, provides an empirical underpinning for the conceptual ideas regarding the degree of complexity of practices elaborated in Sect. 4.6. The three elements of a practice (competence, meaning, and material) and the practice-time profiles for each skill formation practice are determined. These dimensions were derived during the second phase of data analysis (see Sect. 3.4.2).

Terminologies Used in Relationship to Each Other (Fig. 5.3) Practices are nexuses of activities (see Sect. 2.3.4), or nexuses of “component practices” (see Sect. 4.6). Practices are composed of three elements: competence, meaning, and material (see Sect. 4.1). Component practices are composed of component elements. Component elements can form clusters. Practice (=nexus of activities/component practices)

component practices/activities

competence

meaning

Cluster of component elements

material

componentelements

Fig. 5.3  Terminologies used in relationship to each other. (Source: Own representation)

5.1.1  Onboarding The element of competence of skill formation practices can be conceptually divided into three clusters of component-elements: (1) the skill that is “formed” through the practice; (2) the ability to impart the skill; and (3) the ability to coordinate the enactment (scheduling, documenting, bringing together of the necessary material elements, etc.). These clusters of competence-­components can overlap, for instance, in the trainer who needs the skill that is formed, as well as the ability to impart the skill. Furthermore, parts of these clusters of competence-­components can consist of codified knowledge in

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documents or other suitable media (e.g., videos). In the following paragraphs, I describe the competence of onboarding according to these three clusters. (1) The first cluster of competence-components of onboarding is the formed skill: Onboarding is a skill formation practice that provides new employees of an MNE subsidiary with the skill to act oriented within the company. Onboarding strives to impart an understanding of the MNE to a new employee as well as the new employee’s own position and role within the organization. This cluster typically includes the purpose of the organization (e.g., the mission and vision statements of the MNE), a description of what the MNE produces, and the requirements the new employee is expected to fulfill (e.g., general quality requirements, work and environmental safety). Also provided is an orientation of “who is who” within the subsidiary (e.g., who is the employee’s supervisor?) and human resource–related questions (e.g., benefits, possibility of bonuses and promotions). The Mexican human resource manager of GerCIM2 counts among the information imparted during onboarding in his subsidiary the following: Introduction to GerCIM2, the corporate strategy, the presentations of the plant premises, the history, the organization chart, […] the mission, the objectives, the values. Everything related to safety, the products we make, a presentation on the shop floor, the quality policy, etc. (GerCIM2, M50, pg. 72)

In this chapter, various citations from the corpus of interviews are given, such as “GerCIM2, M50, pg. 72.” The indications of the citation’s origin can be read in the following way: GerCIM 1–5 stands for the company case (see Table 3.2, Sect. 3.2.3). In case the citation stems from an interview that is not part of a company case, this field is left out. After the first comma comes the internal interview designation. The letters stand for the country in which the interview was made (D = Germany, C = China, I = India, M = Mexico). The interviews are numbered according to the chronological order of their recording. The citation indication ends with the paragraph (pg.) the citation has in the Maxqda document. Furthermore, interviews were conducted in Spanish, German, and English. Direct citations were translated into English by the author.

These contents vary among the MNE subsidiaries in the sample of this study. Products and company values differ, as do hierarchical structures within the MNE, safety regulations, etc. The common denominator here is that the learning content provided to new employees in onboarding serves to give them the skill to act oriented within the subsidiary. Needless to say, onboarding is not only carried out with the production personnel but usually also with administrative staff at an MNE subsidiary. However, learning contents between production personnel and administrative personnel can differ. Moreover, some subsidiaries perform part of the onboarding at a computer. In the sample of this study, the use of computers is, however, very rare when “onboarding” production personnel. This is for two reasons: there are often not enough or no computers available for the production personnel; and the production personnel in many cases are considered to lack the competence to use a computer sufficiently well.

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(2) The ability to impart a skill, or, in the case of onboarding, the ability to onboard new employees, typically requires the capacity to speak before a group. Trainers explain the learning content, often with the help of a power point presentation. Imparting the skill is typically undertaken by practitioners (usually more than one) who are locally employed in the MNE subsidiary. These trainers stem in many cases from the human resource department, the quality department, and production. A human resource manager from India describes the process succinctly: So, each representative from [a] different department comes and shares the slides or speaks to them. (GerCIM1, I20_1, pg. 68–69)

There are some subsidiaries where the training methods differ. One such exception was the imparting of the understanding of the importance of the new employee’s work within the production process through a simulation game whereby a group of newly hired personnel had to “assemble” toy cars (M5, pg. 133–138). Nevertheless, the majority of subsidiaries imparted skills through the method of speaking in front of a group described above. In a small fraction of the reports of onboarding, this competence field includes the ability to assess the new employees’ acquisition of knowledge during onboarding through a written test. (3) The ability to coordinate the enactment of onboarding typically requires the necessary information and ability to schedule the enactment with all participants, the bringing together of the necessary materials, and the documentation of attendance. The meaning element of skill formation practices, similarly to the competence element, can be conceptually separated into two clusters of meaning. The first (1) meaning-­component cluster essentially covers the legitimacy for forming the skills. In fact, the first code derived from the work with the data was “legitimacy” (see Sect. 4.6). Working with the conceptual ideas from Shove et  al. (2012) led to a change in perspective and the inclusion of the second (2) meaning-component cluster, consisting of the different emotions that practitioners experience during the activities that are part of the skill formation practice. This study’s data provide a clear picture for all three compared skill formation practices for the first meaningcomponent cluster. For the second meaning-component cluster, the data are not always comprehensive, due to the kind of interviews conducted for this study. Specifically, the feelings of the skill learning practitioners were only indirectly assessed through interviews with them. This lack of data regarding the second meaning-­component cluster of all three skill formation practices is the reason why it is not possible to get a clear picture on the complexity of this cluster, nor how it is transferred to the destination fabrics. Thus, I mention this second meaning-component cluster in the descriptions of the skill formation practices, only as far as the data provided a detailed picture of the described practices. Discussing this cluster’s complexity and its availability in the destination fabrics was not possible, also due to a lack of substantial data, for instance in the form of interviews with new operators, new employees, mentors, and trainers. (1) As mentioned above, the first meaning-component cluster concerning the “legitimacy” of onboarding is the provision of new employees with the skill to act

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oriented within the MNE subsidiary. This skill is important for the effective functioning of the subsidiary on different levels. Hierarchical structuring of the subsidiary and regulations and policies are communicated (and thus to a degree reproduced). The learning content on the MNE’s values is especially strongly connected to the MNE’s “corporate culture” (Alvesson and Berg 1992). The values of an MNE are an explicit formulation of the organization’s purpose. Communicating this purpose to new employees can therefore be seen as part of the governing and managing of a company (Wilkins 1984). (2) The second meaning-component cluster consisting of the different emotions practitioners associated with the performance could not be obtained directly from these onboarding practitioners, due to this study’s sampling strategy (see Sect. 3.2.3). Nevertheless, it is not a stretch to guess that new employees want to have the skill to be oriented within the organization they have just entered. Moreover, for all participants, including the trainers, onboarding is part of their job, so the motivation behind the practice is probably to a great degree the motivation to earn a living. The material element of onboarding is typically a kind of classroom or conference room equipped with tables, chairs, and the possibility for presenting slides (Fig. 5.4). Part of the materiality of onboarding is of course also the human bodies of the trainers and the new employees. Group sizes of new employees vary significantly

Fig. 5.4  Multi-use room used for onboarding at a Mexican production plant (M25). (Source: Photograph by J. Wiemann; stylized by author to ensure anonymity of the company)

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between subsidiaries, as well as between enactment instances. In the interviews, the numbers reported vary between 2 and 100 new employees. This variation is rooted in the number of new hires usually at the beginning of the month. Looking at practice-time profiles (as discussed in Sect. 4.5), three characteristics need to be taken into account: first, the practices’ appropriate duration for enactment; second, the point in time the enactment is common; and third, the chronological sequencing of activities for the competent enactment (Shove 2009: 25). (1) The practice-time profile of onboarding a new employee varies from two hours to around a week. Typical onboarding is undertaken in one to two working days. (2) The common point in time for the enactment of onboarding is during the first working days within an MNE subsidiary (though there are cases when it takes place during the first months in order to form a larger group of new employees). Furthermore, onboarding commonly takes place before shop floor inducting and after the hiring of the new employee. In subsidiaries with a high rate of personnel fluctuation, onboarding is typically enacted at the beginning of the month. (3) The chronological sequencing of onboarding is in part dependent on the logical order of the different learning contents. Since learning contents differ between MNE subsidiaries, the time profile of onboarding varies considerably. In the next two sections, shop floor inducting and dual apprenticeship training are described in a similar manner as with onboarding. The aim is to form a basis on which to then compare the complexities of the practices.

5.1.2  Shop Floor Inducting In the following paragraphs, the element of competence in shop floor inducting is explored in parallel with the previous section about onboarding, that is, it is divided into three competence-­component clusters: (1) the skills that are formed through the practice; (2) the ability to impart the skill; and (3) the ability to coordinate the enactment. (1) The first competence-component cluster of shop floor inducting provides production line workers (often called operators) with the skills to effectively, safely, and swiftly operate one or more working stations. The learning operators can be recently hired personnel, or existing personnel repositioned to a new working station in the production. This competence-­component cluster of shop floor inducting overlaps to a considerable degree with the element of competence in the producing practice. The skills that are learned are oriented toward the smooth running of the producing practice. Since the MNEs in the sample of this study manufacture a wide variety of products, the producing practices in the sample are as varied as those related to onboarding. This leads to a considerable range of skills imparted in shop floor inducting. These skills vary within the same production plant, as well as between different manufacturing subsidiaries.

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An example of an imparted skill can be found in the following instruction for the operation of a working station, given by an experienced operator to a new operator: Step 1. You take the drill and leave it on a part of the chassis so you can go for the tray, the lid, and the carpet. You take them with your left hand, you reach in, you place them in this part of the water channel; you place the lid and the carpet in the water channel, and you place the tray. Before placing the tray to fix it, a harness is placed. The harness is very thick and blocks the entrance of the tray, so the harness has to be put aside and placed in such a way that it gives the tray space and allows it to fit without problems. If you do not do this you will fight a lot with the harness and when you want to put the screws it will be swept because the tray is not spliced with the holes, and then sweep many screws, takes time, and affect others. Then… you also notice that, when you put the tray, you put it on top. That they are exactly splicing the holes of the tray with the hole of the body so you can put the screw in, and once you check this, you activate the drill, you give it two turns, and right there you are going to feel how it entered; if it doesn’t enter, don’t press it, it means that it is badly spliced, then you take it out, you splice the tray well, and now if you can put the screws in well… I’m describing this step because I know it, let’s say, I’ve developed my method. […] you put in, screw in all three until the torque, and once you’ve fixed the three screws, now you give it the whole drill to make the torque, the necessary tightening, and then you’re done. (Operator in GerCIM5, M42, pg. 23)1

The operator indicates that the described operation must be completed within one minute, in order to keep the pace of the production line. What we can see from this description is the overlap of the skill formed in the skill formation practice with the producing practice. Furthermore, the description gives the insight that the skills formed in shop floor inducting require repetition, manual dexterity, and speed in order to be acquired. (2) The imparting of the skills in shop floor inducting is typically undertaken by experienced operators in the production line. The experienced operator (often called “mentor”) demonstrates the production step to the new operator, lets him/her try the operation, and supervises until the new operator has acquired the skill to a sufficient level that they can be left on their own. This competence-component cluster contains the ability to practically teach a new operator how to complete the production step correctly and quickly. Nevertheless, not all experienced operators imparting the skills in shop floor inducting have a well-developed ability to teach, or the inclination to do so (Operator in GerCIM5, M42, pg. 7). (3) The competence-component cluster of shop floor inducting, which covers the ability to coordinate the activities of shop floor inducting, requires the ability to schedule the imparting of the skill, the ability to test skill proficiency levels, and the ability to document the spread of the skill in the subsidiary. The coordination and documentation of shop floor inducting are mostly undertaken by the human resource departments of the subsidiaries, while the leading personnel in the production line oversee testing. While the skills imparted in shop floor inducting differ considerably between the MNE’s subsidiaries, this competence-component cluster is quite similar.

 This description was given in an interview and is not a recorded citation from an ongoing shop floor inducting. 1

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The scheduling of all three activities, the testing of the skill levels, and the documenting of the spread of the skill come together as a skill matrix typically maintained in an Excel file. In a skill matrix, one axis lists the different skills a subsidiary’s producing practice requires; the other axis lists the subsidiary’s employees. The table’s cells are filled with an indication of the skill level the employee has been tested for and has achieved. There are typically four skill levels. One human resource manager describes the levels of the skill matrix in the following way: We have a matrix, which now that we go down to the floor, I’ll show you. It’s called ILUO, ‘I’, ‘L’, ‘U’, ‘O’, which is a matrix, […] where people start to get certified as beginners. Then when they reach the ‘L’, it’s a person who can already work with quality, but not yet with productivity. Let’s say, he still doesn’t reach the production rate, he is a little slower, because he’s still in this learning period. Once he reaches the ‘U’[…], he is defined as ‘working with quality and productivity’. And the ‘O’ tells us that he is an experienced person and who additionally is capable of training someone else. These people are also the ones who serve as trainers within the lines. (M4, pg. 7)

The idea of ILUO is to make a complete rectangle, each additional line representing a newly acquired level of the skill in question, as demonstrated in the following figure (Fig. 5.5). Not all interviewed subsidiaries use the ILUO terminology. However, the existence of four levels of proficiency with the level definitions described above is a common characteristic and can be found in all three research regions. The levels of proficiency are tested by the supervisors, often through a practical test (checking for the quality and speediness of the operation) and an oral exam with a number of preestablished questions, or in some cases in form of a written test (e.g., multiple choice questions). This skill matrix reveals a connection to auditing practices. The MNE subsidiaries are either audited by their clients or by auditing agencies who certify the subsidiary’s adherence to work and/or environmental safety norms (e.g., ISO 9000, ISO 9001, ISO 14000 are often named in the data). A human resource manager from GerCIM2, for example, describes how these auditing practices play a significant role in documenting part of the shop floor inducting (GerCIM2, M55, pg. 190–191). Also, other interviews indicate that the relative similarity and conformity of the third competence-component cluster of shop floor inducting can be at least partly attributed to auditing practices. The meaning of shop floor inducting, like onboarding, can be divided into two meaning-component clusters: (1) the legitimacy meaning field (motivational

Fig. 5.5  The ILUO idea in skill matrixes. (Source: Own representation, Interview M4, and production plant visit)

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meaning for forming the skill) and (2) the emotions that participants experience during the performance of shop floor inducting. (1) The legitimacy meaning-component cluster of shop floor inducting is highly intertwined with the meaning of the producing practice at the subsidiaries. Shop floor inducting secures the smooth running of the producing practice. The legitimate reason for forming the skills is to guarantee the quality of the products, to ensure a fast production tempo, and to provide work safety. Shop floor inducting is not called by this name in all the interviews—for instance, some interviewees call this skill formation practice “induction” (GerCI3, I17, pg. 33, the word “induction” appears 144 times in the data and is used by a variety of MNEs, including the Spanish equivalent), or “production training for operators” (GerCIM4, C29, pg. 27, the word “production training” appears 14 times in the interviews, including the Spanish equivalent). Many more names for what I refer to as “shop floor inducting” appear in the interviews. However, all the used terms in some way or another indicate that in essence this skill formation practice aims to impart the skills necessary for operating different working stations on the shop floor. Thus, the legitimacy meaningcomponent cluster of this practice is tied to enabling the production practices by providing the production personnel with the necessary skills. Therefore, for the purpose of this study, I decided to refer to this practice as “shop floor inducting.” (2) The second meaning-component cluster, covering the emotions the practitioners experience during the performance activities, as with the onboarding practice, is a little underrepresented in the data, due to the sampling strategy including only a few interviews with operators. The two interviews with (in total) three operators from GerCIM5  in Mexico, however, indicate that shop floor inducting can be a potential source of stress for both the learning operator and the experienced operator. One of these operators describes the reasons for sometimes lacking motivation to impart the skill in the following way: A lot depends on the operator who trains you. If the comrade is already experienced, has been there for a long time, he already knows about the tricks – the tricks to maneuver certain things so that they come out right or how you can do them faster. Then it also depends on what kind of person he is, because I must tell you that there are many people on the shop floor, our comrade workers, who are selfish and don’t explain enough to you, they omit several things and leave them to you. Some have the mentality of: ‘when I arrived, I learned alone, nobody taught me,’ and they want to apply the same to you. (Operator in GerCIM5, M42, pg. 7)

The operator identifies another reason for the stressful experience of shop floor inducting for operators: the time pressure of the production process. The inducting of an operator often leads to a certain slowness of an operation that is being learned. This slowness can delay other operations depending on the previous operation step. The material involved in shop floor inducting mainly consists of the shop floor machinery and personnel. In a few cases, training stations where skills can be learned also exist. GerCIM2 in Bangalore, for example, has a special “dojo” room for the development of certain operating skills (GerCIM2, I4b, pg. 2–43). The shop floor materiality is arranged in a way that suits the producing practice, and varies

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considerably according to the kind of product that is manufactured. An example of a shop floor can be seen in the picture in Fig. 5.6. Shop floor inducting shares most of its materiality, the shop floor, all the machinery, and the operators with the producing practice (practices can also share elements, as discussed in Sect. 4.2). On the shop floor, many artifacts are primarily used for shop floor inducting. In some subsidiaries, for example, operators learning a new skill through shop floor inducting wear a work-vest that signals their status as learners. They may also make use of worksheets with instructions, here described by a human resource manager: You can come down to our production line, there we have standardized worksheets. These standardized worksheets meet the requirements of the [GerCIM3] production system. This is a work instruction where they have a visual part and [...] a descriptive part of the actions. (GerCIM3, M36, pg. 79)

The stylized photograph in Fig. 5.6 shows such worksheet instructions. The shop floor visits that were part of the methodology of the global-strategies research project I was part of also showed material manifestations of skill matrixes on the shop floor, such as bulletin boards with pictures or names of operators and their skill levels. The coordination of the enactment of shop floor inducting is usually performed by employees in charge of production and employees in the human resource

Fig. 5.6  Technical instructions at the working station, M5. (Source: Photograph by K. Wiemann; stylized by the author to ensure anonymity of subject and company)

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department. These activities of the practice are undertaken in an office environment, using computers, etc. In sum, as with the skills imparted as part of the competence of shop floor inducting, the material element of shop floor inducting is largely shared with the producing practices in the subsidiaries. This connection to producing is also evident in the practice-time profile of shop floor inducting. As in the case of onboarding above, I will describe the practice-time profile of shop floor inducting along three characteristics: (1) the practices’ appropriate enactment duration; (2) the point in time at which its enactment is common; and (3) the chronological sequencing of activities for the competent enactment. (1) The duration of the enactment of shop floor inducting is strongly dependent on the skills that are imparted. As previously discussed, these skills vary considerably. Thus, typical time frames for learning these skills vary according to the skill in question: Some skills appear to be possible to learn during a number of days, while others need months. Also, achieving the different levels of proficiency can take different numbers of working hours. A time frame often defined in the interviews is one to three weeks for the learning of one skill to the level of proficiency where the operator can be left on her/his own. It is also common in many MNE subsidiaries that newly hired operators go through various working stations in a row (typically three to five) learning the skills respective to each one. Having operators with multiple skills who can operate different working stations fosters flexibility in the producing practice. (2) Shop floor inducting is commonly performed during official working hours and after the hiring of an operator and the enactment of onboarding. The point in time for the enactment of shop floor inducting also depends on the number of new hires in a period of time, and possible restrictions of the producing practice at the subsidiary. Coordinating the skill forming activities in shop floor inducting is a yearlong periodic activity. (3) The chronological sequencing of shop floor inducting activities depends to an extent on the imparted skill. Typically, the experienced operator first demonstrates the operation, explains and gives instructions, and then lets the learning operator try to perform the operation. The experienced operator supervises the learner until they have reached the desired level of proficiency, and they can be left on their own. Testing of the operator’s skill level is undertaken after a period of time depending on the difficulty of the skill being learned, and on the progress of the learning operator. The documentation of the skill level in the skill matrix follows. Thus, the chronological progression of shop floor inducting requires a substantial number of activities to be performed, many of them depending on the previous completion of another activity.

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5.1.3  Dual Apprenticeship Training The following description of dual apprenticeship training is derived from the data of this study; it is not a description of dual apprenticeship training in the German vocational education system. The description approximates the practice as it occurs in the three research regions of this study. In addition, I lay out the understanding of the practice as characterized in the interviews with personnel from headquarters in Germany. It must be said that only a third to a quarter of MNE subsidiaries in the three research regions enact dual apprenticeship training. For example, of the MNE cases (see Table 3.2) the automotive supplier GerCIM3 enacts dual apprenticeship training in all three research regions (though not in all the interviewed subsidiaries: one of the two subsidiaries we conducted an interview with did not engage in dual apprenticeship training). GerCIM2, also an automotive supplier, does not enact dual apprenticeship training in any of the four subsidiaries in the research regions that are part of this study’s sample. As with the two previously described skill formation practices, the competence element of dual apprenticeship training can be divided into three competence-component clusters: (1) the skills that are formed; (2) the imparting of the skills; and (3) the coordination of the activities for its enactment. (1) In dual apprenticeship training a wide set of technical, cognitive, and social skills are formed that are part of the skill sets required for an occupation (see Sect. 2.1.1 for a discussion of the relationship between occupation and the notion of skill defined in this study). This study is focused on skill formation practices for employees working in industrial production. The occupations mostly found in the data are mechatronics technicians and toolmakers (GerCIM5 also has the occupation of an electronics technician).2 For chemical industry MNEs in the sample of this study, the occupation is chemical technician. However, in the sample, only GerCIM1 and GerCI3 enact dual apprenticeship training for chemical technicians and only in the Greater Shanghai Area and none of the other research regions.3 Both GerCIM1 and GerCI3 cooperate with the same vocational college in the area to organize their dual apprenticeship training. Thus, the here relayed description of dual apprenticeship training is mostly based on dual apprenticeship training for toolmakers and mechatronic technicians. The occupational profiles are defined in Germany through training regulations (for the mechatronics technician occupation see, for example, Bundesministerium  According to the Association of German Chambers of Industry and Commerce (DIHK), this is a global tendency for transferred dual apprenticeship training, that is, most transferred dual apprenticeship trainings are for mechatronics technicians and mechanics technicians (German Mechatroniker and Mechaniker), see DIHK (2016: 13). 3  GerCIM1 in Central Mexico ran dual apprenticeship training for chemical technicians in the past. They stopped the practice over 15 years prior to the interview, however. The two interviewed employees were not yet working for GerCIM1 when dual apprenticeship training was still enacted at their production facilities. Therefore, the data about the practice at GerCIM1 in Central Mexico do not cover this instance of dual apprenticeship training. 2

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für Wirtschaft und Technologie 2011, 2018) and detailed curricula according to the training courses (Pilz 2009). In these curricula, the different skills are defined and assigned a duration and point in time during which they are supposed to be learned for the completion of dual apprenticeship training. The completion of the apprenticeship depends on the occupational profile in question (24, 36, or 42 months). For example, the duration of the mechatronics technician apprenticeship is 42 months according to the German training regulations. The curricula for the different enactments of dual apprenticeship training in the research regions vary according to how closely they follow the German curriculum. In some subsidiaries, the German curriculum is followed in great detail, while in others only a portion of the German curriculum is covered. However, the understanding of the practitioner in the field of what dual apprenticeship training entails includes a substantial orientation toward the German curricula. The skillset does not only cover technical skills and problem solving skills, but also soft skills. Part of the learning content for dual apprenticeship training in the German regulations is covered through classes at vocational schools (e.g., English language, civics, law). Especially in vocational schools, skills of a more general nature are transmitted. These are not tied to a specific occupation, such as English language skills. A number of MNE subsidiaries in the research regions opt to reduce the more general skills in the curricula. The understanding that these more general skills are not included is also shared in the interviews with employees from the German headquarters. The technical and problem-solving skills, on the other hand, are acquired in special training workshops and on the shop floor. Since the purpose of this description is to assess the complexity of the competence element of dual apprenticeship training in comparison to onboarding and shop floor inducting (see Sect. 5.1.4), a detailed description of each skill imparted in dual apprenticeship training would not be relevant. Instead, what is important to note is the high number of skills that are imparted, and their strong interdependence and connectedness. Nevertheless, to illustrate at least one such skill, I will give the example of manual metalworking, often referred to as “filing,” a skill that is frequently referred to in the interviews (see Fig. 5.7). The learning of manual metalworking involves forming different types of metal into specific, usually predefined, shapes in order to develop a feeling for the material and the tools involved. Filing usually takes up a considerable amount of an apprentice’s time in the first months after starting dual apprenticeship training. In sum, the skills imparted in dual apprenticeship training are numerous. Furthermore, they demand a wide variety of skills, including technical, problem solving, and soft skills. These skills are relevant to the occupation. (2) In dual apprenticeship training, teaching is typically undertaken at two different locations: One is the MNE subsidiary; the other is a vocational school or technical university. In several subsidiaries, the teaching undertaken at public education institutes also takes place in the subsidiaries’ training workshops (sometimes shared between two or three subsidiaries of different German MNEs with production facilities close to each other) as well as on the shop floor itself. This coming together of

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Fig. 5.7 Manual metalworking for dual apprenticeship training. (Source: Photograph by K. Wiemann; stylized by the author to ensure anonymity of subjects and company)

public education institutes and companies is the reason why this skill formation practice is called dual apprenticeship training. The two locations are also associated with different learning contents and/or teaching methods. At the MNE subsidiaries, the teaching is understood to be “practical,” while the learning content at the vocational schools or technical universities is understood to be “theoretical.” This division, however, might not always hold true. It is also difficult to maintain from a conceptual point of view. Nevertheless, different teaching methods accompany different learning environments. Imparting such a wide range of skills in dual apprenticeship training requires the ability to teach in the classroom, in the training workshop, and on the shop floor. The teaching methods depend to an extent on the skill being imparted. The skill of metalworking, for instance, cannot be acquired without working with metal. Thus, this second competence-­component cluster of imparting skills in dual apprenticeship training consists of multiple teaching methods, according to the variety of skills that are part of the first competence field. These methods include, for example, teaching through the solving of a real problem common on the production line.

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Another example is teaching through facilitating group work, which fosters soft skills. In sum, the second competence field of dual apprenticeship training requires the ability to use a variety of teaching methods, and possession of the respective codified knowledge. Imparting the occupational skills in dual apprenticeship training is typically undertaken through a range of teaching personnel: vocational school teachers (or university lecturers), technical experts in the production plant, as well as full-time chief instructors (in Germany also called Meister [master craftsmen]). (3) The coordination of the dual apprenticeship training activities requires the ability to schedule all the practitioners (e.g., the coordination of schedules between the vocational school and the MNE activities), the ability to test apprentices through customary practical and written exams, and the ability to give out certifications for the apprentices. These abilities are typically carried out by the leading personnel of the training center in the subsidiary, and by vocational school personnel. Part of the testing of the apprentices is in many cases undertaken through the respective German Chambers of Commerce Abroad (AHK—Außenhandelskammer) operating within the research regions. This includes the issuing of certificates for the apprentices. The issuing of certificates in Germany is undertaken by the Chambers of Industry and Commerce (IHK—Industrie- und Handelskammer). With regard to examining and certificating, the dual apprenticeship training in the three research regions shows substantial variation. Generally, three types of graduation certificates are issued: first, a certificate issued by the MNE subsidiary; second, a certificate issued by the local AHK (functioning as the counterpart of the IHKs outside of Germany); and third, a certificate officially recognized in the research region (for instance, a graduation certificate issued by a local vocational education establishment). In a couple of cases, more than one type of certificate is given to the graduating apprentices. The variation in the graduation certificates can be attributed to differences with regard to cooperation with vocational education establishments, willingness to bear costs for involving the AHK in the examining and certificating, and differences in the perception of the worth of the certificates in the local labor markets. Some MNE subsidiaries, for instance, fear that by investing in an official AHK certificate for their graduating apprentices, the apprentices become more attractive for competing companies and are more likely to leave the subsidiary after graduation. Mostly, the dual apprenticeship training in the sample of this study engages in some form of examining and certificating in cooperation with the AHKs. In the case of graduation certificates issued by the AHKs, the AHKs are also highly involved in the examining of the apprentices. These certifications differ according to three qualitative categories for dual apprenticeship training outside of Germany, as can be seen in Table  5.1. The categories differ in essential

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Table 5.1  Quality categories for dual apprenticeship training outside of Germany by the AHKIHK-DIHK network

Relationship to German curricula

Training period

Suitability of trainers

Duality

Exams

Level B: Local dual vocational education and training in line with the German model At least 50% of core and professional skills taught in accordance with the German occupation profile that serves as a reference. The training period can Training period in accordance with German be shortened from the period fixed in the job profile. German training regulation to a degree: 42 months in German training regulations → at least 28 months; 36 months in German training regulations → at least 24 months; 24 months in German training regulations → at least 16 months. Trainers trained and Trainers trained and examined in line with examined in accordance with German standards— German minimum training must be proved by standards—must be proved by passing an passing an examination based on the international examination based on the international train-the-trainer-concept train-the-trainer-concept (full version). (basic version). At least 50% companyAt least 70% companybased training. (Training based training. (Training phases that take place at phases that take place in practical vocational company training institutions also count as workshops also count as company-based training.) company-based training. Company-based/ practical training.)

Level A: German dual vocational and educational training abroad Core and professional skills in accordance with German occupation profile.

Original German examination questions are used. Procedure must include a mid-term examination (if specified by German regulations).

Level C: Local dual training with elements of the German system

The training period consists of at least 240 hours.

Training staff have received suitable professional and interpersonal training skills and have the relevant professional experience.

Training should include practice-oriented industrial training at companies. (Measures that take place at practical vocational establishments also count as company-based training.)

Examination questions are set locally. Examination procedure can include a mid-term examination (if specified by German regulations). (continued)

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Table 5.1 (continued) Level A: German dual vocational and educational training abroad Independence Independent examination of examination board of at least three examiners from the company and the vocational school or another educational establishment. Trainers or teachers of the examination participants shall not be involved. Title of German dual vocational certificate education and training.

Level B: Local dual vocational education and training in line with the German model Independent examination board of at least three examiners from the company and the vocational school, or another educational establishment.

Dual vocational education and training in line with the German model in country X.

Level C: Local dual training with elements of the German system Independent test procedures (where envisaged).

Dual training with elements of the German system.

Source: DIHK (2015), shortened and partly summarized by the author

characteristics, primarily the training content and duration, the suitability of the training personnel and training center, and the school/company time ratio (DIHK 2016: 6).4 In Table  5.1, Level A is “German dual vocational education and training (abroad).” This level works most closely with German training curricula and regulations. At this level, the AHKs are the primary organizers of the examination. Here, exam questions provided by the question-setting bodies at the IHK in Germany are adjusted to specific regulations, laws, and standards in the research regions. They are also translated. Level B, the category of “Local dual vocational education and training in line with the German model,” shows a higher deviation from the German curricula with a minimum of 50% of the technical skills covered. For Level B, the AHK also organizes the examination. However, the examination questions are developed locally and are neither brought from Germany, nor translated/adapted (DIHK 2015: 10). Level C, the “Local dual training with elements of the German system,” bares fewer similarities to dual apprenticeship training as regulated in Germany. For this type of training, the AHKs only arrange testing procedures, or in other cases merely monitor the examining. As with onboarding and shop floor inducting, the meaning of dual apprenticeship training can be conceptually divided into two meaning-component clusters: (1) the legitimacy meaning-component cluster (motivational meaning for forming the skill set); and (2) the emotions that participants experience during the performance of dual apprenticeship training.  Association of German Chambers of Industry and Commerce (DIHK—Deutsche Industrie und Handelskammer). 4

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(1) The legitimacy meaning-component cluster of dual apprenticeship training is strongly linked to the notion of the “duality” of this skill formation practice. This duality is not only reflected in the cooperation between companies and vocational schools, but also in its meaning. There are three legitimacy meaning-component sub-clusters that can be identified in dual apprenticeship training. The first legitimacy-sub-cluster is strongly tied to the need of the formed skills for the functioning of the subsidiary. The subsidiaries need to have their machines and production robots repaired and maintained, to have molds and other production tools made, or to have laboratory work done. The demand for skilled personnel to do this kind of work varies between the subsidiaries according to their producing practice. It is also reflected in the willingness of the subsidiaries to invest serious amounts of money in dual apprenticeship training. The costs for the MNE subsidiaries per fully trained dual apprentice vary according to factors such as the cost distribution between the vocational school and the MNE subsidiary, or what amounts to an acceptable wage for an apprentice during the three years of their apprenticeship. The second legitimacy meaning-component sub-cluster of dual apprenticeship training is the notion that it offers an educational opportunity that can secure the professional future of the apprentices, and thus benefits society as a whole. Societal benefit is, for example, reflected in the idea that the wide spread of dual apprenticeship training in Germany is a major reason for Germany’s low rate of youth unemployment (Jansen et al. 2017: 214). This meaning of dual apprenticeship training is provided by the following citation of an employee from a German headquarters, commiserating about the societal benefits of dual apprenticeship training: I also think that if we look again at the last slide, with the topic as a socio-political contribution or as a factor when it comes to employer branding, it simply shows that it is because it [engagement in dual apprenticeship training] is a very emotional topic. […] There are also reasons for this, because in the end it is about the future of our children. This topic is an issue all over the world, including in Mexico. (GerCIM3, Interview D10, pg. 94)

However, this double legitimacy meaning of dual apprenticeship training—serving an educational value/providing societal benefits and satisfying the productionrelated needs of companies—is a source for recurring tension in the research regions. While companies have an interest in focusing specifically on skills imparted in dual apprenticeship training that help their production-related needs, the educational value/societal benefits are generated through imparting a wide set of skills for an occupation that can be used in a whole industry, not just in one specific company. This tension is reflected in differences between dual apprenticeship training in different MNE subsidiaries in the sample. One example is the differences in the number of non-­company-­specific general skills imparted in dual apprenticeship training, as mentioned above. In other cases, a difference can be found in the specific expression of the meaning-­component sub-cluster: satisfying the productionrelated needs of companies. Sometimes the service of training apprentices in dual apprenticeship training is sold to other companies. GerCIM5 in Mexico, for instance, has had apprentices from other companies running dual apprenticeship training at their subsidiary for many years. At the time of our fieldwork, the Mexican GerCIM5

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subsidiary had an especially high number of apprentices from another German MNE subsidiary close by (which was just starting production at that time). During the fieldwork, we encountered other instances of the service of dual apprenticeship training being offered to other companies, when the market value of dual apprenticeship training was the primary motivation for enacting this skill formation practice (M3, M9). The third meaning-component sub-cluster consists of different meaning-components that cluster around the idea of high-quality. The legitimacy for the long duration of dual apprenticeship training, and the considerable financial and organizational effort companies must undertake, is tied to the aim of imparting the skills for highquality workmanship and work ethic to the apprentices. This idea is associated with images of high-quality products and an aspiration of high-standard production processes as well as a sense of pride about German quality manufacturing. To achieve the skills for such high-quality workmanship, the training needs to start from the ground up. This approach is, for instance, reflected in manual metalworking described above. To impart high-quality skills, the training itself is guided by quality standards. These training standards are especially reflected in the examination of the apprentices (e.g., who teaches does not examine) and the qualifications of the teaching personnel (e.g., title of Meister: master craftsman). (2) The array of different emotions that practitioners associate with doing dual apprenticeship are only rather indirectly assessed in the data of this study, and the insights from the data are very limited. What was reflected in several interviews with human resource managers was that apprentices feel proud of taking part in dual apprenticeship training. However, this is what human resource managers think; we did not hear this directly from the apprentices themselves. What could be ascertained from an interview with two apprentices also hints at feelings of pride, but additionally reflects on the challenges dual apprenticeship training presents, physically as well as emotionally (M19, pg. 7). The material element of dual apprenticeship training consists of three learning environments (or material-component clusters) for dual apprenticeship training: classrooms, the different shop floors, and training workshops (or laboratories in the case of chemical technicians). Classrooms are typically located at the vocational school or technical university, though there are a number of subsidiaries that do not cooperate with a public education organization, but undertake the mostly theoryoriented teaching in classrooms at the subsidiary. Shop floors are structured according to the requirements of the producing practices that are enacted and therefore vary substantially between the MNE subsidiaries in the sample. The materiality of training workshops is arranged to suit the imparting of skills according to the requirements of the occupational profile. For example, for chemical technicians training workshops are in the form of training laboratories. The research team in the globalstrategies research project did not visit the technical university where GerCIM1 and GerCI3 have installed their training laboratories (and which are the only training laboratories where subsidiaries in the three research regions enact dual apprenticeship training). Therefore, the following description is only based on training workshops for dual apprenticeship training for toolmakers and mechatronics technicians.

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Dual apprenticeship training for toolmakers and mechatronics technicians consists of the same kinds of training workshops, since these occupations are highly related in terms of the skills they impart. The training workshop is typically located in the buildings of the MNE subsidiary. Only in a small number of cases are the training workshops located at a vocational school or technical university. Some German MNEs also share training workshops with other neighboring MNE subsidiaries (sometimes in Switzerland or Austria). In these cases, the training workshop is usually located close to the production facilities of the participating MNE subsidiaries. The arrangement of the materiality of dual apprenticeship training is manifested in the training workshops. The training workshops typically take place in a separate area in the shop floor or in a separate room (see Fig. 5.8). In these training workshops, a number of machines, tools, training materials (such as different metals, see Fig.  5.9), training books, technical drawings, and other related materials can be found. All these materials are used in the imparting of skills such as metalworking. Another feature of training workshops is the workbenches with bench vises, as depicted in Fig.  5.10. What is most noticeable here is that the apprentices doing

Fig. 5.8  Training center in Central Mexico (above) and China (below). (Source: Photograph by J. Wiemann (above) and K. Wiemann (below); stylized by the author to ensure anonymity of subjects and organizations)

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Fig. 5.9  Materiality for metalworking at a training workshop. (Source: Photograph by J. Wiemann; stylized by the author to ensure anonymity of company)

Fig. 5.10  Typical arrangement of workbenches for dual apprenticeship training at a joint dual apprenticeship training center of two MNEs in the Greater Shanghai Area. (Source: Photograph by K. Wiemann; stylized by the author to ensure anonymity of company)

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metalwork at these workbenches can see each other and this way communicate with their peers and learn from them. An additional aspect of the materiality of dual apprenticeship training is that the apprentices typically wear uniforms when working in the training workshops or on the shop floor (see, for example, Figs. 5.7 and 5.8). The number of apprentices trained per subsidiary per year varies from around 15 to 100. In cases where subsidiaries cooperate with others in the form of joint dual apprenticeship training, or pay a provider for the service of dual apprenticeship training, these numbers can be lower. The number of dual apprentices at the vocational schools or technical universities also varies depending on the number of companies with whom they cooperate. Some educational organizations only have one class of dual apprentices (usually 15–30 apprentices). The practice-time profile of dual apprenticeship training requires the coordination of a large number of activities. Similar to the section on onboarding and shop floor inducting, I describe the practice-time profile of dual apprenticeship training according to the following three characteristics: (1) the practices appropriate enactment duration; (2) the point in time at which its enactment is common; and (3) the chronological sequencing of activities for the competent enactment. (1) The duration of dual apprenticeship training is typically three years.5 (2) The point in time of when the enactment of dual apprenticeship training is common can be summarized in the following way: A new generation of dual apprentices starts training typically once a year (some subsidiaries start every half year). The training is carried out by apprentices between the ages of 15 and 20 years. The age at which apprentices start the training varies with regard to the educational degree new apprentices have achieved before joining the skill formation practice. In cases when dual apprenticeship training is carried out through technical universities, this requires the prior completion of a degree allowing university entrance. Dual apprenticeship training carried out in part in vocational schools at a high school level (upper secondary level) requires the completion of nine to ten years of schooling prior to starting this skill formation practice. Furthermore, the activities that are part of dual apprenticeship training are typically undertaken during working hours. (3) The chronological sequencing of dual apprenticeship training activities requires the competent coordination of a high number of skill imparting activities. In the coding of the interview transcripts, often more than one code can be assigned to the same coded text passage. The software used for the coding process allows the checking of how many times such an overlap of two codes—including all coded text passages under this code—occurs. When cross-checking for such overlapping codes designating the same text passages, I found that the code for chronological time sequencing and the codes referring to the different imparted skills overlapped significantly, showing the high degree to which the different skills imparted in dual

 In Germany, dual apprenticeship training for toolmakers and for mechatronics technicians takes three and a half years. However, in the three research regions this time is shortened to three years. 5

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1.Year

1.activity 2. activity 3. activity

36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35

Week of Year

2.Year 3.Year

AHK exam Training Workshop

Classroom

Shop Floor

Vacat ion

Fig. 5.11  Curriculum for dual apprenticeship training in the Greater Shanghai Area. (Source: Own representation based on photography of a poster)

apprenticeship training significantly influence the time sequencing. The time sequencing of the different activities that impart a high number of skills comes together in form of curricula and schedules. In Fig. 5.11, time sequencing is represented in a detailed curriculum. It is important to remember that the different activities of dual apprenticeship training are carried out in three different learning environments (as described above). In Fig. 5.11, these are represented through the different colors as indicated. This training plan shows that the wide range of imparted skills (as part of the competence element) requires intensive temporal-spatial coordination during the three years of dual apprenticeship training. Additional coordination between the different generations of apprentices (first year, second year, and third year generation) is required since typically dual apprenticeship classes start every year.

5.1.4  Three Degrees of Complexity in Comparison In the previous three sectionss, the skill development practices of onboarding, shop floor inducting, and dual apprenticeship training have been characterized. These characterizations serve as the basis for comparing the complexities of these practices in the current section, in which I compare the complexity of the elements and the complexity of the practice-time profiles of the three skill formation practices, starting with the practices’ competence element, followed by the elements of meaning and material, and finally completing the picture by looking at the practice-time profiles. The dimensions of comparison for the complexity of practices have been discussed in detail in Sect. 4.6.

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To argue that an element of a practice is more or less complex than another element, I use an aggregate understanding of complexity (Manson 2001: 409), according to which an entity is defined as complex when it consists of a number of components interacting in multiple ways without overarching regularity. From this definition, I assume that an entity is more complex than another entity if it has more components, and/or more interaction or relationships between these components, and/or these relationships show a greater variety in kind. The comparisons I draw here are not absolute fixtures; they ought to be understood as a measure that only offers a reference for how complex one skill formation practice is in comparison to the others. As shown in the previous three sections, the three skill formation practices (onboarding, shop floor inducting, and dual apprenticeship training) show three competence-component clusters: (1) the competence-component cluster of skills that are imparted; (2) the competence-component cluster of the abilities to impart the skills; and (3) the competence-component cluster of the abilities to coordinate the enactment of the practice. In the following paragraphs, the competence elements of the three skill formation practices are compared according to these competencecomponent clusters. (1) The first competence-component cluster of onboarding consists of the skills of new employees to act oriented within a subsidiary. In contrast, the competencecomponents of shop floor inducting of this first cluster consist of all skills that are involved in the different producing practices in the MNE subsidiaries. The number of competence-components appears to be higher in shop floor inducting than in onboarding. The number of imparted skills (or the number of competence-components) of shop floor inducting depends on the producing practice. The producing practice determines how many operations are undertaken in the shop floor and, thus, the number of skills that are imparted. For dual apprenticeship training, on the other hand, the number of competence-components, or imparted skills, depends on the intended occupational profile. Thus, it is not quite possible to conclusively argue which of the two practices has more competence-components in this first cluster. However, it is noticeable that the skills imparted in dual apprenticeship training are more interconnected, and interconnected in more ways. In dual apprenticeship training, the skills build on one another, while the imparted skills in shop floor inducting are only connected through the producing practice, but can serve their purpose separately. Therefore, regarding this first competence-component cluster, onboarding is the least complex, followed by shop floor inducting, and finally dual apprenticeship training (the most complex). (2) The second competence-component cluster—the abilities to impart the skills—paints a similar picture. The abilities to impart the skills in onboarding consist mostly of the abilities related to engaging a group and giving a PowerPoint presentation. For shop floor inducting, imparting the skills consists of explaining and demonstrating an operation for a new operator. Thus, the number of abilities to impart onboarding and shop floor inducting appears to be at a similar level. However, the imparting of the skill of shop floor inducting is distributed between high numbers of different operators, while onboarding is imparted through only a handful of

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mostly office staff. In contrast, dual apprenticeship training requires a considerable number of teaching methods to be imparted. Furthermore, the abilities to impart skills in dual apprenticeship training are strongly interconnected. Therefore, in this second competence-­component cluster, onboarding is revealed to be slightly less complex than shop floor inducting, while dual apprenticeship training is much more complex than the other two skill formation practices. (3) The third competence-component cluster regarding the coordinating of the enactment for onboarding consists of the abilities to schedule the different practitioners engaging in onboarding. This is considerably simpler than for the other two skill formation practices. The abilities to coordinate the activities in shop floor inducting and in dual apprenticeship training are more or less on an equal level of complexity: Both require the ability to coordinate and schedule an array of activities during the course of the year. In sum, the competence-element of onboarding is least complex among the three practices analyzed here. The competence of dual apprenticeship training, on the other hand, is considerably more complex than that of shop floor inducting, since it has more components in the second competence-component cluster, and these components are more closely connected with each other and with the components of the first cluster. The skills imparted in dual apprenticeship training are strongly connected to the abilities to teach these skills. Figure 5.12 visualizes the comparison between the competence elements of the three skill formation practices. The legitimacy meaning-component clusters of onboarding and shop floor inducting are both tied to the smooth running of the MNE subsidiaries. The meaning of onboarding covers the provision of new employees with the skill to act oriented within the MNE subsidiary. In this cluster, we find meaning-components of hierarchy, MNE values and purpose, as well as rules and regulations. The legitimacy meaning-component cluster of shop floor inducting is directed toward the secure and smooth running of the producing practice. Also in this cluster are meaning-components of work safety, product quality, and notions of the speediness of producing. Both skill formation practices show a similar degree of complexity since their meanings show similar numbers of similarly connected meaning-components. The meaning element of dual apprenticeship training, on the other hand, is related to two clusters of the legitimacy meaning. First, the cluster of ideas around the need of the skills that are formed for the functioning of the subsidiary (notions of labor demand, work ethics, efficiency, production quality, etc.); second, the cluster around the educational value of dual apprenticeship training (e.g., notions of career paths, youths and their learning capacities,

Competence

low

Onboarding

high Shop floor inducting

Dual apprenticeship training

Fig. 5.12  The complexity of competence in comparison. (Source: Own representation)

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Meaning

low

high Onboarding Shop floor inducting

Dual apprenticeship training

Fig. 5.13  The complexity of meaning in comparison. (Source: Own representation)

learning something from the ground up). These clusters interact in multiple ways, under certain tensions. The larger number of notions and intricately connected ideas comprising the meaning element of dual apprenticeship training makes up for this practice’s higher degree of complexity in the meaning element. Figure 5.13 visualizes the comparison between the meaning elements. The material element of onboarding, because of its classroom setting, is much simpler to arrange than the shop floor, where shop floor inducting takes place. The material required for a classroom setting (chairs, tables, beamer, etc.) consists of fewer components than on a shop floor (machines, tools, raw materials, instruction papers, testing material, etc.). The material arrangement of the shop floor is also more intricately woven into the different steps of the producing practice. Therefore, the material element of shop floor inducting is counted as more complex than the material element of onboarding. Dual apprenticeship training, however, includes classroom material arrangements, shop floor material arrangements, and training workshops as described in the previous section. These arrangements are not only intricately connected in multiple ways within themselves, but also between each other. Thus, the material element of dual apprenticeship training is considered much more complex than the other two skill formation practices. Figure 5.14 visualizes the comparison between the degree of complexity of the material elements at a glance. The practice-time profile of onboarding consists of a smaller number of activities than the practice-time profile of shop floor inducting, since every skill imparted in shop floor inducting has a distinct related activity enabling operators to learn this skill (the number of skills imparted in onboarding is also lower). Moreover, shop floor inducting requires more time from its practitioners than onboarding: Onboarding typically needs only a couple of working days for an enactment, while shop floor inducting can take a couple of months. This is even truer for dual apprenticeship training, which has a three-year-long enactment duration at least. Furthermore, the activities in onboarding have a quite linear sequencing, while shop floor inducting shows much more variation in its sequencing patterns, reflected in the coordination necessary for maintaining a skill matrix. Dual apprenticeship training demands a detailed sequencing of activities, as reflected in the curricula for the three-year completion of an enactment. Consequently, the degrees of complexity of the three skill formation practices can be sorted in the following way: The practice-time profile of onboarding is least complex, while the practice-time profile of shop floor inducting is more complex than onboarding, but less complex than dual apprenticeship training’s practice-time profile, which has a high practitioner time requirement. Figure 5.15 visualizes the comparison between the three skill formation practices' practice-time profiles.

5.1  Comparing the Degrees of Complexity of the Three Skill Formation Practices

low

Material

187

high

Onboarding

Shop floor inducting

Dual apprenticeship training

Fig. 5.14  The complexity of material in comparison. (Source: Own representation)

Practice-time profile

low

high

Onboarding

Shop floor inducting

Dual apprenticeship training

Fig. 5.15  The complexity of practice-time profiles in comparison. (Source: Own representation)

Competence

Meaning

low

high

Material

Practice-time profile

Degree of complexity Onboarding

Shop floor inducting

Dual apprenticeship training

Fig. 5.16  Degrees of complexity of three skill formation practices. (Source: Own representation)

Based on Figs. 5.12, 5.13, 5.14, 5.15, Fig. 5.16 summarizes the differences in the degrees of complexity of the three skill formation practices, as seen in the lowest dark-gray double arrow. The coming together of the four dimensions of complexity of a practice gives a clear picture of the differentiation between the overall degrees of complexity of the

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three practices. Onboarding, due to having a lower degree of complexity in all but the dimension of meaning (on par with shop floor inducting), shows the lowest degree of complexity. Shop floor inducting is more complex than onboarding, followed by the overall highest degree of complexity of dual apprenticeship training. The degrees of complexity of onboarding and shop floor inducting are closer to each other than shop floor inducting is to dual apprenticeship training, owing to the higher degrees of complexity of the four dimensions of dual apprenticeship training. In this section, the first step of comparing the transfer resistances of the three skill formation practices has been accomplished. In the next section, these ideas are developed, providing a full account of the comparison of the transfer resistances of the three skill formation practices.

5.2  F  itting the Practices into the Destination Fabrics: Availability/Integrability and Territorial Institutions The previous Sect. 5.1 provides a comparison of the degrees of complexity of three selected skill formation practices as an empirical underpinning of the ideas developed in Sect. 4.6. Similarly, the following section offers an empirical validation of the ideas concerning transferring practices and MNEs as media for practice transfer, which were developed in Sects. 4.3 and 4.4, respectively. Moreover, this section empirically supports the notion of “transfer resistance” of practices, and substantiates ideas about the role of territorial institutions in destination fabrics. One could compare the transfer resistances of the three skill formation practices of every destination fabric where the practice is enacted, since the exact texture of the fabric of interrelated practices at every destination is different. In the case of this study, this would demand a comparison of the transfers of skill formation practices between every subsidiary. However, this would lead to a very high number of comparisons, while revealing little of the practice transfer dynamics between territories. As will be shown in the following sections, there are social phenomena, namely territorial institutions, which play a role in a major portion of the transfer destinations within the same research region. These phenomena, common in the different transfer destinations within the research regions, make it possible to assess differences in the availability of the elements and the time-­profile’s integrability into the time sequencing between the three research regions. In the following three sections, I therefore compare the transferring of the three skill formation practices: onboarding, shop floor inducting, and dual apprenticeship training, one by one on the basis of the ideas developed in Sect. 4.2 (the transferring of the elements and how they can fit into the destination fabrics at the respective research regions). Special attention is given to the social phenomena playing a role in the research regions, especially to the role of territorial institutions.

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As discussed in Sect. 4.2, the availability of competence, meaning, and material in the destination fabric, as well as the integrability of a practice’s time profile are key factors for fitting a transferred practice into its destination fabric. In some cases, all components of the elements of a practice can already be found at the transfer destination, and need only be arranged in a way that fits the practice. In other cases, only parts of the components of a practice element might be already present at the transfer destination. The missing element-components need to be brought to the transfer destination, some perhaps proving to be more difficult to bring than others. Thus, the integration of the transferred skill formation practices depends on the availability of the elements at the destination fabric. Therefore, the following questions arise: Is the element (or a component of the element) already present at the transfer destination? Or, if the element (or a component of the element) is not yet present at the destination fabric, how much effort will it take to “transport” it to the transfer destination? This effort is undertaken through the transferring practice. Additionally, the transferred practice’s time profile needs to be integrated into the destination fabric. This integration can be confronted with obstacles, such as other practices already using up potential practitioners’ time, or other practices having to change their time profile to accommodate the transferred practice. Consequently, one needs to ask: What obstacles does an integration of the time profile face in the destination fabric? It is important to note at this point, however, that the discussion of the three skill formation practices in the following sections is not an assessment of the transfer of all aspects of the practices. As presented in the methodology chapter in Sect. 3.2.6, practices cannot be fully captured through any method. The discussion in the current section (Sect. 5.2) is based on what could be understood about the practice transfers from the empirical data generated for the global-strategies project. The empirical insights are mainly obtained from the MNE cases. The MNE cases represented in Table 3.2 are those enterprises with whom it was possible to conduct interviews in their German headquarters and in their subsidiaries in at least two (often three) research regions; those interviews are included in the sample. These MNE cases made it possible to closely assess the transfer of the three skill formation practices.

5.2.1  Transferring Onboarding Here, I discuss the availability of the elements, competence, meaning, and material, and the integrability of the time profile of onboarding, while paying attention to similarities and differences in the destination fabrics at the research regions. The activities of organizing the coming together of the elements, and the activities of integrating the time profiles, make up what I defined as the “transferring practice” in Sect. 4.3.

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As could be learnt from two interviews with human resource managers at subsidiaries that were in the process of being established (M36 [GerCIM3] and M34), the transferring of onboarding is part of the process of establishing a new MNE subsidiary. What was apparent from other interviews, however, is that some components of onboarding are transferred at a later date to “update” the local onboarding practice. Transferring the Competence Element of Onboarding The competence element of onboarding consists of the three competence-component clusters: (1) the skills to act oriented in the MNE subsidiary; (2) the abilities to impart the skill, mostly through presenting learning content in a classroom environment; and (3) the abilities to coordinate the imparting of the skills. The availability of the components in these clusters is discussed below. The components of the competence element have to be put together at the destination fabrics in order to enact onboarding in a new setting. The competence element consists of competence-components that can already be found at the destination fabrics, and competence-components that need to be brought in from the origin fabric through a process of decontextualizing and recontextualizing (see Sect. 4.2). (1) The skill to act oriented in the subsidiary consists of imparted information that is partly specific to the subsidiary, and partly transferred through the MNE from Germany. Information specific to the subsidiary is for example, the “who is who” in the subsidiary, an account of the benefits and possibilities for promotions, or descriptions of the production facilities and the subsidiary’s products. This information specific to the subsidiary is compiled within the subsidiary and, in the onboarding practice, put into a presentable format. Thus, though it is available at the onboarding destination fabric, the information has to be put together in a way that is suitable for onboarding, when this skill formation practice is transferred. The information transferred through the MNE from Germany to the destination fabric consists, for example, of the mission and vision statements of the MNE, or general quality requirements. This information is sent from Germany and adapted to the destination fabrics by translating it into the languages spoken in the research regions: Chinese (Shanghai Dialect) in the Greater Shanghai Area, Spanish in Central Mexico, and English, Hindi, or other local Indian languages such as Marathi or Kannada in the Indian research region of the Metropolitan Areas Mumbai-PuneBangalore. The translation can be regarded as an adaption of the component of the onboarding competence element with regard to a regional social phenomenon (the local language). This is part of the “unpacking” of a transferred competence, as discussed in Sect. 4.2. A transferred competence needs to be “unpacked” or recontextualized for use in a different context. The context in the research regions— regarding the MNEs’ values and mission and vision statements—requires recontextualization by translation. The activity of translating is part of the transferring practice that transfers onboarding. The MNE values transferred and translated for onboarding differ between the MNEs. One example is the value of safety for health and environment in GerCIM1,

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a chemical industry company. In all interviews with GerCIM1 representatives in the research regions and in Germany, safety is mentioned as the first priority imparted in onboarding (GerCIM1, M74a, pg. 65, C5, pg. 35). An interviewee from India and an interviewee from Germany even recount the notion—imparted during onboarding—that “my workplace is safer than my home” (GerCIM1, I20_1, pg. 89, and, though not exactly in the same wording, GerCIM1, D6, pg. 69). Specific technical safety regulations that are part of onboarding typically stem from three sources: the MNE in Germany, international environmental and health safety norms (e.g., ISO), and governmental industry safety regulations at the research regions. As part of the transferring, this information is compiled and adapted to a format suiting onboarding. The governmental safety regulations can be seen as territorial institutions (see the definition used in this study in Sect. 4.8). Safety regulations issued by the government are mentioned in all three research regions. Integrating these into the onboarding practice, however, appears to be fairly straight forward in all three research regions. There are no significant differences between the three research regions with regard to the availability of this first cluster of competence-components found in the interviews and other data material. (2) As discussed in Sect. 5.1.1, the second competence-component cluster of onboarding is formed through the abilities to impart the skill, mostly by presenting learning content in a classroom environment and by engaging a group of new employees. These abilities are situated in  local employees. Thus, as part of the transferring practice, these abilities have to be made available for onboarding. Some of the interviews indicate that these abilities to impart the skills in onboarding, that is, the “teaching” abilities, are fostered by the practitioners imparting the skills through “train-the-trainer” practices (e.g., GerCIM4, C29, pg. 212–214; C3, pg. 152; GerCI3, I17, pg. 143). (3) The abilities that are components of the third cluster of competence-components of onboarding are transferred in a similar way to the second cluster. The abilities to coordinate onboarding are also located in local employees of the subsidiaries. In the cases of the second and third clusters, these abilities—components of the competence element of onboarding—already exist in the destination fabric and are made available for onboarding by the transferring practice. The interviews do not give any indication how the making of these abilities available, by hiring of employees with these abilities, for example, is particularly different between the three research regions. Considering these findings regarding the transfer of the competence-components making up the competence element of onboarding, it can be concluded that there are no significant differences in the availability of competence for onboarding between the three research regions. Transferring the Meaning Element of Onboarding As discussed in Sect. 4.2, the way meaning “travels” requires a downplaying of the situatedness of meaning. That said, this downplaying can help us understand how meaning moves as part of a practice transfer. Meanings “travel” via their semiotic repositioning through association and classification. Since meanings cannot be transported like materials, nor abstracted and recontextualized like competences,

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meaning-components already present at the transfer destination merge into a new storyline that fits the transferred practice. This weaving of a new storyline is one of the activities in the nexus of activities that conform the transferring practice. The creation of a new storyline implies a process of making sense of the new practice by classifying and associating it with locally available understandings, motivations, and emotions. In this way, new kinds of semiotic arrangements emerge. The legitimacy meaning-component cluster of onboarding is tied to the effective functioning of the MNE, as well as the communication of the purpose of the MNE, its corporate culture, and its values to new employees. Transmitting these values to new employees is part of the managing of the MNE as a translocal organization or bundle of practices. In the empirical findings, evidence of the availability of this meaning-component cluster is scarce. What can be ascertained from the data, however, is that the meaning-­component cluster concerning the importance and legitimacy of providing new employees with the skills to act oriented in the subsidiary is not questioned. The importance of transmitting these skills to employees (who during onboarding are new employees) is a meaning-component that can be found in human resource managing practices around the world (Neisig 2019). It is even explicitly taught in management education, as can be seen in handbooks about corporate culture (e.g., Schneider and Barbera 2014). Thus, it is not a stretch to argue that this meaningcomponent cluster already exists to a great extent in onboarding’s destination fabrics. However, the cluster needs to be adapted to the context of the subsidiary. Differences between the research regions regarding this meaning-component cluster were not apparent in the interviews. Transferring the Material Element of Onboarding The material element of onboarding is typically a classroom or conference room arrangement of material components within the subsidiary, and the human bodies that come together for the enactment of the practice. The classroom arrangement is usually used not only for onboarding, but also for an array of different practices at the subsidiaries. Thus, this arrangement is not exclusively put together for onboarding: It appears to be part of the production plant itself. As the classroom/conference room arrangement is not exclusive to onboarding, the availability of this element at the subsidiaries is good, in the sense that such a material arrangement would probably exist at the subsidiaries even without the enactment of onboarding, since it is used for other practices as well (such as meetings or other skill formation practices). Something similar can be argued for the human bodies that are part of the enactment. The practitioners, as “material bodies” necessary for onboarding, are also not exclusiveto the subsidiary for enacting onboarding: They primarily engage in other work-related practices and only occasionally engage in onboarding. Thus, practitioners’ physical bodies are overall readily available for onboarding. Concerning the material element of onboarding, no differences between the research regions are apparent in the findings. Integrating the Time Profile of Onboarding The integrability of onboarding into the time sequencing of the fabric of interrelated practices at the transfer destination is unproblematic. Since the new employees are

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not yet taking part in other work practices in the subsidiaries, scheduling their participation is easily possible. Onboarding also overlaps with the working hours, so there is no competition for the practitioners’ time with other daily practices such as sleeping or eating. On the other hand, those employees responsible for onboarding need to be scheduled, leading to potential conflicts with other work-related practices at the subsidiary. But again, since onboarding takes place during working hours, the integrability appears unproblematic. Similarly, the classroom arrangement needs to be free for onboarding. Comparing Availability and Integrability of Onboarding Between the Research Regions In sum, the integration of the onboarding practice-time profile does not substantially clash with other practices at the subsidiary. It requires mostly scheduling, which is easily accommodated. Furthermore, for this dimension of integrability into time sequencing, the findings show no differences between the research regions. Both the above-discussed availability of the elements of onboarding in the destination fabrics and the favorable integrability into the time sequencing show quite a unified picture. For onboarding, no significant differences between the research regions regarding the four dimensions are documented in the empirical data. Furthermore, the overall availability and integrability at the onboarding destination fabrics prove to be good. In Fig. 5.17, the above-discussed dimensions are summarized.

Poor availability and integrability

C IM

C IM

C IM

C IM

C IM

Good availability and integrability Competence

Meaning

Material

Practicetime profile

Overall availability/ integrability

C = Greater Shanghai Area; I = Mumbai-Pune-Bangalore; M = Central Mexico Fig. 5.17  Comparing availability and integrability of onboarding between the research regions. (Source: Own representation)

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In the next two sections, a similar argumentation regarding shop floor inducting and dual apprenticeship training are elaborated, taking into account differences between the research regions.

5.2.2  Transferring Shop Floor Inducting Like onboarding, shop floor inducting is transferred in the process of the establishment of a new production plant. This is necessary in order to transfer a producing practice, which becomes evident in the interviews with employees in MNE subsidiaries in the process of establishing a production facility (M36 [GerCIM3] and M34). In these interviews, the interview partners describe how the ramp-up of the production line also requires that the new operators have the skills to safely and efficiently work at all the working stations. However, some interviewed human resource managers consider shop floor inducting as a local practice that has not been transferred to the MNE subsidiary but originates there (e.g., CerCIM2, C12, pg. 136). The idea of shop floor inducting as a local—not a “formerly” transferred—practice might have arisen for two reasons. First, in practice transfer, not all elements of a practice, or at least not all component-elements, are “transported” to the destination fabric. In many cases, as has been shown in the previous section regarding onboarding, component-elements already exist at the destination fabric and are “only” made available for the transferred practice. The second reason why some practitioners consider shop floor inducting a local (not transferred) practice might be that when the transfer took place, these practitioners were not yet working at the subsidiary. A human resource manager at a subsidiary that was established 20 years before the interview comments about shop floor inducting: I think at first, yes, all these [training] models we have come from Germany, but not anymore. (GerCIM2, M50, pg. 159–160)

Besides this, the interviews also indicate that in many MNEs, even though shop floor inducting is transferred with the establishing of a new producing practice, adjustments to the practice are often developed in the German headquarters at a later date, and then transferred to the international subsidiaries. There are two scenarios in which adjustments are developed in Germany and then transferred to the subsidiary. First, the production process at the subsidiary is either changed by the introduction of a new production line for a new product transferred from Germany, or upgraded for an old product when new technology from Germany becomes available. In the second scenario, new programs are developed at the headquarters with the intention of restructuring or optimizing existing skill formation practices in the MNE’s worldwide subsidiaries.

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These initiatives are part of the transferring practice for shop floor inducting, and typically consist of standardizing efforts to improve skill formation at all of an MNE’s subsidiaries. One such initiative is GerCIM1’s program to make their production workers “fit for production” in their worldwide subsidiaries (GerCIM1: D6, pg. 6–20, C5, pg. 82, I20_1, pg. 180–212, M72, pg. 104). This initiative is described by all our interview partners in the three research regions as well as in the headquarters in Germany.6 The initiative consists of first systematically structuring the different competencies required in production processes at the specific site. In a second step, skills missing the existing production personnel ought to be detected, and individual training plans for all employees developed and put in action. The training is not always formal but often done “on the job.” This initiative restructures the skill matrix mentioned in Sect. 5.1.2. In this case, since shop floor inducting is also coordinated using skill matrixes, it is possible to attest that through the skill matrix there continues to be a transferring moment for shop floor inducting in GerCIM1. This transferring moment is given even after a new producing practice (including its technology) is transferred to either a new or pre-existing production site. Like GerCIM1, several subsidiaries also pursue similar international standardizing initiatives regarding shop floor inducting. The standardizing initiatives are usually organized by the central human resource team in the German headquarters, but with differing degrees of support and input from the international subsidiaries. This input can come in the form of locally developed variants of practices declared as “best practices” by the headquarters. “Best practice” here is understood as a standard that all subsidiaries of the MNE should strive to achieve. The MNEs differ significantly in the attitudes they show regarding their openness to include input from their international subsidiaries. Furthermore, the interviews also show that the employment of such standardizing initiatives differs considerably. While some MNEs employ such initiatives regularly, others leave the continuing of shop floor inducting to the responsibility of the subsidiaries. Such differences in the MNE’s management attitudes have been the subject of studies in international business studies for many decades (Heenan and Perlmutter 1979; Machulik 2010; Perlmutter 1969). It can be thus concluded that the transferring of shop floor inducting is an ongoing effort that starts when a production plant is established and continues through the above-­described activities of transferring new production processes, and through transferring standardizing initiatives that influence shop floor inducting. Transferring the Competence Element of Shop Floor Inducting The competence of shop floor inducting as described in Sect. 5.1.2 consists of three component clusters: the first (1) competence-component cluster is the skills that are “formed,” the second (2) cluster is the abilities to impart the skills, and the third (3) is the abilities to coordinate the enactment of shop floor inducting.

 The interview was with the person who had initiated the program some years before.

6

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(1) The skills that are formed in shop floor inducting are closely related to producing practices. Consequently, these skills are specific to a fabric of interrelated practices consisting of the same producing practice (e.g., manufacturing the same product). In German MNEs, this fabric is typically the bundle of practices constituting a subsidiary in Germany (in some cases, the production plants with similar producing practices are located in a third country). These skills are transferred or “transported” to the destination fabric mostly “inside” employees. The interviews show that there are two options for transferring the skills necessary for the producing practice. The first is that employees possessing the skills in Germany travel to the destination fabric of shop floor inducting and impart the skills to local operators over a period of some weeks to a couple of months. In this case, it is usually the supervisors or production engineers who travel. The second possibility is that local employees from the destination fabric travel to Germany, learn the skills there, and travel back to the destination fabric. I can also tell you that the floor supervisor went to [the subsidiary with the same production technology] and there, he worked in a line with a group, as training on the job, in order to get the knowledge and then he comes [back to Mexico], and he is the expert master. He is the one who knows all the operations, all the details. And he has a training program for the operators through a skill matrix where we define what skills are required for each operation and obviously by rotating these operations so that we can have a person trained in all the operations he needs to rotate and show that he has had a certain number of hours of mastery of that operation, and in that way he acquires the skill. […] This is how it has been done. Today it depends on the new machines that come, I can tell you that we are already facing this issue with the second line that comes in August. The first topic is training provided by the supplier that sells us the machine or machines. We will have a technical expert from that supplier here for four weeks to train my operators. Then he comes and installs the machines, teaches them absolutely everything about the machine so that the operator gets the knowhow, and even so the operator will go to [the subsidiary with the same production technology] for a month to gain the experience while already working the machine. Coming back [these operators] must, through shadowing, train the new ones I hire. That would be the flow. (GerCIM3, M36, pg. 26)

Here, the human resource manager at GerCIM3 in Mexico reports that additionally to the shop floor supervisor, a Mexican engineer and a group of operators travel to the subsidiary with the production technology they must learn. By the time of the interview the group of selected operators was preparing for the trip by training in the English language for three hours a day, so that they could communicate at least rudimentarily (GerCIM3, M36, pg. 70–80). Making the skills available at the transfer destination in this way also occurs when new technology is introduced, as a Mexican human resource manager of GerCIM2 reports: When there is a new technology, we send them [the operators] to the places where they already have it [the new technology] working so they can be trained and see how it works. (GerCIM2, M50, pg. 201–202)

In some cases, if only one machine in a producing practice is new, the operators are trained by the machine-engineering supplier. In this case, a “trainer” employed

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by the machine supplier usually travels to the subsidiary and imparts the skills needed to use the new machine at the destination fabric. Furthermore, the skills needed to produce in the subsidiaries also depend on the predisposed skills and abilities of the operators. Hiring practices ensure the availability of operators for the producing practices, and at the same time for shop floor inducting—without hiring, there are no future operators to train. Regarding the hiring practice, there are significant differences between the subsidiaries. The local availability of the desired kind of personnel is generally seen as problematic in all three research regions. However, this is less so regarding the hiring of personnel for the operator positions. Differences relating to the availability of operators prove to be highly location-specific; mostly to the subsidiaries’ direct surrounding neighborhoods. Thus, the opinions of the interviewees about the hiring of operators, more specifically the pre-shop-floor-inducting-skill-levels and abilities of the future operators, show high variations within each research region. Overall, reports from the Indian research region appear more pessimistic regarding the availability of the desired (suitably skilled) personnel at the local labor markets than those from the Greater Shanghai Area or Central Mexico. In the Greater Shanghai Area, however, several subsidiaries report that the fluctuation of operators is very high. The fluctuation affects shop floor inducting in the frequency of its enactment, since more operators must be trained all around the year. In sum, the skills imparted in shop floor inducting require considerable efforts from the MNEs to transfer them to the destination fabric. Traveling costs and traveling times are “invested.” Nevertheless, these skills are readily available for the MNEs, because they are part of the bundle of practices that form the enterprise. The findings show nearly no differences between the three research regions in the availability of such producing skills, though differences within the research regions are more prominent. (2) The second competence-component cluster of shop floor inducting is the abilities to impart the skills. These abilities are already available at the destination fabrics, insofar as they are possessed by hired operators and supervisors. However, in several cases, the interviews show that these abilities are fostered through another skill formation practice: training-the-­trainer. The number of experienced operators with a train-the-trainer qualification varies among the MNE subsidiaries engaging in the practice. The variation depends on the number of operators working in the subsidiary, the operator fluctuation, and the structuring of the production process. Train-the-trainer practices are typically either imparted by staff within the MNE or provided by local training providers in the research regions. In rare cases, a trainthe-trainer practice is provided by the German headquarters. For instance, GerCIM1 has a global master trainer, who trains local master trainers, who then train the local trainers (GerCIM1, M74a, pg. 57). Part of the second competence-component cluster includes codified instruction materials for operations (see Fig. 5.6). These written instructions for working stations are translated into the languages used in the research regions. A human resource manager in GerCIM3, working at a production plant in the process of being established in Central Mexico, states that this material was—of

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course—translated into Spanish, but moreover also needed to be adapted to Mexican standards and safety norms (GerCIM3, M36, pg. 83). Some interviewees also reveal that the instructions need to be much more detailed, and sometimes have more photographs to make them understandable for the new operators. In sum, there are many differences in the availability of the second competencecomponent cluster between the research regions. Some subsidiaries do not use a train-the-trainer practice to foster the abilities of imparting skills in shop floor inducting. These subsidiaries rely on the abilities their experienced operators already possess. In other subsidiaries, training-the-­trainer practices appear to be an important way of generating the abilities to impart the skills necessary in shop floor inducting. These differences, however, cannot be ascribed to differences between the research regions, but, as findings suggest, to differences between the sizes of the production plants and operator fluctuation. Furthermore, the abilities are mostly locally available (in comparison to the first competence-component cluster of the skills that are imparted). Thus, the abilities to impart skills in shop floor inducting are more or less equally available at the destination fabrics in all three research regions. (3) The third competence-component cluster is composed of the abilities to coordinate the activities. The coordination of shop floor inducting mainly consists of maintaining a skill matrix as described in Sect. 5.1.2. Generating a skill matrix for a newly installed production line is part of transferring the ability to coordinate the activities of shop floor inducting. The skill matrix is made according to the skills required in the production line. Additionally, tests for determining the skill levels must be put together. Here, information from the production line in a subsidiary with a similar production technology is translated and adapted to the new production line. The skill matrixes are typically maintained by personnel from the human resource and the production department. These personnel usually consist of people hired locally, possibly with experience in organizing, testing, and documenting the skills and maintaining a skill matrix. These coordination abilities are thus made available for shop floor inducting through hiring and learning while putting the skill matrix together. There are two other influences on the abilities to coordinate activities: the territorial institutions of work and environmental safety in the research regions, and the international standards of the ISO norms. Safety regulations and national industry standards in the research regions influence and shape the information that is put together in the skill matrix and that is part of the documenting of shop floor inducting. Significant differences between the research regions regarding these regulations did not emerge in the analysis of the interviews. Overall, the influence of the ISO norms is much more apparent. The ISO norms can also be regarded as an institution, following the definition for this study provided in Sect. 4.8. However, due to their international orientation, they do not constitute a territorial institution. ISO norms aim to influence producing practices worldwide: they standardize international production and foster work and environmental safety. ISO norms are mentioned in the interviews 178 times in total, mostly in the context of shop floor inducting. The overlap of text passages

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mentioning ISO norms with codings related to shop floor inducting is prevalent in the interview material. For example, a human resource manager at a GerCIM3 subsidiary in the process of ramping up production at the time of the interview, reports a significant influence of the constellation of practices conforming to the ISO norm institution on shop floor inducting: In fact, a month ago, we had the first ISO 9000 audit, still without a year as a production plant, and we managed to fulfill the training requirements [stipulated in the ISO norms]. […] we were asked to document: how we ensure that a person gets experience and training, and how we validate that a person has the experience to work in certain positions. In this case, for the operators it is through the evaluations we make. We have an evaluation three months after an operator joins, which is practically to validate whether he has already gone through the entire matrix of competences we have at a certain degree or level, which is from basic to medium. After that, we are also asked how we validate the skill, which is through the skill matrix, where we say: ‘If this person had 50 hours on the test bench [working station], after those 50 hours, what is the expected performance?’ The expected performance is average, and from there we say: ‘Ok, maybe he didn’t fulfill it, then he has a gap’, or ‘Yes, he fulfilled it and acquired the skill’. If he acquires the skill, we give him a diploma or an internal certification where we say that the person is fit and has the experience to work in that operation. This is how we document it. (GerCIM3, M36, pg. 40)

In this citation, the detailed influence of ISO 9000 on the maintaining of the skill matrix and the documenting of the skill levels of the operators in shop floor inducting becomes apparent. In fact, the influence of the ISO norms in the case of shop floor inducting far exceeds the influence of national safety regulations. This influence is the most probable reason for the strong similarity in this competence-component cluster (the coordination of shop floor inducting activities) between the research regions. In sum, the competence element of shop floor inducting requires more effort to be transferred to the three research regions than the competence element of onboarding. Especially the first competence-component cluster—the skills imparted in shop floor inducting—requires a considerable number of activities to reach the transfer destination of shop floor inducting. The local availability of the second competencecomponent cluster—the abilities to impart the skills—is mostly given. These abilities “just” have to be made available for enacting shop floor inducting at the destination fabric. The third cluster—the abilities to coordinate the enactment of shop floor inducting—is, on the one hand, locally given and only made available for shop floor inducting. On the other hand, this cluster consists of the information that needs to be put together in a skill matrix coming from the producing practice at a subsidiary with a similar technology and producing practice within the MNE—in most cases, this is a subsidiary of the headquarters located in Germany. Transferring the Meaning Element of Shop Floor Inducting The legitimacy meaning of shop floor inducting is strongly connected to the producing practice. When a new manufacturing plant is established without the skills to use the production line, producing is impossible. Right now, the priority is to train them [the operators], and we have spent more money because we have had to send them to [the subsidiary with the same production technology].

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And that’s not cheap. Finally, if you count flights, travel expenses, hotel stay there, that’s what we spend on because the know-how or training, that doesn’t cost us because we go with the experts from the other plant. But in this part, it is expensive. Yes, we have a budget, but anyway, we really have to do it. Even if we wouldn’t have a budget, we have to do it to be able to acquire the skills. Otherwise, we could not start the operation [of the production]. However, this is going to change; once the start-up processes of the production lines are stabilized, the trips to [the subsidiary with the same production technology] will decrease, because the expectation is that the know-how is available in Mexico, and then we would enter more into a modality of professionalization of the skills. (GerCIM3, M36, pg. 109)

Shop floor inducting also ensures that the transferred skills are maintained at the subsidiary when there is fluctuation of personnel. Funding for maintaining costs related to shop floor inducting is reported as an expenditure for the MNE subsidiaries. This indicates that the responsibility for shop floor inducting is later seen as lying with the subsidiary in the research region. An understanding of the necessity of enacting shop floor inducting is already present in the employees of newly hired personnel at a new subsidiary (since the MNE hires personnel with a professional profile implying an understanding of the necessity of maintaining the skills for the producing practice). The legitimacy of shop floor inducting was not once questioned in the sample of interviews with MNE employees (in comparison to the legitimacy of dual apprenticeship training discussed in the next section). Thus, it can be concluded that in destination fabrics where producing practices are present (which is the case in all of the interviews, due to the sampling strategy), the legitimacy meaning of shop floor inducting is easily available. For the meaning element, differences between the research regions could also not be pinpointed in the interviews. Transferring the Material Element of Shop Floor Inducting The most important material component-arrangement involved in shop floor inducting is the production line itself. Putting together a production line and ordering and installing machinery require considerable effort from the MNE and is a process that takes months or even years. Nevertheless, this effort is undertaken for the producing practice enacted at the MNE subsidiaries. Transferring shop floor inducting is a consequence of transferring the producing practice. The dependence of the producing practice on the skills imparted in shop floor inducting secures the availability of the components of the shop floor for shop floor inducting. Thus, for shop floor inducting the availability of all the material components of a shop floor is good. Additionally, there are material elements of shop floor inducting, such as pin-boards displaying skill matrixes, or printed descriptions of operations. These material components, though they are mostly locally sourced, need to be put together using information that, at least in part, stems from headquarters or another subsidiary of the MNE. With regard to the operators either learning or imparting skills, these are also usually part of the producing practice at the subsidiaries. Thus, their availability is given through this connection. Operators become part of the producing practice through hiring. The availability of operators in the destination fabrics is related to the availability of competence, as discussed above.

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Differences between the research regions regarding the availability of the material element of shop floor inducting can, in sum, be attributed mostly to the availability of material components for the producing practice. The exact technology and other components of the producing practices differ substantially between the subsidiaries, since the MNEs in the sample are diverse in their products. Differences between the research regions regarding the availability of the material components were not apparent in the interviews. However, the transfer of the producing practice, and with it its elements was also not the primary focus of the interviews. This limits this conclusion to a small degree. Integrating the Time Profile of Shop Floor Inducting After discussing the availability of the elements of shop floor inducting, the fourth dimension of the integrability of the time profile of shop floor inducting remains to be analyzed. The integrability of the time profile of shop floor inducting into the destination fabric is very much dependent on the producing practice. The enactment of both practices overlaps, since in shop floor inducting an operation that is also part of the producing practice is repeated. There is, therefore, a certain competition between producing and shop floor inducting: When shop floor inducting is done at a working position, the operation itself is typically done more slowly in the beginning, which can cause delays for producing. Consequently, these practices compete regarding the time they require from the machinery in the shop floor and regarding the time of the operators. As with the elements of shop floor inducting, the findings indicate no differences between the research regions concerning the integrability of shop floor inducting. Comparing Availability and Integrability of Shop Floor Inducting Between the Research Regions The availability of the elements and the integrability of the time profile of shop floor inducting are represented in Fig. 5.18. Differences between the destination contexts of the different subsidiaries regarding the availability of the elements and how they are obtained for shop floor inducting are given. These differences appear within the research regions but are not a discernable feature between the research regions, according to the data this study reveals. One exception is the difficulty perceived by the interviewees in the Indian research region of hiring personnel already possessing the “right” skills by the time shop floor inducting begins. This is represented in Fig. 5.18 in the marginally higher positioning of the “I.” Furthermore, shop floor inducting is highly intertwined with the producing practice. This connection is also apparent in its transfer. The research regions were explicitly chosen because their destination fabrics easily allow the transfer of producing practices from German MNEs. As discussed in the methodology chapter in Sect. 3.2.2, the research regions were selected for their characteristically high number of German manufacturing MNEs. Therefore, a lack of differences between the three research regions regarding the availability/integrability dimension of the transfer resistance of shop floor inducting is not surprising, due to this practice’s strong connection to the producing practice.

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Poor availability and integrability

I C M C IM

C IM

C IM

C IM

Good availability and integrability Competence

Meaning

Material

Practicetime profile

Overall availability/ integrability

C = Greater Shanghai Area; I = Mumbai-Pune-Bangalore; M = Central Mexico Fig. 5.18  Comparing availability and integrability of shop floor inducing between the research regions. (Source: Own representation)

In a manner of speaking, one could conclude that shop floor inducting is merely “piggy-backing” on the transfer of the producing practice. However, this dismisses the fact that to sustainably establish the producing practice at its destination fabric, shop floor inducting is indispensable. Thus, I would argue here that the connection between the producing practice and shop floor inducting is one of mutual dependence. This dependence, in turn, is not dissolved through the transfer, but maintained. One practice cannot be transferred and maintained in the long term without the other.

5.2.3  Transferring Dual Apprenticeship Training Dual apprenticeship training is transferred when new subsidiaries are established as well as later on, sometimes even decades after the establishment of the production plant and producing practice of the MNE subsidiaries. Thus, in contrast to shop floor inducting, when the transfer of dual apprenticeship training takes place it is not linked to the ramp-up of the producing practice that occurs when the subsidiary is established. While dual apprenticeship training can be transferred at the time of the establishment of a production plant, shop floor inducting is always transferred at that time. The motivation for transferring dual apprenticeship training, which is part

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of the meaning element of the transferring practice, appears to cluster around the need of the subsidiary in the research region for employees with the kind of skillset formed through dual apprenticeship training. This meaning element of the transferring practice overlaps with the first legitimacy meaning-component cluster, which is tied to the need for the skills formed for the effective functioning of the subsidiary. The demand for skilled workers also usually needs to be large enough (typically at least around 15 apprentices per year) in order to motivate the MNE to start—and continue—dual apprenticeship training at the subsidiary. This demand can arise at different points in the history of a subsidiary. If the yearly demand of “dually skilled” employees is smaller, subsidiaries tend to search for other options such as: (1) cooperating with one or more  subsidiaries of another MNE close by whose needs are similar, in order to establish dual apprenticeship training as a joint endeavor; or (2) outsourcing to a commercial dual apprenticeship provider.7 In the second case, the subsidiaries are not directly involved in the transferring of dual apprenticeship training. The transferring activities take place to a great degree within the subsidiary at the research region. However, transferring activities are also undertaken in the German headquarters. The decision to initiate dual apprenticeship training at the subsidiaries, however, lies with the executive leadership at the subsidiary in the research region, not in the German headquarters, since the expenses are also mostly borne by the subsidiaries (though they might need approving by the headquarters). In the data of this study, there is not one transfer of dual apprenticeship training that appears to be “forced upon” a subsidiary in the research region. Instead, the headquarters take an advisory and supportive role. (Regarding the transferred elements, this role will be further discussed in the course of this section.) Our findings show that in many cases, there is one key employee (or sometimes a group) in the MNE who promotes the idea of dual apprenticeship training within the company. These promoters are often higher-ranking executive personnel from the German headquarters, or in a smaller number of cases employees from the subsidiaries in the research regions with a strong personal connection to dual apprenticeship training. In either instance, these employees push the idea of establishing dual apprenticeship training outside of Germany. In the case of dual apprenticeship training, the transferring is not only undertaken within the MNE; other organizations participate in the transferring activities as well. The participation of these other organizations is significantly different from the transferring of onboarding and shop floor inducting. Parts of the elements of dual apprenticeship training are made available in the research regions through the

 This option is prominent in the Mexican research region where the offer of commercial dual apprenticeship training is given by two providers dedicated to providing dual apprenticeship training. Additionally, some MNEs invite other neighboring subsidiaries to send apprentices to their program. In the Indian research region in Pune, the VETnet project (see a more detailed description below) offers an option to participate in a limited dual apprenticeship training. In the Greater Shanghai Area, the option for commercial dual apprenticeship training where MNE subsidiaries pay for the training of the apprentices did not appear in the data. 7

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transferring activities of a number of German international organizations. These include the three German Chambers of Commerce Abroad (AHK— Außenhandelskammer) in the research regions, the German Embassies in the research regions, the German Association for International Cooperation (GIZ— Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit), and the Federal Institute for Vocational Education and Training (BIBB—Bundesinstitut für Berufsbildung).8 The role of these German organizations in the transferring practice of dual apprenticeship training is especially focused on supporting MNEs in their quest to make the three elements of dual apprenticeship training available in the research regions. In other words, the transferring practice for dual apprenticeship training is not limited to the MNEs in the sample but is a practice that spans different organizations. The most involved organization in the transfer of dual apprenticeship training, besides the MNEs themselves, are the AHKs in the research regions. An employee of the Chinese AHK gives an example of the activities they undertake as part of the transferring of dual apprenticeship training, having been asked by a German MNE to assist: […] our task was to organize a round table, then we tried to get more companies to join the training cooperation because it is difficult to deal with individual cases. And then, we very quickly found many companies that were interested. We talked to the government, and together with the regional government we selected a suitable school partner. And then we started with the qualification. As the AHK, we looked at the curriculum with the school and worked on the curriculum with partners, specialist partners from Germany. We looked at the teachers, saw where things were missing, and made improvements through the various partners, some of which were vocational schools in Germany, the ministries of education and cultural affairs. These are processes that we steer. But we don’t do it [participating directly in dual apprenticeship training] ourselves and that is extremely important to us because we have clearly defined the role of the AHK. The role of the AHK is to function as a platform and do quality assurance and certification. We are not content providers. (C42, pg. 17)

From this citation, it is possible to understand, on the one hand, the important role the Chinese AHK plays in making the elements of dual apprenticeship training available. On the other hand, it becomes clear that they do not engage in the actual enactment of dual apprenticeship training besides their activities surrounding exams and certifications. These two activities will be discussed later in this section. This kind of engagement—taking part in the transferring activities but to a much lesser degree in the enactment of dual apprenticeship training—is similar to the engagement of the Indian and Mexican AHKs in the respective research regions. One exception in case of the Indian AHK is the VETnet project in Pune9 where the Indian AHK was the driving organization.  The BIBB resides in Bonn, Germany. However, it is involved in transferring activities of dual apprenticeship training around the world (see, BIBB (2020)). 9  This training project was inspired by dual apprenticeship training. The VETnet project is a oneyear course for two-year graduates of Industrial Training Institutes (ITIs) at a private Catholic vocational school, which is interspersed with practical phases at the participating companies. At the time of the interview, the VETnet project counted 14 apprentices. The VETnet project in Pune 8

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Not only German organizations participate in the transferring of dual apprenticeship training, however. Local vocational schools or technical universities partnering with the MNE subsidiaries also undertake activities that are part of the transferring. Additionally, in some transfers local governments in the research regions are involved. To sum up, transferring dual apprenticeship training, in comparison to shop floor inducting and onboarding, is independent from the transfer of the producing practice within the MNE. Furthermore, the transfer activities are not limited to the MNE, but span various other organizations located in the research regions and in Germany. Thus, the transfer of this practice is multilayered and much more diverse than the transfer of onboarding and shop floor inducting. Transferring the Competence Element of Dual Apprenticeship Training As in the analysis of onboarding and shop floor inducting, in the following I will discuss the transfer of the competence element of dual apprenticeship training according to the three competence-component clusters: (1) skills that are formed in dual apprenticeship training; (2) the abilities to impart the skills; and (3) the abilities to coordinate, control, and measure the activities of the enactment. (1) The reference point for the skills formed in dual apprenticeship training are, as discussed in detail in Sect. 5.1.3, the curricula from the German dual system for the respective occupational profiles of mechatronics technicians, toolmakers, or chemical technicians. One central transferring activity is the adaption of the curriculum to the destination fabric. This adaption is typically undertaken through planning and dialoguing between experts in dual apprenticeship training from the German headquarters and (future) practitioners of dual apprenticeship training (including in some cases not only employees from the subsidiary but also members of vocational schools or technical universities). This planning and decision-making dialogue is sustained by a number of different people: mostly personnel from the MNE subsidiary in the research region and headquarters in Germany, personnel from schools or universities when they are in cooperation, and sometimes personnel from the AHKs or local government officials. A key figure in this dialogue is usually an expert in dual apprenticeship training. These experts are in most cases former heads of dual apprenticeship training in Germany or master craftsmen with long years of experience in dual apprenticeship training. This person usually stays at least several months at the subsidiary in the research region. The dialogue, however, in which s/he is involved, does not only include discussions about the curriculum, but also decision-making processes on possible cooperation with local vocational education institutes, numbers of apprentices, and even budgeting. An employee from the

is funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF—Bundesministerium für Bildung und Forschung) and to a lesser degree by the participating (mostly) German MNEs. The training imparted in the VETnet project in Pune is, however, not a typical example of dual apprenticeship training, as defined in this study, especially in that the duration of the training is relatively short—only one year—instead of the customary three years.

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headquarters of GerCIM3 with experience of many dual apprenticeship transfers comments about this dialoguing process: Your question was, how does decision-making take place? This is a relatively long process, [the final concept] you don’t just write down in half an hour, but many people have to work on it over several months before final decisions are made. (GerCIM3, D10, pg. 76)

Regarding the skillset imparted in dual apprenticeship training, there are several influences of the destination fabric on the process of dialogue and negotiation of a suitably adapted curriculum. Some of these factors can be attributed to the MNE subsidiary, others can be linked to territorial institutions in the research regions. As discussed in Sect. 5.2.3, the set of skills imparted in dual apprenticeship training includes a wide variety of technical, cognitive, and social skills. The decisions about the integration of these skills into the curriculum depend strongly on the skill demand of the specific subsidiary. Some MNE subsidiaries follow the German curriculum as closely as possible, others opt to deviate substantially from the German curriculum and concentrate on technical skills related to technology used in their production facilities. Opting to deviate seems to depend in part on how much of the German curriculum suits the skill-needs of the subsidiary. An employee of a German MNE describes the putting together of a curriculum for dual apprenticeship training outside of Germany in the following way: ‘Now let’s see your curriculum.’ Then we put the curricula next to each other and we try to find what matches. And we do this mostly using our gut feeling. It happens when you compare the topics and the course titles that they do one day of robotics and we say: ‘You actually need four weeks.’ […] So we say: ‘We have to do something here.’ And so we establish this curriculum step by step in such a school. And […] we then look for the places of learning and try to establish them in the company. And this is what we mean: We enter the local education system, so to speak. (GerCIM5, D11, pg. 65)

For example, GerCIM3 reports needing only two-thirds of the skills in the German curriculum, and adapting the curricula at the international subsidiaries according to these demands (GerCIM3, D10, pg. 9). On the other hand, the option to closely follow the German curriculum can be attractive for prestige reasons, and as a means to obtain certification by the AHKs confirming that their apprentices graduate at the same level as in Germany (GerCIM5, D11, pg. 72). In tandem with the planning of the curriculum are activities to ensure the availability of the skills defined in the curriculum. These skills need to be made available locally, which is a question of securing the teaching personnel capable of imparting the skills, since these skills need to be first held by the trainers in order to be taught to the apprentices. Thus, the skills formed in dual apprenticeship training (first competence-component cluster) and the abilities to impart these skills (second competence-component cluster) come together when considering the availability of teaching personnel. The availabilities of these two competence-component clusters are discussed below. Securing the teaching personnel not only involves the finding and hiring of trainers employed by the MNE subsidiary, but also in many cases searching for the possibility to work with a local vocational school or technical university (with the right

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kind of teaching personnel). The vast majority of dual apprenticeship trainers/teachers in the three research regions are local residents. Thus, the teaching personnel’s skills and abilities need to be made available for dual apprenticeship training as part of the transferring of these competence-components. Additionally, in most cases, the teaching personnel have to learn new abilities needed for teaching as part of their dual apprenticeship training. The possibilities of cooperation with vocational education establishments differ substantially between the research regions. These differences can be tied to territorial institutions. In Sect. 4.8, I defined institutions as constellations of practices aiming to influence a specific set of other practices in a specific way. Vocational education systems fall under this category since, from a practice theoretical perspective, they are closely linked constellations of practices such as composing curricula, making vocational education regulations, and conducting vocational teaching and learning. Vocational education systems aim to influence the composition and level of skills in the population of a territory. These skills, which are produced through the vocational education system, are used in a number of other—mostly work-related—practices, within the territory. This way a vocational education system influences work-­related practices by producing skills that are part of the competence elements of these work-related practices. The aim of influencing other practices makes a vocational education system an institution, while the aim of influencing the practices within a specific territory (e.g., a country) makes it a territorial institution. Dual apprenticeship training intersects with the education-system-territorialinstitutions through cooperation with vocational education institutes that are part of the constellation of practices forming the vocational-education-territorial-institutions. In the following, I discuss how dual apprenticeship training intersects with the vocational-education-territorial-­institutions in each of the three research regions. Findings for the Greater Shanghai Area show that the possibilities of cooperating with vocational colleges (starting after 12 years of schooling) are good. In fact, the AHK in Shanghai reports that in many cases, it is the vocational colleges that contact them with the intent to start dual apprenticeship training at their facilities. This strong interest of the vocational colleges is motivated by the Chinese government’s political initiative to foster vocational education in the country (C1, pg. 114). A small number of German MNEs in the Greater Shanghai Area engage in dual apprenticeship training without cooperating with a local vocational college. In most cases, however, cooperation takes place. The AHK in Shanghai takes up the important role of matching the vocational colleges with companies interested in cooperating, and they participate in the negotiations of the terms of the cooperation. At the time of the interview, the AHK in Shanghai had arranged cooperation with around 50 MNE subsidiaries, mostly of German origin, including a Japanese, a Swedish, and an Austrian MNE (C1, pg.103). The vocational colleges often cooperate with more than one German MNE for dual apprenticeship training. Therefore, the curricula and the scheduling regarding the portion of the time the apprentices spend at the vocational college, and the time

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spent in training activities at the MNE, take similar structures for the different MNE subsidiaries. Moreover, the vocational colleges typically arrange a group of selected students to be taught in a separate class for one specific MNE. These classes are then declared to be, for instance, a “GerCIM3-class,” which is specifically named and designed for this MNE (a college then has for example a “GerCIM3-” and a “GerCIM5-class”). In this variant of dual apprenticeship training, a large portion of the apprentice’s time is spent at the college, not at the MNE subsidiary: In fact, the apprentice spends the first year exclusively at the college. Unlike dual apprenticeship training in Germany (and also the other two research regions), the training workshops for dual apprenticeship training are located at the vocational colleges, though they are often jointly financed with the MNE subsidiaries. Thus, the learning activities at the vocational college include the part of the training in the workshops. This makes a longer total training time in the vocational colleges than is usual for dual apprenticeship training in Germany or in the other two research regions. In the vocational colleges, apprentices who have not been “claimed” by a company sometimes also participate in dual apprenticeship training. These apprentices can be taken on by companies during the last year of training, if the MNE subsidiaries pay an elevated school fee for the remaining time. For the MNE subsidiaries, this option is attractive since they do not have to predict the number of dual apprenticeship graduates they’ll need to hire three years in advance. The apprentices get a regular graduation certificate from the vocational college. Thus, the influence of the college’s curriculum on the dual apprenticeship curriculum is substantial, as the following citation shows: We have learned that the curriculum there [China] is rather rigid and that the schools cannot react so flexibly. There are other ways of doing things there. We [GerCIM5] make special classes [at vocational colleges] and they [the apprentices] do on top what the German subsidiary wants. (GerCIM5, D11, pg. 68)

The composition of the more general skills (such as English language, civics, law) depends even more than the composition of the technical skills on the college’s curriculum. In China, regulations demand, for instance, classes on Marxism and military training during the first year of college (C42, pg. 37). In the first year of training, the trainees are completely in the college, where the main parts of the Chinese certificate are taught, but also basics in the theoretical and also in the technical area, and some in the practical area. And then from the second and third year onwards, the trainees spend six weeks in the company and four weeks in school […] like block teaching, so to speak. The curriculum is then coordinated by the school and the company so that what they learn can then be applied in the company. (C1, pg. 179–181)

For the vocational colleges, engaging in dual apprenticeship training in the described way requires considerable effort. Starting dual apprenticeship training takes between two and three years. A particular challenge is bringing the college teachers up to the level at which they can teach the skills imparted in dual apprenticeship training (C1, pg. 114). Findings show a particular cultural difficulty within

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the Chinese research region regarding the didactical methods used in dual apprenticeship training. Referring to the college teachers, an interview partner comments: None of the teachers has ever been in a company, neither in a Chinese company nor in an international one, and they don’t know anything about it. Therefore, a quite common communication and intercultural issue comes up. The problem is not so much a methodical and didactical one, in the field of methods and didactics the Chinese are often very good, but they cannot apply them. This is an area where we have to focus our efforts. However, methodology, didactics, the newest teaching forms etc. they [the Chinese] can do it better than the Germans. They can’t apply them [the methods], that needs practice, but they know more than we do. (C42, pg. 29)

Additionally, the transferring of the two competence-component clusters—the formed skills and the abilities to impart the skills in dual apprenticeship training— also means finding and securing the personnel to impart the training activities that take place within the MNE subsidiaries (in the training workshop and on the shop floor). In all three research regions, the MNE perceives it as difficult to find such trainers. In the Greater Shanghai Area, the Hanns-Seidel-Stiftung (an NGO of German origin) organized German “master craftsmen” training, which qualified the participants to teach in dual apprenticeship training (Stockmann and Meyer 2017). Even though this training program ended many years before the fieldwork of this study was undertaken, the “master craftsmen” trained this way still worked as trainers in various German MNE subsidiaries in the research region. This evidently improves the availability of abilities to impart skills (the second competence-component cluster) in the Greater Shanghai Area in comparison to the other two research regions, where no such experienced personnel are available in the local labor market. As with the college teachers, these company-employed trainers also need to have the ability to use the training methods common for dual apprenticeship training, such as imparting training through appropriate “real” work projects. The ability to use these methods, however, is typically not already possessed by the teaching personnel selected in the transfer process. To acquire these abilities, the AHK organizes train-the-trainer courses in the Chinese research region. Regarding the companyemployed trainers, a certain culturally based hesitancy to use the didactical methods typical for dual apprenticeship training, which involves a lot of hands-on demonstrations, is also considered particularly difficult to overcome in the Chinese context by a number of interview partners, as the following citation illustrates: […] but then comes a certain fear: ‘What happens if I don’t know something now? I am an expert now, and I show five young employees a certain technique or impart methodical knowledge and they ask me a question and I don’t know.’ […] It was partly a real problem to get the experts to share their expertise. […] I wouldn’t say that you can generalize this as a cliché, but it is a different understanding compared to the German approach, where you say ‘Come on, let me show you how it’s done.’ (GerCIM5, C39, pg. 2)

In conclusion, in the Greater Shanghai Area the availability of the skills formed and the abilities to impart the skills in dual apprenticeship training are good. Reasons for this are the possibilities of cooperating with vocational colleges due to the high density of vocational colleges in the Greater Shanghai Area, and the political

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interest of the government to satisfy the companies’ skill needs. The composition of the set of skills imparted, however, is substantially changed and adapted in order to ensure the availability of the skills imparted in dual apprenticeship training in the Chinese research region. In the Metropolitan Areas Mumbai-Pune-Bangalore, the possibilities of cooperating with local vocational schools or technical universities appear to be much more difficult than in the Chinese research region. The comparatively low number of MNE subsidiaries enacting dual apprenticeship training in the sample shows no cooperation with local vocational education institutes; an exception is the abovementioned VETnet project headed by the AHK.  The VETnet project undertakes training in the facilities of a private Catholic vocational school in Pune. However, the conception of the VETnet project is an atypical version of dual apprenticeship training, as discussed above in this section. Reasons for not cooperating with local vocational schools, colleges, or technical universities lie especially in the very poor level of vocational education in the vocational education system in India, as perceived by the MNE subsidiaries. Especially the Industrial Training Institutes (ITIs) within the Indian education system—the closest figure India has to a vocational school (German Berufsschule) in the German education system—are reported to be poorly equipped and working with outdated curricula and technology. Colleges, polytechnics, or technical universities as potential cooperation partners were not found in the sample.10 This might be due to a strict separation between blue- and white-­collar workers in India. Indian university students expect to work in an office environment and not on the shop floor (one interview partner attributes this separation to the caste system [I9, pg. 14]). Since many higher vocational education institutes are private, and thus paid for by the students, participating in dual apprenticeship training, which implies sending their students to work on the shop floor, is not attractive. Without cooperating with a local vocational school, the MNE subsidiaries in India do not have to adapt their curriculum to local regulations and can organize the curriculum according to their own goals (though they may follow the German curriculum strictly, they can also adapt the German curriculum to better fit the specific skill demands of the subsidiary). But not cooperating also implies that the challenge of organizing and paying for trainers able to impart the skills lies only with the subsidiary. Indeed, finding suitable training personnel is reported to be difficult in the Indian research region. Also, at the time of the fieldwork in India, there was no trainthe-trainer course for dual apprenticeship training organized by the AHK in the Indian research region. Plans for initiating such a course were mentioned, however (I6, pg.76). In comparison to the Greater Shanghai Area, the Indian research region, therefore, shows an inversed picture: The availability of the skills formed in dual apprenticeship training and the abilities of imparting such skills are comparatively very

 Though graduates from such educational institutes were employed by the German MNE in the sample. 10

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poor. However, the lack of possibilities for cooperation with vocational schools in the Indian research region also results in the relative freedom for the MNE to impart a skillset in dual apprenticeship training that is relevant to them (whether they follow the German curriculum closely since it fits their needs, or alter the curriculum). In Central Mexico, the cooperation with vocational schools or universities is much more varied than in the Chinese or Indian case. In the Mexican research region, our findings show dual apprenticeship training with and without cooperation. Moreover, there is significant variation between the types of schools with which the cooperating takes place: some MNE subsidiaries cooperate with a vocational school at the upper secondary level (starting after nine years of schooling), or with technical universities (starting after 12 years of schooling). While dual apprenticeship training, which was initiated more than 20 years ago, tends not to cooperate with a vocational education institute, nearly all subsidiaries that transferred dual apprenticeship training more recently cooperate with such institutes in some form. GerCIM3 started dual apprenticeship training in Central Mexico, for instance, without cooperation with a local educational institute, in the late 1960s. Only in 2008 did they start to work with a local technical university (GerCIM3, M70, pg. 218–222). The former non-cooperation with schools in Central Mexico, thus, might be due to missing possibilities at that time. Since then the education system in Mexico has grown considerably in size and complexity (Tuirán and Quintanilla 2012), which provides a higher availability of cooperation partners today. There is also a tendency that MNEs prefer cooperating with technical universities whenever it is possible for them, instead of cooperating with vocational schools (M6, pg. 22–30, GerCIM2, M55, pg. 24, GerCIM3, M70, pg. 166, M53, pg. 43). This preference is rooted in the poor reputation of vocational schools in Mexico. At the time of our fieldwork in Central Mexico, a territorial institution was emerging: the Mexican Model of Dual Formation (MMFD—Modelo Mexicano de Formación Dual). The MMFD is a national initiative by the Mexican government under the former president Enrique Peña Nieto (legislative period 2012–2018). About 20 years ago, in the State of Mexico,11 a commercial dual apprenticeship training provider founded by a German expat established a variant of dual apprenticeship training in cooperation with a local vocational school (Cáceres-Reebs and Schneider 2013). This idea was implemented at the national level by the Secretary of Education Rodolfo Tuirán Guitiérrez (previously Secretary of Education at the State of Mexico) under Peña Nieto’s administration. In 2015, the option for vocational students to combine their vocational educational career with an apprenticeship-type work at local companies was officially established (SEP 2015). The MMFD thus emerged in the context of the transfer of dual apprenticeship training from Germany to Mexico. Mexican politicians visited German MNEs with dual

 The State of Mexico (Spanish Estado de México) is one of the 32 federal entities of Mexico. This state surrounds the capital in the east, north, and west.

11

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apprenticeship training, and employees of these German MNEs were also asked to advise and lend their technical expertise for defining curricula and regulations for the MMFD (M15, pg. 32, see also Wiemann 2017; Wiemann and Fuchs 2018). In sum, the MMFD was formed in the context of dual apprenticeship training and its transfer to the Mexican research region. Its emergence was influenced by the existing dual apprenticeship training in Central Mexico. Moreover, in states with MMFD activities, only a small number of the possible vocational schools were starting to participate. At the time of the fieldwork, around 300 companies of different sizes, sectors, and origins had engaged in the MMFD scheme. These were mostly companies of Mexican origin, but several foreign MNE subsidiaries, including a small number of German MNEs, were also participating (data compiled by the end of 2016 by COPARMEX12—Confederación Patronal de la República Mexicana—and made available to the global-strategies research team). At the time of the fieldwork, the MMFD counted about 1500–2000 MMFD apprentices.13 As can be seen in Fig. 5.19, the activities regarding the MMFD were not given in all states. Thus, the MMFD can be considered an emerging territorial institution with a limited territorial spread in Mexico. Interestingly, the interviewees differentiated very clearly between the MMFD and dual apprenticeship training according to the “purely German” model (e.g., M3, M15, M71). This perception of the MMFD was shared by representatives of the Mexican education system, as well as employees of German MNEs in Mexico. The MMFD takes up the idea of duality, in that students both go to a vocational school for “theoretical” learning and have extensive periods of “practical” training at a company. However, the German curricula were only taken as a basis for the discussion of the development of MMFD curricula. The curricula were still in process of being developed at the time of the fieldwork. The Mexican AHK also refers to the MMFD as the “modelo B” (and the “pure German” model as “modelo A” [M15, pg. 24]). This terminology reminds us of the quality criteria developed by the IHKAHK-DIHK-network for the examination and certification of dual apprenticeship training outside of Germany (see Table 5.1). These criteria state that the core and professional skills imparted have to cover at least 50% of the German curricula to meet the minimum criteria of the level B AHK certificate for “Local dual vocational education in line with the German model” (DIHK 2015). To what degree this coverage was achieved in the development of the MMFD curricula was not clear at the time of the fieldwork. At this time, the MMFD included six educational careers14 in the field of industrial manufacturing and an additional seven educational careers in

 COPARMEX is a Mexican employer organization involved in the recruiting of companies for MNEs, and sits on the leading committee of the MMFD advising and organizing board (see Subsecretaría de Educación Media Superior 2016). 13  Estimations of the number of apprentices differed between the Secretary of Education, COPARMEX, and the AHK in the interviews. 14  Electromechanics, machine tools, mechatronics, transformation of plastics or plastics, autotronics, and industrial maintenance (see SEP 2017). 12

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Fig. 5.19  Spread of Mexican Model of Dual Formation. (Source: Wiemann and Fuchs (2018: 382); data compiled by COPARMEX at the end of 2016)

the service sector (SEP 2017). The mechatronics educational career was the most developed within the MMFD at the time of the fieldwork in 2016. What is important to note for this study on practice transfer, is the role the MMFD plays regarding the transferring of dual apprenticeship training, more specifically regarding the availability of the elements for dual apprenticeship training within the Mexican research region. The option to cooperate with vocational schools under the MMFD scheme would seem an obvious possibility for the German MNE to ensure parts of dual apprenticeship training’s elements. Remarkably, at the time of the fieldwork the MMFD appears only slightly to have improved the availability of the elements of dual apprenticeship training. Of the German MNE subsidiaries in the sample, only four participate in the MMFD (M18, M41, M49, M56). The German MNE subsidiaries that had been practicing dual apprenticeship training before the MMFD was established were not interested in changing their dual apprenticeship training to fit the MMFD scheme (e.g., GerCIM3, M70, pg. 161–170). Even two MNE subsidiaries (one automotive original equipment manufacturer (OEM) and one automotive supplier, M6 and M40) that were in the process of establishing dual apprenticeship training at their subsidiary after the MMFD had been established, did not opt to engage with the MMFD scheme. As a reason for this, the interview

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partners particularly emphasized the lower skill level of MMFD graduates. Sure enough, the educational career of mechatronics in the MMFD scheme does aim for a lower skill level than typical examples of dual apprenticeship training outside of the MMFD scheme. Additionally, vocational schools engaging in the MMFD have a bad reputation15 (especially in and around Mexico City [M1, pg. 14]). The newness of the MMFD scheme also causes uncertainty for the MNE subsidiaries. Some employees had not even heard of the MMFD at the time of the fieldwork (e.g., GerCIM4, M31, pg. 128–135; GerCIM2, M50, pg. 224–227). In sum, in Central Mexico the MMFD only slightly improved the availability of the competence element through providing access to the abilities to impart skills in the form of teaching personnel in vocational schools. In part, this is due to the fact that the vocational education establishments were open for cooperation with German MNEs before the MMFD was established. German MNE subsidiaries attest that their cooperation partners are very amenable to their demands regarding teaching content. Concerning cooperation with a local public technical university, for example, an interviewee comments: We have a school subject before the Ministry of Education called ‘Introduction to [GerCIM3] Production Systems.’ That is the level of willingness. We do have a strong impact with the government. (GerCIM3, M70, pg. 170)

For company-employed trainers, the Mexican AHK offers train-the-trainer courses, as in the other two research regions. In conclusion, the good possibilities for cooperation and the willingness of vocational schools and technical universities to adapt their teaching to dual apprenticeship training and the skill demands of the MNE subsidiaries, provide a fairly good availability of the skills formed in dual apprenticeship training (the first competence-component cluster) as well as the abilities to impart these skills (the second competence-component cluster) in the Mexican research region. The third competence-component cluster, consisting of the abilities to coordinate the activities of the enactment of dual apprenticeship training, includes the abilities of scheduling, examining, and awarding certifications. The abilities of scheduling the activities of dual apprenticeship training, especially the knowledge required to effectively put a dual apprenticeship curriculum into practice, are made available through the aforementioned sending of an expert in dual apprenticeship training from the German headquarters to the research regions. This expert stays in the subsidiary for six months to several years, and helps the organization to start the activities of dual apprenticeship training in the course of the transferring practice. The dialogue that is central to the transferring practice of dual apprenticeship training described above also includes decision-making regarding the kind of certificate that will be given to the apprentices when graduating. In all three research regions, the respective AHKs offer different certifications (see Table 5.1). However, there is also an option to find a way to award a certificate officially recognized by  This is reflected in interviews with German MNEs and representatives from Mexican vocational schools, and is also widely understood in the experience of the author. 15

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the state. Thus, the vocational-education-territorial-institutions (which as a constellation of practices include practices of awarding state-­recognized certificates) in the research regions have an impact on the availability of this third competence-component cluster. In the Greater Shanghai Area, for the dual apprenticeship training organized in cooperation with vocational colleges, apprentices typically get a certificate issued by the college, as well as the B-level certificate issued by the AHK after the corresponding examination. The AHK reports having organized the examination of 5000 apprentices in 2015, a very high number. Nevertheless, there are also MNE subsidiaries that do not opt to engage in examinations and certifications with the AHK, because they fear that their apprentices might be “poached” by other companies if they have the certificate (GerCIM4, D8, pg.25). In the Indian research region, due to a lack of cooperation with local vocational institutes, a locally recognized certification—such as that awarded in the Chinese research regions—is not given as part of dual apprenticeship training. Overall, the AHK certifications are well received (I30, pg. 34). In part this might be due to a certain skepticism with regard to Indian certificates. As one interview partner comments: Unfortunately, in India you can have a paper, but you don’t have a skill. Also, you have a skill but no paper. (GerCIM3, I1, pg. 80)

At the time of the fieldwork, there were even discussions with the Indian government about officially recognizing the AHK certificate (GerCIM5, I10, pg. 8–12). Still, the dual apprenticeship training of GerCIM3, which has a decades-long history, intends to continue to internally examine and certify their apprentices (GerCIM3, I1, pg. 80). In Central Mexico, many MNE subsidiaries engaging in dual apprenticeship training opted to only internally examine their apprentices. In cooperation with vocational education institutes, the local certificate is awarded by the school. At the time of the fieldwork, only six German MNE subsidiaries were engaging in the level A certification undertaken by the Mexican AHK (see Table  5.1), which was for 60–120 mechatronics technician apprentices per year (M15, pg. 10–12). One commonly mentioned reason for not engaging in the AHK examination is the high costs for the exams. The examination (and thus certification) process for the MMFD was still being established at the time of the fieldwork. In conclusion, transferring the competence element to the three research regions requires considerable effort not only by the MNE, but also by local vocational education institutes, the AHKs, and others. Teaching personnel (the personification of the first and second competence-component clusters) are in all three cases mostly locally hired. The teaching personnel usually need to acquire a range of new abilities for dual apprenticeship training in addition to those they already possess. When transferring the third competence-component cluster (the abilities to coordinate the activities of the enactment of dual apprenticeship training), the examining and certificating in particular are spearheaded by the AHKs in all three research regions.

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However, there are significant differences in the availability of the competence element related to territorial institutions. Overall, the availability is comparatively good in the Greater Shanghai Area, due to the willingness of the vocational colleges to engage in cooperation with German MNEs. Furthermore, the fact that the vocational colleges in the Chinese research region often cooperate with more than one MNE subsidiary provides the vocational colleges with the chance to use the synergies of more than one cooperation: Teachers can give classes to apprentices from different MNEs, and the same training materials and machinery can be used by apprentices from different MNEs. The territorial institution of the vocational education system in Mexico also shows a considerable openness to cooperation, which also results in a relatively good availability. However, in the Mexican case, cooperations are unique, occurring between one MNE subsidiary and one vocational institute (no synergies from having more than one MNE partner are possible). In Central Mexico, thus, the forms of the cooperations with vocational schools or technical universities are quite varied in terms of the type of school, curriculum, examination, and certification. This variation renders the effort to organize all the details in Central Mexico more challenging than in the Greater Shanghai Area. In the Indian research region, the availability of the competence element of dual apprenticeship training is rather poor compared to the other two research regions since, as discussed above, it is much more difficult to arrange for cooperation with vocational education institutes in this region. Transferring the Meaning Element of Dual Apprenticeship Training Arguably the most important activity for transferring a practice to a new destination fabric is the transfer of the meaning element. The meaning element of a practice contains the motivation to “practice the practice.” This element encompasses the legitimate reason for enacting the practice. The legitimating motivation for practicing dual apprenticeship training shows three important aspects, or legitimacy meaning-component clusters, as described in detail in Sect. 5.1.3. The first cluster is organized around the functioning of the MNE subsidiary: The skill demand of the subsidiary has to make the effort of starting and maintaining dual apprenticeship training necessary (or at least viable) for the subsidiaries. The second cluster is related to dual apprenticeship training as an educational opportunity for the apprentices, which also constitutes a societal benefit for the research region by forming an educated workforce (which creates value, pays taxes, attracts foreign direct investment to the region, etc.). The third cluster supports the first two by emphasizing the high-quality standards of dual apprenticeship training enabling apprentices to do high-quality technical work after graduating. Producing these work skills is central to fulfill the subsidiaries’ skill demands. Above that, it creates the mentioned educational opportunity for apprentices, which entails a societal benefit. For transferring the motivational legitimacy to a new destination fabric, different future practitioners need to be convinced and recruited for participating. These practitioners include the employees of the MNE (in the subsidiary and in the German headquarters); headmasters, teachers, and even local politicians in the case of a

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cooperation with a local vocational education system; and—of course—the future apprentices. As discussed in Sect. 4.2, transferring meaning works via a semiotic repositioning through association and classification. Since meaning-components are often shared by a number of practices, transferring meaning consists of the creation of a story that semiotically positions the transferred practice within the existing meaning-components in the destination fabric. Thus, transferring the meaning of dual apprenticeship training to the destination fabrics in the research regions encompasses the composing of a compelling and motivating story about why it makes sense for future practitioners to practice dual apprenticeship training. The composing of the story is part of the dialogue on planning and decision-making regarding the transferred dual apprenticeship training between MNE headquarters and subsidiaries, vocational education institutes, and German organizations such as the AHKs. Employees in the headquarters of the German MNE who participate in transferring activities for dual apprenticeship training, emphasize two crucial points with regard to transferring the meaning element of dual apprenticeship training. First, they experience that their ideas and understanding of dual apprenticeship training in Germany cannot be transferred to the destination fabrics outside of Germany. Instead they observe that these meaning-components (the story of what dual apprenticeship training means) need to be adapted substantially to enable a transfer. Second, these employees also stress that it takes considerable time to convince future practitioners of this “new” story. Future practitioners must invest considerable effort in the form of financial resources and time when engaging in dual apprenticeship training. These include financial investment in training workshops as well as in the teaching personnel who have to be covered by the MNE subsidiaries. Apprentices have to “invest” around three years of their working lives. The availability of the three meaning-components—(1) skill demand of the MNE subsidiary, (2) educational opportunity/societal benefits, and (3) standards and qualities of dual apprenticeship training—differs between the three research regions. These differences can be attributed in part to territorial institutions. In the following paragraphs, the availabilities of the meaning-component clusters in the destination fabrics in the three research regions are discussed one by one. The first meaning-component cluster of the subsidiaries’ skill demand is linked to the producing practices. The producing practice differs substantially between the MNE subsidiaries in the sample. Generally, influencing factors are the size of the production facilities and the production technology. As meanings “travel” via classification, the skill demand of the subsidiaries needs to be classified as best “solvable” by enacting dual apprenticeship training in order for it to “travel” to the research regions. To achieve this, a considerable cost-benefit calculation is undertaken as part of the transferring activities. For this calculation, an understanding in the form of a story of what the costs and the benefits of dual apprenticeship training are is established in destination fabrics by using pre-existing concepts, ideas, and understandings in new ways.

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Findings show that a minimum number of apprentices is needed for an MNE to first consider initiating dual apprenticeship training, as this citation of an expert from German headquarters shows: I don’t think we will be setting up our own dual apprenticeship training centers in most cases, because we don’t have the numbers [of apprentices]. It only makes sense to have permanent [training] personnel available when certain numbers [of apprentices] are reached. (GerCIM2, D4, pg. 32)

The group sizes of apprentices in the interviewed subsidiaries practicing dual apprenticeship training are stable: between 15 and 30 apprentices per group. Only some MNE subsidiaries have more than one group of apprentices (up to around 100 apprentices per generation [e.g., GerCIM5, M11]). Consequently, to initiate dual apprenticeship training in a subsidiary, the need for the kind of skilled workers dual apprenticeship training produces should be perceived as “high enough.” This need is typically determined by the kind of production (complexity of machines, frequency of maintenance needs, etc.) and the size of the production. But this need also has to be discursively defined as a need for dual apprenticeship graduates. This is not self-evident, as demonstrated by manufacturing companies around the world that, without employing dual apprenticeship graduates, manufacture the same kind of products with similar technologies to the German MNEs in the sample (see for automotive OEMs, for instance, Jürgens and Krzywdzinski 2013). Subsidiaries with less need for dually skilled personnel, in some cases, opt for cooperation with other companies located in the vicinity of their own production facilities. Findings show evidence for different ways to cooperate. One way is to “buy into” an established dual apprenticeship practice at another subsidiary. Some MNEs conducting dual apprenticeship training offer this opportunity to others. For example, we found commercial dual apprenticeship schools in Central Mexico (M3, M9). Another form of cooperation is the “co-initiation of dual apprenticeship training” together with other subsidiaries (C7, I21). Besides the skill demand motivating MNE subsidiaries to engage in dual apprenticeship training, the practice must also be regarded as the most attractive alternative for satisfying these needs. Here, an impact of the territorial institutions of the different vocational education systems comes in. There are generally two alternatives to engaging in dual apprenticeship training: hiring already rightly skilled personnel from the local labor market or engaging in some other form of skill formation practice that also satisfies the MNE subsidiaries’ skill demands. Generally, the German MNE subsidiaries perceive it as difficult to “just” hire the rightly skilled workers on the local labor markets. Only an insufficient number of possible hiring candidates with the desired industry experience are perceived to be available at the local labor markets in the three research regions. New graduates from the different vocational education institutes in the three research regions are perceived to be insufficiently prepared, especially regarding work experience. The insufficient supply of suitably skilled workers on the local labor markets is the reason why, in all three research regions, German MNE subsidiaries “classify” (meaning-components “travel” through classification) their skill demand as “solvable”

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through dual apprenticeship graduates who, due to extensive company training periods, have real work experience. One exception is the demand for chemical technicians in Central Mexico, where findings show an alternative skill formation practice to dual apprenticeship training. In Mexico, none of the chemical industry MNEs in the sample engaged in dual apprenticeship training for chemical technicians. GerCIM1 had a dual apprenticeship program in the past, but about 15 years before the interview they stopped the initiative. The reason was said to lie in a reduced necessity of the kind of skilled personnel delivered by dual apprenticeship training (GerCIM1, M72b, pg. 2–21). Other companies in the sample also did not have dual apprenticeship training in Central Mexico, which is interesting insofar that in the chemical industry in the Chinese research region dual apprenticeship training was very present and considered as an important skill formation practice within GerCIM1 (GerCIM1, C5). The reason why we could not find dual apprenticeship training in the chemical industry in Central Mexico is the presence of a local initiative providing skilled chemical technicians, which has a longstanding tradition in the research region. This initiative coordinates a skill formation practice combining university undergraduate degrees with extensive practice phases in chemical industry companies (M73). The alternative practice in this region competes in some way with dual apprenticeship training. Skill demand as motivation-meaning for transferring dual apprenticeship training to Central Mexico is not as strong as in other industries, since the local skill formation practice already serves this function. Thus, the first competence-­component cluster of dual apprenticeship training for chemical technicians is not, or only hardly, transferable to Mexico, because the motivation-meaning is already occupied by another locally existing practice. Regardless of the industry, in the decision-making dialogue, if a subsidiary wants to start dual apprenticeship training, the dissatisfaction with the availability of suitably skilled personnel does not automatically translate into a decision to use dual apprenticeship training to satisfy the skill demand. Often the personnel in the subsidiaries need a lot of convincing in form of detailed cost-benefit assessments. For the Greater Shanghai Area, findings show a high reluctance to invest in dual apprenticeship graduates. For example, GerCIM2 decided not to engage in dual apprenticeship training because of the costs: Last year, I have had many discussions with the German Chamber [Chinese AHK] on why [to initiate] this education program. Finally, we didn’t do [it], considering the cost. […] The quotation from that school was 10,000 RMB per year for one student. […] Some schools require three years. So, total cost is 30,000 RMB. And I need to pay 30,000 for one person and after that probably they can only work for us for one year, then it is really a big investment. (GerCIM2, C12, pg. 174–176)

At the current rate, 30,000 RMB is equivalent to 3750 Euros.16 The MNE additionally has to bear the costs for company-based training periods and training materials. The apprentices in the Chinese research region are usually not employed by

16

 Estimated exchange rate: 8 RMB per 1 Euro.

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the MNE, and therefore do not get a salary from the MNE. This reduces the costs somewhat when considering that the provision of a salary is typical for dual apprenticeship training in Germany. Even German MNEs with dual apprenticeship training in more than one subsidiary in China still report having difficulties convincing local managing personnel: There are still sites in China, and certainly plant managers as well, where you still have to fight for the reputation [of dual apprenticeship training], and for the understanding that it is worth doing this. That’s not going to happen in two years either. Instead […] our coordinator there […] says that he fought until the very last day and also held critical discussions with plant managers on the subject of reputation, meaningfulness, etc. (GerCIM3, D10, pg. 23)

A similar experience of needing time to understand the motivation to engage and invest in dual apprenticeship training is given by a Chinese human resource manager. She comments on how she needed time to understand the significance of the dual apprenticeship training for the subsidiary: […] the implementation depends on how much we understand. I joined this company in 2009 and I didn’t understand at that time. I was like, ‘Just take the people. There are people in the market. Why do you need to develop, invest, and wait for three years?’ Then, more and more I understand. This is a social society and also you are developing your own skilled people. And their retention and loyalty is very good. (C7, pg. 112)

This reluctance to engage in dual apprenticeship training because of the costs is often attributed to two reasons: first, the high fluctuation rates of production personnel in the Greater Shanghai Area and the subsequent risk of losing the investment in the apprentices if s/he leaves the company; and second the widely perceived view that vocational education is a task undertaken by schools, not by companies. Furthermore, a common understanding in the Greater Shanghai Area is that education in general, including vocational education, is a task of the state, not of the companies. This understanding is shaped by the territorial institution of the vocational education system in China, which is primarily state-driven (see Table 3.1, in Chap. 3, for a classification of the Chinese skill formation system). Despite concerns frequently expressed by the interview partners in the sample, a high number of MNE subsidiaries engage in dual apprenticeship training in the Greater Shanghai Area. As already mentioned above, the AHK in Shanghai arranged for around 50 German MNE subsidiaries to participate in dual apprenticeship training in cooperation with a vocational college (plus 10% non-German companies also engaging in dual apprenticeship training coordinated by the AHK). They organized about 5000 examinations for dual apprentices in the same year in total in 2015 (C1). This shows that the meaning-component cluster in the form of a convincing story for the MNE employees to engage in dual apprenticeship training is difficult to transfer to the Greater Shanghai Area. It requires a lot of time (sometimes years) and effort to convince the Chinese managing staff in the MNE subsidiaries. In the Metropolitan Areas Mumbai-Pune-Bangalore, findings show a different picture. Similar to the case of China, the interviewed MNE employees generally do not see vocational education as a task undertaken by companies. This understanding

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is shaped by the territorial institution of the Indian vocational education system that is primarily privately driven. Education, including vocational education, is seen as the individual task of the future workers and employees (see Table 3.1 for a classification of the Indian skill formation system). In the VETnet project, organized by the Indian AHK, companies pay one lakh rupees (one lakh equals 100,000 Rupees, which is around 1200 Euros)17 for the whole year of training, and an additional 8000 Rupees (around 100 Euros) as a monthly stipend for the apprentices. According to the Indian AHK, the participating MNE perceives this amount as the absolute limit they are willing to pay (I30, pg. 44). Additionally, in the interviews from the Indian research region the attitude often comes across that vocational education needs to be a quick endeavor; the faster the better. This attitude is also strongly reflected in the vocational education system in India. As part of an India-wide initiative to foster manufacturing in the country, Prime Minister Narendra Modi (in office since 2014)18 pushed the issue of vocational education to the forefront as part of his economic policy. One of Modi’s National Skill Development Corporation’s goals is to qualify or further qualify 500 million people by 2022, with an explicit focus on involving the private sector (Wessels and Pilz 2018: 95). Such a high volume of people going through vocational training can only be achieved through short-duration courses. As an interview partner comments, skill formation is very popular. However, the pressure to quickly train large groups of people clashes with the German understanding of vocational education and dual apprenticeship training: The topic has become very popular because of [Prime Minister] Modi. Everyone wants to do it. But primarily it is all about ‘skilling’. And then I would say that our experience is that most people simply don’t have the understanding of vocational education, of all that is really behind it – from a standpoint of people coming from the German dual vocational training system, like us. Instead, here [in India] any course financed by CSR [Corporate Social Responsibility] with two weeks of duration where someone is skilled in something, already counts as vocational education. So really, the basic principles that we understand as ‘German dual apprenticeship training’, we must preach them constantly. (I30, pg. 101)

An interview partner from a German training provider in India comments that the Indian politicians’ focus is on the number of people who get skill formation training, while the quality of their education takes a back seat: […] this government has since the last 4-5 years been talking about skilling 550 million people. But they are talking only about numbers, which is not difficult to achieve […]. You want to train one million people in mechatronics this year, [training providers name] can do it with this little finger alone! But don’t ask me for quality! […] Everybody is talking about numbers. Nobody is talking about quality. Because for quality, you need things for which we are not yet ready. This is the topic… but the good thing is that something has started. The beginning has been made. Two years ago, nobody was talking about skilling India; now at least everybody is. This is now a fashionable word! (I5, pg. 89)

17 18

 Estimated exchange rate: 83.3 Rupees per 1 Euro.  Still in office at the time of the writing of this study.

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Overall, the MNE subsidiaries express a significant reluctance to invest in dual apprenticeship training. Even though they consider the Indian vocational education system as insufficient, a considerable number of interview partners also expresses that their skill formation—mostly through shop floor inducting—works quite well to cover their skill demands. In part, the lower demand for highly skilled mechatronics or toolmakers might be explained by differences in the production technology and products the MNEs manufacture in the Indian research region. It could be that these make for a lower skill demand in maintenance work (and other areas) where dual apprenticeship graduates typically work. The comparatively low demand in terms of skill levels, paired with the relatively high investment MNE subsidiaries have to make to start dual apprenticeship training in the Indian research region (due to the difficulties of cooperating with Indian vocational education institutes, as discussed in the previous section), might be the reason why classifying dual apprenticeship training as an option that solves the skill demand of the MNE subsidiaries is much more challenging than in the Chinese research region. This difficulty is reflected in the low number of MNE subsidiaries engaging in dual apprenticeship training in the Indian research region. Overall, transferring the motivation for engaging in dual apprenticeship training to the MNE subsidiaries in the Indian research region appears difficult, since the understanding of vocational education in India is not easily compatible with dual apprenticeship training’s slow but high-quality skill formation. This makes for a poor availability of the first meaning-component cluster in the Indian case. In Central Mexico, interview partners also claim that the national vocational education system (i.e., the territorial institution) cannot provide the kind of skilled workers they need. As in the other two research regions, the subsidiaries identify practical experience and being able to practically solve problems as missing in the vocational education. In contrast to the Chinese and Indian research regions, however, the willingness to invest in dual apprenticeship training appears higher in Central Mexico. This is evidenced by the existence of two commercial dual apprenticeship training providers in the Mexican research region. Sending an apprentice to take part in dual apprenticeship training for three years at such a commercial training center costs up to 60,000 US Dollars19 (M15, pg. 149). In addition to primarily commercial dual apprenticeship providers, MNE subsidiaries enacting their own dual apprenticeship training also offer participation in this training to apprentices from other MNE subsidiaries, for a fee. The automotive OEM GerCIM5, for example, invites their suppliers to send apprentices to their training center. Another automotive OEM in the sample also had plans to open their dual apprenticeship training for commercial purposes at the time of the fieldwork. The fact that such arrangements were found in the Mexican research region reflects that a considerable number of companies in Central Mexico are willing to invest relatively large amounts of  This commercial dual apprenticeship training provider does not cooperate with a vocational school, but imparts the content at its own facilities. Thus, this amount includes the total cost for the companies per apprentice, in comparison to the amount mentioned for other dual apprenticeship trainings above. 19

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money in dually trained graduates. However, the willingness to invest is combined in many cases with the desire to reduce the costs of dual apprenticeship training by, for instance, opting not to cooperate with the Mexican AHK to examine and certificate the apprentices. Such a cost-benefit optimization of dual apprenticeship training to the needs and goals of the subsidiary also provides a possible explanation for the variety of ways in which dual apprenticeship training is organized in Central Mexico. The finding of the comparatively high willingness to invest in dual apprenticeship training is somewhat surprising since the Mexican vocational education system is generally characterized as a liberal system (see Pilz’s typology: Table 3.1), where vocational education is regarded as the individual task of the respective workers and employees). In contrast to the Indian research region (also a liberal skill formation system), the interview partners in Mexico express a considerable need for skilled employees in the area of mechatronics technicians, toolmakers, and maintenance personnel capable of working with high investment machinery. Additionally, the Mexican interview partners express much more confidence in being able to hold on to their skilled employees than their Chinese counterparts. Even though worker fluctuation is a problem in some places within Central Mexico, especially in larger German MNEs with a good reputation such as GerCIM3 and GerCIM5, interview partners express that employees often stay in their subsidiaries until their retirement (GerCIM5, M12, pg.  123; GerCIM3, M70, pg. 413–414). This good employee retention makes an investment in their education more attractive. In sum, MNE subsidiaries in Central Mexico classify dual apprenticeship training as a viable option to satisfy their skill demands. Thus, the first motivational meaning-­ component cluster, reflected in the MNE subsidiaries’ willingness to invest in dual apprenticeship training, appears to be more readily available than in the other two research regions. The second meaning-component cluster on the educational opportunity and subsequent societal benefits of practicing dual apprenticeship training encompasses the motivation for apprentices and vocational education institutes to engage in dual apprenticeship training. An idea of what an educational opportunity consists of already exists in the three research regions. For transferring dual apprenticeship training, this idea needs to be semiotically associated with dual apprenticeship training as the meaning element is transferred through semiotic association. Dual apprenticeship training is different to other vocational education options for young people in the three research regions because of the considerable amount of time spent on practical learning within a company. In all three research regions, companies are usually seen as a place of work, not of learning. Thus, the time the apprentices spend at the companies as part of dual apprenticeship training, needs to be associated with pre-existing ideas of learning in the research regions. This is not an easy task, as the following quote shows: Especially in countries where the education system does not allow for in-company training, it is difficult to explain to them that those [graduates] who also have done this in-company training can do more, know more than those who have only gone through school […]. This [convincing] is not achieved in the first year, it is a bit by bit process. (GerCIM5, D11, pg. 6)

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To motivate the apprentices to consider dual apprenticeship training as an educational opportunity, and therefore to participate in this type of training, several factors must be taken into account: the type of certification the apprentices get after graduating, the expected job possibilities on the labor market, the amount of time invested to achieve graduation, and possible financial compensation (e.g., stipends by the MNE) or investment in school fees. Besides these, other competing local educational opportunities for prospective apprentices must be considered. These factors influence in part the MNE subsidiaries’ interests in terms of the type of certificates they award after graduation, or financial compensation they might give to potential apprentices. Moreover, these factors are affected by particular territorial institutions in the research regions. In the Greater Shanghai Area, the perception of dual apprenticeship training in cooperation with a vocational college as an educational opportunity is largely influenced by how much of an educational opportunity graduating from the vocational college is thought to be. Higher vocational education (starting after 12 years of schooling), as in the vocational colleges where dual apprenticeship training is enacted, is available to upper secondary school graduates who have achieved the required score in the national university entrance examination (Gao Kao). Often, these are students who did not achieve enough points to enter a university’s Bachelor’s degree program (Stockmann and Meyer 2017: 45). This makes the opportunity of doing dual apprenticeship training a viable second choice for the prospective apprentices. The obstacle of framing long periods of training spent in a company as an educational opportunity is overcome in the Chinese case by classifying the apprentice as a student at the vocational college, not as an apprentice to the company. As this interview partner, a German expat working in China, comments: So you have to take into account the fundamental difference between the German system and the Chinese system, or to put it bluntly: In Germany, the trainee belongs to the company, has a training contract, and spends most of his time in the company and a smaller part of his time at school. Here [in China], he belongs to the school. (GerCIM5, C39, pg. 8)

The difference is also underlined by the choice of wording used for dual apprentices in the Chinese research region. The Chinese interview partners, with whom the interviews were conducted in English, mostly used the term “student” (with a strong connotation of school), not “apprentice” (with a strong connotation of craftsmanship and working in a company). In the Chinese research region, the availability of the meaning-component cluster of dual apprenticeship training as an educational opportunity is thus changed, in that the opportunity is provided for the apprentices by being part of a vocational college, not a company. Here, transferring the element entails a new classification or different positioning of dual apprenticeship training to that in Germany. Nevertheless, the meaning-component to motivate possible apprentices to start dual apprenticeship training is given. The Chinese apprentices even pay a small (variable) school fee to the vocational colleges (C1, pg. 155–165).

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As previously discussed, vocational education in the industrial sector is highly prioritized by the Chinese government in the hope of fostering economic growth and high-end industrial production, securing future employment, and reducing the pressure in the competitive general education. Thus, the idea that dual apprenticeship training is of benefit to the Chinese society is very easily attributed to dual apprenticeship training. The result is that vocational colleges actively search for cooperation partners in German MNEs in the Greater Shanghai Area. Thus, through the re-association of dual apprenticeship training as an educational opportunity, which fits the local idea of such an opportunity, the availability of this meaning-­component cluster is good in the Chinese research region. It also compensates to a degree for the lesser availability of the first meaning-component cluster—the MNE subsidiaries’ skill demands. In the Indian research region, possible future apprentices and their families must first be convinced that dual apprenticeship training is a good educational opportunity. Here, the association of dual apprenticeship training with the Apprenticeship Training Scheme, a territorial institution, especially dampens motivation. The Indian Apprenticeship Training Scheme was an important milestone for the organization of vocational education in India and was introduced to organize craftsman training under the Apprenticeship Act in 1961. The Apprenticeship Act is a nationwide document with fixed regulations for apprentices (entrance qualification, training contract, reservation quotas for castes, etc.) and the design of the training (duration, contents, etc.). The completion of an apprenticeship under the Apprenticeship Act takes between six months and four years. For example, trade apprenticeships for form- and toolmakers are part of the Apprenticeship Training Scheme and require a duration of four years (Wessels and Pilz 2018: 57–62). However, the Act’s regulations, even though they have been reformed more than once, are often criticized for their outdated curricula, lack of qualified instructors, inadequate teaching infrastructure, and low monetary compensation for the apprentices. Dual apprenticeship training is associated with the trade apprenticeships under the Apprenticeship Act, due to the close semantics caused by the sharing of the term “apprenticeship.” This association has to be broken if dual apprenticeship training is to be offered as an attractive educational opportunity to the kinds of future apprentices the MNE subsidiaries desire. A GerCIM5 employee describes the transferring of the second meaning-component cluster when they started dual apprenticeship training in 2012 in the following way: We also face these problems. Initially, we call [the apprentice’s] parents also. When they join, we make sure that what they think and what they want are on the same platform [sic]. Their parents also visit the shop floor and get a feel of the training academy. They see if their children’s future is secure. This type of concern is there not just among students but also among parents. In India, everyone does not go for an apprenticeship; a lot of people choose to go for engineering or a diploma. These were the challenges we faced in 2011-12 when the first batch started. But once the batch rolled out and got absorbed on the shop floor, the word-of-mouth publicity spread and resulted in a good response. Last year, we got 450-500 applications. Now, the news is spreading. It’s not just an apprenticeship; they get a lot of trainings and facilities. And everything is taken care of by [GerCIM5]. Initially, we

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also faced some hiccups because of the government and here, it [doing an apprenticeship under the Indian Apprenticeship Act] is entirely different – the lab set up, the atmosphere, the type of trainings. Unfortunately, in India, the infrastructure is very limited. The technology what they teach is very old, while what we teach is quite new and adaptable to the industry. That is the main concern. That is why apprentices and their parents fear whether they should go ahead with this. They prefer engineering colleges but admission to engineering colleges, they have to pay a lot of fees; they have to pay a lot of money. That is the concern for poor families. (GerCIM5, I10_1, pg. 257)

As discussed above, the competence-component cluster of dual apprenticeship training—consisting of motivating vocational education institutes to start dual apprenticeship training—is poorly available in the Indian research region. Reasons can be found in a substantial lack of financial resources in the public vocational institutes and a missing market for dual apprenticeship training in private education. There also appears to be a tendency, for those who can afford it, to prefer higher general education to dual apprenticeship training: We prefer [apprentices from] rural areas where they cannot afford higher education. We have seen that candidates from such areas are very good in academics. The intention is to uplift them. They get a stipend from [GerCIM5]. In the first year, they get INR 8,000; then INR 9,000; and INR 10,000 in the third year. Almost everything else is free – food is subsidized, transport is minimum – they don’t have to spend anything. (GerCIM5, I10, pg. 39)

In the Indian research region, this second meaning-component cluster of dual apprenticeship training as an educational opportunity that generates benefits for society also appears to be a motivational reason for German MNEs with regard to their involvement in dual apprenticeship training. Engaging in dual apprenticeship training seems to give German MNEs prestige with Indian as well as German politicians. The longstanding dual apprenticeship training at the GerCIM3 subsidiary in Bangalore, for example, received positive media attention. This dual apprenticeship training has been visited by a German chancellor on an official diplomatic mission, and is always named as a particularly good example of dual apprenticeship training outside of Germany. So, the motivation to generate prestige through the association of dual apprenticeship training with societal benefits appears to be another possible reason for German MNE subsidiaries to engage in dual apprenticeship training (GerCIM3, I1, pg. 19–23, 85–88, 119–122). Nevertheless, this motivation does not compensate for the general lack of willingness to invest in dual apprenticeship training in the Indian research region. Thus, in the Indian research region, there is a comparatively poor availability of the second meaning-component cluster of dual apprenticeship training, since MNE subsidiaries must make a considerable effort to motivate future apprentices to start dual apprenticeship training. Especially, the lack of motivation among vocational education institutes to join the dual scheme makes this meaning-­component cluster very poorly available. In Central Mexico, convincing prospective apprentices and their families of dual apprenticeship training as an educational opportunity also requires some effort. As in the Greater Shanghai Area, when there is cooperation with a vocational education institute, new apprentices are typically recruited from the (potential) students of that

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particular school. In those cases, the educational opportunity of starting dual apprenticeship training becomes tied to the educational opportunity with which the vocational institute in question is associated. Thus, a re-association of this meaning-component cluster takes place. In cases where MNE subsidiaries do not cooperate with a local vocational institute, the interview partners regard being a German company member and imparting high-quality German training as a way to motivate new apprentices. Additional motivation is given by the fact that the apprentices in Central Mexico do not pay for dual apprenticeship training. On the contrary, apprentices typically get a small stipend from the MNE subsidiary. Moreover, apprentices have good prospects of being hired after the completion of the training, since the Mexican MNE subsidiaries typically only train the number of apprentices they plan to take on. In the case of the MMFD, however, this picture is somewhat different, as discussed above. Here, the stipend is given by the Mexican state, and the chance of being taken on by the MNE subsidiary is smaller (M69, pg. 227–285). Nevertheless, in the MMFD the apprentices get a Mexican school certificate, which means they can enter the labor market after graduating. In Mexico, vocational education institutes are generally open to cooperation; they regard dual apprenticeship training as an opportunity to enhance their teaching and fulfill their task of benefitting society through education. Many vocational schools have specific employees in charge of fostering the relationships with relevant industries, for the placing of interns and other joint activities. Moreover, in comparison to the Indian research region, in Central Mexico there is not such a strict separation of blue- and white-collar employees—Bachelor’s degree20 engineers often work on the shop floor. Thus, for technical universities engaging in dual apprenticeship training, it is a good option to give their graduates real work experience. The motivational legitimacy of dual apprenticeship training covering the MNE subsidiaries’ demands regarding skilled workers, as well as the idea of dual apprenticeship training as an educational opportunity (leading to societal benefits) can only be achieved through high-quality training. The conception of dual apprenticeship training as high-quality training makes up the third meaning-component cluster. In dual apprenticeship training in Germany, high-quality is achieved through standards or qualities that are defined by state agencies, industry partners, and union representatives (Pilz 2009). Findings show that these standards and qualities are at the core of the planning and decision-making dialogue that is central to the transferring practice of dual apprenticeship training. Among the MNEs in the sample, GerCIM3 and GerCIM5 transfer dual apprenticeship training to subsidiaries outside of Germany most frequently. The employees in the German headquarters of both these MNEs have developed quality standards for dual apprenticeship training abroad (GerCIM2 also has a quality

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 In the Mexican education system called “Licenciatura.”

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standard, though less detailed). The aspects GerCIM5 considers essential are, for example: • Training for the MNE subsidiary’s needs. Apprentices should, as far as possible, be taken on by GerCIM5 after graduating. • The fitting together of theoretical “academic” learning with practical “problemrelated” learning. A considerable part of the learning is done in “real work” situations, not in exercises that are purely designed for learning. • Technically suitable infrastructure in the form of a training workshop. • Central role of trainers: Trainers that are experts in the production work (working in the production themselves) take responsibility for the learning of the apprentices. Apprentices are supervised over the course of the completion of the approximately three-year dual apprenticeship program. • Regular examining of the apprentice through different kinds of tests, written and practical exams, and the completion of “real work” tasks. This serves to certify the skill or skillset the apprentice has already gained. • Certification of the apprentices through an official local certificate. • Cooperation with local public schools in order to achieve a locally accepted certification for the apprentices. (GerCIM5, D11, pg. 6) Forming such quality standards for dual apprenticeship training outside of Germany is part of transferring the meaning element of dual apprenticeship training. These quality standards, however, serve as a definition of what makes “good” dual apprenticeship training in the planning and decision-making dialogue. Creating these standards gives the MNE headquarters a certain definitional power when transferring the practice, as expressed in the following quote: With the standards… […] If we find these elements there, then it is sufficient for us. Then we will also talk about dual apprenticeship training, although it only exists per se in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland. (GerCIM5, D11, pg. 2)

Nevertheless, the employees participating in the transferring of dual apprenticeship training from the German headquarters are very clear that whether or not an MNE subsidiary follows these standards is up to the executive personnel in the subsidiaries abroad. Bringing these standards into the planning and decision-making dialogue is not done with the intent to force these standards on the subsidiaries, but to “create added value” by “not having to reinvent the wheel everywhere” (GerCIM3, D10, pg. 39). With regard to the third meaning-component cluster organized around the quality and standards in dual apprenticeship training, in these two MNE cases the awareness of the different quality aspects is generally transferred through the intensive dialogue between employees from the MNE headquarters and those from the local MNE subsidiaries. Differences between the research regions, regarding many of the detailed aspects, have already been discussed as part of the first and second motivation meaning-component clusters of dual apprenticeship training. At this point, it is important to stress the key role of the afore-mentioned German expats who are sent to organize the transferring of dual apprenticeship training. These expats stay for a

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considerable length of time, often years, at the MNE subsidiary in the research region. Their interpretation of good standards for dual apprenticeship training is transferred—literally—in person, at least for the duration of their stay, to the destination fabric in the research region. Their ideas and interpretations, as part of the decision-­making dialogue, substantially form this meaning-component cluster in the destination fabric of the transfer. Overall, the motivational legitimacy meaning element of dual apprenticeship training requires considerable effort to be transferred to the destination fabrics in the three research regions. The Greater Shanghai Area is characterized by a reluctance to engage in dual apprenticeship training from the company side. This reluctance is, however, compensated for by the strong willingness to engage and invest in dual apprenticeship training by the vocational colleges in this research region. In other words, the easy classification of dual apprenticeship training as an educational opportunity compensates for the more difficult classification of dual apprenticeship training as a good way to satisfy the subsidiaries’ skill demands. This compensation makes the Greater Shanghai Area the research region with the most widely spread dual apprenticeship training. The transfer of the motivational meaning to Central Mexico shows that it is easier to motivate the MNE subsidiaries here than in the Chinese research region. Also, there is an openness of the vocational education institutes to starting dual apprenticeship training, though their willingness is not at the same level as the enthusiasm of the Chinese vocational institutes to engage in cooperation. This makes the availability of the meaning element comparable but slightly smaller than in the Greater Shanghai Area. The Indian research region shows a different picture. The comparatively small number of German MNEs engaging in dual apprenticeship training, and the fact that the existing training facilities do not cooperate with vocational education institutes, reflects the poor availability of this meaning element. In particular, the association of dual apprenticeship training with the trade apprenticeship under the Apprenticeship Act makes the transfer of the high-quality standard dual apprenticeship training practice difficult, since a constant differentiation has to be made to justify the considerable, but necessary, investments. In the Indian research region, the strict separation of well-educated white-collar employees from their blue-collar counterparts who do the “dirty” shop floor work makes it difficult to use existing meaning-components in the destination fabrics to associate or attach the meaning of dual apprenticeship training. Thus, the availability of the legitimacy meaning element of dual apprenticeship training is comparatively poor in the Indian research region. Transferring the Material Element of Dual Apprenticeship Training Compared to shop floor inducting, the material elements for enacting the activities of dual apprenticeship training, particularly the training workshops, the apprentices, and the teaching personnel, are not already available at the destination fabric. In the case of shop floor inducting, the most important material-component cluster, the shop floor, is transferred to the destination fabric not so much for shop floor inducting, but for the producing practice. For dual apprenticeship training, the training workshop, the apprentices, and the teaching personnel have to be brought together

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exclusively. The precondition for making these material-components available for dual apprenticeship training is the willingness of the different parties engaging in dual apprenticeship training to invest in these material-components. The willingness to invest has been discussed at length in the previous section. However, regarding the transfer of the material element of dual apprenticeship training, what needs to be stressed is the considerable effort it takes to form the different material-­ component clusters, especially the training workshops. Putting together all the different parts necessary for a well-equipped training workshop takes considerable expertise and time. An intuition of just how much time and effort is required can be gained by looking at the training workshop. A GerCI3 employee reports that putting together the training laboratory for chemical technicians in Shanghai cost around one million Euros and took three years from planning to completion (GerCi3, D7, pg. 17). Other MNEs report similar sums of money for installing training workshops for mechatronics technicians and toolmakers, but smaller amounts of time needed for installation (C7, pg. 110). The classroom material-component clusters, in comparison to the training workshops, are, in the case of cooperation with vocational education institutes, usually already put together as consistent material arrangements for teaching theoretical content in dual apprenticeship training. The classroom’s material-component clusters, therefore, “only” have to be made available for use. MNE subsidiaries with dual apprenticeship training without cooperation with a vocational education institute need to arrange a classroom learning space exclusively for dual apprenticeship training. In comparison to onboarding, where a similar material-component arrangement is required, the classroom arrangement is used much more frequently in dual apprenticeship training. Thus, sharing with other training or meeting practices is only possible in some cases. The third material component cluster in dual apprenticeship training is the shop floor (see Fig. 5.8). The shop floor is usually already at the destination fabric of a transfer of dual apprenticeship training. It only needs to be made available for use. Since dual apprentices are typically integrated in “real” working processes during the time they spend on the shop floor, arranging this as part of the transferring practice only takes a small effort. The making available of the apprentices and teaching personnel for dual apprenticeship training (both being part of the materiality of dual apprenticeship training), has already been discussed as part of the meaning element (see in the previous section). Regarding the availability of the material element of dual apprenticeship training between the research regions, the findings show no significant differences. There are also no differences in the effort it takes to put together the different materialcomponent clusters of dual apprenticeship training, though there are differences in who invests in these arrangements and makes the effort to put the arrangement together. In the Greater Shanghai Area, when there is cooperation with a vocational college, the vocational college is the place where the training workshop is located, though buying and installing the necessary machinery and equipment is described as a joint activity by the vocational college and the MNE subsidiary. In Central

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Mexico, the training workshop is usually located at the MNE subsidiary and put together by their employees. Exceptions are the two commercial dual apprenticeship providers, where the training workshops are at the facilities of the provider. In the Indian research region, due to no cooperation with vocational education institutes, training workshops and classrooms are located and put together by the MNE subsidiaries (with the exception of the VETnet project where the training workshop is located at a private Catholic vocational school). Nevertheless, the differences in who makes the effort of putting together the material-component clusters of the training workshop, as well as the classroom arrangements, do not decrease the effort it takes to arrange the material-components. Thus, the availability of the material element does not differ between the research regions. Integrating the Time Profile of Dual Apprenticeship Training Dual apprenticeship practitioners—mostly apprentices, but also teaching personnel—need to fit the activities of dual apprenticeship training into their professional careers, and into the rhythm of practices they engage in during their daily lives. Spending time enacting dual apprenticeship training requires a motivational legitimacy. The motivation for investing time in dual apprenticeship training has been discussed in the section on the transfer of the meaning element. Besides the motivational aspect, however, fitting the time profile of dual apprenticeship training into the destination fabrics as part of the transfer requires considerable organizational effort. Dual apprenticeship training involves a large number of different daily activities. The central organizing instrument for these activities is the curriculum. Here, certain activities are organized in chronological order, which needs to be followed for competent enactment. As part of the transfer of dual apprenticeship training, the chronological order is put together in the curriculum, and is then translated into schedules for the apprentices, teachers, and the usage of the different material arrangements. When starting dual apprenticeship training, the effort of finding a suitable schedule for the different activities of dual apprenticeship training is high. The form these schedules take is influenced by elements of practices that are part of territorial institutions in the three research regions, for instance, the beginning of the school year at the vocational education institutes, vacation times, and even work-hour regulations. The elements of practices that are part of territorial institutions influence the schedules as well. However, as part of the transferring practice these schedules have to be made. There is no indication in the empirical data that the effort to make the schedules differs between the research regions. Thus, the effort it takes to integrate the practice-time profile of dual apprenticeship training is comparatively equal between the three research regions. Comparing Availability and Integrability of Dual Apprenticeship Training Between the Research Regions Compared to the transferring of onboarding and shop floor inducting, findings for dual apprenticeship training show, in addition to a significant variation in dual apprenticeship training within the research regions, also considerable differences between the regions with regard to the availability of the elements and the

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integrability of the practice-time profile. These differences can be attributed in part to territorial institutions in the research regions. The availability of the elements of dual apprenticeship training differs in the competence and the meaning elements. The availability of the competence element is comparatively good in the Greater Shanghai Area due to the strong willingness of the vocational colleges (being a bundle of practices that is part of the territorial institution of the vocational education system) to engage in cooperation with German MNEs. The territorial institution of the vocational education system in Central Mexico also shows a considerable openness for cooperation, which also results in a relatively good availability of the competence element. In comparison to the Chinese, however, the Central Mexican cooperations with vocational institutes show much more variation in terms of the type of school, curriculum, examination, and certification. This variation makes the effort of organizing all these details individually more challenging than in the Greater Shanghai Area, where companies can enter into already existing models of cooperation. In the Indian research region, the availability of the competence element of dual apprenticeship training is comparatively poor due to the apparent difficulties of arranging cooperation with vocational education institutes. Overall, as represented in Fig. 5.20, the availability of the competence element of dual apprenticeship training, though generally not too good, is best in the Greater Shanghai Area, followed by Central Mexico. The Indian research region shows a very poor availability of the competence element.

I C M

Poor availability and integrability I C

M

I

C M

C IM

I

C

M

Good availability and integrability Competence

Meaning

Material

Practicetime profile

Overall availability/ integrability

C = Greater Shanghai Area; I = Mumbai-Pune-Bangalore; M = Central Mexico Fig. 5.20  Comparing availability and integrability of dual apprenticeship training between the research regions. (Source: Own representation)

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The meaning element of dual apprenticeship training requires considerable effort to be transferred to the destination fabrics in the three research regions. The Greater Shanghai Area is characterized by a reluctance to engage in dual apprenticeship training from the company side due to an understanding that vocational education is a task of the state, not of companies (this perception again stems from the territorial institution of the Chinese vocational education system). This very perception, however, makes the vocational colleges in the Greater Shanghai Area highly motivated to engage in cooperation with German MNE subsidiaries. Such strong motivation compensates for the companies’ reluctance, making the Greater Shanghai Area the research region with the highest number of activities of dual apprenticeship training (reflected in the 5000 B-level AHK examinations in one year). The transfer of the meaning element to Central Mexico shows, as part of the first meaning-component cluster, less reluctance by the MNE subsidiaries to engage in dual apprenticeship training than in the Chinese case. There is also an openness of the vocational education institutes to starting dual apprenticeship training. Nevertheless, in the Mexican research region cooperation with vocational schools and technical universities is individually organized, unlike in the Chinese research region, where vocational colleges often cooperate for dual apprenticeship training with a number of German MNEs at the same time. Moreover, vocational colleges in China show considerable enthusiasm to cooperate by actively searching for cooperation partners. This makes the availability of the meaning element comparable but slightly smaller in Central Mexico in comparison to the Greater Shanghai Area. This difference is graphically represented in Fig. 5.20 by positioning the Greater Shanghai Area slightly below Central Mexico. The data from the Indian research region tell a different story. The comparatively small number of German MNEs engaging in dual apprenticeship training, and the fact that the existing dual apprenticeship trainings are not conducted in cooperation with vocational education institutes (with the exception of the VETnet project), reflects the poor availability of this meaning element. In this region, the meaning element of dual apprenticeship training appears to be difficult to transfer, since classifying dual apprenticeship training as a viable educational option is obstructed by its association with training under the Apprenticeship Act (territorial institution). Additionally, the strict separation of well-educated white-collar employees from their blue-collar colleagues makes it harder to use existing meaning-components in the destination fabrics in order to associate or attach a motivational meaning for engaging in dual apprenticeship training. This makes the availability of the legitimacy meaning element of dual apprenticeship training comparatively poor in the Indian research region. The challenge of transferring the meaning element to the Indian research region is represented in Fig. 5.20 by positioning the “I” in the upper part of the meaning dimension. There are considerably large investments (especially the investment in the training workshop) that have to be made for dual apprenticeship training to take place. This is in part because the different material-component clusters of dual apprenticeship training, in comparison to the material element of onboarding and shop floor inducting, are mostly exclusive to dual apprenticeship training. For instance, in the

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case of shop floor inducting, the shop floor is also a material element in the producing practice, thus making it more easily available for shop floor inducting. In the case of dual apprenticeship training, a large part of the material element is exclusive to dual apprenticeship training, and not already at the destination fabric. The lack of pre-existing material-component arrangements at the destination fabrics makes the availability of the material element of dual apprenticeship training largely dependent on the motivation of the future practitioners to financially invest in the putting together of the different material-components. In other words, the availability of the material element depends on the availability of the meaning element. This is reflected in Fig. 5.20, by the resemblance of the positioning of availability of the material element in the research regions to the positioning of the availability of the meaning element. The effort of putting together the different material-components into arrangements (building and installing a training workshop) that can be used in dual apprenticeship training, however, is very similar between the three research regions. This similarity is represented by the gaps between the research regions that are smaller for the material element than for the meaning element in Fig. 5.20. Integrating the time profile of dual apprenticeship training into the destination fabrics in the three research regions requires several scheduling and adapting activities that are part of the transferring of dual apprenticeship training. As discussed in the respective section on the time profile, different territorial institutions have an impact on the form the schedules take. Nevertheless, findings show no significant difference between the research regions with regard to the effort it takes to integrate dual apprenticeship training into the destination fabrics at the three research regions. This is represented in Fig. 5.20. Based on the analysis of the effort it takes to transfer the three elements of dual apprenticeship training and to integrate the time profile into the destination fabrics in the research regions, the overall differences between the three research regions are summarized in the darker gray arrow column at the right side of Fig. 5.20. After discussing and comparing every dimension by itself, I conclude that the availability and integrability for transferring dual apprenticeship training is best in the Greater Shanghai Area, followed by Central Mexico. The Indian research region shows by far the poorest availability/integrability. The availability of the elements and the integrability of the time profile of shop floor inducting are also represented in Fig. 5.20. In this section, I have discussed the transferring of onboarding, shop floor inducting, and dual apprenticeship training, and compared the effort it takes to transfer each skill formation practice by the four dimensions (competence, meaning, material, and time profile). Furthermore, I have worked out the differences between the research regions. In the following section, I compare the transfer resistance of the three skill formation practices by bringing together the dimension of the complexity of the three skill formation practices with the availability/integrability of the practices.

5.3  Comparing the Transfer Resistances of Three Skill Formation Practices…

235

5.3  C  omparing the Transfer Resistances of Three Skill Formation Practices Between Three Research Regions Practices are transferred by means of their elements. They need to be integrated into the time sequencing of practices at the destination fabric. The effort it takes in the form of the transferring practice to make the elements available at the destination fabric, and to integrate the time profiles, has been discussed separately in the previous sections. In this section, I bring these dimensions together in order to compare the transfer resistances of the three skill formation practices. Findings represented in Fig. 5.16 (the degrees of complexity of the three skill formation practices), and Figs. 5.17, 5.18, and 5.20 (differences in the availability/ integrability dimension between the three research regions), are merged in Fig. 5.21. This figure, thus, “condenses” the differences in transfer resistance, with a high transfer resistance in the upper right corner, and a low transfer resistance in the lower left corner.

poor

I

C = Greater Shanghai Area I = Mumbai-Pune-Bangalore M = Central Mexico

+

High transfer resistance

M C

Availability/ integrability

I CM C IM

good

_

Low transfer resistance

low Onboarding

Shop floor inducting

Dual high apprenticeship training

Degree of complexity of the three practices

Fig. 5.21  Transfer resistances of onboarding, shop floor inducting, and dual apprenticeship training in the three research regions. (Source: Own representation)

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The degrees of complexity of the three practices of onboarding, shop floor inducting, and dual apprenticeship training are represented by the light gray bars spanning the x-axis. Since the degrees of complexity of the skill formation practices are independent from the destination fabrics of their transfer, the width of the gray bars does not represent a spectrum of complexity-­degree, but it is rather a graphic decision to make room for the letters “C,” “I,” and “M.” Along the y-axis runs the dimension of the element-availability and time profileintegrability according to differences between the research regions (i.e., not between the individual destination fabrics of each transfer to a subsidiary). Every transfer destination for every transfer of a practice to a new destination fabric is different, since the fabric of interrelated practices is different. Nevertheless, as discussed in the introductory part of Sect. 5.2, there are social phenomena that can provoke differences in the overall element-availability and time profile-integrability between regions. The differences regarding the availability/integrability dimension between the three research regions, the Greater Shanghai Area, the Metropolitan Areas Mumbai-Pune-Bangalore, and Central Mexico, are represented by the letters “C,” “I,” and “M,” respectively. The findings of this study show that territorial institutions play a key role in influencing these differences. Territorial institutions can, but do not necessarily have to, play a role in the relevant destination fabric. It depends on whether institutions connect substantial parts of the relevant destination fabric, as discussed at length in Sect. 4.8, on the practice theoretical take on institutions. Onboarding shows the lowest overall transfer resistance of the three skill formation practices. It has the lowest degree of complexity, and a good availability/integrability in the three research regions. Shop floor inducting has a higher overall transfer resistance than onboarding, due to its greater complexity and poorer availability/integrability in all three research regions. Compared to dual apprenticeship training, however, shop floor inducting shows a lower overall transfer resistance. Both onboarding and shop floor inducting show nearly no difference in the availability/integrability dimension between the three research regions. With regard to shop floor inducting, one exception is the difficulty of hiring the “rightly” skilled personnel for shop floor inducting, as reported in the Indian research region. This is represented by the slightly higher positioning of the “I” in the middle bar in Fig. 5.21. Reasons for the noticeable similarities between the research regions (in the case of both skill formation practices) lie in the connections these practices make in the destination fabrics. Both practices, as the findings show, mostly only connect with practices that are part of the MNE-practice-bundle in the destination fabrics. Therefore, they are only connected indirectly to territorial-institution-constellations. This result might, however, be linked to the fact that the three research regions in the sample of this study were explicitly chosen because they showed good possibilities for forming the practice bundles of German manufacturing MNE subsidiaries (see Sect. 3.2.2). Therefore, a lack of differences between the three research regions regarding the availability/integrability dimension of the transfer resistance of onboarding and shop floor inducting is not surprising.

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Dual apprenticeship training, on the contrary, shows the highest transfer resistance, due to its high degree of complexity and relatively poor availability/integrability in the research regions. Interestingly, regarding the availability/integrability dimension, findings point to considerable differences between the three research regions. Here, territorial-­ institution-­ constellations are shown to considerably influence the availability/integrability dimension for the dual apprenticeship training. In the Greater Shanghai Area, we found a high local concentration of dual apprenticeship training. Notably, the willingness of the vocational colleges (part of the territorial-­institution-­constellation of the vocational education system) to cooperate intensively with German MNEs for dual apprenticeship training contributed to a comparatively good availability of the competence and the meaning elements of the practice in the research region. The willingness of the vocational colleges compensates for the skepticism of the companies about investing in dual apprenticeship training. The availability of the elements of dual apprenticeship training through the vocational-education-institution makes the Greater Shanghai Area the research region with the lowest transfer resistance for dual apprenticeship training, in comparison to the other two. The lower transfer resistance is indicated in Fig. 5.21 by the lower positioning of the “C” in the gray bar on the right. In the Indian research region, we found sporadic “lighthouses” of dual apprenticeship training, though they had hardly any interaction with the local vocationaleducation-­institution. The difficulty of cooperating with the existing vocational education institutes in the Indian research region as well as the general unwillingness of companies to invest in vocational education and, therefore, in dual apprenticeship training make the competence and meaning elements of dual apprenticeship training only poorly available. This poor availability translates into an overall high transfer resistance for dual apprenticeship training in the Metropolitan Areas Mumbai-Pune-Bangalore. This is represented by the positioning of the “I” in the highest corner in the right bar in Fig. 5.21. In Central Mexico, we find both MNE subsidiaries and vocational education institutes willing to engage in dual apprenticeship training. The findings show several forms of cooperation for dual apprenticeship training between different types of vocational education institutes and German MNEs. However, compared to the Chinese research region, in Central Mexico we find mostly individual cooperations between one vocational education institute and one German MNE.  This makes the effort it takes to organize every individual cooperation higher than in the Chinese research region, where vocational colleges often have a number of cooperations with German MNEs at the same time. This results in an overall lower availability of the elements for dual apprenticeship training than in the Chinese research region. This is depicted by the positioning of the “M” above the “C” in the right bar in Fig. 5.21. Additionally, in Central Mexico, the findings show an intriguing combination of dual apprenticeship training enacted by German MNEs and the emerging territorial institution of the MMFD. It is also remarkable that the emerging territorial institution of the MMFD helped only slightly in elevating the availability of the elements of dual apprenticeship training in the research region at the time of the fieldwork. In

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part, this might be due to the relative novelty of the MMFD. Another reason could be the fact that MNE subsidiaries in Central Mexico seem to prefer cooperating with technical universities because of the bad reputation of the vocational high schools in the MMFD.  Technical universities, however, are not integrated into the MMFD. In sum, onboarding shows the least transfer resistance and no differences between the research regions. Shop floor inducting is more complex than onboarding and the availability/integrability is poorer, making the transfer resistance higher. Of the three skill formation practices, dual apprenticeship training shows the highest degree of complexity and also the poorest availability/integrability. It is thus the practice with the overall highest transfer resistance. Concerning the availability/integrability of dual apprenticeship training, the significant influence of territorial institutions results in differences in the transfer resistance between the three research regions.

5.4  Reflecting on the Empirical Contributions of This Study In this chapter, I have compared the differences in the transfer resistances of onboarding, shop floor inducting, and dual apprenticeship training, both relative to each other and between the three research regions. This discussion serves to provide empirical validation of the conceptual heuristic of the transfer resistance of practices in transfer, as elaborated in Chap. 4. As previously discussed, it is important to bear in mind the relationship between the empirical insights presented in this chapter and the theorizations relayed in Chap. 4, and that the falsification of the theoretical ideas presented in Chap. 4 with the empirical insights of this chapter is not possible, since the theorizations have been developed from empirical insights based on the same data. Instead, this chapter gives context and empirical perspective to the theorizations in Chap. 4. Additionally to the conceptual contributions of this study highlighted in Sect. 4.9, this chapter tackles the empirical research desiderates outlined in Chaps. 1 and 2 in the fields of economic geography, practice theoretical thought, and the multidisciplinary research field practice transfer (summarized in Fig. 2.8). The empirical insights presented in this study contribute to debates in economic geography in two ways. (1) This study specifically focuses on the transfer of skill formation practices enacted by German MNEs. The issue of the transfer of technical skills is often neglected in debates about the international organization of knowledge in economic geography (see Sect. 2.1.1). The study sheds light on the importance of the internationalization of non-academic knowledge and skills by and through MNEs. As the findings presented in this chapter show, transferring non-academically acquired knowledge and skills to their international subsidiaries is a major issue for German MNEs. Regarding onboarding and shop floor inducting, this transfer is especially of concern in the context of the transfer of producing practices when establishing a new production site. The motivations and time frame for transferring dual

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apprenticeship training, on the other hand, have proven to be more varied. Dual apprenticeship training is transferred at different stages of the development of MNE subsidiaries (see Sect. 5.2). This study’s empirical emphasis on non-academic knowledge and the skills of blue-collar workers thus reveals the importance of this type of knowledge, something that is often not so much forgotten in economic geography, but left aside in favor of studying knowledge transfer in groups of highly educated personnel such as engineers (Fuchs et al. 2016). In this study, I show how these (non-academically acquired) skills “travel” as a competence-component cluster to the three research regions. This skill-competence-component cluster is, however, part of, and connected to, the competence element of the transferred skill formation practice, as well as the production practices—as has been empirically proven. This fine-grained empirical insight highlights the significant role production-related skills play in the cross-border organization of MNEs. Through the extensive discussion of the transferring practices aiming to make production-related skills sustainably available at the transfer destinations, the importance MNEs give to the internationalization of these skills becomes empirically apparent. This result gives in-depth insights in answer to the first research question of this study on the spatiality of “knowing” in practice transfer. (2) This study contributes to the field of economic geography by studying the empirical phenomenon of practice transfer within MNEs, which has been only scarcely addressed in the research field (see Sect. 2.2.2). This study conceptualizes MNEs as multi-local bundles of practices. These bundles are the vehicles or media for practice transfer. Focusing on the empirical phenomenon of practice transfer from a research interest—one guided by disciplinary perspectives that stem from economic geography—this study fosters the connection to literature from the field of international business studies, as discussed in more detail in Sect. 4.9. Additional to the field of economic geography, this study contributes to debates in the field of practice theories and the multidisciplinary research field practice transfer by focusing on practice transfer across distance, specifically on the transfer of onboarding, shop floor inducting, and dual apprenticeship training from Germany to the Greater Shanghai Area, the Metropolitan Areas Mumbai-Pune-Bangalore, and Central Mexico. The empirical findings presented in this study contribute to debates in practice theoretical writings by allowing for an expansion of practice theoretical thought. So far, practice theoretical work has paid little attention to the empirical phenomenon of practice transfer across distance. Due to practice theories’ anchoring of theoretical advancements in practice, a lack of empirical studies also indicates a lack of conceptualization of this research issue. The empirical findings of this study have served to develop distinct practice theoretical theorizations about “distance” and an understanding of “transferring practices,” as a conception of what actively overcomes distance. This perspective can be seen as part of the growing practice theoretical cannon on the connections between different constellations of practices (Hui et al. 2017).

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This study contributes to the multidisciplinary research field practice transfer in two ways, though there are also some limitations. (1) This study empirically contributes to the research field practice transfer, in particular with regard to the existing literature discussing the issue of transferring dual apprenticeship training by MNEs—though sometimes not framed as practice transfer but as an educational transfer (see in more detail Sect. 2.1.1). Gessler (2017) prominently speaks about the “innovation” that occurs when a dual apprenticeship training is transferred to a new context. Other studies on the transfer of dual apprenticeship training within German MNEs confirm the substantial adaption and reconfiguration dual apprenticeship training undertakes when transferred to a new destination context (Aring 2014; Fortwengel 2014; Holle 2019; Körbel et al. 2017; Peters 2019; Pilz and Li 2014). These results are also confirmed by the empirical findings of this study, as shown in the extensive elaborations on the transferring of dual apprenticeship training in Sect. 5.2.3. By focusing on the transfer of more than one skill formation practice, this study opens up an additional empirical finding: practices transform when transferred across space, but the transformation substantially depends on the nature—specifically on the characteristics of the three elements—of the transferred practice, which is then conceptually made accessible through the differences in the degree of complexity of practices. However, in comparison to the literature above-mentioned, this study is not as nuanced in assessing exactly which characteristics of the “German variation” of dual apprenticeship training are transferred or “transferable” to the destination contexts in the three research regions. Assessing the transferability of dual apprenticeship training, however, was not the principal question leading this research. For a more in-depth consideration from this angle, I recommend the dissertation of my colleague, Kristina Wiemann (2020), who has also worked with the data stemming from the global-strategies research project (see Sect. 3.2.1), and who followed this line of inquiry more closely. For a similarly inclined study working with different empirical material, also see Peters (2019). Additionally, one aspect comes to mind, which is not made as conceptually precise in this study as it is in other studies on the transfer of skill formation practices (e.g., Barabasch and Wolf 2011; Freund and Gessler 2017; Li and Pilz 2019), namely the cultural differences between the research regions and the origin fabrics of the three transferred skill formation practices. Such cultural particularities have been identified as relevant empirical phenomena in the results of the data analysis presented in this chapter (e.g., attitudes toward blue-collar work and technical training, ideas about hierarchy, culturally embedded teaching styles and methods). The central concept of “transfer resistance” is defined in this study as a sociocultural and time-spatial tension—in tandem with Ibert (2010)—which comes into being when a practice is transferred or at least intended to be transferred. From a practice theoretical view, culture can be seen as a social phenomenon that is part of a plenum of practices. As all social phenomena, it is manifested in practice, and in turn forms practices. In this study’s conceptual understanding, the social phenomenon of culture gets dissolved in the notion of fabrics of interrelated practices at the transfer origin and destination. The mentioned cultural aspects—such as culturally

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embedded teaching styles—are either part of the elements of the transferred practice, or part of the fabric of interrelated practices at the transfer destination. Depending on the transferred practice, these cultural aspects may or may not play a role in the transfer. Other theoretical perspectives might be conceptually sharpened to distinguish social aspects from cultural aspects regarding the tensions between practices. However, in the practice theoretical perspective, this conceptual fuzziness is deliberate. Here practices—containing intermingled social and cultural aspects— are the primary lens through which empirical phenomena are approached. (2) Furthermore, this study contributes to the research field practice transfer by adding to existing debates and empirical insights mostly developed from the disciplinary background of international business studies (discussed in Sects. 2.2.3 and 2.2.4). These debates identify institutional distance as the principal explanation for the transformation practices undergo in transfer. The empirical findings of this study confirm that institutions play a role in the transfer of practices, as previous research has revealed (Chiang et  al. 2016; Fortwengel 2014; Kostova and Roth 2002). This study expands these findings by empirically defining the differences related to the transfer of the three transferred practices (onboarding, shop floor inducting, and dual apprenticeship training) to the same three institutional environments. While onboarding and shop floor inducting are only very peripherally affected by the institutionally formed practices of vocational education systems, dual apprenticeship training, due to the nature and complexity of its elements, is very much affected by this institution-practice-constellation. This empirical insight has been used in this study to develop the notion of the “destination fabric of interrelated practices,” which includes the possibility of containing institutions. In fact, the realization that the predominant notion of “institutional distance” in the multidisciplinary research field practice transfer could not sufficiently explain the empirical findings made in this study became a major impulse for turning to practice theories (as shown in more detail in Sects. 1.2, 2.2.4, and 2.2.5). This shift enabled a different view on the empirical findings, and made possible the development of the practice theoretical notion of “transfer resistance” as the distance that has to be overcome in practice transfer. Overall, this study’s empirical findings relativize the hitherto dominant conceptual importance of institutions in the multidisciplinary research field practice transfer. The relevant empirical findings this study makes in the field of economic geography, practice theories, and the research field practice transfer are summarized in Fig. 5.22.

1

This study focusses specifically on technical skills applied in the shop floor of German MNEs (Sect. 5).

Contributions Desiderates

1. 1 What is the spatiality of “knowing” in practice transfer?

This study shows the transfer of three skill formation practices (onboarding, shop floor inducting, and dual apprenticeship training) from Germany to the three research regions (Sect. 5.2)

Contributions

Practice theories

How practices are transferred across geographic distance has only been sparsely empirically studied from a practice theoretical perspective (Sect. 2.4).

Despite important discussions in economic geography on In this study the practices as im- transfer of skill portant carriers of formation practices tacit forms of within MNE is the knowledge and on focal point of the global diffusion departure (Sect. of practices, practice 5). transfer within MNE has received very little attention (Sect. 2.2.1) Research questions (Sect. 1.3):

Technical skills needed in production are still mostly left out in debates on the international organization of knowledge in economic geography (Sect. 1.2).

Desiderates

Economic geography

Fig. 5.22  Empirical contribution of this study in a nutshell. (Source: Own representation)

Empirical desiderates/constributions

The transfer of various practices in a similar field and the differrences between their transfer has so far been underexplored (Sect. 2.2.4).

Literature on the transfer of training practices in MNEs is still an underexplored research field (Sect. 2.1.1).

Desiderates

In this study, I analyze the transfer of three practice that are part of the field of skill formation. Differences between the transfer of these skill formation practices are made apparent (Sect. 5).

This study confirms empirical findings from literature on the transfer of dual apprenticeship training in MNEs regarding the transformation practices undergo in transfer, and develops a finegrained practice theoretical conception to grasp the phenomenon (Sect. 5).

Contributions

Research field practice transfer (multidisciplinary)

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5.4.1  Asking Two Additional Questions Where do we go from here? In this last section of this chapter, I want to briefly discuss two aspects that go beyond what has been discussed so far. The first of these aspects is of academic interest, the second is of interest for practitioners. Can Practice Transfer by MNEs Lead to Change in Large Social Phenomena in the Receiving Environment? As has been shown in the course of this study, the fabrics of interrelated practices have a dynamic texture. This dynamism is demonstrated by how the destination fabrics absorb and integrate onboarding, shop floor inducting, and dual apprenticeship training. One interesting question to ask is if practice transfer through MNEs as vehicles (in our case) can lead to change in large social phenomena. As previously discussed, nearly every practice transfer requires the destination fabric to change, at least to a small degree, to “accommodate” the new practice. A more interesting question would therefore be whether practice transfer could also lead to major change in the texture of interwoven practices in a territory. The conceptual ideas developed in this study concerning the role of territorial institutions in the destination fabrics give us an idea of what to look for: change in the territorial institutions. If regional or national territorial institutions change, this can be regarded as major, since these institutions tend to be relatively large social phenomena. From this, a hypothesis about change in large social phenomena “caused by” practice transfer within MNEs can be derived: If a transferred practice intersects more directly with a territorial institution in the destination fabric, change in this territorial institution is more likely to occur. According to this hypothesis, whether transferred practices have the potential to lead to change in territorial institutions, and therefore in large social phenomena, depends on how the practices intersect with the existing fabric of interrelated practices at their destination environment. The findings of this study provide some indications confirming this hypothesis. As we have seen in Sect. 5.2.3, dual apprenticeship training intersects directly with practices that are part of the territorial institutions of vocational education in all three research regions. In Central Mexico, we observed the formation of a new territorial institution in form of the MMFD scheme. This evidence would have to be further explored and cross-checked with other cases of practice transfer to conclusively prove the hypothesis formulated above. However, it opens up new academically interesting and relevant pathways for further research along these lines of inquiry. Furthermore, as we have seen in the previous discussions, dual apprenticeship training, due to its “dual” nature combining practical and theoretical contents, and both company- and school-based learning are prone to intersecting with territorial institutions in the research regions. This opens up questions about the kind of practices MNEs transfer between their worldwide subsidiaries, and the impacts these transfers might have. Exploring this hypothesis brings to mind discussions on how MNEs are in a privileged position to drive change due to their access to different institutional contexts (e.g., Cantwell et al. 2010). Moreover, it contributes to these debates by adding a possible new perspective and understanding of aspects of social change and globalization processes.

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What Can Practitioners Potentially Learn from This Study? In this section, I briefly provide some ideas on what practitioners can possibly learn from this study. For this, it is necessary to first define “practitioners” referred to. Here “practitioners” are the people who actively engage in practice transfer. First, an obvious observation that is nevertheless worth making: practice transfer takes effort. This is especially true for complex practices such as dual apprenticeship training, which can take years. The considerable effort it takes to transfer a complex practice is something that experienced transferring practitioners are aware of. However, new practitioners interviewed as part of this study found this surprising. Second, practices transform through transfer. Though this might be known by experienced practitioners, it cannot be stressed enough. New transferring practitioners, especially those originating from the transfer origin—in the case of this study, Germany—in many cases showed frustration because of the impossibility of doing things the way they are used to in Germany. The transformation a practice undergoes through transfer is also a cause of tension between different transferring practitioners in the headquarters and in the subsidiaries abroad. When MNEs transfer the same practice to various subsidiaries, the transferring practice also contains a process of working out a “standard,” that is, a conception of the core qualities of the practice. As we have seen with regard to dual apprenticeship training, MNEs that transfer dual apprenticeship training repeatedly have made such standards in the form of lists of the core qualities and attributes of the dual apprenticeship training. These standards leave a lot of room for variation, however. Ansari et al. (2014) show similar standardization processes for the transfer of “quality management practices” within MNEs. The authors find that the transferring practitioners in the headquarters of MNEs often engineer quality management practices to vary “for allowing a better fit with diverse contextual specificities” (Ansari et al. 2014: 1313). Defining such a standard with sufficient room for the transformation of a practice in transfer could therefore be a good step to take for transferring practitioners. Third, and most importantly, the practice theoretical approach I have used in this study pays special attention to the transferred practice itself. The conception of the three elements of a practice by Shove et al. (2012) might encourage practitioners to systematically look at the practices they intend to transfer, to take stock of the competence, meaning, and material elements, and to take into account the complexity of the transferred practice. This could help when making the elements available in the destination fabric. Of great importance is here not leaving out the transfer of the meaning element or, more specifically, that part of the meaning element constituting the motivation for engaging in the transferred practice at the destination fabric. If the motivational meaning is not sufficiently available at the transfer destination, the effective transfer of a practice might be a futile endeavor.

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Li J, Pilz M (2019) Transferring German evaluation policy to China: a prospective evaluation of peer review in TVET. Comp Educ Rev 63:613–632. https://doi.org/10.1086/705425 Machulik M (2010) Das EPRG-Konzept von Howard V.  Perlmutter: Eine umfassende Rekonstruktion und eine empirische Analyse im Spannungsfeld von Archetypen und Hybridformen internationaler Unternehmungen. Schriftenreihe Probleme und Chancen der Globalisierung, vol 5. Kovač, Hamburg Manson SM (2001) Simplifying complexity: a review of complexity theory. Geoforum 32:405–414. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0016-­7185(00)00035-­X Neisig M (2019) Human Resource Management and Business Legitimacy: changing roles and legitimacy-as-process. In: Rendtorff JD (ed) Handbook of business legitimacy: responsibility, ethics and society. Springer, Cham, pp 1079–1100. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-14622-1_6 Perlmutter HV (1969) The tortuous evolution of the multinational corporation. Columbia J World Bus 4:9–18. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315199689-7 Peters S (2019) Bildungstransfer im Unternehmenskontext, 1st edn. Internationale Berufsbildungsforschung, Springer VS, Wiesbaden Pilz M (2009) Initial vocational training from a company perspective: a comparison of British and German in-house training cultures. Vocations Learn 2:57–74. https://doi.org/10.1007/ s12186-­008-­9018-­x Pilz M, Li J (2014) Tracing Teutonic footprints in VET around the world? Eur J Training Develop 38:745–763. https://doi.org/10.1108/EJTD-­10-­2013-­0110 Schneider B, Barbera K (2014) The Oxford handbook of organizational climate and culture, Oxford library of psychology. Oxford University Press, Oxford SEP (2015) ACUERDO número 06/06/15 por el que se establece la formación dual como una opción educativa del tipo medio superior. In: Diario Oficial de la Federación. Online verfügbar unter http://www.dof.gob.mx/nota_detalle.php?codigo=5396202&fecha=11/06/2015 SEP (2017) Avances y ubicación del MMFD. http://www.sems.gob.mx/es_mx/sems/avances_ubicacion_mmfd. Accessed 20 July 2017 Shove E (2009) Everyday Practice and the Production and Consumption of Time. In: Shove E, Trentmann F, Wilk R (eds) Time, consumption and everyday life: practice, materiality and culture. Bloomsbury, London/New Delhi/New York/Sydney, pp 17–34 Shove E, Pantzar M, Watson M (2012) The dynamics of social practice: everyday life and how it changes. SAGE, London Stockmann R, Meyer W (2017) Chinas Berufsbildung im Wandel: 30 Jahre Entwicklungszusammenarbeit mit der Hanns-Seidel- Stiftung. Waxmann Verlag, Münster Subsecretaría de Educación Media Superior (2016) Normas de Organización y Funcionamiento del Comité de la Opción Educativa de Formación Dual. http://www.sems.gob.mx/work/models/sems/Resource/12345/1/images/Normas-­de-­organizacion-­y-­funcionamiento-­del-­COEFD. pdf. Accessed 3 Jan 2017 Tuirán R, Quintanilla S (2012) 90 años de educación en México, Centzontle, 1st edn. Fondo de Cultura Económica, México, DF Wessels A, Pilz M (2018) Indien. Internationales Handbuch der Berufsbildung, vol 48. Barbara Budrich, Leverkusen Wiemann J (2017) Export of German-style vocational education: a case study in the automotive industry in Puebla, Mexico. Intl J Automot Technol Manage 17:208–222.  http://dx.doi. org/10.1504/IJATM.2017.10005767 Wiemann J, Fuchs M (2018) The export of Germany’s “secret of success” dual technical VET: MNCs and multiscalar stakeholders changing the skill formation system in Mexico. Cambridge J Regions Econ Soc 11:373–386. https://doi.org/10.1093/cjres/rsy008 Wiemann K (2020) Qualifizierungspraxis deutscher Produktionsunternehmen in China, Indien und Mexiko. Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden, Wiesbaden Wilkins AL (1984) The creation of company cultures: the role of stories and human resource systems. Hum Resour Manage 23:41–60. https://doi.org/10.1002/hrm.3930230105

Chapter 6

Threading Everything Together: Conclusion

Abstract  This chapter summarizes and discusses the answers to the four research questions introduced in Chap. 1. This is done by threading together the derivation of the research desiderates in Chap. 2 with the theorizations in Chap. 4 and the empirical underpinnings in Chap. 5. The present chapter first explains the spatiality of knowing in practice transfer. Secondly, the chapter summarizes the reasons for the transformation practices undergo when transferred. Thirdly, reasons for differences in the difficulty to transfer different practices across the same distance are given, and, finally, the role of territorial institutions is discussed and summarized. The chapter ends with final critical reflections. Keywords  Conclusion · Answers to research questions · Critical reflections Chapter 1 of this study began with a discussion of why the transfer of skill formation practices within MNEs is an important research object, and gave an outline of the research questions. In Chap. 2, I positioned each research question in the current state of the research fields of economic geography, practice theories, and the multidisciplinary research field practice transfer. By the end of Chap. 2, I was able to define the conceptual and empirical research desiderates further. After an in-depth discussion of the applied methodology in Chap. 3, I elaborated a practice theoretical approach to practice transfer in MNEs across distance. Finally, in Chap. 5 I analyzed and compared the transferring practices and the transfer resistances of three skill development practices of German MNEs to China, India, and Mexico. In this sixth chapter, I conclude the study in two sections: first, I briefly summarize the answers to the four research questions (Sect. 6.1); second, I critically reflect on the conceptual and empirical contributions of this study (Sect. 6.2).

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6.1  Answering the Four Research Questions: A Summary In this section, I link the conceptual framework with the empirical findings by focusing on the four research questions laid out in Sect. 1.2. In other words, I connect the results of the five previous sections with each other to answer the question: What do we know now, that we did not know before? Research Question 1: What Is the Spatiality of “Knowing” in Practice Transfer? In this study, I addressed two research desiderates about the relationship of “knowing” and “space” simultaneously: first, the lack of a practice theoretical framework to understand practice transfer across space; and second, the still under-researched area of the transfer of skills and non-academic knowledge in production processes. Both the idea of transferring “knowing” through practice transfer and the question of skill formation (as a form of transferring “knowing”), led to the first research question of this study: What is the spatiality of “knowing” in practice transfer? “Knowing” is an indispensable part of a practice. When practices are transferred across space to a new destination fabric of interrelated practices, the “knowing” is transferred as part of the practice. In this study, I followed Shove et al. (2012) in terminologically capturing such “knowing” as the “competence element” of a practice. The competence element can be transferred across distance by first being decontextualized from its origin fabric of interrelated practices and then recontextualized in the destination fabric. One way of decontextualizing the competence-component of a practice is by codifying the component and then transporting the code to the destination fabric. A recontextualization of the codified competence-component can only occur if the practitioners in the destination fabric use parts of the competence elements of practices already found at the destination fabric to make use of the newly transferred and codified competence element. The recontextualization, using as it does existing competence-components at the destination fabric, works because practices share competence-components. In the case of onboarding, for instance, we find this “mode of transportation” of competence-components in the translation of the MNE’s mission and vision statements into the languages spoken in the research regions. Another way of decontextualizing and transferring a competence-component is by taking a knowledgeable practitioner to the destination fabric. This “mode of transportation” is prominent in the transfer of the competence element of shop floor inducting and dual apprenticeship training. For instance, to transfer the “skills imparted” in shop floor inducting when a new subsidiary is established, the future operators are sent to the origin fabric in Germany to learn the skill. They then use and impart this skill in the destination fabric. Another example is when, in the case of dual apprenticeship training, an expert in dual apprenticeship training is sent to the destination fabric to start the practice. This expert typically stays for a considerably long time (six months to a couple of years).

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What is important for both “modes of transferring” of competence-components is that they always require the usage of competence-components that, though they belong to other local practices, already exist in the destination fabric. Moreover, the perspective developed in this study of the transfer of “knowing” as an inherent part of a transferred practice emphasizes that the transfer of the competence element is not separable from the transfer of the whole practice—its meaning and material elements, and its integration into the time sequencing at the destination fabric. Thus, in this study, the spatiality of “knowing” in practice transfer is conceptualized in the notion of “transfer resistance” in terms of “what has to be overcome” in the transfer of a practice across space as an important, yet inseparable dimension of practice. Above that, in this study, we have seen how “non-academic” technical skills are of immense importance for the functioning of MNEs at their worldwide subsidiaries. As our evidence shows, this importance is reflected in the considerable effort the MNEs undertake to transfer skill formation practices to their international subsidiaries in order to maintain these skills locally. Research Question 2: Why Are Practices Transformed When They Are Transferred Across Space? The current state of research on practice transfer shows that practices transform when transferred across distance. It is common-place in practice transfer research that transferring a practice to another location is a “re-invention,” at least to some degree (Shove and Pantzar 2005: 60). This study also provides evidence of the transformation that onboarding, shop floor inducting, and dual apprenticeship training undergo in their transfer to the three research regions. Why practices transform when transferred across distance, however, had not been comprehensively conceptualized (see Sect. 1.2). Existing concepts on practice transfer concentrate on the reasons for the difficulty to transfer practices and attribute this difficulty to differences in institutional environments between sending and receiving contexts (see Sects. 2.2.3 and 2.2.4). The reasons for the transformation (not the difficulty to transfer practices), however, so far had been left aside. This led to the second research question: Why are practices transformed when they are transferred across space? In this study, I developed the heuristic framework of “transfer resistance” of a practice in transfer in terms of the distance that a practice needs to overcome in a transfer across space (see Chap. 4). The transfer resistance is what causes practices to transform. More specifically, the cause of the transformation lies in the texture and composition of the destination fabric of interrelated practices that is represented by the availability/integrability dimension of transfer resistance. The kind of component-­elements available in the destination fabric (and the possibilities to integrate them into the time sequencing) influences the form the transferred practice takes at the new location. As discussed in Sect. 5.2, transferring the elements of onboarding, shop floor inducting, and dual apprenticeship training requires taking components of the elements from the destination fabric and using these components as part of the elements of the transferred skill formation practices. Often, only a small portion of the components of the practices is actually brought from the origin

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fabric. The three elements of the transferred skill formation practices (competence, meaning, and material) proved to be mostly composed of locally available element components. These “locally sourced” element components, however, differ from the elements in the origin fabric. One example of a difference of an element in the destination fabric to that in the origin fabric is the motivational meaning of dual apprenticeship training in the Chinese research region. As discussed in detail in Sect. 5.1.3, here the meaning-­ component cluster of the companies’ relative reluctance to engage (and thus invest) in dual apprenticeship training is compensated for by the willingness of the vocational colleges to engage. This leads to a difference in the meaning element of dual apprenticeship training in the Greater Shanghai Area, and also transforms dual apprenticeship training in that, for instance, the training workshop is often placed at the vocational college and not at the MNE subsidiary as is usually the case in dual apprenticeship training. In sum, practices are transformed when they are transferred across space because they integrate into the destination fabric of interrelated practices that differs from the origin fabric. Through the integration of elements already existing at the destination fabric, the transferred practice adapts and transforms. The scope of this transformation, thus, depends on the texture of the destination fabric. Research Question 3: Why Are Some Practices “More Difficult” to Transfer Across Space Than Others? Studies on practice transfer show that practice transfer is not an easy endeavor; it takes considerable effort to transfer a practice across space (Chiang et  al. 2016; Fortwengel 2014, 2017b; Gamble 2010; Shove and Pantzar 2005). This study also evidences this difficulty for the transfer of three skill formation practices. Current research on practice transfer considers institutions as principal causes for the difficulty of transferring a practice from one geographical context to another (Batt and Hermans 2012; Fortwengel 2017a; Kostova and Roth 2002). If the difficulty of transferring a practice would only lie in differences between the sending and the receiving institutional environment, this would suggest that any practice that is transferred between the same two institutional environments would be equally difficult to transfer. The empirical evidence of this study, however, shows three skill formation practices, each one transferred from Germany to each of the three research regions. If the stipulation above were to hold true, the implication would be that the difficulty of transferring onboarding, shop floor inducting, and dual apprenticeship training is equally difficult for each of the research regions, and differently difficult between the research regions. However, this stipulation is false, as evidenced in Chap. 5. Dual apprenticeship training proves to be overall much more difficult to transfer, followed by shop floor inducting, and last onboarding. Additionally, onboarding and shop floor inducting show hardly any difference in the effort it takes to transfer them between the three research regions (which have fairly different institutional environments). These empirical insights led to the third research question: Why are some practices “more difficult” to transfer across space than others?

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Based on the empirical insights of this study, I have developed the notion of the “degree of complexity” of a practice as an inherent quality of the practice itself making up for the differences between the “transferability” of practices. Some practices are more difficult to transfer across the same distance, because of their different degrees of complexity. A practice’s complexity is formed, maintained, or changed in its geographical origin fabric. This complexity influences the transfer resistance of a practice. The more complex a practice is, the higher the transfer resistance; or, in other words, the more complex a practice, the more difficult it is to transfer it, no matter to which destination. For instance, dual apprenticeship training is more complex (than shop floor inducting or onboarding) because its elements have more components, which are also interacting more and in more ways. The more complex dual apprenticeship training requires more effort to be transferred in terms of the higher number of activities in a transferring practice that make these complex elements available, no matter to what new destination fabric dual apprenticeship training is transferred. In a nutshell, practices with a higher degree of complexity are more difficult to transfer, no matter where they are transferred to. The degree of complexity is an inherent quality of a practice; one that influences its transferability considerably. Research Question 4: What Role Do Institutions Play in the Transfer of Practices Between Territories (e.g., Nations, Regions)? When and How Do Institutions Impact Practices in Transfer? As discussed above, institutions cannot account for all of the differences in the transferability of practices. However, current research on practice transfer, in addition to empirical evidence from this study, indicates that institutions do play a role in practice transfer (see Sect. 2.2.4). These facts led to the fourth and last research question of this study: What role do institutions play in the transfer of practices between territories (e.g., nations, regions)? When and how do institutions impact practices in transfer? To answer this research question, I first developed a notion of “institution” that is compatible with the here chosen practice theoretical approach. I defined institutions as constellations of practices that aim to influence a specific set of other practices in a specific way. As a second step, I explored the connections institutions have to territories, in order to provide a concept that could grasp what makes up differences in the transferability of a practice in transfer between different territories. As discussed in Sect. 4.8, territory is produced and maintained in territorial institutions. This conception makes it possible to assess differences territorial institutions make in the destination fabrics of a practice transferred to a specific territory in question. Thus, territorial institutions can be seen as social phenomena one needs to look out for in the destination fabric of a practice transfer. In other words, looking at the role of national or regional territorial institutions in the destination fabrics gives us the conceptual tools to understand what it is about the territoriality that affects a practice transfer to a different national or regional territory. What does this mean more concretely? When a practice is transferred to a new destination, it inevitably makes new connections with the fabric of interrelated

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practices at that destination. For the purpose of this study, I defined the “destination fabric of interrelated practices” as the section of the fabric at the transfer destination that directly or indirectly intersects with the transferred practice and still has an influence on the transferred practice. The destination fabric is consequently different for every instance of transfer of a practice. However, there can be larger social phenomena stretching across the destination fabrics that intersect with the transferred practice at different places of its enactment. It is a goal of this study to assess what influences the transfer of a practice to a specific territory. Looking out for territorial institutions in the destination fabrics of the same practice to the same territory is a way to address this question. As conceptualized in Sect. 4.8, and empirically validated in Sect. 5.2, there are two basic scenarios regarding the presence of a territorial institution in the destination fabrics of a practice: Either a practice directly intersects (shares elements, or intersects with the time sequencing) with a practice (or several practices) that are part of the constellation of practices of a territorial institution, or it only indirectly intersects with said territorial institution through other practices. As shown in Chap. 5, the elements and practice-time profile of the transferred skill formation practices determine with what parts of the destination fabric the transferred practice intersects, overlaps, and/or comes into direct contact. As we have seen in cases where onboarding, shop floor inducting, and dual apprenticeship training were all transferred to the same MNE subsidiary, the connections the three skill formation practices make with the available elements differ, even though they are transferred to basically the same place (i.e., same MNE subsidiary). Regarding onboarding and shop floor inducting, findings from all three research regions show no direct connection to territorial institutions. This lack of a direct intersection explains why—while there are differences in the availability/integrability dimension within each research region--no clear evidence could be found to pinpoint differences between the three research regions. Dual apprenticeship training, on the other hand, shows a direct intersection with practices that are part of the territorial institutions of the vocational education systems in all three research regions. This intersection influences the availability/integrability dimension considerably, making dual apprenticeship training overall easiest to transfer to the Greater Shanghai Area, followed by Central Mexico, and finally the Metropolitan Areas Mumbai-Pune-Bangalore. It is noteworthy that the intersection of dual apprenticeship training with the territorial institutions of the vocational education systems in all three research regions is not a chance occurrence; it results from the nature of dual apprenticeship training itself. More precisely, the fact that dual apprenticeship training, in its very constitution, is a practice that engages companies as well as vocational education institutions makes this skill formation practice prone to intersect with the territorial institutions of the vocational education system in the three research regions. In sum, institutions, specifically territorial institutions, play a role in the destination fabrics of interrelated practices, if practices that are part of the territorial institutions directly intersect with the transferred practice. In terms of the availability/ integrability dimension, territorial institutions provoke similarities in the texture of

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the various destination fabrics in a territory when they intersect with the destination fabrics in that territory.

6.2  Final Reflections In this study, I have built on existing concepts from practice theories and human geography as well as substantial insights from the empirical findings in order to develop theorizations at an abstraction level of a “middle-range theory” or theory with a limited scope (Esser 2002) of practice transfer across distance. For this, I developed a practice theoretical approach of practice transfer in the concept of “transfer resistance.” Transfer resistance is a tension that is produced through a transferring practice. It is an interactional effect, a sociocultural and time-spatial tension (Ibert 2010). This tension only comes into play through the actual transferring of a practice, or at least the intent to transfer it. In this concept, I capture the spatiality of practice transfer in terms of the distance that has to be overcome when a practice is transferred. Based on this concept, I am able to answer the four research questions of this study, as summarized in the previous section. The study contributes to three streams of research: economic geography, practice theories, and the interdisciplinary research field practice transfer. This study fosters theory-building in debates on knowledge in practice transfer in economic geography. Specifically, I give existing debates on the spatiality of “knowing” from a practice theoretical perspective a conceptual twist, by elaborating a spatial understanding of following practices across space, instead of following the “knowing” in practice. Through the practice element of “competence” the spatiality of “knowing” in practice transfer is made conceptually accessible. Additionally, this study finds reasons for the transformation practices undergo when transferred. The study evolves the concept of the “degree of complexity of a practice” to explain the differences the three skill formation practices show when transferred to the same territory. Moreover, I show how working with practice theories’ flat ontology brings new insights where institutional perspectives are limited. The study develops a practice theories-compatible notion of territorial institutions as relevant social phenomena playing a significant role in understanding the destination fabrics of interrelated practices (see Chap. 4). This study empirically focuses on technical skills applied on the shop floor by blue-collar workers, and on how these technical skills can move across space contained in skill formation practices. The spatiality of this type of knowledge or “knowing” receives far less attention in economic geography than academic scientific forms of knowledge (see Sect. 2.2.1). This study shows, however, the importance of technical skills for the functioning of the German MNEs in the sample, and how the constant reproduction of these skills through skill formation practices is indispensable for these companies. This study also contributes to recent debates in practice theoretical writings on the dynamics of larger constellations of practices putting a spatial aspect center

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stage: the transfer of practices across space through translocal bundles of practices, namely MNEs. The distinction between “transferring practice” and “transferred practice” additionally opens up a practice theoretical understanding of globalization or globalizing through the transferring of practices. Also, by employing a practice theoretical approach this study takes a substantially different perspective on practice transfer than the mainstream literature on globalization has done so far. Through this approach, I have been able to solve empirical puzzles that could not be explained by conceptual frameworks existing in the current literature. For a more extensive discussion of the conceptual and empirical contributions of this study, see also Sects. 4.9 and 5.3. When reflecting on the contributions as well as the limitations of this study, one major point that stands out is the usage of the practice theoretical approach. Overall, this study shows that there are many advantages of employing a practice theoretical approach when studying the transfer of skill formation practices in MNEs. For one, practice theories have a fundamentally procedural view. They tend to see the social world as an ongoing, routinized, recurring accomplishment. This makes it possible to look at transferred skill formation practices at different points in time, not just at the first moment of their transfer, which is a major methodological advantage. Practice theories also highlight the roles of the body as well as material things. This characteristic is especially helpful when dealing with skills, and even more so when dealing with technical skills in a production setting because of their inherent bodily physicalness. From a practice theoretical viewpoint, knowledge is understood as a form of mastery of carrying out social and material activity, which supports the understanding of “skill” as employed in this study, and the transfer of a practice itself, since here the knowledge required for a practice has to be transferred. Besides this, practice theories’ interest in all human matters puts emphasis on power constellations that construct social reality (Nicolini 2013: 1–8). This is reflected in the distinction between “transferring practice” and “transferred practice” in this study. Nevertheless, there are also some limitations to employing a practice theoretical approach. One is the difficult ontological compatibility of a practice theoretical perspective with an institutional perspective. Practice theories work on the grounds of a flat ontology, while institutional theories ontologically assume societal levels (e.g., the micro-macro dichotomy; Schatzki 2016). This compatibility is relevant because institutional approaches have so far predominantly been used in studies on practice transfer. The applying of a practice theoretical perspective therefore limits cross-fertilization with this stream of literature. In this study, I have elaborated a practice theoretical definition of an institution in order to enable cross-fertilization. However, the definition of “institution” as developed in this study cannot “just” be translated to conceptions of institutions from institutional approaches. Further limitations of this study are of a methodological nature. One such limitation is the assessing of the studied practices only via information gathered in interviews and plant visits, without observing the practice “in action” (e.g., through observation). As discussed in Sects. 3.2.6, this disadvantage was mitigated through the high number of interviews and the quality of the gathered data. Overall, the

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applied methodology proved to be appropriate for following the research interest of this study on the transferring of practices across space. Another methodological limitation is that the scope of the transferred practices was restricted to skill formation practices. This limitation leaves room for studying the practice transfer of other types of practices in which MNEs engage, and this way cross-checking if the developed conceptual framework works equally well for these practices. Similarly, practice transfer should also be studied in other territories than the three sampled research regions in China, India, and Mexico. Further studies in different territorial contexts could reveal more in-depth insights into the role of territories in practice transfer. As discussed in the introduction of Chap. 4 and more extensively addressed in Sect. 4.9, the theorizations and conceptual contributions of this study aim at the abstraction level of a middle-range theory or theory of a limited scope. However, whether or not a practice theoretical approach to practice transfer across distance can in fact be counted as a middle-range theory of practice transfer is a question only future research can answer. With this in mind, it will be valuable to explore areas within economic geography besides the transfer of practices within MNEs, such as the transfer of practices in urban and regional politics (Peck 2011; Peck and Theodore 2010). Practices such as participatory budgeting—a process of deliberative, democratic decision-making, in which ordinary people decide how to allocate part of a municipal or public budget—are frequently transferred between cities and municipalities (Herzberg et al. 2010). Another area could be the transfer of consumer practices to fabrics of interrelated practices where they do not yet exist, as examined in the study by Shove and Pantzar (2005), which was a precursor for the approach to practice transfer developed in this study. In the face of climate change and loss of biodiversity, a further object of study may be the transfer of alternative economic practices across distance (Gibson-Graham 2008; Healy 2009; North 2005). Finally, writing about the world and practices always implies a reduction in the immense complexity of everything practices entail. Academic writing means carving one storyline out of many possible storylines—it always necessitates a reduction in the complexities. Some aspects are emphasized while others fade into the background, at the discretion of the author. I have discussed how these choices were arrived at in the case of this study in the methodology chapter. Suffice to say, I have concentrated on the transfer, the movement, of three selected skill formation practices across space. That said, it is worth remembering that this study exists as part of the larger global-strategies project (see Sect. 3.2.1). The same empirical findings have been used by my colleagues in the global-strategies project and me when employing different perspectives and following different research interests. This shows how even such an extensive study as this one is not “the be-all, end-all” storyline. Hopefully it is an articulate argumentation that draws new connections between different entities in the world and enables us to act in a more informed way—the characteristic of “good” science according to Isabel Stengers (Stengers et al. 1997).

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Name Index

A Adams, A.V., 18 Agnew, J., 143 Alic, J.A., 23 Alkemeyer, T., 53 Alvesson, M., 165 Alvstam, C.G., 29 Amin, A., 26, 78, 131 Ancori, B., 26 Ansari, S., 7, 35, 244 Ardrey, R., 143 Aring, M., 4, 240 Asheim, B., 6, 25–27 B Barabasch, A., 5, 18, 240 Barbera, K., 192 Bartlett, C.A., 127 Bartlett, L., 84 Bathelt, H., 2, 7, 25, 27–29, 33, 44, 149 Batt, R., 7, 250 Battilana, J., 35 Beauregard, R., 130 Beaverstock, J.V., 6 Becker, M.C., 32 Berg, P.-O., 165 Beugelsdijk, S., 127 Bitterer, N., 29 Bjerregaard, T., 127 Bjornavold, J., 23 Blue, S., 132 Bok, R., 30 Bongaerts, G., 8, 116, 117

Boschma, R., 3, 6, 19, 27, 32, 33, 41, 44, 45, 145, 150 Botello Ramírez, J.A., 87 Bouncken, R., 44 Bourdieu, P., 47, 48, 50, 52, 58, 81, 82, 121, 123, 124 Boxenbaum, E., 35 Branch, J., 145 Brenner, N., 56 Brinks, V., 28 Brockmann, M., 20, 22 Bulkeley, H., 30 van der Burgt, J., 18 Buschmann, N., 53 Busemeyer, M.R., 5, 24, 85, 146 Butler, J., 51 Butzin, A., 116, 119 C Cáceres-Reebs, D., 211 Cagliano, R., 7 Callon, M., 27 Canato, A., 7, 35 Cantwell, J., 3, 24, 243 Chiang, F.F.T., 2, 37, 39, 241, 250 Coe, N.M., 30, 87 Cohendet, P., 25–28 Colardyn, D., 23 Comunian, R., 30 Corbin, J.M., 8, 104 Corradi, G., 126 Cowen, D., 144

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 J. Wiemann, Geographies of Practice Transfer, Economic Geography, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-95185-6

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Name Index

258 D Daniel, A., 81 David, R.J., 35 Davies, A.R., 47 Deeg, R., 41 Delany, D., 144 Dewsbury, J.-D., 93 Dicken, P., 21, 62, 83, 85, 128, 144, 152 Dickmann, M., 39 Diez, J.R., 3, 19, 24 DiMaggio, P.J., 39 Djelic, M.-L., 141 Dunne, C., 9, 10 Dunning, J.H., 39, 127 Durkheim, E., 53 E Ebers, M., 127 Edquist, C., 27 Edwards, T., 37 Esser, H., 8, 116, 117, 147, 253 Euler, D., 18 Everts, J., 48, 49, 60, 123, 124, 129, 130 F Faller, F., 46, 47 Faßbender, U., 18 Faulconbridge, J.R., 3, 6, 25, 28–30 Feldman, M.S., 106 Fiss, P.C., 35 Flick, U., 8, 79, 81, 94, 95, 98 Fortwengel, J., 2, 7, 19, 24, 35, 40–42, 240, 241, 250 Foucault, M., 51, 124 Fratocchi, L., 1 Frenken, K., 3, 27, 32, 33, 41, 145 Freund, L., 240 Fuchs, M., 2–4, 6, 17, 19, 26, 27, 83, 84, 87, 100, 103, 212, 213, 239 G Gamble, J., 35, 250 Garfinkel, H., 51 Geiselhart, K., 8, 9, 78, 79, 82, 97, 99, 101 Georg, W., 84, 87 Gertler, M.S., 23, 25, 26, 29, 33, 36, 40, 85, 128, 141 Gessler, M., 5, 7, 18, 240 Ghoshal, S., 127 Gibson-Graham, J.K, 154, 255 Giddens, A., 47, 48, 50, 52, 54, 57, 58, 123, 124

Gilbert, E., 144 Giuliani, E., 41 Glesne, C., 78, 79 Glückler, J., 29, 47 Gottmann, J., 143 Grabher, G., 28 Graf, L., 18 Grant, R.M., 38 Greiner, C., 127 Gritzas, G., 47 Grubbauer, M., 29, 30 H Hall, P.A., 24, 41, 141 Hamel, G., 38 Hanf, G., 22 Harré, R., 27 Harvey, D., 87 Harzing, A.W., 39 Hautala, J., 26, 28 Hay, J., 79 Healy, S., 154, 255 Heeg, S., 29 Heenan, D.A., 127, 195 Hegel, G.W.F., 53 Heidegger, M., 49 Henn, S., 27, 29, 44 Henwood, K., 117 Hermans, M., 7, 250 Herzberg, C., 153, 255 Hess, M., 47 Hillebrandt, F., 48–52, 81 Hitchings, R., 93, 94 Hodgson, G.M., 33 Holle, L., 240 Höllerer, M.A., 35 Hordern, J., 18 Howells, J., 27 Höyssä, M., 26, 28 Hui, A., 37, 49, 58, 62, 151, 239 Hymer, S.H., 39 I Ibert, O., 6, 25–28, 30, 43–45, 137, 149, 150, 240, 253 Ivarsson, I., 29 J Jackson, G., 2, 19, 24, 41 Jansen, A., 5, 178 Jarrar, Y.F., 35 Jensen, R., 7, 36

Name Index Jo, H.-J., 3 Joas, H., 8, 102 Johannessen, K.S., 50 Johnson, B., 26 Jones, A., 23, 46, 47, 127, 141 Jürgens, U., 3, 4, 19, 218 K Kavoulakos, K.I., 47 Kemmis, S., 18, 61 Kennedy, M.T., 35 Kieser, A., 127 Kinder, S., 36, 135 Klofsten, M., 36 Knorr-Cetina, K., 27, 28, 33, 51, 58, 106 Kogut, B., 38 Körbel, M., 18, 240 Kostova, T., 7, 35, 38–42, 127, 241, 250 Krzywdzinski, M., 3, 4, 19, 218 Kuckartz, U., 79, 102, 104 Kühl, S., 126 Kujath, H.J., 26, 30, 44, 45 L Latour, B., 27, 28, 51, 56, 80, 81, 123, 124, 130 Lauterbach, U., 18 Lave, J., 6, 18, 23, 30, 37, 120, 126, 152 Lawson, C., 27 Lee, R., 47 Lenz, R., 47 Li, J., 18, 19, 173, 227, 240 Liehr, P.R., 117 Longhurst, R., 94 Lorenz, E., 27 Luhmann, N., 53 M Machulik, M., 195 Malinowski, B., 53 Malmberg, A., 27, 29, 44, 144 Manson, S.M., 184 March, J.G., 38 Marston, S.A., 56, 57, 130 Martin, R., 33 Marx, K., 53 Maskell, P., 27, 29, 44 Massey, D.B., 57, 130 Mattissek, A., 78, 79 McCann, E., 144 Merton, R.K., 8, 116, 117 Meyer, J.W., 141

259 Meyer, K.E., 127 Meyer, W., 209, 224 Moldaschl, M., 28, 31 Morgan, G., 84 Moritz, S., 26 Morrison, A., 41 Mudambi, R., 127 Müller, F.C., 30 Murphy, J.T., 23, 46, 47, 141 N Neij, L., 26 Neisig, M., 192 Nelson, R.R., 32, 38 Neumayer, E., 29, 33 Nicolini, D., 8, 35, 37, 48–52, 56, 78, 81, 93, 95, 126, 127, 151, 254 Nooteboom, B., 27, 28 North, D.C., 141 North, P., 154, 255 O Okada, A., 3, 6 Orlikowski, W.J., 26, 126 P Painter, J., 87, 144, 145 Paltridge, B., 9, 10 Pantzar, M., 7, 37, 48, 115, 122, 134, 151, 153, 249, 250, 255 Parsons, T., 53 Peck, J., 30, 153, 255 Pentland, B.T., 106 Perkins, R., 29, 33 Perlmutter, H.V., 127, 195 Peters, S., 240 Pfaffenbach, C., 10, 77, 79 Pidgeon, N., 117 Pilz, M., 4, 5, 7, 17–19, 83–87, 103, 109, 173, 221, 223, 225, 227, 240 Polanyi, M., 21, 26, 32 Postill, J., 58 Powell, W.W., 39 Prahalad, C.K., 38 Proff, H.V., 24 Pudelko, M., 39 Pugh, R., 26 Q Quack, S., 141 Quintanilla, S., 211

Name Index

260 R Rabadjieva, M., 116, 119 Radwan, L., 36, 135 Rallet, A., 44 Reckwitz, A., 2, 6, 36, 37, 48–51, 53, 55, 57–60, 62, 117, 123 Reuber, P., 10, 77, 79 Reum, N., 44 Roberts, J., 152 Roth, K., 7, 35, 39–42, 241, 250 Rowan, B., 141 S Sakdapolrak, P., 127 Saldaña, J., 102–104, 106 Santos, M., 136 Sapsed, J., 30 Sassen, S., 143 Schäfer, F., 81 Schäfer, H., 49, 59 Schäfer, S., 49 Schalljo, M., 100 Schamp, E.W., 3, 212 Schatzki, T.R., 37, 48–50, 52–62, 106, 107, 117, 123, 127, 129, 130, 132, 134, 135, 142, 254 Schmid, B., 57, 144 Schmidt, R., 8, 78, 79 Schneider, B., 192 Schneider, U., 211 Schulz-Schaeffer, I., 8, 116, 117 Scott, W.R., 39, 40, 142 Selznick, P., 38 SEP, 87 Shove, E., 7, 37, 48, 58, 59, 61, 62, 93, 94, 107, 108, 115–122, 125, 130–136, 141, 142, 149, 151–153, 164, 166, 244, 248–250, 255 Simon, H.A., 127 Smith, M.J., 117 Soskice, D.W., 24, 41, 141 Soule, S.A., 35 Southerton, D., 58 Spurling, N., 132 Stamm, A., 3 Statistisches Bundesamt, 84 Stendahl, E., 127 Stengers, I., 78, 255 Stephan, C., 132 Stockmann, R., 18, 209, 224

Strang, D., 35 Strauss, A., 8, 104 Sunley, P., 33 Szulanski, G., 7, 35, 36, 38, 39 T Theodore, N., 30, 153, 255 Thrift, N., 28, 47, 78, 93, 130, 131, 136 Tödtling, F., 44 Torre, A, 44 Trampusch, C., 5, 24, 85, 146 Trentmann, F., 61 Trippl, M., 44 Tsoukas, H., 26 Tuirán, R., 211 V Vallance, P., 26 Vavrus, F.K., 84 Vogelpohl, A., 109 Vogelsang, B., 20 W Walter, A.L.J., 41 Ward, K., 144 Watson, M., 37, 48, 115, 124, 134, 143, 152 Weber, M., 124 Wenger, E., 6, 18, 23, 30, 37, 120, 126, 152 Wenzel, C., 106, 107 Werlen, B., 47, 78 Wessels, A., 221, 225 Whittington, R., 35, 126 Wiemann, J., 1–11, 15–63, 83, 103, 108, 132, 165, 180, 181, 212, 213 Wiemann, K., 4, 17, 20, 83, 87, 92, 100, 103, 108, 170, 174, 180, 181, 212, 240 Wilkins, A.L., 165 Winch, C., 20–22 Winter, S.G., 32, 38 Wittgenstein, L., 49, 50 Wolf, S., 5, 18, 240 Woolgar, S., 27 Wrana, J., 3, 19, 24 Z Zairi, M., 35 Zajac, E.J., 35

Subject Index

A AHK, 91, 92, 98, 136, 175–177, 183, 204–207, 209, 210, 212, 214, 215, 217, 219–221, 223, 233 B Best practices, 36 C Central Mexico, 2, 11, 87, 159–244, 252 Central research interest, 6–8, 77 Comparison between research regions Central Mexico, 2, 11, 87, 159–244, 252 Greater Shanghai Area, 2, 11, 87, 98, 160, 172, 181, 183, 190, 193, 197, 202, 203, 207, 209, 210, 215, 216, 219, 220, 224–226, 229, 230, 232–237, 239, 250, 252 Metropolitan Areas Mumbai-Pune-­ Bangalore, 2, 11, 87, 160, 190, 210, 220, 235–237, 239, 252 Comparison between skill formation practices dual apprenticeship training, 11, 18, 23, 42, 100, 103, 105, 107, 108, 149, 150, 159–244, 249–252 onboarding, 4, 11, 18, 42, 105, 107, 108, 149, 150, 159–166, 168, 169, 171, 173, 177, 182–194, 230, 231, 234–236, 238, 239, 249–252 shop floor induction, 4, 11, 18, 23, 42, 88, 92, 105, 107, 108, 134, 149, 150,

159–161, 163, 166–171, 173, 174, 177, 179, 180, 182–188, 194–203, 209, 210, 222, 225, 227, 229–231, 233–236, 239, 242, 249–253 Comparison of transfer resistances, 108–109, 140, 159–244 Component practices, 134, 135 Conceptual contributions, 147–154 Critical reflections, 79, 82 Curricula, 173 D Degree of complexity of practices, 108–109, 133–138, 153, 162, 240 Degrees of complexity in comparison, 183–188 Destination fabrics of interrelated practices, 116, 132, 188–234 Distance in practice transfer, 43, 45, 137, 138 distance as sociocultural and time-spatial tension, 43–45, 137, 140 institutional distance, 19, 25, 39–43, 46, 133, 140, 146, 150, 153, 241 Dual apprenticeship training, 2, 172–183, 202–234 Dual apprenticeship training in the German skill formation system, 5 E Elements of a practices, 117–119

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 J. Wiemann, Geographies of Practice Transfer, Economic Geography, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-95185-6

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262 Empirical findings, 2, 7–9, 39, 43, 133, 134, 137, 140, 147, 150, 151, 153, 159, 161, 192, 239–241, 248, 253, 255 Empirical validation of concepts, 188, 238 Epistemological approximation, 78–81 F Fabrics of interrelated practices, 128–133 “Family” of Practice Theories, 48–51 Flat ontology, 36, 53, 55–57, 143 G Geographical scope of study, 84–87 Governing practices, 125 Greater Shanghai Area, 172 I Institutional distance, 19, 25, 39–43, 46, 133, 140, 146, 150, 153, 241 Institutional theories, 142 Institutions, 141–143, 145 Introduction to practice theoretical thinking, 15, 46–61

Subject Index MMFD, 86, 87, 92, 211–215, 227, 237, 238, 243 Multidisciplinary practice transfer research field, 11, 64, 148, 149, 153, 238–242, 247 O Onboarding, 2, 4, 162–166, 189–194 Ontological alternative, 52–57 Origin and destination contexts, 128–133, 240 P Power, 22, 42, 44, 46, 51, 54, 56, 61, 99, 100, 116, 119, 123–128, 131, 142, 144, 145, 152, 164, 228, 254 Practice theoretical approach to practice transfer, 2, 115–154, 247, 252, 254, 255 Practice transfer, 35, 37–39, 61–63 Practice transfer in economic geography, 15–64, 253 Proximity/distance, 43–45, 150

L Learnings for practitioners, 164, 243–244

R Relevance of study, 1–11 Research desiderate, 25–46, 61–64 Research designs, 8, 10, 11, 77, 81, 82, 84, 94, 96–97, 102, 108 Research questions, 1–11, 31, 39, 45, 90, 93, 97, 103, 104, 116, 121, 123, 140, 141, 143, 147, 149, 150, 239, 247–253 answers to research questions, 6–8, 11, 39, 45, 99, 104, 107, 109, 116, 140, 141, 143, 148–150, 229, 248–253, 255 Research regions, 172 Routine, 33, 38

M Mechatronics technicians, 180 Methods, 77, 79, 81–84, 93–95, 97, 99, 102, 103, 106, 109, 121, 164, 167, 174, 175, 185, 189, 209, 240 Metropolitan Areas Mumbai-Pune-Bangalore, 2, 11, 87, 160, 190, 210, 220, 235–237, 239, 252 Middle-range theories, 8, 116, 117, 147, 153, 253, 255

S Shop floor inducting, 2, 4, 166–171, 194–202 Skill, 20–23 Skill formation practices, 3, 4, 11, 16–24, 28, 42, 62, 63, 83, 85, 87, 88, 90, 92–101, 103–109, 120, 121, 125, 126, 131, 133–135, 140, 146, 149, 150, 153, 159–244, 247, 249, 250, 252–255 Skill matrixes, 168 Structure of book, 1–10

K Knowing, 121 Knowing in practice, 25, 26, 120 Knowledge transfer(s), 2, 6, 16, 19, 24–31, 44–46, 120, 137, 149, 150, 239

Subject Index T Tacit knowledge, 26 Territorial institutions, 11, 24, 41–43, 45, 85, 87, 103–105, 116, 132, 140–147, 150, 151, 153, 188–234, 236–238, 243, 251–253

263 Territory, 143–146 Theorizations derived from findings, 147, 253 Transfer resistances, 3, 11, 45, 46, 108, 109, 116, 137–140, 146, 150–153, 159–244, 247, 249, 251, 253 Transferring practice, 123–126, 128, 152