title: IMPLEMENTING PUBLIC POLICY IN A MULTI-NATIONAL COMPANY: SPANNING OCCUPATIONAL BOUNDARIES
Creators: name: Wolmarans, Leon
Publisher: name: University of Liverpool Repository
Year: 2020

description: In this action research project, I inquire into the challenge and describe what happened when a multinational company (MNC) implemented South Africa’s Broad-Based Black Economic (B-BBEE) ownership policy, a policy that aims to indigenize economic ownership to redress apartheid injustices. Public policy implementation research generally reports on the effectiveness of different implementation models in public service (McTigue, Monios, and Rye, 2017; Holland et al., 2016; Hupe and Hill, 2016; Kohoutek, 2013), but tends not to explore the implementation of local policies. It also does not explore the more micro aspects of managing across boundaries in MNCs. Globalization introduces management complexity into organizations who operate across national and occupational boundaries. The process to implement the public policy of a subsidiary in a MNC presented an opportunity to study how this novel requirement introduced tensions between occupational communities involved in the implementation and how skills and tools enabled boundary spanning to transfer knowledge and gain legitimacy, thereby easing tensions that threatened to delay the implementation. In this study, I explore how to manage those tensions that arose from different understandings and expectations of the occupational communities involved in the local public policy implementation in the MNC. Particularly, I explore difficulties to engage different stakeholder communities to participate, how to facilitate exchange of information and ease tensions between communities, and how to accommodate different communities’ expectations and goals. My action research project is a real-time longitudinal field study that used cultural historical activity theory (CHAT) as action research modality. I produced data using narrative, temporal and visual strategies from process research. Process research assisted in organizing raw data and provided context and history, from a critical realist philosophy of knowledge creation. In the data analysis, I deployed CHAT to model the human activity systems, to explore what caused tensions between elements in the activity systems of the project, and to understand what I could do to ease those tensions. MNC research is lacking in longitudinal studies extensive enough to explore the complexity of having an impact when using useful methods such as CHAT in complex managerial action-based situations. The findings reveal how I transferred knowledge across community and occupational boundaries and gained project legitimacy by using boundary spanner skills, understanding of MNC bureaucracy and routines, social capital formation, boundary objects, own domain knowledge and knowledge of occupational community practices. Knowledge transfer and project legitimacy were needed to manage tensions arising from actions to engage occupational communities, share complex policy requirements, negotiate competing issues of policy and time, and develop new MNC policy. This study contributes to knowledge by marrying CHAT as action research modality with process research. It applies Carlile’s (2004; 2002) recommendations to transfer knowledge at organizational boundaries across syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic boundaries by using boundary spanning and its skills and tools, as it enabled knowledge transfer of complex public policy requirements to occupational communities in my MNC. Furthermore, boundary spanning established project legitimacy with these communities. Additionally, my own occupational domain knowledge emerged as a key skill that facilitated this local public policy implementation in my MNC. Finally, I contribute a bottom-up policy implementation model, moderated by my experience in my action research project, to identify literature on MNC challenges that may be less relevant today.