Importation as innovation: transposing managerial practices across fields

Abstract

This article examines transposition as a source of innovation. Transposition is the act of applying a practice from one social context to another.We trace how and why three individuals transposed the American practice of diversity management into Denmark in 2002. The analysis outlines how they came up with the idea to transpose diversity management to Denmark and what motivated them to do so. Based on our analysis, we propose an institutionalist account of innovation in which transposition across fields characterized by different dominant institutional logics plays a prominent role.We identify a number of facilitating conditions for such transposition to occur and we explain how it can subsequently lead to innovation.