Learning to be a lawyer in transnational law firms: communities of ...

invoked differently and result in inconsistent changes in institutional effects from place-to-place
- at national and sub-national levels - seems important. Relatedly, analyzing the extent to which
TNCs act as ‘lead firms’ or as vectors of ‘challenger rules‘ (Djelic and Quack, 2003) that have
wider effects on the relationship between institutions, firms best practices and workers attitudes,
values and behaviours in host-countries seems important. As Djelic and Quack (2003) allude, the
institutional entrepreneurship strategies of TNCs – such as using CoP to regulate workers’
identities - may act as the first step towards the more widespread reproduction of Anglo-
American models of business and legal practice in, to use the terminology outlined in Table 2,
‘particularistic’ and ‘arm’s length’ environments if domestic firms copy the approach of
transnational firms in order to compete with them and offset the new competition they create (see
also Morgan and Quack [2005] on such processes). However, little is known about the extent to
which TNCs’ institutional entrepreneurship strategies actually invoke such wider change. The
findings presented here would suggest that such change will not involve the replication of Anglo-
American models but their reproduction. But again the geographically heterogeneous nature of
this reproduction process is currently understudied. Further research on the way TNCs as
relational communities engage in institutional entrepreneurship would therefore seem to be
urgently needed.
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