Qualitative interviews and observations were conducted to study the cross-border transfer of organizational learning systems to the subsidiaries of five Japanese manufacturing companies operating in South China. This paper develops a holistic model of the overall process, by integrating knowledge-oriented, routine-oriented, and social/contextual perspectives, each of which plays a necessary role in explaining essential aspects. One feature of the transfer of organizational learning systems entailed arranging local access to, and opportunity to replicate, various types of knowledge repository that contained corporate values as well as technical expertise. A second feature involved the development of collective learning routines through dynamic interplay with evolving, locally based, knowledge repositories. A third feature, in two companies, entailed the creation of enterprise contexts that reproduced the socialization and corporate culture maintenance rituals, and the open plan factory and office designs, that were hallmarks of the respective parent companies, and which appeared highly conducive to the transfer of collective learning routines to the local sites. Findings indicate that successful cross-border transfer of organizational learning systems entails the development and implementation of an overall heuristic design for cultivating collective learning routines through the engineering of enterprise contexts and the responsive management of knowledge repositories.

The concept of organizational learning has taken its prominence in the past several decades as a way to achieve competitive advantage. Companies are urged to become “learning organizations” to develop their learning capability for survival and maintaining competitiveness. However, very few studies have addressed the issue of how organizational structure may contribute to organizational learning. This article attempts to bridge the gap in literatures by engaging in a theoretical debate to generate a synthesis of these two concepts.

Previous studies of communities of practice had often emphasized the ease with which members are able to participate in the collective learning process through joint practices within a particular community. However, nothing much has been done to reveal the difficulties and problems of learning between different communities due to different and sometimes conflicting identities and power inequalities. This article reports a failed experience of a tertiary institution to outsource its information technology (IT) department. By highlighting the social conflicts experienced by the in-house IT technicians in coordinating with the outsourcing staff, we argue that the received unitary, managerialist viewpoints of communities of practice somehow neglect the broader social context and micro-political factors of learning. This neglect underestimates the critical challenges of resolving the social tensions caused by multiple identities and embedded power differentials across different communities of practice.

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The main objective of this article is to explore the challenges for globalizing knowledge management theories. Adopting a practice-based view of knowledge and engaging critically with Nonaka's SECI (socialization, externalization, combination and internalization) model, the hidden behavioral assumptions and cultural values and meanings embedded within the model are revealed so as to provide a thought experiment to explain the organizational and inter-cultural dynamics that may disrupt its translation in overseas contexts. It is argued that a successful implementation of Nonaka's SECI model requires a 'glocalized' approach, which involves trade-offs between core underlying values and objectives during the process of local translation. This article contributes to current theories of knowledge management by revealing the underlying sources of cultural embeddedness and the implications for their global diffusion.

We analyse political sensegiving and sensemaking by expatriates and host country employees through exportive, contestative and integrative stages of knowledge assimilation at two China-based subsidiaries of different Japanese MNCs. Comparative case study analysis indicated that efforts by expatriates and HQ-based experts to convey, routinize and standardize home country practices during the exportive and contestative stages, while involving traditional ‘one way’ knowledge transfer, can provide a foundation for a subsequent integrative stage, during which host country employees’ locally embedded knowledge is assimilated despite geopolitical asymmetry between home and host countries. Without this foundation, knowledge assimilation can remain ‘frozen’ at the contestative stage, with host country employees resisting importation of good practices from the HQ, and expatriates marginalizing host country employees’ contributions unless these are exceptionally compelling.