Market transition 'one MBA at a time': institutionalization of management education in Postsocialism

Abstract

Can institutionalization of organizational fields be led from the outside? What consequences do new organizational fields have for large scale social change? Examining the institutionalization of management education field in Central and Eastern Europe since the fall of Communism provides an opportune research site to address both of these questions. Using a variety of qualitative data including content analysis of websites and an open-ended survey of administrators, we outline the coercive, normative and mimetic processes that have contributed to field institutionalization. We point to the consequential role of international actors and East-West networks and argue that this institutionalization has been largely led from the outside. Moreover, as sites of market-based knowledge diffusion, often created with a goal to facilitate postsocialist transformations, management schools have been crucial in helping build capitalism from the bottom up, one MBA at a time.