This paper deals with the institutional embeddedness of transnational corporations (TNCs), in particular, when locally grounded stakeholder groups engage with their legitimacy. Based on the empirical investigation of one exemplary case of spatial re-ordering within the French semiconductor industry, it challenges the view according to which offshoring decisions results from an undisputed order. The theoretical framework intends to merge the institutional logics approach with more recent accounts within neo-institutionalism borrowing insights from the translation perspective in order to theorize institutional change. Existing spatial embeddedness of the firm is considered as an institutionalized organizational form challenged by offshoring pressures. The purpose of the research project consists, accordingly, in theorizing the controversy surrounding the establishment of a new spatial embeddedness. By focusing on how local actors implement strategic moves to avoid offshoring, our fieldwork aims at enriching our understanding about the way local movements of resistance try to be involved in the strategic decision process of TNCs. Thus, it has the potential to make several contributions to neo-institutional studies on TNCs. First, our results highlight that resistance to offshoring draws on the capacity of actors to re-define their own logics of action in order to legitimate an organizational logics that ensure local embeddedness, as regards the dominant institutional logics of their organizational field. However, far from subordinating existing organizational forms to global industry standards, these discursive strategies relate to a process of hybridization which could be subsumed under the notion of symbolic bricolage, stating that multiple, brand new and old-fashioned logics, are strongly intertwined in the process of institutional change. Such insights into the articulation between logics of action, organizational and institutional logics could further inform our understanding of the multiple institutional logics framework by integrating geographical scale as an additional dimension. Second, our fieldwork results posit that the constitution of a coalition of interests, while it promotes the local stickiness of the firm’s operations, forbid at the same time the access of less connected and more radical stakeholder groups to locus of strategic decision-making. Thereby, it invites further research on institutional change to explore the space left in-between isomorphic and strategic behaviors, to decipher the complex interplay between domination and resistance at stake in the process of change.
