On religion as an institution in international business : executives’ lived experience in four African countries

Abstract

We use institutional theory to understand how managers in different types of firms make sense of the dysfunction of institutionally weak environments. We interviewed ninety executives working in Botswana, Kenya, Nigeria and Zimbabwe, and found that religion was used as a normative institution when dealing with remediable institutional dysfunction, typically corruption, and as cultural-cognitive institution when dysfunction was perceived as non-remediable (associated with pervasive uncertainty) for those working for domestic firms and so-called nascent multinationals. No executives working for developed country (European) multinationals used religion as a system of meaning-making; executives of emerging market (South-African) multinationals used religion only normatively.