Institutional Factors Affecting Expansion within the East African Community: An Analysis of Managers’ Personal Stories

Abstract

This study investigates the roles of the regulative, normative, and cognitive institutional pillars as perceived obstacles and facilitators of internationalization within an integrated region. Integrated regions involve efforts to create institutional similarities among member nations and encourage intra-regional trade. These efforts make integrated regions a theoretically interesting and important context for analyzing managerial perceptions of the institutional environment. We content analyze essays and questionnaires from managers in the East African Community (EAC) to compare the three pillars. Our findings suggest that managers perceive the regulative pillar to be the greatest source of institutional obstacles to expansion within the EAC. Interestingly, the managers also perceive the regulative pillar to be the greatest source of institutional facilitators of expansion within the EAC.

Keywords:

• institutional pillars
• regional integration
• content analysis
• institutional distance

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

We are grateful to Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ) GmbH for their generous support of our research and their cooperation with securing input from EAC managers.

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

Trey Sutton (PhD, Florida State University) is an Assistant Professor of Management in the Robins School of Business at the University of Richmond. His research focuses on how firms affect and are affected by the institutional environment, giving special attention to the roles of social movements, government, and institutional entrepreneurs. Prior to pursuing his PhD, Trey worked as a management consultant, managing projects such a merger integration and executive reporting development.

Jeremy Short is the Rath Chair in Strategic Management at the University of Oklahoma. His award-winning teaching includes classes such as principles of management, strategic management, entrepreneurship, and management history. Short's research focuses on the determinants of firm and organizational performance. He has published more than 65 articles in such journals as Academy of Management Journal, Strategic Management Journal, Strategic Entrepreneurship Journal, Organization Science, Personnel Psychology, Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, Academy of Management Learning and Education, and Journal of Business Venturing, among others. He recently served two terms as an associate editor for the Journal of Management and he serves on the editorial board of Strategic Entrepreneurship Journal, Organizational Research Methods, Journal of Business Venturing, and Family Business Review. He has published a graphic novel focusing on management and entrepreneurship (Atlas Black: The Complete Adventure), as well as a graphic novel focusing on franchising and family business (Tales of Garcón: The Franchise Players). Short's work has been featured in media outlets such as Scientific American Mind, BizEd, and CNBC.

Aaron F. McKenny (PhD, University of Oklahoma) is an Assistant Professor of Management at the University of Central Florida. His research is primarily focused on the intersection of entrepreneurship and strategic management with an emphasis on the role of social and other non-economic phenomena in organizational settings. He is on the review boards for the Journal of Management and Family Business Review. His research has been published in several journals, including Organizational Research Methods, Journal of Business Venturing, The Leadership Quarterly, Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, Family Business Review, Business Communication Quarterly, and Business Horizons.

Rebecca Namatovu is a Lecturer at Makerere University Business School and a doctoral candidate at the Gordon Institute of Business Science, University of Pretoria in South Africa. Her work examines creative resource mobilization and entrepreneurial firm survival in constrained settings.

Notes

¹Though our analysis did not require automated coding, recent advancements in computer-aided text analysis tools, such as DICTION, CAT Scanner, LIWC, and others, allow researchers to quickly and reliably code large volumes of text (Short, Broberg, Cogliser, & Brigham, 2010).

²Whereas ANOVA reports only if the three pillars are equal in terms of their proportions, the Bonferroni test involves a series of pairwise comparisons (e.g. regulative vs normative) to determine if any of the pairs are not equal. In our models, three post hoc comparisons are performed (i.e. each unique combination of two pillars) with a corrected significance level of α/q, where q is the number of post hoc comparisons. The corrected significance level takes into account the increased odds of finding a significant result in repetitive tests (Miller, 1966).