Corporate governance in Turkey, 2000-2018:a process study of translation

Official URL: https://risc01.sabanciuniv.edu/record=b2486414_(Table of contents)

Institutional theory in organization studies is concerned with social contexts of organizations. Recently, how these social contexts can be better understood and how organizational responses may contribute to the shaping of these contexts have become a subject of interest in studies centering the concept of translation. In addition, process organization studies that gained popularity as a methodologically different perspective aimed to understand organizational phenomena within a process that can be traced with successive phases. These two approaches, albeit similar in their approaches, have not been fully leveraged in tandem. This dissertation takes corporate governance as an empirical material and attempts to understand how corporate governance as an idea and/or a set of practices have been translated into Turkey, a context that is very much different than the context of which the idea originated. In doing so, the process through which corporate governance has been translated from the concept’s initiation in Turkey in 2000 to 2018 when the latest available data was collected is analyzed qualitatively by employing Røvik (2007)’s “rules of translation” approach as adopted by Wæraas and Sataøen (2014). Taking actors of translation as government and public authorities, business associations, consulting firms and corporations, the study reveals that corporate governance has been transformed into a more contextualized version of the concept in three phases and through narratives and practices of the actors who perform different translations depending on their agentic capacities and interests