elaborated upon each micro-strategy and showed how individuals in both cases applied them,
fairly deliberately, to facilitate the transfer of SRI. The micro-strategies resonate with
previous research findings and theoretical formulations of contextualization, translation and
institutional transfer. We evaluate their contribution to these respective lines of inquiry.
Contextualization
Actor Network Theory (ANT) proposes that business practices undergo constant adaptation to
new contexts of application. According to Bruno Latour (1996a), the success of an innovation
depends on the capacity of actors to entangle specific dimensions of the innovation with the
context in which it is implemented. Practices are adapted and related to dimensions of the new
context to secure support for it (Akrich et al. 1988a, 1988b; Latour 1996a, 2005). In ANT, no
act of contextualization is considered impossible and no business practice is expected to
remain the same for any length of time. The object of analysis in ANT is the process through
which individuals, ideas, and objects are coupled and decoupled in a constant process of
contextualization (Latour 1994, 1996b, 2005). However, no assumptions are made about how
this process unfolds or about how individuals strategically mobilize these elements.
Our findings contribute to refining the concept of contextualization. Most importantly,
they identify a limited range of contextualization patterns that occur during the transfer
process. As could be expected, the object of transfer, SRI, was disentangled and re-entangled
in the transfer process, attaching individuals, ideas and objects to SRI in a way that fit the new
context. Our contribution consists in identifying a specific structure of disentanglement / re-
entanglement beneath the apparent freedom of association. Each micro-strategy of
contextualization captured a particular combination of material and symbolic aspects,
resulting in a limited range of micro-strategies. We suggest, therefore, a refined notion of
contextualization in ANT, although this contribution may be considered biased in the favour
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