Sticking or Twisting? Swedish Subsidiary Role Change in Emerging Markets in Crisis

Using a sensemaking lens to examine the creation of subsidiary roles, this paper is built on three premises: (1) subsidiary managers often have different perceptions about their subsidiary role in the multinational enterprise, and (2) that such roles are not static and require continues re-interpretation and 3) that subsidiary roles are continually negotiated not assigned. Using data collected from 17 subsidiaries before and after the recent economic crisis in Brazil, we found support that subsidiary managers' sense making processes plays an important part in the interpretation of the subsidiary's roles and continual reinterpretation of these roles. Subsidiary roles were found to be negotiated between the HQ and the subsidiary and that subsidiaries with higher levels of innovativeness also evidenced when there exists what we call reinterpretation capabilities