Abstract

"The Strategic Cultivation of ‘Localness’: Banks in Rwanda, 1916-2016"

Thomas DeBerge, Loyola University Chicago (tdeberge@luc.edu)

‘Foreignness’ and ‘localness’ are central concepts through which international business scholars have explored the advantages and disadvantages of firms based on their origin. While often reduced to an immutable characteristic of firms, more recent scholarship has reframed ‘foreign’ and ‘local’ as organizational identities that can be strategically managed. Crucially, questions remain concerning how such identities acquire contextually specific meanings that change over time and how firms can cultivate these identities to their strategic advantage. The case of banks in Rwanda, from the period of Belgium’s mandate over the territory through the period after independence until the present day, provides a unique context to explore the long-term dynamics of ‘foreign’ and ‘local’ identities, the meanings of which were imbued with historical significance and were embedded in geospatial categories – specifically, mapping onto the ‘urban’ and ‘rural’ divide as an artifact of the colonial past and post-colonial development. The identification of different types of banking organizations as being ‘foreign’ or ‘local’ is found to depend upon their relation to these spatial categories, creating the opportunity for banks to cultivate new identities by deploying strategies to transcend spatial boundaries. Thus, the organizational identities of ‘foreign’ and ‘local’ are demonstrated to be malleable, with their meanings both temporally and spatially dynamic and their attachment to specific firms as manageable through deliberate strategizing. By merging insights from history, anthropology, and geography with conceptual categories derived from organization theory and international business, this study adds nuances to our understanding of what ‘foreign’ and ‘local’ mean and how ‘local’ identities can be cultivated for the firm’s advantage. The primary sources used in this study combine several types of evidence, including colonial-era reports, bank documents, and, in the contemporary period, interviews with banking executives, all of which were analyzed using historical research methods through the lens of management theory.