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In this essay, we offer retrospective and prospective examinations of the study of institutional complexity in international management research. Drawing on seminal works from multiple Academy of Management (AOM) journals, the essay begins by highlighting both the contributions of new institutional theory to international management scholarship and its limitations in an increasingly ambiguous and complex global business environment. We then present a selection of AOM articles to showcase how the institutional logics perspective offers a promising means of responding to and overcoming these limitations by creating a more nuanced conceptualization of the nature and the sources of institutional complexity and addressing more holistically how multinational enterprises experience, manage, and leverage this complexity. By shifting toward a more agentic and pluralistic approach to the study of institutional complexity and the multinational enterprise, we establish signposts toward future theoretical and empirical research avenues that can provide new perspectives on topical conversations and debates in the international management literature.
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Edman et al. (2025) studied this question.
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