Patrick Gilbert

Je soutiens dans mes recherches l'idée que le social et le matériel sont étroitement liés. La matérialité de cette thèse c'est le poids de ses 186 pages, mais aussi le poids de ses conséquences et de ses riches potentialités d'actions pour le futur. Il est sûr également qu'elle n'aurait jamais pu voir le jour sans la présence physique, intellectuelle et spirituelle de nombreuses personnes.

Je voudrais tout d'abord ici remercier ma directrice de thèse, Françoise CHEVALIER, sans qui l'ensemble de cet ouvrage n'aurait jamais été possible. Merci pour cette merveilleuse aventure, pour ce soutien indéfectible, pour cette disponibilité même, et souvent, à l'autre bout du monde.

Merci de m'avoir aiguiller toujours dans la bonne direction. Je garde en mémoire un grand nombre de bons moments passés à travailler dans ton bureau à Jouy-en-Josas ou dans celui de la rue Vieille du temple. Il est impossible de tous les décrire mais si je devais n'en garder qu'un j'aimerais souligner ce moment si particulier, en Chine, lors d'un de nos entretiens Skype, où j'ai compris toute la profondeur de ta passion des études de terrain et que la richesse d'une théorie naît de l'implication et du temps qu'un chercheur consacre à son terrain.

Je tiens également à remercier, Sylvie SAINT-ONGE, qui fut comme une co-directrice de thèse pour moi. Merci de m'avoir accueilli à HEC Montréal. Merci surtout pour la richesse de nos échanges, si précis et si inspirant sur les pratiques de gestion de la performance.

Je souhaite également remercier les membres de mon jury pour l'intérêt qu'ils ont bien voulu accorder à mon travail. Je souhaite les remercier en particulier pour toute l'inspiration que j'ai trouvée dans leurs ouvrages et leurs articles de recherche. Je pense en particulier aux travaux de

rencontrer. Je souhaite également remercier l'ensemble des équipes administratives et pédagogiques du doctorat qui ont toujours été là pour nous simplifier la vie et nous accompagner dans nos difficultés et nos projets au quotidien.

La vie personnelle est mise à rude épreuve lors d'une thèse et ce long chemin n'aurait pas été possible sans des amis attentifs. Je pense à tous ceux que j'ai rencontrés à HEC et avec qui j'ai partagé les joies et les difficultés des cours de première année, le plaisir des conférences et des voyages en Grèce, aux Etats-Unis et aux quatre coins du monde. Je pense à Andie, Nimish, Maria, Cédric, Pier, Shiva, Joao, Laure. Je pense à tous les doctorants et professeurs que j'ai rencontrés dans d'autres institutions et dont certains sont aujourd'hui devenus de véritables amis, Julien, Pauline, Kevin, Xavier, Sarah, Lotfi, Ewan, Typhaine et Aude. Je pense à tous mes amis d'enfance et de jeunesse qui ont écouté, sans parfois bien comprendre mais toujours avec beaucoup d'indulgence, naître mes idées de recherche alors qu'elles étaient parfois encore obscures à moimême. Je pense à Anne, Romain, Germain, Audrey, Raphaël, Augustin, Béatrice, Benjamin, Emilie, Camille, Victor, Julien, Isaure et tous les autres. J'ai aussi une pensée pour Leah, Lenda et Ian sans qui cette thèse n'aurait pas la même fluidité ni la même sonorité. J'ai enfin une pensée toute particulière pour ces deux amies sans qui ce long chemin aurait été beaucoup moins facile et moins passionnant : Kseniya avec qui j'ai tant échangé sur la gestion, la Sociomatérialité et tant d'autres choses encore et Céline avec qui j'ai passé tant de temps dans les bibliothèques et qui est pour moi un modèle de travail.

Je tiens aussi à remercier ma famille que j'ai parfois mise à rude épreuve tout au long de ces six années. Mes parents tout d'abord, qui à leur manière, m'ont accompagné dans ce projet. Mes frères ensuite, Martin, Thomas, Bertrand et Marc qui ont tout de suite compris mon projet. Ma belle famille également qui a toujours été d'un soutien indéfectible et parfois même mise à contribution pour certaines transcriptions. Merci Monique, Maud, Solen, Edmond et Michèle. Votre soutien m'a beaucoup touché.

Je remercie enfin mes trois filles dont deux sont nées au cours de cette thèse. Elles ont été la raison pour laquelle j'ai eu le courage de me lancer dans ce projet. Elles ont passé beaucoup de dimanches loin de leur père sans jamais se plaindre et je les en remercie infiniment. Elles ont grandement contribué au point final de cette thèse, en me rappelant mon devoir avec tendresse et insistance comme savent le faire les enfants : « dis papa, c'est quand la fin de ta thèse ? ». Enfin merci à toi Gaëlle, pour toutes les impressions que tu as faites pour moi et pour toutes celles que tu as toujours rendues avec bienveillance sur mon travail. Merci pour tes suggestions, tes encouragements et ton soutien indéfectible sans qui absolument rien de cette thèse n'aurait été possible. Tu es présente dans chacune de ces lignes.

Résumé de la thèse « C'est, en effet, l'étonnement qui poussa, comme aujourd'hui, les premiers penseurs aux spéculations philosophiques. Au début, leur étonnement porta sur les difficultés qui se présentaient les premières à l'esprit; puis, s'avançant ainsi peu à peu, ils étendirent leur exploration à des problèmes plus importants, tels que les phénomènes de la Lune, ceux du Soleil et des Étoiles, enfin la genèse de l'Univers »1 .

Cette thèse de doctorat traite d'un sujet bien plus humble que « la genèse de l'Univers » : comment les employés locaux des Entreprises Multinationales (EMNs) adoptent les pratiques de Gestion des Ressources Humaines (GRH), et en particulier les pratiques de Gestion de la Performance (GP). Elle trouve néanmoins son origine dans un étonnement similaire à celui décrit par Aristote. Fraîchement diplômé d'un Master de GRH réputé en France, j'étais recruté comme Assistant Ressources Humaines (RH) d'une importante EMN française du secteur de la Chimie.

Tout était nouveau pour moi, à la fois effrayant et excitant. Je n'étais plus simple stagiaire, mais salarié à temps plein pour la première fois de ma vie. Je vivais et je travaillais pour la première fois de ma vie en Chine. Après six mois passés à effectuer des tâches relativement simples et faciles, la Directrice des RH, satisfaite de mon travail, décidait de me confier un projet plus ambitieux. Le Directeur Général d'une des plus grandes usines en Chine était mécontent des pratiques de gestion de la performance mises en place au sein de son entité. D'après lui, l'ensemble du processus n'était pas assez stimulant et motivant pour les salariés locaux. Suivant une approche très rationnelle et cartésienne [START_REF] Chiapello | Management Tools: A Critical Social Science Perspective[END_REF][START_REF] Chiapello | Sociologie des outils de gestion: introduction à l'analyse sociale de l'instrumentation de gestion[END_REF][START_REF] Jullien | A treatise on efficacy: Between Western and Chinese thinking[END_REF] comme me l'avait enseignée mes professeurs, je décidais d'abord d'analyser en détails tous les formulaires des entretiens annuels pour me faire une idée plus précise de la situation. Je constatais que les responsables et les salariés locaux étaient plutôt bien impliqués dans le processus. Ils remplissaient presque tous les formulaires. Ils s'efforçaient de respecter précisément les principes du « Management par Objectifs » [START_REF] Drucker | People and performance: The best of Peter Drucker on management[END_REF]Lock, Latham & Erez, 1988) conformément aux recommandations du siège de l'entreprise. Selon les standards français, la mise en place du processus d'évaluation annuelle était plutôt un succès. Néanmoins il persistait un problème significatif. L'écart type dans les notations était extrêmement faible et il n'en résultait que très peu de différences dans les augmentations de salaire annuelles et les bonus de fin d'année. Il n'y avait pas ou très peu de discrimination entre les salariés les plus performants et les moins performants. Je présentais alors mes résultats au comité exécutif local et le Directeur Général mentionné précédemment, un expatrié américain, proposa immédiatement de mettre en place une courbe de distribution forcée pour résoudre ce problème [START_REF] Cardy | Performance appraisal: Alternative perspectives[END_REF]. Les responsables français et chinois se moquèrent gentiment de lui. C'était si typiquement américain. A la place de sa proposition, le comité exécutif me demanda de mettre à jour la procédure d'évaluation annuelle et d'organiser des sessions de formation pour les cadres intermédiaires. Un an plus tard, la courbe de distribution des notations individuelles était toujours la même. En apparence, rien n'avait changé.

Plusieurs années après, alors que je commençais mon doctorat, cette question continuait de m'habiter. Pourquoi est-ce si difficile pour les salariés et les responsables locaux des EMNs d'adopter et d'utiliser fidèlement les pratiques de GRH provenant du siège ? Comme tout bon jeune doctorant, je me plongeais immédiatement dans l'étude et la lecture de centaines d'articles académiques pour tenter de répondre à cette question. Je décidais de commencer par lire davantage sur l'élément central de ma thèse : les pratiques de gestion de la performance. J'étudiais les différents paradigmes habituellement utilisés pour décrire les pratiques de GP et plus particulièrement les théories de la contingence [START_REF] Cederblom | The performance appraisal interview: A review, implications, and suggestions[END_REF][START_REF] Keeley | A social-justice approach to organizational evaluation[END_REF], les théories cognitives [START_REF] Denisi | A cognitive view of the performance appraisal process: A model and research propositions[END_REF][START_REF] Kluger | The effects of feedback interventions on performance: A historical review, a meta-analysis, and a preliminary feedback intervention theory[END_REF][START_REF] Lefkowitz | The role of interpersonal affective regard in supervisory performance ratings: A literature review and proposed causal model[END_REF] et les approches dites sociales et organisationnelles [START_REF] Levy | The social context of performance appraisal: A review and framework for the future[END_REF][START_REF] Murphy | Performance appraisal: An organizational perspective[END_REF], 1995;[START_REF] Pichler | The social context of performance appraisal and appraisal reactions: A metaanalysis[END_REF]. J'étudiais plus en détails les nombreux outils utilisés pour gérer la performance individuelle: les entretiens annuels, les techniques de fixation d'objectifs individuels, les « feedback » de performance, les échelles comportementales (Behaviourally Anchored Ratings Scales), les échelles d'observation (Behavioural Observation Scales), les évaluations à 360 degrés, les courbes de distributions forcées, ou les programmes de coaching (pour une liste détaillée se reporter à [START_REF] Cardy | Performance appraisal: Alternative perspectives[END_REF][START_REF] Murphy | Understanding performance appraisal: Social, organizational, and goal-based perspectives[END_REF]. Après plusieurs mois, je me fixais sur une définition de la gestion de la performance comme l'ensemble des pratiques par lesquelles une organisation identifie, mesure, développe et aligne les objectifs individuels sur ses objectifs stratégiques [START_REF] Aguinis | Performance management[END_REF][START_REF] Gilbert | L'évaluation de la performance individuelle[END_REF][START_REF] St-Onge | Gestion des performances au travail: bilan des connaissances[END_REF], ce qui permettait à la fois d'étendre et de fixer les limites de ce que j'avais observé lors de mon expérience professionnelle.

Après un an d'études doctorales, j'avais acquis une bien plus grande rigueur scientifique aussi bien théorique que méthodologique, mais je restais cependant frustré. Dès que je présentais mes travaux de recherche (la gestion de la performance en Chine) à mes professeurs et mes camarades doctorants, ils trouvaient mon sujet de management interculturel passionnant. Pourtant j'étais convaincu que le prisme interculturel n'était pas suffisant pour analyser mon expérience passée. Il n'était pas assez pertinent [START_REF] Weick | Theory construction as disciplined reflexivity: Tradeoffs in the 90s[END_REF] pour décrire et expliquer les pratiques que j'avais observées, mais je ne pouvais pas non plus proposer un cadre théorique alternatif à mes professeurs et mes camarades. Je n'avais pas de cadre conceptuel ni de données solides pour expliquer ma « théorie d'usage » [START_REF] Argyris | Theory in Practice: Increasing Professional Effectiveness[END_REF]. Je restais bloqué au premier stade d'une « introspection bégnine », très loin d'une possible « réflexivité constitutive et radicale » (Woolgar, 1988, p.21).

Ma Directrice me laissa alors retourner sur le terrain à ce moment là. Je retournais dans l'entreprise pour laquelle j'avais travaillé cinq ans auparavant, mais avec un positionnement épistémologique radicalement différent. Je m'engageais dans un programme de recherche exploratoire et commençais une étude de cas longitudinale approfondie [START_REF] Pettigrew | Longitudinal field research on change: Theory and practice[END_REF][START_REF] Burgelman | Bridging history and reductionism: A key role for longitudinal qualitative research[END_REF]. J'étais familiarisé avec mon terrain, ce qui me permettait de gagner du temps et de mieux comprendre les personnes que j'observais, leur vocabulaire, leurs plaisanteries, et les collègues ou les événements auxquels elles se référaient. Ma directrice de thèse veillait néanmoins à ce que je fasse des aller-retour fréquents entre mon terrain et mes cadres théoriques pour éviter tous les pièges d'une trop grande familiarité avec l'objet de son observation. Mon but était d'observer les « théories d'usage » et non les « théories professées » [START_REF] Argyris | Theory in Practice: Increasing Professional Effectiveness[END_REF] J'ai d'abord été étonné de constater à quel point les conceptions des pratiques de GP étaient différentes selon les salariés. Au sein de la même entreprise, certains collaborateurs ne faisaient référence qu'aux entretiens d'évaluation annuelle, alors que d'autres incluaient le programme de gestion des talents lancé par le siège et/ou les programmes locaux de fidélisation, de coaching et de récompense de la performance. Les salariés définissaient les pratiques de GP sur un spectre allant de techniques artisanales développées localement au cours du temps à des pratiques scientifiques élaborées rigoureusement. La notion de technologie émergea ainsi petit à petit de mon terrain d'étude. La GP était perçue dans cette entreprise comme un ensemble de pratiques caractérisées par l'interpénétration de la technique et de la science [START_REF] Chiapello | Management Tools: A Critical Social Science Perspective[END_REF]Chiapello et al., 2013). A ce moment là, ma directrice me demanda de me concentrer davantage sur mon cadre théorique, et j'explorais plus en détails le courant « socio-technique » [START_REF] Perrow | A framework for the comparative analysis of organizations[END_REF][START_REF] Woodward | Management and technology[END_REF]), la théorie de l'Acteur Réseau [START_REF] Callon | Some elements of a sociology of translation: domestication of the scallops and the fishermen of St Brieuc Bay[END_REF][START_REF] Latour | Reassembling the social: An introduction to actor-network-theory[END_REF] et enfin la théorie de la Sociomatérialité [START_REF] Leonardi | Theoretical foundations for the study of sociomateriality[END_REF][START_REF] Orlikowski | Sociomaterial practices: Exploring technology at work[END_REF][START_REF] Orlikowski | 10 sociomateriality: challenging the separation of technology, work and organization[END_REF]) qui apparue alors comme la meilleure façon de conceptualiser mes observations. La diffusion et l'adoption des pratiques de GRH par les salariés locaux des EMNs est un thème classique de la recherche en gestion des affaires internationales (GAI). Jusqu'à la fin des années 1990, le débat s'est principalement articulé autour de la question de la divergence ou de la convergence des pratiques de GRH au niveau macro [START_REF] Dowling | International human resource management: Managing people in a multinational context[END_REF][START_REF] Tarique | International Human Resource Management: Policies and Practices for Multinational Enterprises[END_REF]. D'un côté les théoriciens de la convergence affirment que les salariés ont tendance à adopter des pratiques standardisées au niveau mondial en raison de pressions institutionnelles ou culturelles similaires [START_REF] Edwards | Global standardization or national differentiation of HRM practices in multinational companies? A comparison of multinationals in five countries[END_REF][START_REF] Pudelko | Country-of-origin, localization, or dominance effect? An empirical investigation of HRM practices in foreign subsidiaries[END_REF][START_REF] Shadur | The adoption of international best practices in a Western culture: East meets West[END_REF]. A l'opposé, les théoriciens de la divergence affirment que les institutions et les cultures sont intégrées dans des contextes régionaux ou nationaux uniques qui poussent les salariés à adapter les pratiques de GRH globales en fonction de leurs besoins locaux spécifiques [START_REF] Brewster | Towards a'European'model of human resource management[END_REF][START_REF] Rosenzweig | Influences on human resource management practices in multinational corporations[END_REF][START_REF] Tregaskis | Converging or diverging? A comparative analysis of trends in contingent employment practice in Europe over a decade[END_REF][START_REF] Whitley | Business systems in East Asia: Firms, markets and societies[END_REF]. Depuis le début des années 2000 et les travaux fondateurs de [START_REF] Kostova | Transnational transfer of strategic organizational practices: A contextual perspective[END_REF] et Roth [START_REF] Kostova | Adoption of an organizational practice by subsidiaries of multinational corporations: Institutional and relational effects[END_REF], le débat s'est déplacé vers les pressions intra-organisationnelles et « l'internalisation » des pratiques de GRH. Kostova souligne notamment qu'il est nécessaire de se concentrer sur le niveau micro et « l'état où les salariés de l'unité destinataire accordent une signification symbolique à la pratique » (Kostova, 1999, p. 311).

A partir de cette approche, les chercheurs en Gestion Internationale des Ressources Humaines (GIRH) ont apporté de nombreuses preuves que le rôle joué par les expatriés [START_REF] Harzing | The bridging role of expatriates and inpatriates in knowledge transfer in multinational corporations[END_REF][START_REF] Hocking | Balancing global and local strategic contexts: Expatriate knowledge transfer, applications, and learning within a transnational organization[END_REF][START_REF] Rosenzweig | Influences on human resource management practices in multinational corporations[END_REF], l'engagement des directeurs généraux locaux [START_REF] Björkman | The determinants of line management internalisation of HRM practices in MNC subsidiaries[END_REF] et l'échange de capital social entre les sièges et les filiales locales est particulièrement important dans l'adoption des pratiques de GRH [START_REF] Ahlvik | Towards explaining subsidiary implementation, integration, and internalization of MNC headquarters HRM practices[END_REF].

Nonobstant l'importance des contributions passées, les chercheurs en GAI et en GIRH se sont principalement concentrés sur la dimension sociale du processus d'adoption des pratiques organisationnelles. Cette attention particulière se retrouve notamment dans les travaux d'auteurs en stratégie tels que Kostova [START_REF] Kostova | Transnational transfer of strategic organizational practices: A contextual perspective[END_REF][START_REF] Kostova | Adoption of an organizational practice by subsidiaries of multinational corporations: Institutional and relational effects[END_REF] et Szulanski [START_REF] Jensen | Stickiness and the adaptation of organizational practices in cross-border knowledge transfers[END_REF][START_REF] Szulanski | Exploring internal stickiness: Impediments to the transfer of best practice within the firm[END_REF], qui ont fortement influencé les auteurs en GIRH. Par conséquent, la matérialité des pratiques de GRH a reçu, de manière surprenante, assez peu d'attention théorique et la contribution majeure de cette thèse de doctorat est d'associer la théorie de la Sociomatérialité et la littérature en GAI pour réintroduire la notion de matérialité dans le débat.

Cette thèse apporte ainsi un certain nombre de perspectives radicalement différentes. Premièrement, comme décrit dans la figure 1, elle offre une cadre multiniveau pour répondre à notre question de recherche : Comment les salariés adoptent les pratiques de GRH dans les filiales locales des EMNs ? Deuxièmement, elle permet d'apporter de nouvelles perspectives au concept émergent en GAI de « pratiques organisationnelles hybrides » [START_REF] Chung | South Korean MNEs' international HRM approach: Hybridization of global standards and local practices[END_REF][START_REF] Davila | Humanistic leadership: Lessons from Latin America[END_REF][START_REF] Gamble | Transferring organizational practices and the dynamics of hybridization: Japanese retail multinationals in China[END_REF][START_REF] Gould | Think glocally, act glocally: A culture-centric comment on Leung, Bhagat, Buchan, Erez and Gibson[END_REF][START_REF] Pache | Inside the hybrid organization: Selective coupling as a response to competing institutional logics[END_REF][START_REF] Pudelko | Cross-national learning from best practice and the convergence-divergence debate in HRM[END_REF][START_REF] Yahiaoui | Hybridization: striking a balance between adoption and adaptation of human resource management practices in French multinational corporations and their Tunisian subsidiaries[END_REF]. Les théoriciens de la convergence et ceux de la divergence étant toujours en désaccord sur l'horizon futur des pratiques organisationnelles au niveau mondial, le concept d'« hybridation » tente d'aller au-delà de cette opposition consubstantielle. Néanmoins certaines dimensions de ce concept restent encore mal définies et en particulier sa dimension matérielle. Enfin, d'un point de vue épistémologique, cette thèse approfondit notre compréhension de la capacité ou puissance d'agir (« agency ») des individus dans les MNEs. Dans la littérature en GAI, le débat s'est longtemps réduit à étudier la relation d'interdépendance entre les individus et la culture ou les institutions. En explorant l'imbrication de la « capacité d'agir du matériel » et la « capacité d'agir du social », la théorie de la Sociomatérialité [START_REF] Leonardi | Theoretical foundations for the study of sociomateriality[END_REF]Leonardi, Nardi & Kallinikos, 2012) nous permet d'explorer une approche radicalement différente.

Dans le premier chapitre de cette thèse, je me concentre plus particulièrement sur l'adoption des pratiques de GRH au niveau micro. La littérature en GAI se focalise sur les phénomènes au niveau macro. Les EMNs sont « des organisations qui conduisent des affaires à l'extérieur de leur pays d'origine » et il est nécessaire d'avoir une compréhension globale des cultures nationales et des contextes internationaux. Les pratiques organisationnelles restent néanmoins en définitive toujours mise en oeuvre par des individus.

En se basant sur des entretiens réalisés avec 49 employés, responsables et directeurs de l'EMN étudiée dans cette étude, la principale contribution de ce chapitre est d'identifier quatre archétypes de l'adoption des pratiques de GRH (formelle, cérémoniale, déviante et innovante). Les quadrants sont souvent utilisés en gestion pour illustrer et simplifier les théories [START_REF] Pollock | Ranking devices: The socio-materiality of ratings. Materiality and organizing: Social interaction in a technological world[END_REF] et nos quatre archétypes ne sont pas entièrement nouveaux. Mcgaughey et De Cieri (1999), ainsi que [START_REF] Kostova | Adoption of an organizational practice by subsidiaries of multinational corporations: Institutional and relational effects[END_REF] ont eux aussi proposé quatre modes d'adoption des pratiques organisationnelles et de GRH. Cependant, le premier modèle est basé sur l'opposition entre les dynamiques de convergence et de divergence alors que le second modèle est basé sur la manière dont les salariés locaux mettent en place les pratiques provenant du siège et leur perception de la plus value de ces mêmes pratiques.

Ce premier chapitre décrit un phénomène différent à partir de l'imbrication des capacités Le second chapitre de cette thèse se concentre sur l'adoption des pratiques de GP dans les EMNs au niveau meso. Je me suis notamment penché sur les différentes pratiques de GP dans quatre entités de l'EMN étudiée. Au cours des deux dernières décennies le concept d'hybridation est devenu de plus en plus populaire dans la littérature en GAI, notamment pour expliquer comment les entités locales des EMNs adaptent les pratiques de GRH et créent des nouvelles pratiques uniques, ni identiques aux pratiques locales ni identiques à celles provenant du siège. Le concept d'hybridation est passé d'une définition relativement évasive d'un changement partiel entre les pratiques managériales traditionnelles et modernes (Harzing & Pinnington, 2010;[START_REF] Tarique | International Human Resource Management: Policies and Practices for Multinational Enterprises[END_REF] à une approche plus sophistiquée, basée sur les cadres théoriques culturalistes et institutionnalistes [START_REF] Elger | Assembling work: Remaking factory regimes in Japanese multinationals in Britain[END_REF][START_REF] Gamble | Transferring organizational practices and the dynamics of hybridization: Japanese retail multinationals in China[END_REF][START_REF] Huo | Divergence or convergence: a cross-national comparison of personnel selection practices[END_REF][START_REF] Pudelko | Cross-national learning from best practice and the convergence-divergence debate in HRM[END_REF][START_REF] Tung | Comparing the attitudes toward money, material possessions and savings of overseas Chinese vis-à-vis Chinese in China: convergence, divergence or crossvergence, vis-à-vis 'one size fits all'human resource management policies and practices[END_REF][START_REF] Zhu | Human resource management with 'Asian'characteristics: a hybrid people-management system in East Asia[END_REF].

Néanmoins toutes ces approches présupposent que l'hybridation est un processus qui relève fondamentalement de pressions institutionnelles ou culturelles et elles tendent ainsi elles aussi à réduire la dimension matérielle des pratiques organisationnelles. En me fondant sur la théorie de la Sociomatérialité, je propose une nouvelle définition de l'hybridation comme le processus par lequel des pratiques uniques émergent dans des filiales locales à partir de l'imbrication du social et du matériel entre le siège et les filiales locales des EMNs. Cette définition me permet d'identifier deux nouvelles formes de GP dans les quatre entités de l'EMN étudiée que j'ai appelées la pratique de GP harmonieuse confucéenne et la pratique de GP harmonieuse instrumentale. Cela me permet ainsi de contribuer à la littérature interculturelle en développant le concept d' « harmonie », central dans la pensée confucéenne mais qui n'a reçu jusqu'alors que peu d'attention en comparaison avec les concepts de « Mianzi », qui renvoie à la forte réticence à perdre la face en Chine [START_REF] Bozionelos | An investigation on the attitudes of Chinese workers towards individually based performance-related reward systems[END_REF] et de Guanxi, « un type spécial de relation caractérisée par des règles implicites d'obligation et de réciprocité » (Lu, Jia, & Heisey, 2002, p.1252). Je montre aussi que ces deux pratiques uniques ne résultent pas seulement d'un processus social, mais également de l'imbrication du social et du matériel [START_REF] Leonardi | Theoretical foundations for the study of sociomateriality[END_REF]Leonardi, Nardi & Kallinikos, 2012). En effet, ces deux pratiques opposées, ni similaires aux pratiques du siège ni similaires aux pratiques chinoises traditionnelles de GP sont deux solutions uniques visant à répondre à l'ambiguïté originelle introduite par le siège de l'entreprise entre les objectifs de contrôle et de développement du processus de GP.

Dans le dernier chapitre, je conceptualise une approche sociomatérialiste multiniveau du transfert des pratiques de GRH dans les EMNs. Cette thèse de doctorat est en effet divisée en trois principaux chapitres qui peuvent être lus comme des articles de recherche indépendants. Mais l'approche épistémologique générale reste fondée sur la « théorie ancrée » (grounded theory) [START_REF] Glaser | Basics of grounded theory analysis: Emergence vs forcing[END_REF][START_REF] Strauss | Grounded theory methodology[END_REF] et les trois chapitres sont étroitement liés. Dans le premier chapitre, j'utilise principalement la théorie sociomatérialiste au niveau micro pour explorer l'imbrication de la capacité d'agir individuelle et matérielle pendant le transfert transnational des pratiques de GRH. Dans le second chapitre, j'utilise la théorie sociomatérialiste pour étudier l'évolution et l'hybridation de pratiques sur une période de dix ans au niveau meso. Le dernier chapitre résulte directement des deux précédents. Il constitue une première tentative pour assembler ces résultats théoriques et fournir un modèle multiniveau intégré, en développant un autre concept central de la théorie de la Sociomatérialité: la notion de « dispositif » [START_REF] Orlikowski | What happens when evaluation goes online? Exploring apparatuses of valuation in the travel sector[END_REF].

Comme souligné par [START_REF] Foucault | Power/knowledge: Selected interviews and other writings[END_REF] et les théoriciens de l'Acteur Réseau [START_REF] Callon | Some elements of a sociology of translation: domestication of the scallops and the fishermen of St Brieuc Bay[END_REF][START_REF] Latour | Reassembling the social: An introduction to actor-network-theory[END_REF], le concept de dispositif attire notre attention sur le rôle joué par les acteurs humains mais aussi les acteurs « non-humains » dans les pratiques organisationnelles. Dans le contexte de la GAI, la conception du transfert transnational des pratiques de GRH comme un dispositif sociomateriel rend d'autant plus visible la co-construction du savoir et les rapports de force entre le siège et ses filiales [START_REF] Aggeri | Qu'est-ce qu'un dispositif stratégique[END_REF][START_REF] Townley | Foucault, power/knowledge, and its relevance for human resource management[END_REF]. A partir du concept de dispositif, je propose également une nouvelle définition des pratiques de GRH dans les EMNs comme des manières uniques de conduire les activités de GRH en utilisant le savoir de GRH qui résulte de l'imbrication inextricable du social et du matériel entre le siège et ses filiales. Je contribue ainsi directement à la littérature en GAI, et j'élargis aussi le champ d'étude de la théorie sociomatérialiste aux pratiques de GIRH et je montre que cette théorie peut s'appliquer à l'analyse macro.

List of Tables and Figures

Tables Table 1 Overview of the data collection process over 10 years Table 2 Major PM tools in the Chinese entities of Kemike (2005Kemike ( -2015) ) Table 3 The entanglement of the social and material agencies in the adoption process The global diffusion of HRM knowledge 114

Table 7 The socio-technical structure of the transfer of HRM practices in MNEs 117

Table 8 The entanglement of the social and material agencies 123

Table 9 The sociomaterial transfer of HRM practices 128 The multilevel apparatus of the transfer of HRM practices in MNEs 106

Figures

General Introduction

The calm of objects strikes as truly strange And slightly hostile;

While we are torn by time, they stay unnerved, There's nothing seems to rattle them.

Sole witnesses of our true decays,

Our real off-days;

They've taken on the hue of our old woes, Of our insipid souls.

With no redemption or forgiveness, and too much like these things,

We turn in circles, lifelessly;

There's nothing soothes this feverish gloom, Our sentiment of loss.

Built by our objects, made to resemble them,

We exist through them.

Deep within us, though, lie reminiscences

Of times when we were gods.

Rebirth I,

The calm of objects is strange indeed. Michel Houellebecq2

"For it is owing to their wonder that men both now begin and at first began to philosophize; they wondered originally at the obvious difficulties, then advanced little by little and stated difficulties about the greater matters, e.g. about the phenomena of the moon and those of the sun and of the stars, and about the genesis of the universe"3 .

This doctoral thesis addresses a much humbler question than the "genesis of the universe":

How do local employees adopt Human Resource Management practices in Multinational

Enterprises (MNEs), and Performance Management (PM) practices in particular? However, this thesis originates in a sense of wonder similar to that described by Aristotle: my first international work experience. Freshly graduated with a top-ranked human resource management (HRM) Master degree in France, I was recruited as a Human Resources (HR) Assistant in the Chinese subsidiary of a major French Chemical MNE. Everything was new all around me, both frightening and exciting. I was no longer an intern but, for the first time in my life, a full-time employee. I was living in China for the first time in my life. After six months doing simple, easy tasks, the China HR director, my manager, was satisfied with my work and decided to entrust me with a more ambitious project. The General Manager of one of the company's largest plants in China was dissatisfied with the existing performance appraisal practices. In his view, the whole process was insufficiently challenging and motivating for local employees.

Following a very Cartesian and rational approach [START_REF] Chiapello | Management Tools: A Critical Social Science Perspective[END_REF][START_REF] Chiapello | Sociologie des outils de gestion: introduction à l'analyse sociale de l'instrumentation de gestion[END_REF][START_REF] Jullien | A treatise on efficacy: Between Western and Chinese thinking[END_REF] as taught by my HRM professors, I decided first to conduct a detailed investigation of all the performance appraisal forms, to gain a clear understanding of the situation. Local managers and employees were fairly involved in the process. Almost all of them filled in forms. They endeavoured to abide by the principles of "Management by Objectives" [START_REF] Drucker | People and performance: The best of Peter Drucker on management[END_REF]Lock, latham & Erez, 1988) as requested by the global headquarters. By French standards, the implementation of performance appraisal processes was rather satisfactory. However, there remained a major issue. The standard deviation of performance ratings was extremely low. As a consequence, there were not, ultimately, any significant differences between the yearly bonuses and salary increases of the employees. There was no discrimination between top-and lowperformers. I presented my results to the local executive committee, and the General Manager mentioned previously, an American expatriate, immediately suggested introducing forced distributing rating scales to solve this problem [START_REF] Cardy | Performance appraisal: Alternative perspectives[END_REF]. The French and Chinese top managers politely laughed at him. His solution was so typically American. Instead of adopting his suggestion, the executive committee asked me to refresh the performance appraisal procedure and organize training sessions for middle managers. One year later, the distribution of performance ratings was still the same. Apparently, nothing had changed.

Several years later, when I started my PhD, this question still puzzled me. Why is it so difficult for local employees and managers of MNEs to faithfully use and adopt HRM practices which come from headquarters? Like any other fresh PhD candidate, I immediately delved into the study of hundreds of academic articles. I decided to start by reading more about the core element of my thesis, performance management practices. I investigated the different paradigms usually used to described PM, and more particularly contingencies theories [START_REF] Cederblom | The performance appraisal interview: A review, implications, and suggestions[END_REF][START_REF] Keeley | A social-justice approach to organizational evaluation[END_REF], cognitive theories [START_REF] Denisi | A cognitive view of the performance appraisal process: A model and research propositions[END_REF][START_REF] Kluger | The effects of feedback interventions on performance: A historical review, a meta-analysis, and a preliminary feedback intervention theory[END_REF][START_REF] Lefkowitz | The role of interpersonal affective regard in supervisory performance ratings: A literature review and proposed causal model[END_REF], and social and organizational approaches [START_REF] Levy | The social context of performance appraisal: A review and framework for the future[END_REF][START_REF] Murphy | Performance appraisal: An organizational perspective[END_REF], 1995;[START_REF] Pichler | The social context of performance appraisal and appraisal reactions: A metaanalysis[END_REF]. I read more about the various tools used to manage performance in organizations: performance appraisal interviews, individual objective setting techniques, performance feedback, Behaviourally Anchored Ratings Scales (B.A.R.S.), Behavioural

Observation Scales (B.O.S.), 360-degree evaluations, Forced Distribution Rating Systems (F.D.R.S.), or mentoring programs (for a detailed review see in particular [START_REF] Cardy | Performance appraisal: Alternative perspectives[END_REF][START_REF] Cardy | Performance appraisal: Alternative perspectives[END_REF]Murphy &[START_REF] Murphy | Understanding performance appraisal: Social, organizational, and goal-based perspectives[END_REF]. After several months, I stabilized a definition of PM as the set of practices by which an organization identifies, measures, develops and aligns individual performance with its strategic objectives [START_REF] Aguinis | Performance management[END_REF][START_REF] Gilbert | L'évaluation de la performance individuelle[END_REF][START_REF] St-Onge | Gestion des performances au travail: bilan des connaissances[END_REF], which both expanded on, and set boundaries to, what I had observed in my previous work experience.

After the first year of my PhD program, I had acquired a great deal of theoretical and methodological scientific rigor, but I felt frustrated. As soon as I presented my research interests (performance management practices in China) to my professors and PhD fellows, they were very enthusiastic about my cross-cultural management topic. However, cross-cultural theories were not sufficient for investigating my earlier work experience. They were not relevant enough [START_REF] Weick | Theory construction as disciplined reflexivity: Tradeoffs in the 90s[END_REF] to describe and explain the practices I had used and observed in the company I had worked for, but I could not offer any alternative theoretical framework to my professors and PhD fellows. I had no theoretical framework or solid data to explain my theory-in-use [START_REF] Argyris | Theory in Practice: Increasing Professional Effectiveness[END_REF]. I was locked in the first stages of a "benign introspection" which was far from being any form of "radical constitutive reflexivity" (Woolgar, 1988, p.21).

At that point, my supervisor finally let me go back into the field. I went back into the company that I had worked for 5 years earlier, but with a radically different epistemological position. I embarked on an explorative research program. I chose an in-depth longitudinal case study [START_REF] Pettigrew | Longitudinal field research on change: Theory and practice[END_REF][START_REF] Burgelman | Bridging history and reductionism: A key role for longitudinal qualitative research[END_REF]. I was familiar with the field, which helped me save time and better understand the people I was observing, their vocabulary, their jokes, and the colleagues and events they referred to. My thesis supervisors regularly reminded me though to keep going back and forth between data and theory to avoid the pitfalls of being too familiar with my field of study.

My purpose was to observe and understand "theories-in-use" and not "espoused theory" [START_REF] Argyris | Theory in Practice: Increasing Professional Effectiveness[END_REF] I was first surprised to note that employees had very different definitions of PM practices.

Within the same company, some of them only referred to performance appraisals, whereas others also referred to the talent management program initiated by headquarters, and / or the specific local retention program, performance award program or mentoring program. Employees defined PM practices on a spectrum ranging from hands-on techniques locally improved over time to rigorously scientifically designed practices. Hence, the notion of technology gradually began to emerge from my field study. PM was perceived in this company as a set of practices characterized by the mutual penetration of technique and science [START_REF] Chiapello | Management Tools: A Critical Social Science Perspective[END_REF]Chiapello et al., 2013). At that point, my supervisor urged me to delve more deeply into my theoretical framework, and I explored more thoroughly socio-technical theory [START_REF] Perrow | A framework for the comparative analysis of organizations[END_REF][START_REF] Woodward | Management and technology[END_REF], Actor Network Theory [START_REF] Callon | Some elements of a sociology of translation: domestication of the scallops and the fishermen of St Brieuc Bay[END_REF][START_REF] Latour | Reassembling the social: An introduction to actor-network-theory[END_REF], and lastly sociomaterial theory [START_REF] Leonardi | Theoretical foundations for the study of sociomateriality[END_REF][START_REF] Orlikowski | Sociomaterial practices: Exploring technology at work[END_REF][START_REF] Orlikowski | 10 sociomateriality: challenging the separation of technology, work and organization[END_REF]. The latter emerged as the best way to conceptualize my observations.

The diffusion and the adoption of global HRM practices by local employees in MNEs is a classic issue in the International Business literature. Until the late 1990s, the debate focused mainly on the convergence and divergence of HRM practices at the macro level [START_REF] Dowling | International human resource management: Managing people in a multinational context[END_REF][START_REF] Tarique | International Human Resource Management: Policies and Practices for Multinational Enterprises[END_REF]. On the one hand, convergence scholars argue that employees tend to adopt standardized HRM practices worldwide because of similar institutional or cultural pressures [START_REF] Edwards | Global standardization or national differentiation of HRM practices in multinational companies? A comparison of multinationals in five countries[END_REF][START_REF] Pudelko | Country-of-origin, localization, or dominance effect? An empirical investigation of HRM practices in foreign subsidiaries[END_REF][START_REF] Shadur | The adoption of international best practices in a Western culture: East meets West[END_REF]. Conversely, divergence scholars argue that institutions and cultural values are embedded in unique national or regional contexts, which lead employees to adapt global HRM practices to their specific local needs [START_REF] Brewster | Towards a'European'model of human resource management[END_REF][START_REF] Rosenzweig | Influences on human resource management practices in multinational corporations[END_REF][START_REF] Tregaskis | Converging or diverging? A comparative analysis of trends in contingent employment practice in Europe over a decade[END_REF][START_REF] Whitley | Business systems in East Asia: Firms, markets and societies[END_REF]. Since the early 00s and the seminal work of [START_REF] Kostova | Transnational transfer of strategic organizational practices: A contextual perspective[END_REF] and Roth [START_REF] Kostova | Adoption of an organizational practice by subsidiaries of multinational corporations: Institutional and relational effects[END_REF], the focus has shifted toward intraorganizational pressures and the "internalization" of HRM practices. Kostova in particular argues that it is necessary to look at the micro level and the "state in which the employees at the recipient unit attach symbolic meaning to the practice" (Kostova, 1999, p. 311). Following this approach, International Human Resource Management (IHRM) researchers have produced considerable evidence to show that the role of expatriates [START_REF] Harzing | The bridging role of expatriates and inpatriates in knowledge transfer in multinational corporations[END_REF][START_REF] Hocking | Balancing global and local strategic contexts: Expatriate knowledge transfer, applications, and learning within a transnational organization[END_REF][START_REF] Rosenzweig | Influences on human resource management practices in multinational corporations[END_REF], the involvement of local General Managers [START_REF] Björkman | The determinants of line management internalisation of HRM practices in MNC subsidiaries[END_REF], and the social capital shared by headquarters and local subsidiaries are especially important for the adoption of HRM practices [START_REF] Ahlvik | Towards explaining subsidiary implementation, integration, and internalization of MNC headquarters HRM practices[END_REF].

Notwithstanding the importance of their past contributions, IB and IHRM researchers strongly emphasized above all the social dimension of the process for adopting organisational practices. This heavy emphasis is apparent in the work of strategy authors such as Kostova [START_REF] Kostova | Transnational transfer of strategic organizational practices: A contextual perspective[END_REF][START_REF] Kostova | Adoption of an organizational practice by subsidiaries of multinational corporations: Institutional and relational effects[END_REF] and Szulanski [START_REF] Jensen | Stickiness and the adaptation of organizational practices in cross-border knowledge transfers[END_REF][START_REF] Szulanski | Exploring internal stickiness: Impediments to the transfer of best practice within the firm[END_REF], who have greatly influenced IHRM scholars. As a consequence, the materiality of HRM practices has, surprisingly, received scant theoretical attention, and the central contribution of this doctoral thesis is to combine sociomaterial theory and IB literature to bring materiality back into the debate. This thesis thus offers a number of radically new perspectives. Firstly, and as described in Figure 1, it offers a multilevel framework for addressing the stated research question: How do employees adopt HRM practices in the local subsidiaries of MNEs? Secondly, it brings new perspectives on the emergent IB concept of "hybrid organizational practices" [START_REF] Chung | South Korean MNEs' international HRM approach: Hybridization of global standards and local practices[END_REF][START_REF] Davila | Humanistic leadership: Lessons from Latin America[END_REF][START_REF] Gamble | Transferring organizational practices and the dynamics of hybridization: Japanese retail multinationals in China[END_REF][START_REF] Gould | Think glocally, act glocally: A culture-centric comment on Leung, Bhagat, Buchan, Erez and Gibson[END_REF][START_REF] Pache | Inside the hybrid organization: Selective coupling as a response to competing institutional logics[END_REF][START_REF] Pudelko | Cross-national learning from best practice and the convergence-divergence debate in HRM[END_REF][START_REF] Yahiaoui | Hybridization: striking a balance between adoption and adaptation of human resource management practices in French multinational corporations and their Tunisian subsidiaries[END_REF]. Convergence and divergence scholars still disagree about the future of organizational practices worldwide, and the concept of "hybridization" seeks to go beyond this consubstantial opposition. However, certain dimensions of this concept remain elusive and especially its material dimension. Lastly, from an ontological perspective, this thesis enriches our understanding of individual agency in MNEs. In the IB literature, the debate has long been limited

to the interdependency relationship between individuals on the one hand and culture or institutions on the other. By exploring the entanglement of material agency and social agency [START_REF] Leonardi | Theoretical foundations for the study of sociomateriality[END_REF]Leonardi, Nardi & Kallinikos, 2012), sociomaterial theory enables us to take a radically different approach.

Figure 1: Dissertation summary

In the first chapter of this dissertation, I explore more specifically the adoption of HRM practices at the micro level. International business studies, by definition, investigate macro phenomena. MNEs are "organizations that conduct business outside their countries of origin" (Tarique, Briscoe & Schuler, 2015, p.6), and it is necessary to have a comprehensive approach to national cultures and the international context. Ultimately however, organizational practices are enacted by individuals.

Drawing mainly on interviews conducted with 49 employees, managers and directors of the MNE under investigation, the main contribution of this chapter is to identify four archetypes of the adoption of HRM practices (formal, ceremonial, deviant and innovative). Quadrants are often used to illustrate and simplify theories in management [START_REF] Pollock | Ranking devices: The socio-materiality of ratings. Materiality and organizing: Social interaction in a technological world[END_REF], and our four archetypes are not entirely new. Mcgaughey and De Cieri (1999) or [START_REF] Kostova | Adoption of an organizational practice by subsidiaries of multinational corporations: Institutional and relational effects[END_REF] also suggested four modes of adoption of HRM and organizational practices. However, the former model is based on the opposition between convergence and divergence dynamics, while the latter is based on the extent to which local employees implement, and perceive added value in, global practices.

This first chapter describes a different phenomenon built on the entanglement of social and material agencies. Some local employees feel constrained by the material agency of HRM practices.

In other words, they only see one way to use forms, software or procedures, or they feel that they are being monitored when using them. If these employees also perceive a high need for global integration and a low need for local responsiveness, they tend to see HRM practices, which are transferred by headquarters, such as performance appraisals and talent management practices as being superior to local practices, and adopt them formally. On the other hand, if such employees perceive a low need for global integration and a low need for local responsiveness, they tend to reject headquarters' practices. In some cases, for instance, managers sign performance appraisal forms without having conducted the corresponding performance appraisal interviews beforehand.

Conversely, some local employees perceive a strong "material affordance" of HRM practices transferred by headquarters. They see the forms, software or procedures designed by headquarters as opportunities for action. When these employees perceive a high need for global integration and a high need for local responsiveness, they tend to slightly deviate from Headquarters' recommendations while still keeping in line with the overall guidelines. Local employees tend to create innovative practices. However, if the same employees perceive a low need for global integration and a high need for local responsiveness, they tend to strongly deviate from the recommendations of Headquarters.

The second chapter of the thesis focuses on the adoption of PM practices in MNEs at a meso level. I look more closely at the differences between PM practices in four Chinese entities of the MNE under investigation. Over the last two decades, the concept of hybridization has gained in popularity in the IB literature in order to explain how local entities of MNEs adapt HRM practices and create new and unique practices, which are similar neither to traditional local practices nor to Headquarters' practices. The concept moved from a relatively elusive definition of hybridization as an incomplete shift between traditional and modern managerial practices (Harzing & Pinnington, 2010;[START_REF] Tarique | International Human Resource Management: Policies and Practices for Multinational Enterprises[END_REF], to more sophisticated approaches based on cultural and institutional theoretical frameworks [START_REF] Elger | Assembling work: Remaking factory regimes in Japanese multinationals in Britain[END_REF][START_REF] Gamble | Transferring organizational practices and the dynamics of hybridization: Japanese retail multinationals in China[END_REF][START_REF] Huo | Divergence or convergence: a cross-national comparison of personnel selection practices[END_REF][START_REF] Pudelko | Cross-national learning from best practice and the convergence-divergence debate in HRM[END_REF][START_REF] Tung | Comparing the attitudes toward money, material possessions and savings of overseas Chinese vis-à-vis Chinese in China: convergence, divergence or crossvergence, vis-à-vis 'one size fits all'human resource management policies and practices[END_REF][START_REF] Zhu | Human resource management with 'Asian'characteristics: a hybrid people-management system in East Asia[END_REF].

However, all these approaches assume that hybridization is a process, which is fundamentally driven by either cultural or institutional forces, and they also tend to downplay the material dimension of organizational practices. Drawing on sociomaterial theory, I propose a new definition of hybridization as being a process by which unique practices emerge in local subsidiaries from the entanglement of the social and the material at Headquarters and in local subsidiaries. This definition allowed me to identify two new hybrid performance management practices in the four Chinese entities of the MNE under investigation which I have called the "harmonious Confucian"

PM practice and the "harmonious instrumental" PM practice. This contributes to cross-cultural literature by developing the concept of "harmony", which is central in Confucian philosophy but has received relatively scant attention compared with the concepts of "Mianzi", which refer to the strong reluctance of losing face in China [START_REF] Bozionelos | An investigation on the attitudes of Chinese workers towards individually based performance-related reward systems[END_REF], or "Guanxi", "A special kind of relationship, characterized by implicit rules, both of obligation and reciprocity" (Lu, Jia, & Heisey, 2002, p.1252). I also show that these two unique hybrid practices are driven not only by a social process, but also by the entanglement of the social and the material [START_REF] Leonardi | Theoretical foundations for the study of sociomateriality[END_REF]Leonardi, Nardi & Kallinikos, 2012). Indeed, these two opposing practices, similar neither to headquarters PM practices nor to traditional Chinese PM practices, are two unique local solutions resulting from the seminal ambiguity of the headquarters PM process between its control and development purposes.

In the last chapter, I conceptualize a multilevel sociomaterial approach to the transnational transfer of HRM practices in MNEs. This doctoral thesis is indeed divided into three major chapters, which may be read as three independent research articles. However, the overall epistemological approach is based on grounded theory [START_REF] Glaser | Basics of grounded theory analysis: Emergence vs forcing[END_REF][START_REF] Strauss | Grounded theory methodology[END_REF], and

the three chapters are closely related. In the first chapter, I mainly use sociomaterial theory at the micro level to explore the entanglement of individual and material agency during the transnational transfer and adoption of HRM practices. In the second chapter, I use sociomaterial theory to investigate the evolution and hybridization of practices across a ten-year period at the meso level.

The last Chapter stems directly from the two previous empirical chapters. It is a first attempt to gather these theoretical results and provide an integrated multilevel model, by expanding another central concept to sociomaterial theory: the notion of "apparatus" [START_REF] Orlikowski | What happens when evaluation goes online? Exploring apparatuses of valuation in the travel sector[END_REF].

As highlighted by [START_REF] Foucault | Power/knowledge: Selected interviews and other writings[END_REF] and Actor Network theorists [START_REF] Callon | Some elements of a sociology of translation: domestication of the scallops and the fishermen of St Brieuc Bay[END_REF][START_REF] Latour | Reassembling the social: An introduction to actor-network-theory[END_REF], the concept of apparatus draws our attention to the role played by human but also "nonhuman" actors in organizational practices. In an IB context, seeing the transnational transfer of HRM practices as a sociomaterial apparatus makes the co-construction of knowledge and the power game between headquarters and subsidiaries more clearly visible [START_REF] Aggeri | Qu'est-ce qu'un dispositif stratégique[END_REF][START_REF] Townley | Foucault, power/knowledge, and its relevance for human resource management[END_REF].

By using the notion of apparatus, I also suggest a new definition of HRM practices in MNEs as the unique ways of conducting HRM activities and using HRM knowledge resulting from the inextricable entanglement of the social and the material between headquarters and local subsidiaries. I therefore contribute directly to the IB literature, but I also expand the study field of sociomaterial theory to IHRM practices and show that sociomaterial theory can contribute to macro analysis.

Chapter Resource Management (HRM) practices in their home country and they naturally tend to transfer them to their subsidiaries in order to gain a competitive advantage in local markets [START_REF] Jensen | Stickiness and the adaptation of organizational practices in cross-border knowledge transfers[END_REF]. However, MNEs face strong extra-organizational pressures. They operate in multiple environments [START_REF] Gligor | Building international business theory: A grounded theory approach[END_REF] and it is uncertain whether home-country HRM practices fit with local economic, cultural and institutional needs [START_REF] Dowling | International human resource management: Managing people in a multinational context[END_REF][START_REF] Tarique | International Human Resource Management: Policies and Practices for Multinational Enterprises[END_REF]. Furthermore, MNEs, whether they are characterized by a

Global, a Multi-Domestic or a Transnational structure, also face strong intra-organizational tensions between the need for both global integration and local responsiveness [START_REF] Bartlett | Managing across borders: The transnational corporation[END_REF] Harzing, 2007;[START_REF] Shadur | The adoption of international best practices in a Western culture: East meets West[END_REF]. On the other hand, divergence theorists advocate that local employees tend to adapt global HRM practices or use local HRM practices because they fit local cultural and institutional needs better [START_REF] Brewster | Towards a'European'model of human resource management[END_REF][START_REF] Rosenzweig | Influences on human resource management practices in multinational corporations[END_REF][START_REF] Tregaskis | Converging or diverging? A comparative analysis of trends in contingent employment practice in Europe over a decade[END_REF][START_REF] Whitley | Business systems in East Asia: Firms, markets and societies[END_REF].

After the seminal work of [START_REF] Kostova | Transnational transfer of strategic organizational practices: A contextual perspective[END_REF], the focus shifted, however, toward intraorganizational pressures. In particular, Kostova highlighted that the central question of the transfer and the adoption of organizational practices concerns not only the formal implementation processes, but also how local employees fully adopt or "internalize" global organizational practice, meaning to what extent they perceive it as bringing added value to their daily work. MNEs face strong external pressure to adapt to the local environment. However, they also encounter strong intra-organizational pressure to transfer their most successful home-country organizational practices. This tension leads individuals to implement organizational practices without fully adopting them and to engage in ceremonial practices, meaning that they formally comply with the requirements from the parent company but do not see them as valuable [START_REF] Kostova | Transnational transfer of strategic organizational practices: A contextual perspective[END_REF][START_REF] Kostova | Adoption of an organizational practice by subsidiaries of multinational corporations: Institutional and relational effects[END_REF].

Notwithstanding their important contribution, cultural and institutional theories have left some questions unanswered. Firstly, cultural and institutional theories mainly focus on the extraorganizational pressures at play during the adoption process. Kostava and recent Institutionalist researchers have shifted our attention towards intra-organizational pressures, but it is necessary to better observe practices in use at the micro level [START_REF] Värlander | Enacting a constellation of logics: How transferred practices are recontextualized in a global organization[END_REF], as the adoption of HRM practices is by definition enacted by individuals. The role of individual agency in countries with very different cultures and institutions, and in complex organisational structures such as MNEs, requires particular attention [START_REF] Gamble | Transferring organizational practices and the dynamics of hybridization: Japanese retail multinationals in China[END_REF]. Secondly, cross-cultural and institutional theories mainly focus on the social dimension of HRM practices, meaning how social constructs such as culture and institutions shape individual and group behaviors. They tend to be less concerned with the technical dimension of organizational practices [START_REF] Yu | Building a process model of local adaptation of practices: A study of Six Sigma implementation in Korean and US firms[END_REF], and this runs contrary to what has emerged from our longitudinal case-study design.

To investigate the adoption process of HRM practices, we therefore suggest using Sociomaterial theory [START_REF] De Vaujany | If these walls could talk: The mutual construction of organizational space and legitimacy[END_REF]Leonardi, Nardi & Kallinikos, 2012;[START_REF] Orlikowski | Sociomaterial practices: Exploring technology at work[END_REF][START_REF] Orlikowski | 10 sociomateriality: challenging the separation of technology, work and organization[END_REF], which has recently gained in popularity in organizational studies.

Sociomaterial theory proposes, in particular, to pay equal attention to both the social and the material dimensions of organizational practices, and this leads us to suggest that the adoption of global HRM Practices by local employees results from the sociomaterial process by which individual and material agencies are entangled in MNEs.

By combining the International Human Resources Management (IHRM) and the sociomaterial literatures, our main contribution is to propose a new theoretical framework for the adoption of HRM practices, and to bring materiality back into the discussion. Furthermore, we

intend not only to build on these two streams of literature but also to challenge them to move from a multidisciplinary to a truly interdisciplinary perspective [START_REF] Doz | Qualitative research for international business[END_REF]. Hence the international setting of this research also contributes to the enrichment of sociomaterial theory, and to the notion of individual and material agencies in particular. Lastly, our theoretical framework is built from a longitudinal case study investigation of Performance Management (PM) practices in four Chinese entities of a large chemical MNE [START_REF] Eisenhardt | Building theories from case study research[END_REF], and a further contribution of this research is thus to give a voice to managers and to conceptualize issues from the standpoint of the actors at work [START_REF] Doz | Qualitative research for international business[END_REF][START_REF] Gligor | Building international business theory: A grounded theory approach[END_REF].

In the first section of this article, we review the issues surrounding the adoption of HRM practices, building both on IHRM and sociomaterial literature. We then describe our in-depth case study research design. The subsequent sections introduce our theoretical model and consist of indepth analyses of our interviews and archival data. Finally, we discuss our findings and offer some concluding remarks on the theoretical and managerial implications of our research, as well as on its limitations.

THEORETICAL FRAMING 1.2.1 The adoption of global HRM practices in MNEs

The diffusion and adoption of organizational practices around the world is a classic management topic [START_REF] Rogers | Diffusion of innovations[END_REF]. However, research on the adoption and adaptation of HRM practices by local employees is relatively new [START_REF] Yu | Building a process model of local adaptation of practices: A study of Six Sigma implementation in Korean and US firms[END_REF]. It originates from the longstanding debate between convergence and divergence theorists. On the one hand, convergence theorists argue that MNEs face strong extra-organizational pressures, which incite them to standardize their HRM practices [START_REF] Shadur | The adoption of international best practices in a Western culture: East meets West[END_REF][START_REF] Pudelko | Country-of-origin, localization, or dominance effect? An empirical investigation of HRM practices in foreign subsidiaries[END_REF][START_REF] Edwards | Global standardization or national differentiation of HRM practices in multinational companies? A comparison of multinationals in five countries[END_REF]. According to convergence theorists, cross-cultural and institutional pressures are either converging towards the same model or are relatively weak. For instance, it is commonly agreed that individualism is on the rise around the world [START_REF] Oyserman | Rethinking individualism and collectivism: evaluation of theoretical assumptions and meta-analyses[END_REF]. Chinese managers now act more independently [START_REF] Cooke | Human resource management in China: New trends and practices[END_REF] and adopt Western HRM practices, such as individually based performance-rated reward systems [START_REF] Froese | Work values, job satisfaction and organizational commitment in China[END_REF]. From an Institutionalist perspective, Björkman and his colleagues (2008) also advocate that coercive pressure from the Chinese government has been rather weak towards MNEs since the economic reform launched by Deng Xiaoping. Moreover, labor laws, such as the three personnel reforms in 1992 and the 1994 Labor Law, have encouraged organizations to implement labor contracts, performance-linked rewards systems and contributory social insurance [START_REF] Cooke | Human resource management in China: New trends and practices[END_REF][START_REF] Warner | Reassessing human resource management 'with Chinese characteristics': an overview[END_REF], thus reinforcing the standardization trend.

On the other hand, the divergence theorists insist on the unique cultural and institutional contexts that drive MNEs to adapt to their local environment [START_REF] Rosenzweig | Influences on human resource management practices in multinational corporations[END_REF].

According to them, HRM practices, compared to other management practices, are more deeply constrained by local rules and regulations, as well as the local culture. Brewster and many European scholars argue that HRM practices remain specific because of state involvement in particular [START_REF] Brewster | Towards a'European'model of human resource management[END_REF][START_REF] Tregaskis | Converging or diverging? A comparative analysis of trends in contingent employment practice in Europe over a decade[END_REF]. As a consequence, local employees and HR managers are constrained to adapt worldwide best practices before using them in their everyday working life.

Convergence and divergence theorists have deeply enriched our understanding of the adoption of global HRM practices by local employees of MNEs. They have especially well described and explained the role played by cultural and institutional contexts. There remain though a number of major theoretical gaps. Firstly, there is still no consensus between convergence and divergence theorists, even among the most prominent scholars in the IB field. As a result, the concept of Hybrid practices has recently emerged to go beyond this opposition [START_REF] Chung | South Korean MNEs' international HRM approach: Hybridization of global standards and local practices[END_REF][START_REF] Davila | Humanistic leadership: Lessons from Latin America[END_REF][START_REF] Gamble | Transferring organizational practices and the dynamics of hybridization: Japanese retail multinationals in China[END_REF][START_REF] Yahiaoui | Hybridization: striking a balance between adoption and adaptation of human resource management practices in French multinational corporations and their Tunisian subsidiaries[END_REF]. Hybrid HRM practices were first defined as organizational practices which were neither totally similar to HRM homecountry practices nor HRM host-country practices (Harzing & Pinnington, 2010). Although innovative, this definition was somehow elusive and scholars suggested a more sophisticated approach to hybrid practices, not as a simple "juxtaposition of home-and host-country effects" (2010, p. 706), but as "the emergence of distinctive configurations that may depart from both homebased templates and local practices" (Elger & Smith, 2005, p. 362). This new approach highlights that creating and adapting global HRM practices is now central for MNEs. However, how and why people adapt HRM practices, and what the role played by individual agency is [START_REF] Gamble | Transferring organizational practices and the dynamics of hybridization: Japanese retail multinationals in China[END_REF] remains unclear. Secondly, earlier convergence theorists [START_REF] Kerr | Industrialism and industrial man[END_REF] had strongly highlighted the role of technology in the adoption process of management practices worldwide. They argued in particular that local employees adopt global organizational practices because they see them as more rational and scientifically based. However, this technical dimension of HRM practices has received relatively scant attention in recent years.

Furthermore, MNEs do not only face strong external pressure. They also face strong intraorganizational pressure during the transnational transfer of HRM practices. Local subsidiaries naturally tend to replicate the most successful home-country practices of MNEs to gain a competitive advantage on the local market [START_REF] Jensen | Stickiness and the adaptation of organizational practices in cross-border knowledge transfers[END_REF]). However, they may not fit with local needs and local employees are therefore likely to engage in ceremonial practices, meaning they formally comply with the requirements issued by the parent company but do not see them as valuable [START_REF] Kostova | Transnational transfer of strategic organizational practices: A contextual perspective[END_REF][START_REF] Kostova | Adoption of an organizational practice by subsidiaries of multinational corporations: Institutional and relational effects[END_REF]. Decoupling between internal and external needs in order to maintain legitimacy is typical of large organizations [START_REF] Meyer | Institutionalized organizations: Formal structure as myth and ceremony[END_REF], but the process is even more crucial in MNEs. As MNEs face strong tensions between the need for global integration and the need for local adaptation [START_REF] Bartlett | Managing across borders: The transnational corporation[END_REF], local employees are even less likely to perceive home-country practices as adding value to their daily work and to become committed to them [START_REF] Kostova | Adoption of an organizational practice by subsidiaries of multinational corporations: Institutional and relational effects[END_REF].

Building strong relational social capital between key actors at the MNE headquarters and in the local branches is therefore especially important for the adoption of HRM practices [START_REF] Ahlvik | Towards explaining subsidiary implementation, integration, and internalization of MNC headquarters HRM practices[END_REF]. The role of the local General Manager, and how he or she values HRM practices is highly significant [START_REF] Björkman | The determinants of line management internalisation of HRM practices in MNC subsidiaries[END_REF]. The number of expatriates in the host unit, as well as the strength of the legal and trust relationships between the home and the host unit, strongly impact the adoption of global HRM practices by local units [START_REF] Rosenzweig | Influences on human resource management practices in multinational corporations[END_REF]. [START_REF] Kostova | Transnational transfer of strategic organizational practices: A contextual perspective[END_REF] and neo-Institutionalist scholars have made a huge contribution to the research on the adoption of HRM practices. They have highlighted in particular the fact that the internalization, and not only the implementation, of organizational practices is central to the transnational transfer process. They have shifted the focus of research towards intra-organizational pressures. However, along with convergence and divergence theorists, they tend to minimize the technical and material dimension of HRM practices [START_REF] Yu | Building a process model of local adaptation of practices: A study of Six Sigma implementation in Korean and US firms[END_REF]. Kostova highlights the symbolic dimension of organizational practices: "a meaning that goes beyond technical efficiency" (Kostova, 1999, p. 310). She defines the adoption or "internalization" of organizational practices as a "state in which the employees at the recipient unit attach symbolic meaning to the practice" (Kostova, 1999, p. 311). We advocate, on the contrary, that HRM practices are infused by both social and technical dimensions. HRM practices include a wide range of tools and technical dimensions: compensation and benefits software, online-recruitment platforms or HR forms and procedures such as performance appraisal forms, 360-degree evaluation processes, and talent management programs. From an ontological perspective, most HRM practices are fundamentally a means to an end, or what Heidegger defines as a technological and instrumental way to "being in the world" [START_REF] Heidegger | The question concerning technology, and other essays[END_REF]. Most HRM practices aim at increasing individual performance in order to ultimately foster organizational performance [START_REF] Huselid | The impact of human resource management practices on turnover, productivity, and corporate financial performance[END_REF]. It is therefore impossible to fully understand the adoption of HRM practices without paying careful attention to their material and technological dimensions.

The Sociomaterial approach to the adoption of HRM practices

The origin of Sociomaterial theory [START_REF] Leonardi | Theoretical foundations for the study of sociomateriality[END_REF][START_REF] Orlikowski | Sociomaterial practices: Exploring technology at work[END_REF] can be traced back to the work of [START_REF] Callon | Some elements of a sociology of translation: domestication of the scallops and the fishermen of St Brieuc Bay[END_REF] and [START_REF] Latour | Reassembling the social: An introduction to actor-network-theory[END_REF] and the work of the Tavistok Institute of Human Relations in the 1950s. It was first developed in the field of Information Systems (IS), but it offers new theoretical perspectives on organizational practices and Sociomaterial theory has rapidly gained in popularity in organizational studies [START_REF] Orlikowski | What happens when evaluation goes online? Exploring apparatuses of valuation in the travel sector[END_REF][START_REF] De Vaujany | If these walls could talk: The mutual construction of organizational space and legitimacy[END_REF]. Surprisingly, until now it has received only scant attention in the IHRM field though. The astonishment of [START_REF] Orlikowski | 10 sociomateriality: challenging the separation of technology, work and organization[END_REF] that technology is everywhere but is largely absent from management literature can be extended to the IB field.

Contrary to Cross-cultural and Institutional theories, Sociomaterial theory assumes that it is necessary to pay equal attention to the social and the material to investigate organizational practices. "The social and the material are considered to be inextricably related. There is no social that is not also material, and no material that is not also social" [START_REF] Orlikowski | Sociomaterial practices: Exploring technology at work[END_REF](Orlikowski, , p. 1437)).

Originally, Sociomaterial theory first investigated Information System practices. Information

System practices, such as using and implementing Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems, manifestly require numerous advanced technologies. Their materiality is highly visible. However, the sociomaterial concept of "materiality" is not limited to new information technologies alone.

According to Sociomaterial theorists, materiality is "the arrangement of artifacts' physical and/or digital materials into particular forms that endure across differences in place and time and are important to users" (Leonardi, 2012, p. 42). It includes tools, instruments, objects, texts, times, and places [START_REF] Orlikowski | What happens when evaluation goes online? Exploring apparatuses of valuation in the travel sector[END_REF], and materiality can therefore be safely extended to HRM practices. As highlighted by Yu and Zaheer (2010, p. 480), HRM practices also refer "to particular techniques, methodologies, and guidelines that practice users are supposed to use". HRM practices do not only include material artifacts, they are deeply infused with a technical dimension, meaning they imply "an external referent; that is, a tangible object in the real world with which they correspond" (Rosenzweig & Nohria, 1994, p. 30).

Secondly, sociomaterial theory assumes that organizational practices come from the entanglement of the social and the material [START_REF] Leonardi | Materiality, sociomateriality, and socio-technical systems: What do these terms mean? How are they different? Do we need them[END_REF], meaning they result both from individual and material agencies. Organizational practices are "the space in which multiple human (social) agencies and material agencies are imbricated" (Leonardi, 2012, p. 42). Organizational practices are commonly defined in the IB field "as the routine use of organizational knowledge" (Szulanski, 1996, p. 28). However, when Szulanski assumes that organizational practices also have "a tacit component, embedded partly in individual skills and partly in collaborative social arrangements", he merely emphasizes the social dimension of organizational practices. When Kostova (1999, p. 309) defines "organizational practices as particular ways of conducting organizational functions that have evolved over time under the influence of an organization's history, people, interests, and actions and that have become institutionalized in the organization", she also mainly emphasizes the social dimension of organizational practices. However, HRM practices, such as the extent of employee benefits, the use of bonuses to compensate managers, or the amount of employee training [START_REF] Rosenzweig | Influences on human resource management practices in multinational corporations[END_REF], all require the use of technology such as salary surveys, consolidated reports, HR forms and procedures. They are all based on knowledge resulting from materiality.

According to Sociomaterial theory, organizational practices results both from social and material agencies. Hence, the adoption of organizational practices does not result only from the willingness of individuals or how they make sense of their cultural and institutional environment. It also results from the constraints and opportunities enabled by materiality. Both human and material agencies have the capacity to act independently. They "differ phenomenologically with respect to intention" (Leonardi, 2012, p. 37), meaning that material agency, contrary to human agency, cannot set goals and have the volition to achieve them. But material entities have their own performativity and may act without direct human involvement. The social agency of individuals in an international context has been extensively investigated in the IB filed. But material agency, "ways in which technology's materiality acts" (Leonardi, 2012, p. 42) has received only scant attention. Materiality both constrains organizational practices, but also enables affordances, meaning possibilities for action based on the context in which they are used [START_REF] Leonardi | When flexible routines meet flexible technologies: Affordance, constraint, and the imbrication of human and material agencies[END_REF][START_REF] Faraj | The materiality of technology: An affordance perspective[END_REF]. Magic quadrants, frequently used by information technology Vendors [START_REF] Pollock | Ranking devices: The socio-materiality of ratings. Materiality and organizing: Social interaction in a technological world[END_REF] or management scholars, are ranking devices that not only simplify the amount of knowledge, but also add knowledge by inferring that all the dots including in the quadrant (employees, managers, small or large companies) are equal. Standard assessment tools or on-line evaluation platforms constrain and enable opportunities for action in the hospitality industry [START_REF] Orlikowski | What happens when evaluation goes online? Exploring apparatuses of valuation in the travel sector[END_REF].

Sociomaterial theory offers new perspectives to investigate the adoption of organizational [START_REF] Aguinis | Performance management[END_REF][START_REF] Gilbert | L'évaluation de la performance individuelle[END_REF][START_REF] St-Onge | Gestion des performances au travail: bilan des connaissances[END_REF], are only a part of all HRM practices. However, they appear to us as having sufficient depth and breadth to be theoretically generalizable to HRM practices as a whole [START_REF] Yin | Case study research: Design and methods[END_REF]. PM is one of the most strategic areas of HRM [START_REF] Aguinis | Performance management[END_REF] in the sense that all PM practices require to be aligned with organizational objectives. PM is also directly related to many other HRM practices, as the process starts from the recruitment of employees and continues right up to their departure, thus including compensation & benefits, as well as training and development activities [START_REF] Aguinis | Performance management[END_REF].

On the one hand, our sample is an extreme case [START_REF] Patton | Qualitative evaluation and research methods[END_REF]. The cultural and institutional distance between China and Western countries is high [START_REF] Hofstede | Cultures and Organizations: Software of the Mind, revised and expanded 3rd ed[END_REF][START_REF] Jullien | A treatise on efficacy: Between Western and Chinese thinking[END_REF][START_REF] Warner | Reassessing human resource management 'with Chinese characteristics': an overview[END_REF]. This is helpful, as extreme case studies help to make organizational patterns more visible [START_REF] Eisenhardt | Building theories from case study research[END_REF][START_REF] Yin | Case study research: Design and methods[END_REF]). However, cross-cultural and institutional differences are likely to be more salient in our data. On the other hand, our sample also has some typical characteristics that may increase the transferability of our findings [START_REF] Lincoln | Naturalistic inquiry[END_REF].

Our data have been collected within an organization referred to as "Kemike" to protect anonymity, which can be described as a typical transnational company [START_REF] Harzing | An empirical analysis and extension of the Bartlett and Ghoshal typology of multinational companies[END_REF]. Its historical headquarters are located in France but the company's sales also concern Europe, the USA and Asia.

The company employs more than 19 000 employees in 50 countries and generated a revenue of €7.7 billion in 2015. It has more than 2900 employees in China, with its main industrial platform worldwide located near Shanghai. The company went through the 4 typical stages of an MNE's development abroad [START_REF] Tarique | International Human Resource Management: Policies and Practices for Multinational Enterprises[END_REF]; and the history of Kemike in China is especially representative of the internationalization of MNEs.

Our purpose is to investigate HRM practices from the standpoint of the local employees in particular, and a qualitative research design appeared especially appropriate to us. "Qualitative research is great for addressing "how" questions-rather than "how many"; for understanding the world from the perspective of those studied" (Pratt, 2009, p. 856). A longitudinal design was also crucial to our research, as it allowed us to observe institutional and cultural changes over time [START_REF] Tregaskis | Converging or diverging? A comparative analysis of trends in contingent employment practice in Europe over a decade[END_REF]. Between 2005 and 2015, the socioeconomic environment of China went through several major external and internal changes and this relatively long observation period helped to enhance a holistic understanding of PM practices.

Secondly, our methodological strategy was to echo the practice lens advocated by [START_REF] Orlikowski | 10 sociomateriality: challenging the separation of technology, work and organization[END_REF] to gain a richer understanding of the boundaries between people, activities and tools in organizations. Under this perspective, the boundaries and the objectives of strategies or technologies are constantly redesigned at all levels of the organization. In return, practices constantly redefine the way strategies and technologies are enacted and evolve. This is what emerged clearly from our data. Throughout our 10-year observation period, the PM system of the organization was gradually enriched or diminished, with the introduction or failure of new tools such as retention programs and talent management programs as detailed hereinafter in Table 2. We also deliberately decided to focus on the way global HRM practices were adopted or not by local employees. We could have investigated how PM practices were formally designed by top management and then transferred to the local units, however, our practice lens approach [START_REF] Orlikowski | 10 sociomateriality: challenging the separation of technology, work and organization[END_REF]) led us to focus on emergent local practices.

Lastly, it is important to note that we initially adopted the theoretical framing of this paper for the sake of clarity, but that the overall epistemological framework of the research is abductive, meaning that the theoretical ideas were developed throughout the unfolding investigation and mapping of the case [START_REF] Shepherd | Inductive top-down theorizing: A source of new theories of organization[END_REF]. We used grounded theory methods [START_REF] Strauss | Grounded theory methodology[END_REF] to make sense of our data, and endeavoured to constantly go back and forth between data and theory [START_REF] Eisenhardt | Building theories from case study research[END_REF][START_REF] Yin | Case study research: Design and methods[END_REF]. We began our observations in 2005, by simply investigating how local Chinese employees made sense of PM practices. Subsequently, the concept of technology and sociomaterial theory gradually emerged as the best way to conceptualize what we observed, and we reached theoretical saturation [START_REF] Glaser | The Discovery of Grounded Theory : Strategies for Qualitative Research[END_REF]) after coding our second major round of interviews in 2016. It was thus that we came to suggest the theoretical model outlined in the current research. The overall theme for the two sets of semi-structured interviews was the evaluation of performance at work (see appendices for more details). In 2012, the interviews were designed to address the informal and formal performance evaluation of the individuals both as managers and as people being managed. In 2015, we changed the design of the interviews slightly in order to gain a deeper understanding of what we were investigating and also to improve the quality and the depth of the interviews. As is the nature of abductive theory, the specific concepts of performance management and technology emerged gradually throughout our investigation, and we therefore decided to focus more on the adoption of PM tools. However, we endeavored to avoid asking direct questions about PM tools in order to allow the informants themselves to refer to them or not.

Data Collection

Keeping in mind our practical lens perspective, we more specifically asked questions such as: "How do you concretely measure the performance of your team members, or how do you concretely develop the performance and skills of your team members?"

Data Analysis

Fifty-two out of the fifty-nine interviews were recorded (3123 minutes) and transcribed (1350 pages). The data was analyzed by two researchers using NVivo software in order to construct a taxonomy of categories emanating from both the field and the literature review. We started by processing (1) template coding [START_REF] King | Template analysis[END_REF], meaning coding according to the research templates.

We first coded classic cultural and institutional dimensions associated with China, such as Guanxi [START_REF] Chua | Guanxi vs networking: Distinctive configurations of affect-and cognition-based trust in the networks of Chinese vs American managers[END_REF] or Mianzi [START_REF] Bozionelos | An investigation on the attitudes of Chinese workers towards individually based performance-related reward systems[END_REF], as well as different strategies to appropriate HRM practices (localization vs standardization). We also coded the different purposes of PM (developmental, control or administrative) as described in the PM literature [START_REF] Cleveland | Multiple uses of performance appraisal: Prevalence and correlates[END_REF]. We then developed (2) axial coding, [START_REF] Strauss | Grounded theory methodology[END_REF] by uncovering relationships among subcategories grounded in the field and adding or disconfirming the previous ones. Going back and forth between theory and data, the materiality of PM practices and the structural tension between the need for global integration and the need for local responsiveness of transnational companies [START_REF] Bartlett | Managing across borders: The transnational corporation[END_REF]) steadily emerged as central concepts in our analysis. Finally, we processed (3) emergent coding [START_REF] Eisenhardt | Building theories from case study research[END_REF][START_REF] Yin | Case study research: Design and methods[END_REF], meaning generating a more parsimonious theory by identifying the categories and subcategories of variables that affect PM practices. Hence, the multilevel entanglement of the material and the social dimensions of PM practices emerged as the best way to conceptualize and interpret our data. The idea that the adoption of Global HRM practices results from a sociomaterial process gradually appeared in our data while, day after day, we noticed that Kemike employees referred to HRM practices as a technology, meaning as practices infused with techniques based on scientific principles. HRM practices are not the result of purely deductive and scientific processes, such as mathematics or physics. However, neither are they the results of solely hands-on techniques that are socially improved over time. HRM practices are characterized by the mutual penetration of technique and science (Chiapello & Gilbert, 2013). Some employees doubt the scientific nature of HRM practices, but this criticism, in their minds, only strengthens the idea that practices should be

1.4.FINDINGS [In

scientific. HRM practices emerge from the tension between what is perceived as universally true

and what is perceived as a social construction over time. [START_REF] Murphy | Understanding performance appraisal: Social, organizational, and goal-based perspectives[END_REF]. At Kemike China, the local employees commonly and spontaneously referred to 5 major practices when talking about PM practices: the annual performance review, variable remuneration, the Special Benefit Scheme (SBS), the outstanding performance award program and the Talent Management program.

As with many MNEs, even transnational ones, the overall PM process in Kemike is initiated by the headquarters. The control purpose largely prevails. "Management by objective" [START_REF] Locke | The determinants of goal commitment[END_REF] is the overall philosophy of the whole system as pointed out by managers: "I pages versus 2 pages in the headquarters. See appendices for more details).

While the headquarters initiates the overall PM process, local units contribute though to initiate some specific local practices. Year after year, new PM practices and tools have gradually emerged in the different local units and the whole process has sometimes changed drastically from one unit to another. In 2004, just after the spin-off from the Oil and Gas parent company, the regional headquarters and the industrial platforms 1 and 2 of Kemike had relatively similar PM systems (as described in Table 2). They were all based on annual performance reviews and a standard compensation and benefits policy, including a yearly salary increase and a bonus.

However, over time the industrial platform 1 developed to include an outstanding performance awards program (in 2007), and a mentoring program (in 2008). By doing so, they not only developed new tools, but also redirected the whole process towards development purposes. On the contrary, the regional headquarters developed a retention program for managers aiming at control purposes. This program, based on seniority, was a much more traditional, hierarchically oriented way to manage individual performance. "The Kemike China Special Benefit Scheme (SBS) is a financial benefit for the middle and senior-level managers. It aims at rewarding and retaining the key contributors of the company by giving them benefits related to their loyalty to the company" (Extract from the SBS handbook, 2006). The regional headquarters also attempted, unsuccessfully, to implement a variable remuneration scheme for executive managers as well as more discriminating rewards for employees. As for the industrial platform 2, they didn't launch any other significant PM practices. As a consequence, and although the guidelines from the headquarters were the same for all the Chinese units, each entity "translated" [START_REF] Callon | Some elements of a sociology of translation: domestication of the scallops and the fishermen of St Brieuc Bay[END_REF][START_REF] Latour | Reassembling the social: An introduction to actor-network-theory[END_REF] PM tools according to their own needs, resulting in different "materialities" of practices.

The social context (extra-and intra-organizational pressures)

We've reached out to them [regional headquarters] for some talent management exchange, but On the one hand, there are several institutional and cultural pressures that are liable to influence the adoption of Global PM practices by local employees of MNEs in China. Regarding institutional pressures, the regulatory pressure has been rather weak on MNEs in China since the economic reform launched by Deng Xiaoping [START_REF] Björkman | Changes in institutional context and MNC operations in China: Subsidiary HRM practices in 1996 versus 2006[END_REF]. This strengthens the standardization of HRM practices and we noted no legal constraint on PM practices at Kemike

China. But at the same time, over recent years the overall labor legislation has steadily become ever more demanding for MNEs in China. The government implemented a new Labour Contract Law [START_REF] Warner | Reassessing human resource management 'with Chinese characteristics': an overview[END_REF] and an Immigration Law in 2008 and 2013 respectively. The legislation concerning the internal passport (Hukou) also imposes constraints on MNEs, and several of the executive managers highlighted that all these legal constraints are slowing down the internal mobility of local employees. This indirectly impedes the companies in developing their talent management programs based on national and regional mobilities (Stokes, Liu, Smith, Leidner, Moore & Rowland, 2015).

We identified several national cultural dimensions, which may lead people to both deviate from and at the same time to formally move towards headquarters' recommendations. According to headquarters' recommendations PM should be based on "open discussion". However, there are many evaluation situations at Kemike China in which managers and subordinates use a typical

Chinese indirect communication style [START_REF] Sun | Organization development and change in Chinese state-owned enterprises: a human resource perspective[END_REF][START_REF] Tsai | Exploring the factors associated with employees' perceived appraisal accuracy: a study of Chinese state-owned enterprises[END_REF] and very marked hierarchical distancing (see appendices for further details). Cultural components may, however, also lead people to adopt PM practices in line with headquarters' requirements. Although we paid particular attention to other typical Chinese cross-cultural differences such as uncertainty avoidance, long-term orientation [START_REF] Hofstede | Cultures and Organizations: Software of the Mind, revised and expanded 3rd ed[END_REF] Mianzi, and Guanxi [START_REF] Froese | Work values, job satisfaction and organizational commitment in China[END_REF][START_REF] Zhang | When is pay for performance related to employee creativity in the Chinese context? The role of guanxi HRM practice, trust in management, and intrinsic motivation[END_REF], we did not notice any significant impact on how people make PM practices their own. [START_REF] Bozionelos | An investigation on the attitudes of Chinese workers towards individually based performance-related reward systems[END_REF] advance that the influence of Guanxi and Mianzi on performance evaluation may result in very low differentiation of employees in respect to their performance, and we did notice the reluctance of managers to make discriminations among their subordinates. None, however, either directly or indirectly mentioned the influence of Mianzi or Guanxi. This does not mean that these cultural dimensions may not potentially impact how Chinese people internalize PM practices, but we suggest that an indirect communication style and marked hierarchical distances between managers and subordinates are significantly more likely to influence the adoption of Kemike's PM practices than any other cultural dimensions because the PM process at Kemike is fundamentally designed as a control process. The material component of PM and how top management design PM practices set the social boundaries and cultural dimensions for individuals to make sense of the whole process [START_REF] Orlikowski | Sociomaterial practices: Exploring technology at work[END_REF].

The transfer of HRM practices also results from a social process between headquarters and subsidiaries. As Kemike is a transnational MNE [START_REF] Bartlett | Managing across borders: The transnational corporation[END_REF], the transfer is the result of neither a mere ethnocentric and top-down process nor, on the contrary, a mere polycentric and bottom-up process. It results from a collaborative process between entities. For instance, each year the budget for salary increase and bonuses is negotiated between the regional headquarters and the global head office. Most HRM projects, such as a new program designed for talent, go back and forth between the global headquarters and the local subsidiaries.

However, this social process is constrained by the organizational structure of the MNE. The more heavily local units are dependent on their parent unit in terms of financial, technological and human resources, the less likely they are to enact local initiatives [START_REF] Björkman | Transferring HR practices within multinational corporations[END_REF][START_REF] Kostova | Transnational transfer of strategic organizational practices: A contextual perspective[END_REF][START_REF] Rosenzweig | Influences on human resource management practices in multinational corporations[END_REF]. Hence, although the regional head-office is relatively independent from the global headquarters, it remains strongly dependent on the different business units' headquarters located all around the world. Similarly, Kemike's industrial platforms 2 and 3 have only loose relationships with the headquarters, but they are strongly dependent on their business units. Consequently, many initiatives from the regional headquarters have failed, and industrial platforms 2 and 3 have not yet launched any significant local initiatives.

"One thing we haven't done so far is the succession plan part. It is one of our major projects but it's kind of difficult because Kemike is managed by BU and each BU is very independent.

Some of them have even their own succession plans. (China HRD, 2012)

We were part of the group but we were still an independent entity -The only interaction with the group was at the President's level to get budget approval … there was no day-to-day interaction with the group … We had their forms and we used them, but nobody was rigorously

trained. (GM of an industrial unit, 2015)

If MNEs have a Multi-domestic organizational structure, meaning that subsidiaries are dependent on resources but are still largely free to adapt local conditions, they are more likely to localize HRM strategies, policies, and practices. If, on the other hand, MNEs are closer to a global organizational structure, meaning that they are highly centralized, they are more likely to share the same HRM strategies, policies, and practices in all countries [START_REF] Des Horts | Vers une gestion stratégique des ressources humaines[END_REF][START_REF] Dowling | International human resource management: Managing people in a multinational context[END_REF][START_REF] Tarique | International Human Resource Management: Policies and Practices for Multinational Enterprises[END_REF]. In transnational firms such as Kemike, the transfer of HRM practices results from the relationships not only between headquarters and subsidiaries, but also between subsidiaries in different countries [START_REF] Bartlett | Managing across borders: The transnational corporation[END_REF]. Hence, Kemike's industrial platform As in any MNE, Kemike local employees perceive pressures for global integration, meaning the obligation to adopt HRM practices according to headquarters guidelines, and pressures for local responsiveness, meaning the need to adapt practices according to local situations [START_REF] Bartlett | Managing across borders: The transnational corporation[END_REF]. Furthermore, throughout our observations we also noticed that some Kemike China employees felt constrained by the materiality of PM practices. Some managers complain about their impossibility to choose real talent in their team, because the talent management program was not designed for the low-or mid-level managers. Some managers feel compelled to record facts about their employees' performance all along the year, in order to conduct the annual performance appraisal interview. Other managers wait until the end of the legal three-year employment period before dismissing poor performers. As there is a direct link between annual performance review and compensation and benefit systems, managers spend a lot of time grading their team members. Some of them also tend to give good performance grades only to make sure their employees get a high salary increase.

"Sometimes some group leaders and shift leaders prepare the hard copies (of the annual performance review) and they ask operators to sign them (without actually doing the annual performance review).

" (HR Manager of an industrial platform, 2012)

If at the end of the day the candidate who is selected to become the real big boss only depends on how close he or she is to the big boss and how much the big boss likes her or him, then what's the whole point of the PMS? (China Logistic Manager, 2012)

The employees who feel constrained by the design of PM practices tend to have a static approach to HRM tools, and to formally adopt or, on the contrary, reject global HRM practices.

They are reluctant to deviate from the original use of the HRM tools, whether they fully adopt or fully reject global practices. They have a very stable, consistent and coherent view of PM tools (Chiapello & Gilbert, 2013;[START_REF] Quattrone | What is IT?: SAP, accounting, and visibility in a multinational organisation[END_REF][START_REF] Orlikowski | 10 sociomateriality: challenging the separation of technology, work and organization[END_REF]) and perceive organizational tools as immutable. They focus on numbers, on quantifiable performance, which reinforces the materiality of PM practices. If employees, who feel constrained by the materially of PM practices, face difficulties with PM tools and do not allow themselves to deviate from standard use, they are likely to reject PM practices.

Organizational tools have their own performativity, meaning that "reality is enacted through performance" (Orlikowski & Scott, 2013, p. 12). Employees reject PM practices not only because they are not trained to use them, but because of the performativity of PM tools. When managers assess their team members, they not only check boxes or give grades, they also reward and punish according to the specific management principles embedded in the PM tools.

Criticism of PM practices is not new, whether in China, the USA or other Western countries [START_REF] Murphy | Understanding performance appraisal: Social, organizational, and goal-based perspectives[END_REF] We changed 2 years ago. I asked Production Assistants to be involved in the performance appraisal together with their Shift Leaders. They should participate in the evaluation of all the shift teams, so that they can give some (consistent)

judgment (about the 4 different teams). (HR & Admin manager of an industrial site, 2015)

At Kemike China this is typical of directors who bypass front line management. According to the headquarters guidelines, middle management should directly handle the whole PM process.

As stated in the global PM handbook, the annual performance review should be "completed and signed by the direct supervisor" and the subordinates "should perform an objective self-assessment of achievements". Managers and their direct subordinates are supposed to actively participate in the PM process to ensure that objectives can be customized and internalized, and that people are bound by what they have agreed upon [START_REF] Locke | The determinants of goal commitment[END_REF]. Thus, when directors bypass their own managers to directly evaluate front-line employees, they not only change an organizational routine in order to improve its efficiency, they move away from the very principle of the Kemike PM system.

This deviation from Global PM practices is related to the high hierarchical distance in China [START_REF] Bond | The Oxford handbook of Chinese psychology[END_REF], but only partially. Firstly, this deviation is reinforced because of the materiality of the whole process. The financial consequences of the annual performance evaluation are significant for the employees of Kemike China (0 to 2 months of bonus, and 0 to 10% of salary increase). This is the reason why people focus to such an extent on the control purpose of the process. In the industrial platform 1, which targets the developmental rather than the control purpose of PM, we did not observe as strong a deviation as in other Chinese entities. Secondly, this deviation is reinforced by the organizational structure of the entity. There is strong deviation when there is loose control from headquarters (as is the case for industrial platforms 2 and 3), together with a control orientation of the practices, and a dynamic approach by individuals.

Conversely, if employees who perceive material affordances face high pressure for global integration and high pressure for local responsiveness, they are more likely to make an innovative At Kemike China, some employees argue that the whole PM system is unfair because some managers are not well trained and are too lenient with their subordinates, despite poor performance.

As highlighted earlier, this issue is not specific to China. The greater or lesser leniency of managers is a common weakness of PM systems worldwide [START_REF] Jawahar | Where all the children are above average: The performance appraisal purpose effect[END_REF]. Companies may train their managers to better use PM tools or improve the accuracy of the measurement method to cope with this challenge [START_REF] Aguinis | Performance management[END_REF][START_REF] Murphy | Understanding performance appraisal: Social, organizational, and goal-based perspectives[END_REF]. However, we observed that some Kemike employees independently decided to adjust the materiality of the practice slightly. For example, one of the local directors decided to create his own excel sheet including a leniency grade for all his managers in order to increase or decrease the final evaluation of front-line employees.

Another decided to create a "second distribution" system, including a lump sum of money to reward his best employees. The talent manager created, on her own, a new category of Talents in Asia to better match local needs with the very dynamic career path of young talents in China. All these employees decided, by themselves, to modify the materially of the PM practices, at the same time ensuring that their deviations were agreed upon by their own managers and local HR departments.

They created a local "added value" [START_REF] Kostova | Transnational transfer of strategic organizational practices: A contextual perspective[END_REF] to fit with their operational constraints, but without changing the socially agreed-upon purpose of the practice. They created new and unique practices resulting from the entanglement of the social and the material.

1.5.DISCUSSION 1.

Theoretical Contributions

This paper considers how employees adopt and make global HRM practices their own in the local subsidiaries of MNEs. Our first contribution is to suggest four archetypes of the adoption of HRM practices: formal, ceremonial, deviant and innovative. When people are constrained by the materiality of HRM practices, meaning their approach to HR situations is limited by the forms, software or procedures they are using, and they face high pressure for global integration together with low pressure for local responsiveness, they tend to formally adopt global HRM practices. On the contrary, when people are constrained by the materiality of HRM practices and face low pressure for global integration together with low pressure for local responsiveness, they tend to develop a static understanding of PM tools and reject (or adopt only ceremonially) global HRM practices. When people perceive material affordances of HRM practices, meaning their approach to HR situations is reinforced by the forms, software or procedures they are using, and they face high pressure for global integration and low pressure for local responsiveness, they tend to develop a dynamic understanding of PM tool and to deviate from global HRM practices. Lastly, when people perceive material affordances of HRM practices and face high pressure for global integration and high pressure for local responsiveness, they tend to adopt innovative HRM practices.

Our four archetypes of appropriation are not new per se. Mcgaughey and De Cieri (1999) have already proposed four modes of adoption, which are seemingly close to ours (assimilation, integration, separation and novelty) and based on the convergence-divergence dynamics. [START_REF] Kostova | Adoption of an organizational practice by subsidiaries of multinational corporations: Institutional and relational effects[END_REF] suggest four patterns of adoption (active, minimal, assent and ceremonial) based on the extent to which local employees implement and see added value in Global practices.

However, contrary to our approach, previous research focuses on institutional and intraorganizational pressures, and most importantly, it strongly emphasizes the social dimension of the adoption process. As highlighted by Kostova and Roth (2002, p.229) "It could be theorized that, in general, depth of adoption within organizations is not necessarily driven by rational, efficiencybased decisions but can be better explained in terms of the interpretive social processes through which employees build perceptions about the efficiency of a practice".

On the contrary, the key contribution of this research is to pay equal attention to the social and material dimensions of the adoption process, and more precisely to the entanglement of the social and the material. Our 10-year-long observations confirm that adopting Global HRM practices in the local subsidiaries is an interpretative process. However, this process is not only constrained by intra-organizational pressures and the macro environment, either cultural or institutional.

Structural explanations cannot alone explain the adoption of organizational practices [START_REF] Gamble | Transferring organizational practices and the dynamics of hybridization: Japanese retail multinationals in China[END_REF]. Within the same institutional and cultural environment, people have very different approaches to HRM practices depending on how they make sense of the technological dimension of HRM practices.

The material dimension of practices constrains and sets boundaries on the interpretation of local groups and individuals. Firstly, the materiality of HRM practices may strongly vary between local units in MNEs over time. HRM practices are complex. They include a rich variety of organizational tools that evolve year after year, and the purpose of practices may vary between headquarters and local subsidiaries, and also within local subsidiaries. HRM practices are made up of a sum of managerial fads and fashions (Abrahamson, 1996;[START_REF] Abrahamson | Management fashion: Lifecycles, triggers, and collective learning processes[END_REF][START_REF] Chevalier | Cercles de qualité et changement organisationnel[END_REF] and may lose their consistency over time. This material uncertainty leaves varying degrees of room to individual agency and opportunities to adapt practices coming from the headoffice.

Secondly, the adoption of HRM practices results from the entanglement of individual (social) and material agencies [START_REF] Leonardi | When flexible routines meet flexible technologies: Affordance, constraint, and the imbrication of human and material agencies[END_REF][START_REF] Leonardi | Materiality, sociomateriality, and socio-technical systems: What do these terms mean? How are they different? Do we need them[END_REF]. In the international context, local employees have more autonomy and freedom to escape the "iron cage" and adapt global HRM practices when there is a high institutional and cultural distance between headquarters and local subsidiaries. For instance, [START_REF] Gamble | Transferring organizational practices and the dynamics of hybridization: Japanese retail multinationals in China[END_REF] reports how some expatriates adapt the global HRM practices of a Japanese MNE by developing a new approach to discipline based on yellow and red cards, because of their greater decision latitude. On the other hand, materiality has its own performativity and may constrain or expand the possibilities for action [START_REF] Leonardi | When flexible routines meet flexible technologies: Affordance, constraint, and the imbrication of human and material agencies[END_REF]. In the local subsidiaries, employees often perceive global HRM practice as more scientific, rigorous and innovative, at least at the beginning of the implementation. Depending on how they make sense of techniques and science [START_REF] Latour | We have never been modern[END_REF], local employees tend therefore to develop dynamic or static approaches to HRM tools and practices. If they have a static understanding, they will be reluctant to get away from the original design of HRM tools, leading to the formal adoption or the rejection of Global Hence, we argue that materiality should be reintroduced into the theoretical debate in order to fully understand the transnational transfer and adoption process of HRM practices. For instance, does the adaptation of global practices enhance knowledge transfer and organizational performance? The knowledge-based approach suggests that adaptation increases the difficulty of initiating, implementing, ramping-up and integrating organizational practices [START_REF] Jensen | Stickiness and the adaptation of organizational practices in cross-border knowledge transfers[END_REF][START_REF] Szulanski | Presumptive adaptation and the effectiveness of knowledge transfer[END_REF]. Cultural and institutional scholars [START_REF] Mcgaughey | Reassessment of convergence and divergence dynamics: implications for international HRM[END_REF][START_REF] Kostova | Adoption of an organizational practice by subsidiaries of multinational corporations: Institutional and relational effects[END_REF][START_REF] Björkman | Transferring HR practices within multinational corporations[END_REF][START_REF] Festing | Country Specific Profiles of Performance Management in China, Germany, and the United States-An Empirical Test[END_REF] advocate that it depends on the cultural and institutional distance between the home-and host-countries of MNEs.

However, the efficiency of the adaptation also varies according to the materiality of HRM practices.

As highlighted by [START_REF] Yu | Building a process model of local adaptation of practices: A study of Six Sigma implementation in Korean and US firms[END_REF] in their comparative study of Six Sigma implementation in Korea, successful adaptions requires conceptual, social and technical adaptation. The consideration of the timing of social and technical adaptations is crucial, and we agree that technical adaptation often comes later than social adaption, especially in the top-down transnational transfer of organizational practices.

Our Sociomaterial approach also confirms that the adoption of global practices is more nuanced than a mere top-down process. Adoption is an ongoing process, which cannot be fully anticipated by global head-offices and it results from the imbrication of social and material agencies at the micro level. Material constraints and affordances set the cognitive boundaries for individual interpretation and drive the positive (formal or innovative) or negative (rejection or deviant) adoption of HRM practices.

In conclusion,, the international context of this research also helps enrich sociomaterial theory. Firstly, it extends sociomaterial theory to a new field: IHRM. Secondly, it enriches sociomaterial concepts such as "material constraint" and "affordance". We agree with [START_REF] Hutchby | Technologies, texts and affordances[END_REF] and [START_REF] Leonardi | When flexible routines meet flexible technologies: Affordance, constraint, and the imbrication of human and material agencies[END_REF] that constraints and affordances have a relational character. Material agency exists independently from individual agency, but material constraints and affordances are perceived by individuals and result from the entanglement of individual and material agencies.

However, this research also fine-tunes our understanding of the relationship between constraints and affordances. Material constraints do not necessarily have negative outcomes. They may result in very formal adoption, which is extremely positive especially for global and ethnocentric MNEs [START_REF] Bartlett | Managing across borders: The transnational corporation[END_REF]. The central chararcteristic of material constraint is not its negative outcome, but the limitation of individual agency through a very static approach to organisational tools. Conversely, material affordances do not necessarily have positive outcomes. They may result in deviant adoption which is at odds with the original design of organizational practices. The central chararcteristic of material affordance is not its positive outcome, but the increase in action opportunities for individuals through a very dynamic approach to organisational tools.

Managerial Contributions

As they move forward in their internationalization process, MNEs need to carefully combine global and local practices [START_REF] Dowling | International human resource management: Managing people in a multinational context[END_REF][START_REF] Tarique | International Human Resource Management: Policies and Practices for Multinational Enterprises[END_REF]. Although it is necessary to

Limitations and Boundary Conditions

As with any case study design research, a potential limitation involves the possible generalization of our findings. Qualitative research, and case study research in particular, does not seek for external validity and statistical generalization, but transferability [START_REF] Lincoln | Naturalistic inquiry[END_REF] and analytical generalization [START_REF] Yin | Case study research: Design and methods[END_REF]. Our case study is extreme in the sense that it investigates China, and thus a cultural and institutional context which is very distant from that of western countries. However, from an analytical perspective, extreme case studies help to make organizational patterns more visible [START_REF] Eisenhardt | Building theories from case study research[END_REF][START_REF] Yin | Case study research: Design and methods[END_REF]). In addition, our sample is especially representative of the internationalization of MNEs, and we would assume our results to be transferable to transnational firms in other contexts. Our emphasis on the materiality of HRM practices might only be particularly relevant in less culturally and institutionally distant countries.

We also generalize our findings from PM to HRM practices. [START_REF] Rosenzweig | Influences on human resource management practices in multinational corporations[END_REF] state "HRM practices will tend to conform to local practices in the following order, starting with the one that will most closely resemble local practice: (1) Time Off; (2) Benefits;

(3) Gender

Composition; (4) Training; (5) Executive Bonus; and, (6) Participation" (Rosenzweig & Nohria, 1994, p. 232). PM practices (having either a development or a control purpose) would therefore be more likely to be standardized than practices concerning work duration and gender composition.

However, other researchers advocate that PM is one of the HRM practices for which cultural dimensions display the most enduring influence, especially because it is related to compensation and benefits that are themselves strongly related to organizational justice issues [START_REF] Cooke | Performance management 13 in China. Performance management systems: a global perspective[END_REF]. We agree that a narrow definition of PM practices represents a potential limitation on our results.

However, our research treats PM not as a single practice, but rather as a system of practices related to other HRM practices [START_REF] Wright | Desegregating HRM: A review and synthesis of micro and macro human resource management research[END_REF].

Future Research

Sociomaterial theory has recently gained popularity in the field of organization studies [START_REF] Leonardi | Materiality, sociomateriality, and socio-technical systems: What do these terms mean? How are they different? Do we need them[END_REF][START_REF] Orlikowski | Sociomaterial practices: Exploring technology at work[END_REF][START_REF] Orlikowski | 10 sociomateriality: challenging the separation of technology, work and organization[END_REF]) and, to our knowledge, our paper is the first to propose a sociomaterial framework in the field of IHRM. This opens promising avenues for future research in the IB and IHRM fields. First, we need more qualitative research to enrich our understanding of sociomaterial theory in these fields. As argued above, our model can be generalized to all HRM practices. However, additional qualitative research could strengthen and expand our theory. For instance, it could be argued that PM practices are more infused with technology than other HRM practices [START_REF] Yu | Building a process model of local adaptation of practices: A study of Six Sigma implementation in Korean and US firms[END_REF], and recruitment practices in particular.

The sociomaterial theoretical framework and the focus on material agency might therefore be less relevant. However, it depends on how temporal and material boundaries of recruitment practices are set. Where do recruitment practices begin and end? Should we only focus on interviewing skills, or go further upstream and downstream in the recruitment process by focusing on the organizational tools used to promote employer branding and conduct induction programs? What does the concept of technical abilities imply, and how do organizations and individuals make sense of these abilities?

Sociomaterial theory opens new foci of interest for HRM practices, including both single and multiple practices [START_REF] Wright | Desegregating HRM: A review and synthesis of micro and macro human resource management research[END_REF], and we strongly believe it could deeply enrich IHRM and other management fields in the global context, such as strategy and accounting, which both involve sociomaterial practices.

A second promising avenue for future research involves methodological developments. How can we measure the adoption of organizational practices and HRM practices in particular? [START_REF] Kostova | Adoption of an organizational practice by subsidiaries of multinational corporations: Institutional and relational effects[END_REF] suggest adapting the scale of psychological ownership. This makes sense, as they define "internalization", meaning a comprehensive adoption, as the "state in which the employees at the recipient unit attach symbolic meaning to the practice" (Kostova, 1999, p. 311). However, under a sociomaterial perspective, we assume that adoption results from the entanglement of human and material agency. We therefore suggest that future quantitative researchers should further explore this avenue and develop new scales to measure adoption. In particular, it could be extremely fruitful to look at previous research on the adoption of management tools [START_REF] Salisbury | Research report: Better theory through measurement-Developing a scale to capture consensus on appropriation[END_REF] and expand this stream of research to the IB field. Multinational Enterprises (MNEs) transfer their most successful home-country practices to their subsidiaries in order to gain in organizational learning [START_REF] Crossan | An organizational learning framework: From intuition to institution[END_REF] and competitive advantage on the local markets [START_REF] Björkman | The determinants of line management internalisation of HRM practices in MNC subsidiaries[END_REF][START_REF] Jensen | Stickiness and the adaptation of organizational practices in cross-border knowledge transfers[END_REF]. However, MNEs face strong local cultural and institutional pressures, and homecountry practices are likely to evolve over time [START_REF] Dowling | International human resource management: Managing people in a multinational context[END_REF][START_REF] Tarique | International Human Resource Management: Policies and Practices for Multinational Enterprises[END_REF]. Furthermore, the further MNEs advance in their internationalization process, the more they tend to share human, financial and technological resources and foster cooperation among their different entities worldwide. They tend towards transnational structures [START_REF] Bartlett | Managing across borders: The transnational corporation[END_REF]1989) and endeavour to benefit from local innovation and global integration, which may result in new forms of organizational practices. Even international replicators, such as Ikea, develop "flexible replications" to benefit from local organizational innovations [START_REF] Jonsson | International expansion through flexible replication: Learning from the internationalization experience of IKEA[END_REF].

INTRODUCTION

Hence, the concept of hybridization has gained in popularity in the International Business [START_REF] Rosenzweig | Influences on human resource management practices in multinational corporations[END_REF][START_REF] Rowley | Convergence and divergence in Asian human resource management[END_REF], and hybrid practices were first described as being at the midway point between Head Office practices and local practices (Harzing & Pinnington, 2010;[START_REF] Tarique | International Human Resource Management: Policies and Practices for Multinational Enterprises[END_REF]. In the late nineties, IB scholars shifted to a radically different approach and suggested a less elusive definition of hybridization as a process by which new and unique practices emerge either from the interaction between cultural and institutional pressures (Boyer, Charron, Jurgens & Tolliday, 1998;[START_REF] Elger | Assembling work: Remaking factory regimes in Japanese multinationals in Britain[END_REF][START_REF] Huo | Divergence or convergence: a cross-national comparison of personnel selection practices[END_REF][START_REF] Pudelko | Cross-national learning from best practice and the convergence-divergence debate in HRM[END_REF][START_REF] Zhu | Human resource management with 'Asian'characteristics: a hybrid people-management system in East Asia[END_REF][START_REF] Tung | Comparing the attitudes toward money, material possessions and savings of overseas Chinese vis-à-vis Chinese in China: convergence, divergence or crossvergence, vis-à-vis 'one size fits all'human resource management policies and practices[END_REF] or from the tension between organizational structure and human agency [START_REF] Chung | South Korean MNEs' international HRM approach: Hybridization of global standards and local practices[END_REF][START_REF] Gamble | Transferring organizational practices and the dynamics of hybridization: Japanese retail multinationals in China[END_REF][START_REF] Yahiaoui | Hybridization: striking a balance between adoption and adaptation of human resource management practices in French multinational corporations and their Tunisian subsidiaries[END_REF]. While the first current highlights extra-organizational pressures, the second one focuses more on intraorganizational pressures and the question of agency.

All this research has deeply enriched our understanding of the hybridization process. There remain gaps in the literature, however. Firstly, cultural and institutional theories, which have been widely used to investigate hybridization, constitute a mainly macro theoretical framework.

Organizational practices, on the other hand, are by definition enacted by individuals at the micro level [START_REF] Orlikowski | Practice in research: phenomenon, perspective and philosophy[END_REF][START_REF] Schatzki | Peripheral vision: The sites of organizations[END_REF][START_REF] Tsoukas | On organizational becoming: Rethinking organizational change[END_REF]. Secondly, both cultural and institutional theories focus on the social dimension of organizational practices, insofar as they assume that individual behaviours are fundamentally embedded in human entities such as culture or institutions. However, according to sociomaterial theory (Leonardi, Nardi & Kallinikos, 2012;[START_REF] Orlikowski | Sociomaterial practices: Exploring technology at work[END_REF][START_REF] Orlikowski | 10 sociomateriality: challenging the separation of technology, work and organization[END_REF], organizational practices do not only include material artefacts such as managerial tools, procedures, documents and software. They consubstantially result from the entanglement of the social and the material (Orlikowsky, 2007) and it is not possible to investigate hybrid practices without giving equal weight to both. Our two research questions can therefore be formulated as follows. Firstly: What are hybrid practices? Are hybrid practices only a midway point on a continuum between MNEs' home-country and host-country practices or are they new and unique organizational practices? Secondly: How do hybrid practices emerge? Do they result solely from cultural and institutional pressures? What are the respective roles of human and material agency in the hybridization process?

Sociomaterial theory has recently gained in popularity in organization studies to investigate organizational practices in particular [START_REF] Leonardi | Materiality, sociomateriality, and socio-technical systems: What do these terms mean? How are they different? Do we need them[END_REF][START_REF] Orlikowski | Sociomaterial practices: Exploring technology at work[END_REF][START_REF] Orlikowski | 10 sociomateriality: challenging the separation of technology, work and organization[END_REF]. It has, however

, not yet been used in the IB field. The first contribution of this research is thus to bring this theory into the IB and IHRM fields. More specifically, sociomaterial theory enables us to shift attention away from cultural and institutional theories and bring materiality back into our field of research [START_REF] Leonardi | Materiality, sociomateriality, and socio-technical systems: What do these terms mean? How are they different? Do we need them[END_REF]. Secondly, this research is based on a 10-year longitudinal study of the transnational transfer of Performance Management (PM) practices to the Chinese entities of a large chemical MNE. Two new hybrid PM practices have thereby been identified: the "harmonious Confucian" PM practice, and the "harmonious instrumental" PM practice. This research thus also contributes to the PM and IHRM literatures.

The remainder of this article is organized as follows. In the first section, we review the three main approaches to hybridization process. We then detail the key theoretical and epistemological concepts of sociomaterial theory, which are particularly important for this research.

In the following section, we discuss our methodological approach and how our data analysis was guided by abductive principles. In the subsequent section, we introduce our findings and the sociomaterial approach to the hybridization process of organizational practices in MNEs. To conclude, we discuss our theoretical and managerial contributions, make some concluding remarks and suggest future research opportunities.

THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK

The hybridization of performance management practices in MNEs

The concept of hybridization first emerged in the IB literature from the classic opposition between the convergence and divergence of international organizational practices. On the one hand, the proponents of convergence [START_REF] Edwards | Global standardization or national differentiation of HRM practices in multinational companies? A comparison of multinationals in five countries[END_REF][START_REF] Pudelko | Country-of-origin, localization, or dominance effect? An empirical investigation of HRM practices in foreign subsidiaries[END_REF] advocate that MNEs tend to standardize their organizational practices worldwide because of similar pressure from the external cultural and institutional environment. As individualism gains ground all around the globe [START_REF] Oyserman | Rethinking individualism and collectivism: evaluation of theoretical assumptions and meta-analyses[END_REF], convergence proponents argue for instance that local managers are more likely to act independently and use Western individual-based practices. On the other hand, the proponents of divergence [START_REF] Rosenzweig | Influences on human resource management practices in multinational corporations[END_REF][START_REF] Rowley | Convergence and divergence in Asian human resource management[END_REF] advocate that MNEs tend to localize their organizational practices in their subsidiaries because of the specific environment in which they are embedded. The hybridization concept therefore appeared first as a way to describe organizational practices that are neither totally similar to those of the MNE's host country nor totally similar those of its home-country. Hybrid organizational practices are defined as an incomplete shift between traditional and modern managerial systems (Harzing & Pinnington, 2010;[START_REF] Tarique | International Human Resource Management: Policies and Practices for Multinational Enterprises[END_REF].

Building on this theoretical framework, scholars have identified hybrid PM practices in China which are neither totally similar to traditional Chinese practices, nor totally similar to modern

Western PM practices (see figure 1 for more details). They have been described as an incomplete shift between moral-and merit-based conceptions of performance [START_REF] Yang | Power and performance: Institutional embeddedness and performance management in a Chinese local government organization[END_REF]2012), which aim to achieve a mix between development and control purposes [START_REF] Cooke | Human resource management in China: New trends and practices[END_REF][START_REF] Cooke | Talent management in China and India: A comparison of management perceptions and human resource practices[END_REF][START_REF] Su | The effective human resource management system in transitional China: A hybrid of commitment and control practices[END_REF]), with a strong focus on control [START_REF] Yang | Power and performance: Institutional embeddedness and performance management in a Chinese local government organization[END_REF] and less on commitment [START_REF] Su | The effective human resource management system in transitional China: A hybrid of commitment and control practices[END_REF]. Contrary to traditional Chinese PM practices, hybrid PM practices are formalized and go beyond the Chinese "average culture", which typically undermines top performance to maintain social harmony [START_REF] Yang | Power and performance: Institutional embeddedness and performance management in a Chinese local government organization[END_REF][START_REF] Aguinis | Performance management universals: Think globally and act locally[END_REF]. They also strongly emphasize financial and extrinsic rewards and are mainly based on performance appraisal [START_REF] Froese | Work values, job satisfaction and organizational commitment in China[END_REF]. However, hybrid PM practices do not go as far as modern Western management practices. They focus less on ongoing feedback [START_REF] Baldassarre | GE's Real-Time Performance Development[END_REF][START_REF] Buckingham | Reinventing performance management[END_REF][START_REF] Lawler | A Study of Cutting-Edge Performance Management Practices: Ongoing Feedback, Ratingless Reviews and Crowdsourced Feedback[END_REF] In the late nineties, a second, more sophisticated, approach was developed. According to this second current, hybridization is a process by which new and unique practices emerge locally and result from the interaction between cultural and institutional pressures (Boyer et al., 1998;[START_REF] Elger | Assembling work: Remaking factory regimes in Japanese multinationals in Britain[END_REF]. This approach was particularly fruitful in explaining the hybridization of PM practices in China [START_REF] Huo | Divergence or convergence: a cross-national comparison of personnel selection practices[END_REF][START_REF] Pudelko | Cross-national learning from best practice and the convergence-divergence debate in HRM[END_REF][START_REF] Tung | Comparing the attitudes toward money, material possessions and savings of overseas Chinese vis-à-vis Chinese in China: convergence, divergence or crossvergence, vis-à-vis 'one size fits all'human resource management policies and practices[END_REF][START_REF] Zhu | Human resource management with 'Asian'characteristics: a hybrid people-management system in East Asia[END_REF]. As highlighted by Gamble (2010, p. 706), the central idea is that hybrid practices are not simply the "juxtaposition of home and host country effects", but "the emergence of distinctive configurations that may depart from both home-based templates and local practices" (Elger & Smith, 2005, p. 362).

This second approach builds on different cultural and institutional paradigms. Hybrid practices are not driven by a cultural or institutional continuum between the MNE's home-and host-countries. They result from unique local hybrid institutions [START_REF] Wang | Modelling regional HRM strategies in China: an entrepreneurship perspective[END_REF][START_REF] Warner | Reassessing human resource management 'with Chinese characteristics': an overview[END_REF] and unique local hybrid cultures [START_REF] Davila | Humanistic leadership: Lessons from Latin America[END_REF][START_REF] Frenkel | The multinational corporation as a third space: Rethinking international management discourse on knowledge transfer through Homi Bhabha[END_REF]. Culture, defined as a web of meaning [START_REF] Geertz | The interpretation of cultures[END_REF][START_REF] Gould | Think glocally, act glocally: A culture-centric comment on Leung, Bhagat, Buchan, Erez and Gibson[END_REF] brings forth unique national or collective values that ultimately lead to unique hybrid practices. Unlike a universal cultural paradigm, such as Hofstede's approach [START_REF] Ailon | Mirror, mirror on the wall: Culture's consequences in a value test of its own design[END_REF], individual values are not located on a continuum. Asian people, for instance, may be both individualistic and collectivist at the same time [START_REF] Li | An exploration of the HRM values of Chinese managers working in Western multinational enterprises in China: Implications for HR practice[END_REF][START_REF] Oyserman | Rethinking individualism and collectivism: evaluation of theoretical assumptions and meta-analyses[END_REF][START_REF] Ralston | The crossvergence perspective: Reflections and projections[END_REF][START_REF] Thompson | The Starbucks brandscape and consumers'(anticorporate) experiences of glocalization[END_REF], which might explain why Chinese managers, although coming from a collectivist culture [START_REF] Hofstede | Cultures and Organizations: Software of the Mind, revised and expanded 3rd ed[END_REF], are at ease with individual-based performance-rated reward systems [START_REF] Froese | Work values, job satisfaction and organizational commitment in China[END_REF]. Similarly, Chinese institutions neither converge with, nor diverge from, Western capitalism. Socialism with Chinese characteristics includes hybrid institutions, which neither depart from traditional socialist institutions such as the "iron rice bowl" system nor tend towards Western capitalist institutions either [START_REF] Warner | Reassessing human resource management 'with Chinese characteristics': an overview[END_REF].

More recently, a third current of IB research focused on intra-organizational relationships.

This current shifted attention in particular towards the debate on the primacy of the structure or the agency. It defines hybridization as the creation of new and unique practices out of a selective adaptation process by the actors in the home and host countries in an international context [START_REF] Chung | South Korean MNEs' international HRM approach: Hybridization of global standards and local practices[END_REF][START_REF] Gamble | Transferring organizational practices and the dynamics of hybridization: Japanese retail multinationals in China[END_REF][START_REF] Morgan | Transnational communities and business systems[END_REF][START_REF] Yahiaoui | Hybridization: striking a balance between adoption and adaptation of human resource management practices in French multinational corporations and their Tunisian subsidiaries[END_REF]. It is clear that MNEs face strong external pressure during the transnational transfer of their home-country practices. However, they also face strong intra-organizational pressure to transfer their most successful home-country practices in order to gain a competitive advantage on local markets [START_REF] Kostova | Transnational transfer of strategic organizational practices: A contextual perspective[END_REF]. MNEs strategically decide to select some elements of the global and local practices because of institutional pressures [START_REF] Yahiaoui | Hybridization: striking a balance between adoption and adaptation of human resource management practices in French multinational corporations and their Tunisian subsidiaries[END_REF], such as a perception of weak legitimacy as regards the MNE's Head

Office if it is located in a non-dominant economy [START_REF] Chung | South Korean MNEs' international HRM approach: Hybridization of global standards and local practices[END_REF]. Furthermore, as advocated by [START_REF] Gamble | Transferring organizational practices and the dynamics of hybridization: Japanese retail multinationals in China[END_REF], expatriates have structurally more autonomy to modify home-country practices because they operate remotely and they are more likely to exert their decision latitude to implement their own managerial innovations. MNEs face a constellation of micro-institutional logics and both local managers and expatriates inevitably re-contextualize Head Office practices to create local innovation and establish greater legitimacy [START_REF] Värlander | Enacting a constellation of logics: How transferred practices are recontextualized in a global organization[END_REF].

A sociomaterial approach to hybridization

Notwithstanding the important contributions of cultural and institutional theories, there remain important theoretical gaps that need to be addressed to better understand the hybridization process. Firstly, organizational practices are, by essence, enacted at the micro level. As highlighted by the authors of the practice turn [START_REF] Schatzki | Peripheral vision: The sites of organizations[END_REF][START_REF] Tsoukas | On organizational becoming: Rethinking organizational change[END_REF][START_REF] Orlikowski | Practice in research: phenomenon, perspective and philosophy[END_REF], it is necessary, from an onto-epistemological perspective, to "explore how organizational practices are constituted and enacted by actors [to] capture essential aspects of the logic of practice" (Sandberg and Tsoukas, 2011, p.339). However, both cultural and institutional theories investigate organizational practices mainly at the macro and meso levels. Cultural theories, either based on positivist paradigms [START_REF] Leung | Culture and international business: Recent advances and their implications for future research[END_REF][START_REF] Hofstede | Cultures and Organizations: Software of the Mind, revised and expanded 3rd ed[END_REF] or on constructivist paradigms [START_REF] Geertz | The interpretation of cultures[END_REF][START_REF] Gould | Think glocally, act glocally: A culture-centric comment on Leung, Bhagat, Buchan, Erez and Gibson[END_REF], aggregate individual perceptions and examine values held at country level or at least at group level. Likewise, institutional theories focus on institutions and how agents or organization legitimize their action under isomorphic pressures, mainly at the macro level [START_REF] Björkman | Transferring HR practices within multinational corporations[END_REF][START_REF] Meyer | Institutionalized organizations: Formal structure as myth and ceremony[END_REF][START_REF] Kostova | Transnational transfer of strategic organizational practices: A contextual perspective[END_REF][START_REF] Kostova | Adoption of an organizational practice by subsidiaries of multinational corporations: Institutional and relational effects[END_REF].

Secondly, the central assumption behind institutional theories is that global or local institutions [START_REF] Whitley | Business systems in East Asia: Firms, markets and societies[END_REF] drive individual values and practices. Organizational practices are "particular ways of conducting organizational functions that have evolved over time under the influence of an organization's history, people, interests, and actions and that have become institutionalized in the organization" (Kostova, 1999, p. 309). According to cultural theories, individual values and practices are driven either by the specific dimensions of national cultures [START_REF] Hofstede | Cultures and Organizations: Software of the Mind, revised and expanded 3rd ed[END_REF][START_REF] Leung | Culture and international business: Recent advances and their implications for future research[END_REF] or by group interpretations [START_REF] Geertz | The interpretation of cultures[END_REF][START_REF] Gould | Think glocally, act glocally: A culture-centric comment on Leung, Bhagat, Buchan, Erez and Gibson[END_REF]. As a consequence, both institutional and cultural theories focus on the social dimension of practices, meaning how individuals, groups or nations make sense of their actions.

However, materiality is a consubstantial dimension of organizational practices. Performance management, which is commonly defined as the process by which an organization identifies, measures, develops and aligns individual performance with its strategic objectives [START_REF] Aguinis | Performance management[END_REF][START_REF] Gilbert | L'évaluation de la performance individuelle[END_REF][START_REF] St-Onge | Gestion des performances au travail: bilan des connaissances[END_REF], includes a wide variety of managerial tools, such as behaviourally anchored ratings scales, forced distribution rating systems, 360 degree evaluations, and performance appraisal forms or software [START_REF] Murphy | Understanding performance appraisal: Social, organizational, and goal-based perspectives[END_REF][START_REF] Lawler | A Study of Cutting-Edge Performance Management Practices: Ongoing Feedback, Ratingless Reviews and Crowdsourced Feedback[END_REF]. These tools are central elements in the whole process. They set the boundaries within which individuals make sense of their practices (Orlikowsky, 2007). They restrict or enlarge how people make sense of practices.

As underlined by sociomaterial theory [START_REF] Leonardi | Materiality, sociomateriality, and socio-technical systems: What do these terms mean? How are they different? Do we need them[END_REF][START_REF] Orlikowski | Sociomaterial practices: Exploring technology at work[END_REF][START_REF] Orlikowski | 10 sociomateriality: challenging the separation of technology, work and organization[END_REF], "the social and the material are considered to be inextricably related -there is no social that is not also material, and no material that is not also social" (Orlikowsky, 2007(Orlikowsky, , p. 1437)).

Organizational practices emerge from the entanglement of the social and the material. On the one hand, organizational practices are created and designed by individuals or groups of individuals, such as consultants or top managers, for specific purposes. PM practices have traditionally aimed to achieve administrative, control and development purposes [START_REF] Cleveland | Multiple uses of performance appraisal: Prevalence and correlates[END_REF].

However, the end-users may implement these practices faithfully or deviate from their designers' original purposes [START_REF] De Vaujany | De la conception à l'usage: vers un management de l'appropriation des outils de gestion[END_REF][START_REF] Quattrone | What is IT?: SAP, accounting, and visibility in a multinational organisation[END_REF][START_REF] Grimand | L'appropriation des outils de gestion et ses effets sur les dynamiques organisationnelles: le cas du déploiement d'un référentiel des emplois et des compétences[END_REF]. On the other hand, the material dimension of organizational practices refers to the set of concrete artefacts and techniques used to enact practices, and how these artefacts and techniques constrain the users and designers of these practices. For instance, forced distributed rating scales are likely to enhance competition among individuals [START_REF] Cappelli | The performance management revolution[END_REF][START_REF] Murphy | Understanding performance appraisal: Social, organizational, and goal-based perspectives[END_REF] whereas top management may be seeking to promote cooperation among employees. It is therefore impossible to make sense of organizational practices without looking simultaneously at both their material and social dimensions.

From an ontological perspective, the constitutive entanglement of the social and the material rests upon the idea that there are no existing independent entities, either human or material [START_REF] Barad | Posthumanist performativity: Toward an understanding of how matter comes to matter[END_REF][START_REF] Orlikowski | Sociomaterial practices: Exploring technology at work[END_REF][START_REF] Latour | We have never been modern[END_REF]. Both human and non-human actors possess their own performativity. They "differ phenomenologically with respect to intention" (Leonardi, 2012, p. 37).

Contrary to human agency, material agency cannot intentionally set goals. However, both human and material agencies have the ability to act by themselves. "People have perceptions, objects have materiality, and affordances or constraints are created when people construct perceptions of an object's materiality" [START_REF] Leonardi | Social Media and Their Affordances for Organizing: A Review and Agenda for Research[END_REF]. As a consequence, the notion of "the entanglement of the social and the material" goes beyond a mere interaction between them. It helps in grasping how organizational practices emerge and change over time. How do people intentionally use, but also deviate from, the original design? How do the tools and artefacts involved in organizational practices set the framework from which people make sense of their practices?

Building on sociomaterial theory, the research question should therefore be reframed as follows: How does the entanglement of the social and the material bring forth new and unique hybrid practices in MNEs?

practices in the Chinese subsidiaries of a Western MNE may therefore be considered as an extreme case study, and this helps to reveal organizational patterns [START_REF] Eisenhardt | Building theories from case study research[END_REF][START_REF] Yin | Case study research: Design and methods[END_REF].

This case study also presents a number of typical characteristics that contribute to increasing the transferability of our findings [START_REF] Lincoln | Naturalistic inquiry[END_REF]. Data was collected within a typical transnational company [START_REF] Bartlett | Managing across borders: The transnational corporation[END_REF][START_REF] Harzing | An empirical analysis and extension of the Bartlett and Ghoshal typology of multinational companies[END_REF], referred to in this study as "Kemike" for the sake of anonymity. The company's sales are shared equally between Europe, the USA and Asia, and Kemike is faced with high needs for both global integration and local adaption [START_REF] Bartlett | Managing across borders: The transnational corporation[END_REF]. The company, which is in the ICIS Top 100 Chemical Companies listing, has more than 19 500 employees located in 50 countries and had revenue of approximately €7.5 billion in 2016. It is ranked number one to number three worldwide on 90% of its portfolio. In China, the company went through the 4 typical stages of an MNE's development abroad and the history of the company is especially representative of the internationalization of MNEs [START_REF] Tarique | International Human Resource Management: Policies and Practices for Multinational Enterprises[END_REF]. It currently has more than 2 900 employees in China, with its main worldwide industrial platform being located close to Shanghai. The observation period spans ten years, between 2005 and 2015. During the first observation period from 2005 to 2008, I worked as a full-time employee for the human resources department at the MNE's regional headquarters. I worked on several strategic HRM projects in close cooperation with the Asia-Pacific HR director, and in particular on the renewal of the PM program. This immersion period enabled me to gain wider access to both the field and the data, and to better understand the organizational context. From an interpretive perspective, subjectivity is an opportunity rather than a weakness [START_REF] Patton | Variety in Qualitative Inquiry[END_REF]. However, it requires attention to be paid to the position of the author in the field, for him to remain as neutral as possible. I therefore endeavoured to use reflexivity, decentring and self-analysis techniques to avoid the pitfalls of subjectivity [START_REF] Brivot | Beyond panopticism: On the ramifications of surveillance in a contemporary professional setting[END_REF]. As is required by the nature of interpretative field studies, the results were discussed several times with two other scholars to ensure multiple interpretations of the data [START_REF] Weick | Theory construction as disciplined imagination[END_REF][START_REF] Klein | A set of principles for conducting and evaluating interpretive field studies in information systems[END_REF]. The second observation period started in 2012 and ended in 2015. I spent two three-week periods conducting respectively 23 and 34 interviews in the organization, as an external researcher. In the interval, I kept regular contact with the organization, as described in table 4.

Data collection

Building on the epistemological principles of the practice theory, the data were collected while keeping constantly in mind the necessity to focus on individual practices. Archival data include 800 internal documents related to the PM practices of the local entities and the Head Office, such as performance appraisal forms, PM procedures but also training documents and PowerPoint presentations. In total, 59 semi-structured interviews of approximately one hour were conducted over 3 years, as detailed in table 4. The interviewees were deliberately selected to ensure hierarchical, gender, and national diversity. The 49 interviewees comprise 15 women and 34 men working as managers, department heads or regional top-managers in production, sales and functional departments. 9 people were interviewed twice in order to explore the changes, which occurred over time. The general topic of the two rounds of interviews was PM practices. However, as is inherent to the nature of grounded theory [START_REF] Strauss | Grounded theory methodology[END_REF], specific concepts gradually emerged throughout the research. The first round of interviews dealt with formal and informal practices, with more open questions such as: "What is expected from you?", or "What do you expect from your subordinates?" The second round of interviews, while also being about general performance practices, focused more specifically on the social and material dimensions of PM practices with questions framed as follows: "Could you describe to me how you assess the work of your team members?", or "Tell me how, concretely, you develop the performance and the skills of your team members".

As a former member of the HR department of the organization, I had two major concerns for the interviews: (a) building a trustful relationship with the interviewees (Denzin & Lincoln, 2011) to avoid being perceived as a formal member of the organization; and (b) being as open-minded and flexible as possible [START_REF] Myers | The qualitative interview in IS research: Examining the craft[END_REF][START_REF] Jacob | Writing interview protocols and conducting interviews: Tips for students new to the field of qualitative research[END_REF], to avoid being locked into preconceived schemas. As the first minutes of interviews are essential, I always endeavoured to make the discussion comfortable for the informants by using their own vocabulary and addressing their concerns. I always started interviews as follows: "You know anonymity is especially important for me. It is just as important as safety for you". While apparently being mundane, this sentence turned out to be especially convincing for interviewees, as I was using their own words and mental schemes to make them understand that anonymity was important for me. Moreover, being an insider and knowing the organization helped me save time during interviews. I was already familiar, in particular, with the organization chart and the organizational context. However, this could also have prevented me from looking for the unexpected and exploring interesting lines of research [START_REF] Myers | The qualitative interview in IS research: Examining the craft[END_REF]. Hence, I paid particular attention to being as open as possible to unexpected findings, as is shown by this extract from my field notes:

I let myself be carried along by his subjective thoughts much more easily. For instance, when he (the informant) started the interview by talking about the importance of maintaining good team cohesion and digressing as regards the "hukous" (internal passport), while I was asking him how he actually measured the performance of his team, I wondered if it wasn't necessary to refocus the discussion. I finally let myself be guided by his thoughts and it really helped me to better understand the concerns and the needs of the operators. Extract from the field notes made after an interview with Martin Zhang. Nov. 5th, 2015.

Data analysis

Figure 5: Data collection and analysis process Data analysis is a non-linear process in abductive research [START_REF] Eisenhardt | Building theories from case study research[END_REF]Rheinhardt, Kreiner, Gioia & Corley, 2018, forthcoming). It constantly requires going back and forth between data and theory. For this research, it can however be divided, a posteriori, into three main stages (as described in Figure 2). After the preliminary immersion period, I first engaged in a broad literature review of PM practices and international business practices in China. Following a Glasarian approach [START_REF] Glaser | Basics of grounded theory analysis: Emergence vs forcing[END_REF], the main purpose was not to start developing a theory [START_REF] Burgelman | Bridging history and reductionism: A key role for longitudinal qualitative research[END_REF], but to set the boundaries of the problem statement [START_REF] Weick | Theory construction as disciplined imagination[END_REF]. Then I purposefully selected two local entities of the MNE with varying degrees of advancement in their PM practices [START_REF] Eisenhardt | Building theories from case study research[END_REF] to conduct the first round of interviews. After that, I started open coding [START_REF] Strauss | Grounded theory methodology[END_REF][START_REF] King | Template analysis[END_REF]. Based on Gioia methodological principals [START_REF] Corley | Identity ambiguity and change in the wake of a corporate spin-off[END_REF][START_REF] Gioia | Seeking qualitative rigor in inductive research: Notes on the Gioia methodology[END_REF], data were coded according to very broad research template, such as classic Chinese cultural and institutional dimensions and the commonly agreed purposes of PM practices.

Eventually, this open coding threw up two central concepts: the material dimension of PM practices and the importance of intra-organizational relationships.

The second stage of data analysis started with an in-depth investigation of the literature on sociomaterial theory and the transnational transfer of organizational practices in MNEs. Then, I went back into the field to conduct additional interviews in the two entities that had been investigated previously, plus two new entities. I went deeper into the coding process by exploring axial coding [START_REF] Strauss | Grounded theory methodology[END_REF][START_REF] Corley | Identity ambiguity and change in the wake of a corporate spin-off[END_REF][START_REF] Gioia | Seeking qualitative rigor in inductive research: Notes on the Gioia methodology[END_REF], meaning confirming or disconfirming the relationships between the subcategories that had emerged previously. This phase triggered the emergence of two new central concepts: the concept of hybridization and the concept of the entanglement of the social and the material.

At the end of the coding process, I engaged in emergent coding [START_REF] Eisenhardt | Building theories from case study research[END_REF][START_REF] Yin | Case study research: Design and methods[END_REF], by developing concepts more parsimoniously and aggregating the subcategories that had emerged in the previous phase. "Confucian" and "instrumental" harmonious PM practices emerged as two distinct sets of hybrid practices in Kemike's local subsidiaries. The sociomaterial approach to hybridization thus ultimately emerged. Finally, in order to be sure of reaching theoretical saturation [START_REF] Glaser | The Discovery of Grounded Theory : Strategies for Qualitative Research[END_REF][START_REF] Rheinhardt | Conducting and Publishing Rigorous Qualitative Research[END_REF], I restarted the full coding process by developing 1 st order codes, 2 nd order theoretical themes, and aggregate dimensions [START_REF] Corley | Identity ambiguity and change in the wake of a corporate spin-off[END_REF][START_REF] Gioia | Seeking qualitative rigor in inductive research: Notes on the Gioia methodology[END_REF]. At this stage, any incremental learning was minimal in the coding process. PM is an overall process that includes numerous practices [START_REF] Aguinis | Performance management[END_REF]. As detailed in Table 5, five major PM practices emerged at Kemike China over the 10-year observation period: the annual performance review and the talent management program, both initiated by the Head Office, and the special benefit scheme, the outstanding performance award program and the local mentoring program, all initiated by the local entities of the China company. As in most MNEs, including transnational companies [START_REF] Bartlett | Managing across borders: The transnational corporation[END_REF], the Kemike Head Office initiates the company's overall PM process. The global HR director defines the PM objectives with his team and, year after year, they roll out different programs among the entities worldwide, according to managerial fads and fashions (Abrahamson, 1996;[START_REF] Abrahamson | Management fashion: Lifecycles, triggers, and collective learning processes[END_REF] 1991). However, as new PM practices spread, the purpose of the whole PM practice increasingly loses its focus in the local entities. Eventually the whole process becomes less and less clearly defined in the local entities, as employees perceive a constant tension between control and development purposes within the PM process [START_REF] Cleveland | Multiple uses of performance appraisal: Prevalence and correlates[END_REF].

FINDINGS

Tensions between control and development purposes

The annual performance review is the cornerstone of the PM process at Kemike China. It is such a central practice that it has been directly translated as the "Performance Management System" in the internal documents of the Chinese Branch. Each local entity, even recently acquired, must implement this practice according to Head Office guidelines. The annual performance review is supposed to combine both control and development goals. "The Kemike Performance Management System is a key management tool for the construction of Kemike and the development of it strategy.

Beyond the day-to-day management, the PM system is the opportunity for a formal discussion to appraise the achievements of the past year. It is a milestone to review the job description (…) and to prepare the mid-term and the long term goals" (Extract from a PPT presentation of the Chinese Branch).

However, from a material perspective, internal templates largely emphasize the measurement, and not the development, of individual performance (8 pages versus 1 page in the Chinese documents). Furthermore, most Chinese employees and expatriates widely shared the assumption that the control purpose prevails, and annual performance review mainly aims at making distinctions between individuals, so as to be able to make decisions on issues such as salary increases, promotions or dismissals [START_REF] Cleveland | Multiple uses of performance appraisal: Prevalence and correlates[END_REF].

I only use the annual performance review to know how my team members see the future. (…) But it is not at all how the annual performance review is designed. (…) It is very formal and simplistic. Asia-Pacific President of Kemike (2012) (French Expatriate)

In our program if your result is less than 2.5 (…) either we train you or we transfer you to another position. Afterwards we review your performance again, and if you fail again, we can legally fire you. HR director of an industrial site near Shanghai (2015)

We mainly focus on the annual Performance Management System because it is linked to the salary. Production Manager (a) of an industrial site near Shanghai (2012) I think we are not yet where we would like to be. We do a little discrimination. In terms of bonus, we are on a scale of 80/100 now, whereas before the scale was more around 90/95.

GM (a) of an industrial site near Shanghai (2012)

On the other hand, in 2015, the global HR department launched a new talent management program, which was frequently mentioned by the local managers as being one of the most important parts of PM practice. Contrary to annual performance review, this new PM practice is widely perceived by them as targeting "within-individuals" distinctions, such as training and development HR practices [START_REF] Cleveland | Multiple uses of performance appraisal: Prevalence and correlates[END_REF]. As highlighted by the Asia-Pacific Talent Manager (2015): "In a very competitive labor market, if the company only provides people with financial incentives and does not provide them with a very clear vision of their career path, it is impossible to retain the best performers".

However, the Kemike Talent Management Program is based on an exclusive approach.

It includes only high potential employees above a certain job-position level. It aims to "anticipate the moves and departures, and manage succession plans » (Extract from a PPT presentation of the Chinese Branch), and clearly belongs to the second perspective on Talent Management according to the classification made by [START_REF] Lewis | Talent management: A critical review[END_REF]. "It focuses primarily on the concept of a talent pool" and it is "quite close to what is typically known as succession planning/management or human resource planning" (p.140). As a consequence, the design of the practice assumes that certain employees are more talented than others, and clearly aims at making distinctions between individuals [START_REF] Cleveland | Multiple uses of performance appraisal: Prevalence and correlates[END_REF].

Performance Management Practices initiated by the local entities

In transnational MNEs, such as Kemike, local entities are not highly dependent on the human, technological and financial resources of Head Office [START_REF] Bartlett | Managing across borders: The transnational corporation[END_REF][START_REF] Harzing | An empirical analysis and extension of the Bartlett and Ghoshal typology of multinational companies[END_REF]. This structural autonomy enables them to develop their own organizational practices. But they also face strong internal pressure for worldwide integration, and their organizational practices are deeply infused with MNE corporate culture. As a consequence, new hybrid practices emerge, which are totally similar neither to local nor to global practices.

As highlighted by the Kemike Asia-Pacific President, "For the moment, we (the regional headquarters) have received a lot of investments so, I would say, we are relatively independent from the head office". Building on this relative autonomy, the HR director decided to launch a Special Benefit Scheme (SBS) for the employees of the Chinese regional headquarters only. This retention program "is a financial benefit for the middle and senior-level managers. It aims at rewarding and retaining the key contributors of the company by giving them benefits related to their loyalty to the company" (extract from the SBS Handbook, 2006). It includes, more specifically, an education allowance and a savings plan based on hierarchical level and seniority and it is considered as an important PM practice by employees. The SBS clearly goes beyond traditional Chinese PM practices. It comprises monetary incentives [START_REF] Cooke | Performance management 13 in China. Performance management systems: a global perspective[END_REF] and it is framed in line with modern PM practices. However, contrary to modern PM practices, it does not rely on merit-based conceptions of performance [START_REF] Aguinis | Performance management[END_REF], and aims instead at retaining people on the basis of the notion of an "average culture", meaning that low performers are not heavily penalized [START_REF] Daniel | Raising quality consciousness among Chinese manufacturing personnel: Testing the effectiveness of performance management tools[END_REF].

The Jiangsu industrial platform is one of the most dynamic Kemike entities worldwide. Its workforce jumped from 160 in 2005 to 800 in 2015. It includes 5 different plants and is now the largest industrial Kemike platform worldwide. Hence, it is not surprising to observe that this entity is also one of the most dynamic and innovative ones as regards PM practices. In addition to the practices initiated by Head Office, the Jiangsu industrial platform, of its own initiative, decided to implement an "Outstanding Performance Award Program" (OPAP) and a "Mentoring program".

The purpose of the OPAP "is to promote organizational values and objectives, encourage positive behavior, increase productivity and customer satisfaction (internally and externally), and increase employee retention" (extract from the OPAP Procedure, 2007), whereas the mentoring program is defined as "an effective means of supporting personal development and accelerating the professional growth of new and experienced employees at all levels" (extract from the Mentoring Procedure, 2008).

These two practices are deeply infused with Kemike corporate culture. They are in line with modern PM practices based on a holistic approach to group-oriented (Towers [START_REF] Perrin | Gestion du rendement : tendances et pratiques : perspectives globales[END_REF] and development-oriented [START_REF] Aguinis | Performance management[END_REF] performance. However, a more careful look at the content of these practices, and the mentoring program in particular, reveals a much more local approach.

According to the Head Office guidelines, mentors should be in different job positions and they should also be at least two hierarchical levels above their mentees. A final hybrid PM practice emerged in one of the Chinese entities over the 10-year observation period. In 2013, the industrial platform located in Shanghai took a radically different approach towards annual performance review. As described above, the annual performance review is the cornerstone of the Kemike PM process. It is highly centralized and the global HR department makes strong recommendations about this practice. It should be "completed and signed by [both] the direct supervisor and the subordinates", and subordinates "should perform an objective selfassessment of achievements" (extract from the Global PM Handbook). In line with modern PM practices, the global HR department sees the annual performance review primarily as a "social and communication process rather than primarily as a measurement tool" (Murphy & Cleveland, 1995, p.1), and they want to ensure that objectives are agreed upon by both managers and subordinates [START_REF] Locke | The determinants of goal commitment[END_REF]. However, since 2013 the Shanghai industrial platform has, of its own initiative, switched to a radically different approach.

We changed 2 years ago. I asked Production Assistants to be involved in the performance appraisal together with their Shift Leaders. They should participate in the evaluation of all the shift teams, so that they can give some (consistent)

judgment (about the 4 different teams). HR & Admin manager of an industrial site in Shanghai (2015)

So you need an N+2 (director) to be involved. That is basically the background for that kind of methodology. (...) Why should people listen to him (N+1, a front-line manager). I mean, can't they talk to the big boss directly? (China HRD, 2015)

Now employees have their direct manager and their director facing them during their annual performance review. Some of the front-line employees complained about the subjectivity of their managers, and the HR manager decided to implement this new practice. This is a common measurement issue in PM systems worldwide [START_REF] Jawahar | Where all the children are above average: The performance appraisal purpose effect[END_REF], and companies generally decide to train their managers to solve this issue [START_REF] Murphy | Understanding performance appraisal: Social, organizational, and goal-based perspectives[END_REF][START_REF] Aguinis | Performance management[END_REF].

However, the local HR manager chose a radically different approach. She decided that the annual performance review of front-line employees should henceforth be conducted by their direct manager and their director, which is clearly a very marked deviation from Head Office recommendations. This is also a new and unique practice among all the 133 entities of the MNE worldwide.

The impact of the local sociocultural context

Past IB researchers have strongly emphasized the cross-cultural dimension observed in the hybridization process (Boyer et al., 1998;[START_REF] Elger | Assembling work: Remaking factory regimes in Japanese multinationals in Britain[END_REF][START_REF] Festing | Country Specific Profiles of Performance Management in China, Germany, and the United States-An Empirical Test[END_REF]. Thus, at Kemike China, high hierarchical distance in particular, meaning the tendency for Chinese managers to maintain social distance with their team members [START_REF] Bond | The Oxford handbook of Chinese psychology[END_REF], and the Chinese indirect communication style [START_REF] Sun | Organization development and change in Chinese state-owned enterprises: a human resource perspective[END_REF][START_REF] Tsai | Exploring the factors associated with employees' perceived appraisal accuracy: a study of Chinese state-owned enterprises[END_REF], lead employees and managers to adopt a very top-down approach to PM practices. Subordinates do not dare to challenge their boss during their annual performance review, or to simply give him feedback on their everyday coaching and management style. As highlighted by the deviation of the annual performance review observed at the Shanghai industrial platform, when managers face difficulties with PM practices, they prefer to refer to their own boss. Branch: "harmonious Confucian PM" and "harmonious instrumental" PM practices.

"Harmonious Confucian" performance management

The concept of "harmony" is central to the intellectual history of China [START_REF] Cheng | Histoire de la pensée chinoise[END_REF]. It first appears in the Confucian tradition but it is also central to legalism and Taoism. The former Chinese president, Hu Jintao, used the notion of a harmonious socialist society as one of the pillars of his political thought [START_REF] Delury | Harmonious" In China[END_REF]. As a consequence, the notion of harmony may be used in many different ways, which are sometimes even contradictory. Chinese managers may intentionally adopt radically different interpretations of harmony. This turns the notion of harmony into something extremely powerful, as it is often used by Chinese managers to solve managerial issues, but it can also be easily misinterpreted. Leung and his colleagues (2002) make a distinction between two opposite perspectives on harmony: the "value" and the "instrumental" perspectives. The former refers to a classical Confucian view and defines harmony as a goal rather than a means. The later, on the contrary, defines harmony as a means to "avoid the disruption of an interpersonal relationship" and to "protect self-interest" (Chen, Leung li & Ou, 2015, p.648).

"Harmonious Confucian" PM practice emerged gradually in the Jiangsu industrial platform over the observation period. It resulted from the combination of global and local PM practices. But most importantly, it emerged as a way to solve the tensions born from the ambiguity inherent in the design of the overall PM process and the opposition between control and development purposes.

This is a new and unique approach to individual and group performances at Kemike China. It is not a specific practice or program launched by the local HR department, but a holistic perspective on performance, which emerges from what is expressed by employees and from the everyday enactment of PM practices. This overall approach goes beyond the simple promotion of team spirit.

It enhances the development of team performance while recognizing individual performance [START_REF] Li | An exploration of the HRM values of Chinese managers working in Western multinational enterprises in China: Implications for HR practice[END_REF].

While managers are conducting performance appraisal, setting and negotiating goals, coaching their team members or giving them ongoing feedback, they endeavour to foster cooperative conflict. They avoid social conflict so as to maintain group harmony, but not individual conflicts [START_REF] Chen | Conflict management and team effectiveness in China: The mediating role of justice[END_REF][START_REF] Tjosvold | Constructive conflict in China: Cooperative conflict as a bridge between East and West[END_REF]. Following Confucian principles, managers see harmony as a concern for higher goals such as group morality and benevolence, and they do not necessarily avoid any confrontation. They seek to promote mutually beneficial relationships and engage people towards this goal [START_REF] Wang | A dispositional approach to psychological climate: Relationships between interpersonal harmony motives and psychological climate for communication safety[END_REF]. Based on this approach, harmony leads to a positive psychological climate for the Chinese [START_REF] Wang | A dispositional approach to psychological climate: Relationships between interpersonal harmony motives and psychological climate for communication safety[END_REF], and has a positive impact on creativity when mediated by creative effort [START_REF] Chen | Interpersonal harmony and creativity in China[END_REF]. One of the production managers, for instance, decided, on his own initiative, to develop a "joint performance review" between the Maintenance and Production departments, something which had never before been done at Kemike.

As long as managers are well integrated into the company culture, they will not think they are the owner of their team or set boundaries with other teams. HR needs to be straightforward and to encourage people to be open.

HR Director of the Jiangsu industrial platform (2015)

There are always conflicts between the Maintenance and Production departments.

(…) So we did this joint performance review [between Maintenance and Production] to prove that the new organization can work smoothly. Production manager (a) of the Jiangsu industrial platform (2015)

Managers aim at developing the performance of their team members by exemplarity. They seek to engage people through benevolence and righteousness, and not through obedience and uniformity [START_REF] Leung | A dualistic model of harmony and its implications for conflict management in Asia[END_REF]. As stated in the Analects of Confucius "The Master said, lead them by means of regulations and keep order among them through punishments, and the people will evade them and will lack any sense of shame. Lead them through moral force (de) and keep harmony among them through rites (li), and they will have a sense of shame and will also correct themselves" (translated from [START_REF] Cheng | Histoire de la pensée chinoise[END_REF] You need to make sure that people are happy (…) and have personal satisfaction at work. It means that when someone works, he needs to be convinced that his job really helps the company.

Because after he completes his job, he feels personal satisfaction. Production manager (a) of the Jiangsu industrial platform (2015)

You should create an environment to make sure people feel comfortable and also make sure people feel the need to work hard (laugh). It's a kind of balance. In China, we say "shā jī jǐng hóu" (杀鸡儆猴). Killing the chicken, to "teach" [scare] Managers also build on the necessity of maintaining harmonious relationship to avoid conflicts [START_REF] Cheng | A framework for strategic decision making and performance among Chinese managers[END_REF][START_REF] Chew | A Confucian perspective on conflict resolution[END_REF][START_REF] Tjosvold | Constructive conflict in China: Cooperative conflict as a bridge between East and West[END_REF] while managing individual performances. This tactic is particularly efficient in breaking down the resistance of subordinates when managers negotiate their annual objectives with them. It is the most common way to instrumentally use the "harmonious" approach to performance management. Contrary to what is recommended by global Head Office, managers, even at the Jiangsu industrial platform, deliberately set relatively easy objectives to make sure their subordinates get their bonus and do not complain or leave the company.

While I set the objectives for my team, I need to hope they [my subordinates] can get the bonus (laugh) (…) or at least 80 or 90% of the bonus. Otherwise they might be dissatisfied and not motivated. HR manager of the industrial platform near Shanghai (2012)

Managers think: "if we give a low score to our guys, they [their subordinates] will think we hate them. So managers try to please everyone". HR manager of the industrial platform in Guangdong (2015) Everyone gets between 90% and 95% of the bonus. The distribution is very limited.

GM (a) of an industrial unit on the Jiangsu platform (2012)

As you do the annual performance review at the end of the year, people consider they will automatically get the bonus (Laugh) China Sales Manager (b) of the regional

Headquarters (2012)

Some managers also use harmony to strengthen their personal influence and power. They advocate in particular that group harmony can only be achieved through a strong hierarchical structure (Chen et al., 2010;[START_REF] Tjosvold | Constructive conflict in China: Cooperative conflict as a bridge between East and West[END_REF]. One of the best illustrations at Kemike China is the new performance review process of the Shanghai industrial platform. Now, both managers and directors of the local plant conduct the annual interviews, and it makes the whole process much more top-down oriented. Some managers also simply discourage their team members from doing self-evaluation as recommended by the global performance management handbook.

I would say that 80% of them are using performance management, but there's another group ... the shift supervisors. These guys, they started as operators, and then they were These two opposing practices are similar neither to Head Office PM practices nor to traditional Chinese PM practices. They are totally new and unique among all the MNE's entities. They are two local solutions and are the translation [START_REF] Callon | Some elements of a sociology of translation: domestication of the scallops and the fishermen of St Brieuc Bay[END_REF][START_REF] Latour | Reassembling the social: An introduction to actor-network-theory[END_REF] of the seminal ambiguity of Head Office PM process between its control and development purposes [START_REF] Cleveland | Multiple uses of performance appraisal: Prevalence and correlates[END_REF]. As underlined in the Chengyu 4 in the introduction to this article, these solutions are typically Chinese.

But they also reveal a material tension in this international context. Although this manager has solid English skills, he did not correctly translate the proverb as "killing the chicken to scare the monkeys", but opted for a more positive formulation: "killing the chicken to teach the monkeys".

Theoretical Contributions

This research is the first to use a sociomaterial theory [START_REF] Leonardi | Materiality, sociomateriality, and socio-technical systems: What do these terms mean? How are they different? Do we need them[END_REF][START_REF] Orlikowski | Sociomaterial practices: Exploring technology at work[END_REF][START_REF] Orlikowski | 10 sociomateriality: challenging the separation of technology, work and organization[END_REF] to investigate the hybridization process in MNEs. It therefore hopes to contribute to enriching the IB field and enhancing a pluralist future for IB research [START_REF] Doz | Qualitative research for international business[END_REF][START_REF] Welch | Theorising from case studies: Towards a pluralist future for international business research[END_REF][START_REF] Gligor | Building international business theory: A grounded theory approach[END_REF] by combining IB and sociomaterial theories. Hybridization has long been defined by IB scholars as an incomplete shift between traditional and modern managerial systems (Harzing & Pinnington, 2010;[START_REF] Tarique | International Human Resource Management: Policies and Practices for Multinational Enterprises[END_REF].

Since the late nineties, researchers have suggested that hybridization is the process by which unique practices emerge from cultural and institutional extra-organizational pressures (Boyer et al., 1998;[START_REF] Elger | Assembling work: Remaking factory regimes in Japanese multinationals in Britain[END_REF], or intra-organizational pressures [START_REF] Morgan | Transnational communities and business systems[END_REF][START_REF] Gamble | Transferring organizational practices and the dynamics of hybridization: Japanese retail multinationals in China[END_REF][START_REF] Chung | South Korean MNEs' international HRM approach: Hybridization of global standards and local practices[END_REF][START_REF] Yahiaoui | Hybridization: striking a balance between adoption and adaptation of human resource management practices in French multinational corporations and their Tunisian subsidiaries[END_REF]. However, these approaches are based on cultural or institutional theoretical frameworks, and they assume that the hybridization process is fundamentally driven either by cultural or institutional forces.

Sociomaterial theory, on the other hand, gives equal weight to the social and material 96 dimensions of organizational practices [START_REF] Orlikowski | 10 sociomateriality: challenging the separation of technology, work and organization[END_REF]. As such, our research shifts attention towards the materiality of hybridization. It helps us to focus again on the changes in material artefacts, such as the procedures and internal documents of hybrid practices. The first step in any hybridization process is to identify the sub-practices listed in internal documents. At Kemike, this helped us identify sub-practices such as the annual performance review conducted by two managers, and the hybrid mentoring program, so as ultimately to better understand the overall process at an organizational level. The entanglement of the social and the material also refers to the design of practices [START_REF] Leonardi | Materiality, sociomateriality, and socio-technical systems: What do these terms mean? How are they different? Do we need them[END_REF], meaning the capability to identify what the objectives of the practices are and how this is materially translated into artefacts and internal documents.

Furthermore, one of the key assumptions of sociomaterial theory is that the social and the material are constitutively entangled [START_REF] Leonardi | Materiality, sociomateriality, and socio-technical systems: What do these terms mean? How are they different? Do we need them[END_REF]. "To be entangled is not simply to be intertwined with another, as in the joining of separate entities, but to lack an independent, selfcontained existence" (Barad, 2007, p. ix). The notion of entanglement goes beyond a simple interaction between the social and the material. Organizational practices result equally from individual and material agencies. They reconfigure across time and space, and that is particularly The notion of constitutive entanglement also offers new perspectives on individual agency in the hybridization debate. As advocated by [START_REF] Gamble | Transferring organizational practices and the dynamics of hybridization: Japanese retail multinationals in China[END_REF], expatriates have more latitude in MNEs to use their autonomy to develop new and unique practices. Some of them have taken the opportunity of the transnational transfer of an organizational practice to develop their own approach to discipline -"introducing red and yellow cards -and a series of monthly 'campaigns' intended to increase employees' motivation and skills" (Gamble, 2010, p.724). The role of local general managers and their involvement in the HRM process is crucial as well [START_REF] Björkman | The determinants of line management internalisation of HRM practices in MNC subsidiaries[END_REF].

Stakeholders, including parent company HR, subsidiary HR, local managers, employees and labor unions, play a key role in the reinterpretation of recruitment, selection, compensation, performance appraisal and career management practices [START_REF] Yahiaoui | Hybridization: striking a balance between adoption and adaptation of human resource management practices in French multinational corporations and their Tunisian subsidiaries[END_REF].

However, organizational practice does not only result from human agency. The managerial tools, the procedures and the forms constrain how hybrid practices emerge in MNEs. The employees and managers of Kemike China typically use Chinese indirect communication style [START_REF] Sun | Organization development and change in Chinese state-owned enterprises: a human resource perspective[END_REF][START_REF] Tsai | Exploring the factors associated with employees' perceived appraisal accuracy: a study of Chinese state-owned enterprises[END_REF], and they are not at ease with the open discussion style required by the global Head Office to conduct annual appraisals. Over time, managers face managerial difficulties. They try to make sense of these difficulties in line with the tools provided by Head

Office. However, these tools also constrain the interpretation of local managers. This material constraint may lead them to deviate drastically from Head Office guidelines, as by introducing an extremely vertical performance appraisal review. This constraint may also be welcomed positively by local mangers, as it is subject to individual interpretations and leads to creative hybrid practices such as "joint performance review". Some local Chinese managers appreciate being forced to have straightforward discussions, contrary to the typical Chinese indirect communication style [START_REF] Sun | Organization development and change in Chinese state-owned enterprises: a human resource perspective[END_REF][START_REF] Tsai | Exploring the factors associated with employees' perceived appraisal accuracy: a study of Chinese state-owned enterprises[END_REF]. The annual performance review triggers discussions that would have been impossible otherwise.

« I think the PM system is a good tool, because this tool will force you to have official interviews regularly ». Technical department Manager of the industrial site near

Shanghai (2012)

My team members are not so willing to come to me and raise questions. So, the performance management system is quite good. (…) It encourages my subordinates to come to me directly; if he or she feels overloaded, or if there is something to change in the workload. We can sit down together and think about solutions. Even if there is no overload, but some changes are needed, we can think about the solutions. Finance and admin manager of the industrial site in Shanghai (2015)

On the other hand, managerial tools are enacted and constantly reinterpreted by human beings. The end users may chose, or not, to faithfully use the PM tools designed by local or global Headquarters. Cultural and institutional approaches are structural, as they assume that personal values are driven by a country's social or economic institutions [START_REF] Rowley | Convergence and divergence in Asian human resource management[END_REF][START_REF] Whitley | Business systems in East Asia: Firms, markets and societies[END_REF] or the specific dimensions of national cultures [START_REF] Hofstede | Cultures and Organizations: Software of the Mind, revised and expanded 3rd ed[END_REF][START_REF] Lindholm | National culture and performance management in MNC subsidiaries[END_REF][START_REF] Zhou | Chinese and American managers' compensation award decisions: a comparative policy capturing study[END_REF]. However, individuals may also deliberately adapt global tools to local specificities. Hence, the talent manager of Kemike China decided, of her own initiative, to create a new category of talents -"junior talents" -because of the job market structure and culture in China. As Chinese young people with high potential are constantly being solicited by head-hunters and are used to being rapidly promoted every year or every two years, it was necessary, according to her, to create this new category.

Managerial Contributions

This research suggests that hybridization in MNEs is a sociomaterial process. One of the key contributions of sociomaterial theory is to bring materiality back into the current managerial literature [START_REF] Leonardi | Materiality, sociomateriality, and socio-technical systems: What do these terms mean? How are they different? Do we need them[END_REF]. As a result, the first recommendation for MNEs is to pay particular attention to the design of organizational practices, and HRM and PM practices in particular. It is crucial for Head Office to set up clear purposes and create managerial artefacts such as procedures, forms, software or mobile applications to avoid major local deviations. These artefacts help set the boundaries for the end-users of practices. These boundaries constitute a cognitive framework for local managers who inevitably use their latitudinal power to modify Head Office practices [START_REF] Gamble | Transferring organizational practices and the dynamics of hybridization: Japanese retail multinationals in China[END_REF]. Since organizational practices constantly evolve over time into hybrid sub-practices, I also suggest that global HR departments should regularly conduct the inventory and mapping of local organizational practices, in order to track local deviations but also local innovations that could be transferred among other entities of the organization worldwide.

Another key contribution of sociomaterial theory [START_REF] Leonardi | Theoretical foundations for the study of sociomateriality[END_REF][START_REF] Orlikowski | Sociomaterial practices: Exploring technology at work[END_REF][START_REF] Orlikowski | 10 sociomateriality: challenging the separation of technology, work and organization[END_REF]) and sociotechnical approaches [START_REF] Callon | Some elements of a sociology of translation: domestication of the scallops and the fishermen of St Brieuc Bay[END_REF][START_REF] Latour | Reassembling the social: An introduction to actor-network-theory[END_REF][START_REF] Latour | We have never been modern[END_REF][START_REF] Quattrone | What is IT?: SAP, accounting, and visibility in a multinational organisation[END_REF] is to highlight the necessity of granting decision-making latitude so as to enhance the adoption of organizational practices by individuals [START_REF] De Vaujany | De la conception à l'usage: vers un management de l'appropriation des outils de gestion[END_REF][START_REF] Grimand | L'appropriation des outils de gestion et ses effets sur les dynamiques organisationnelles: le cas du déploiement d'un référentiel des emplois et des compétences[END_REF]. One of the key challenges for organizations is to make sure that employees internalize organizational practices and avoid ceremonial practices, meaning that employees only use organizational practices superficially and do not see any added value in them [START_REF] Kostova | Adoption of an organizational practice by subsidiaries of multinational corporations: Institutional and relational effects[END_REF]. This is especially true for PM practices [START_REF] Murphy | Understanding performance appraisal: Social, organizational, and goal-based perspectives[END_REF][START_REF] Aguinis | Performance management[END_REF]. MNEs may therefore balance the need to set material boundaries to the local interpretation of global practices, with the freedom for local employees to customize global practice and allow innovative hybrid practices to emerge, such as the "harmonious Confucian" performance management style at Kemike China.

Boundary Conditions and future Research

To what extent can the findings of this longitudinal case study research be analytically generalized [START_REF] Yin | Case study research: Design and methods[END_REF] and transferred [START_REF] Lincoln | Naturalistic inquiry[END_REF]? Although the "harmonious

Confucian" PM practice and the "harmonious instrumental" PM practice enrich our knowledge on performance practices, they are clearly limited to the Chinese context. The notion of Harmony is deeply embedded in its national context, and these two new hybrid performance practices are not transferable to other countries. Hybrid practices are by definition unique and can therefore scarcely be replicated even in the same country.

However, the sociomaterial framework suggested in this article can be generalized to different organizational practices and different contexts than that of PM practices in China. The definition of hybridization as a process by which new and unique practices emerge in local subsidiaries from the entanglement of the social and the material at Head Office and in local subsidiaries, and is limited neither to PM practices nor to the Chinese context. One central question, 100 however, is to better identify the materiality that sets the cognitive interpretation of organizational practices and vice versa. I intentionally chose a widely shared definition of PM, which includes a large variety of managerial tools [START_REF] Murphy | Understanding performance appraisal: Social, organizational, and goal-based perspectives[END_REF][START_REF] Lawler | A Study of Cutting-Edge Performance Management Practices: Ongoing Feedback, Ratingless Reviews and Crowdsourced Feedback[END_REF]. This definition enabled me to make hybrid practices and their evolution over time more visible.

However, certain managerial practices, such as recruitment [START_REF] Huo | Divergence or convergence: a cross-national comparison of personnel selection practices[END_REF] or international finance practices, are more likely to be standardized and it could be extremely fruitful to investigate whether human and material agencies evolve similarly over time.

INTRODUCTION

The transnational transfer of Human Resource Management (HRM) practices from headquarters to local subsidiaries is essential to Multinational Enterprises (MNEs). First of all, HRM practices help organizations to make gains in employee engagement, productivity and corporate financial performance [START_REF] Delery | Modes of theorizing in strategic human resource management: Tests of universalistic, contingency, and configurational performance predictions[END_REF][START_REF] Huselid | The impact of human resource management practices on turnover, productivity, and corporate financial performance[END_REF]. Next, the successful transfer of Global HRM practices enables MNEs to benefit from internal knowledge, which has been painstakingly developed at Headquarters and thus gain a competitive advantage on local markets [START_REF] Szulanski | Exploring internal stickiness: Impediments to the transfer of best practice within the firm[END_REF]. Furthermore, since HRM practices are made of tacit and explicit knowledge, they are difficult to replicate and the benefit of competitive advantages may be more long-lasting [START_REF] Boxall | The strategic HRM debate and the resource-based view of the firm[END_REF]. However, MNEs operate in multiple institutional and cultural contexts (Gligor, Esmark & Gölgeci, 2016). They also face strong intra-organizational pressures to transfer internal practices and it is never certain whether Global HRM practices will fit with local needs and ultimately be adopted by local employees [START_REF] Kostova | Transnational transfer of strategic organizational practices: A contextual perspective[END_REF][START_REF] Tarique | International Human Resource Management: Policies and Practices for Multinational Enterprises[END_REF].

The International Business (IB) literature first investigated the transfer of global HRM to the local subsidiaries of MNEs through the prisms of convergence and divergence. On the one hand, convergence scholars [START_REF] Edwards | Global standardization or national differentiation of HRM practices in multinational companies? A comparison of multinationals in five countries[END_REF][START_REF] Pudelko | Country-of-origin, localization, or dominance effect? An empirical investigation of HRM practices in foreign subsidiaries[END_REF][START_REF] Shadur | The adoption of international best practices in a Western culture: East meets West[END_REF] advocate that MNEs face strong extraorganizational cultural and institutional pressures, which incite them to standardize their HRM practices within their worldwide entities. On the other hand, divergence scholars [START_REF] Brewster | Towards a'European'model of human resource management[END_REF]Des Horts & Segalla, 1988;[START_REF] Rosenzweig | Influences on human resource management practices in multinational corporations[END_REF][START_REF] Tregaskis | Converging or diverging? A comparative analysis of trends in contingent employment practice in Europe over a decade[END_REF] advocate the uniqueness of national or regional cultural and institutional contexts, which incites MNEs to localize their practices worldwide. In particular, they claim that, compared with other organizational practices, HRM practices are more sensitive to cultural and institutional influences because HRM practices are based on individual work values [START_REF] Cooke | Postacquisition evolution of the appraisal and reward systems: A study of Chinese IT firms acquired by US firms[END_REF] and constrained by national labor laws [START_REF] Brewster | Towards a'European'model of human resource management[END_REF][START_REF] Des Horts | La gestion des ressources humaines en Europe: une divergence des pratiques[END_REF][START_REF] Tregaskis | Converging or diverging? A comparative analysis of trends in contingent employment practice in Europe over a decade[END_REF]. However, in spite of the extensive research that has been conducted, there is still no consensus about the convergence or the divergence of HRM practices. Scholars are therefore now exploring new concepts, such as that of hybridization, which may be defined as the emergence of new and unique practices which are neither totally similar to MNEs' home-country practices nor to host-country practices and which emerge from a selective adaptation process [START_REF] Chung | South Korean MNEs' international HRM approach: Hybridization of global standards and local practices[END_REF][START_REF] Davila | Humanistic leadership: Lessons from Latin America[END_REF][START_REF] Gamble | Transferring organizational practices and the dynamics of hybridization: Japanese retail multinationals in China[END_REF][START_REF] Yahiaoui | Hybridization: striking a balance between adoption and adaptation of human resource management practices in French multinational corporations and their Tunisian subsidiaries[END_REF].

In the late nineties, IB research shifted toward intra-organizational pressure. In particular, Strategy scholars drew our attention to the concept of "internal stickiness" [START_REF] Szulanski | Exploring internal stickiness: Impediments to the transfer of best practice within the firm[END_REF], meaning the difficulty of transferring internal knowledge in MNEs. Building on a knowledge-based view of the firm, Szulanski (1996, p.27) sees MNEs as a global network of disseminated knowledge resources and offers evidence that "the major barriers to internal knowledge transfer [are] knowledge-related factors such as the recipient's lack of absorptive capacity, causal ambiguity, and an arduous relationship between the source and the recipient". Building on institutional theory, [START_REF] Kostova | Transnational transfer of strategic organizational practices: A contextual perspective[END_REF] and her colleagues [START_REF] Kostova | Adoption of an organizational practice by subsidiaries of multinational corporations: Institutional and relational effects[END_REF]) also provided strong evidence that the successful transfer of organizational practices, conceived as the internalization of practices by local employees, are highly dependent on the institutional distance between the home-and the hostcountries of the MNEs and on the intra-organizational context. For structural reasons, MNEs are led to transfer their most successful home-country practices to their local subsidiaries whether or not they fit with local needs. As a consequence, the greater the institutional distance between the homeand host-countries of MNEs is, the lower the level of adoption and internalization of organizational practices by employees will be. This strategy research current has enabled International Human Resources Management (IHRM) scholars to show that a strong relational capital between key actors in the home-and host-countries of MNEs (expatriates, local general managers, and front-line employees) is extremely important for the adoption and the internalization of HRM practices [START_REF] Ahlvik | Towards explaining subsidiary implementation, integration, and internalization of MNC headquarters HRM practices[END_REF][START_REF] Björkman | The determinants of line management internalisation of HRM practices in MNC subsidiaries[END_REF].

Past IB and IHRM research has extensively investigated the role of the extra-and intraorganizational context during the transnational transfer of organizational practices and of HRM practices in particular. The macro and meso levels have been thoroughly detailed. However, organizational practices are by definition enacted by individuals [START_REF] Schatzki | Peripheral vision: The sites of organizations[END_REF]Tsoukas & Chia, tradition. It is rooted in the classic work on technology and organization done by seminal authors such as [START_REF] Woodward | Management and technology[END_REF] and [START_REF] Perrow | A framework for the comparative analysis of organizations[END_REF] and in the work of the Tavistok Institute of Human Relations in the 1950s. Building also on the Actor-Network Theory [START_REF] Callon | Some elements of a sociology of translation: domestication of the scallops and the fishermen of St Brieuc Bay[END_REF][START_REF] Latour | Reassembling the social: An introduction to actor-network-theory[END_REF], sociomaterial theory investigates technology at a more micro level however. It has recently gained in popularity in organizational studies precisely because it helps to bring materiality back into the organizational debate [START_REF] Chiapello | Sociologie des outils de gestion: introduction à l'analyse sociale de l'instrumentation de gestion[END_REF].

From an epistemological perspective, Sociomaterial theory gives equal weight to the social and material dimensions of organizational practices. "The social and the material are considered to be inextricably related. There is no social that is not also material, and no material that is not also social" [START_REF] Orlikowski | Sociomaterial practices: Exploring technology at work[END_REF](Orlikowski, , p. 1437)). Organizational practices are not made of materiality on the one hand and used by individuals on the other hands. They neither result solely from objective, explicit knowledge, external to human beings as advocated by realist theories, or on the contrary from hands-on techniques that are socially and steadily improved over time [START_REF] Quattrone | What is IT?: SAP, accounting, and visibility in a multinational organisation[END_REF].

Organizational practices emerge from the entanglement of individual agency and material agencies.

By combining IHRM literature and sociomaterial theory, the contribution of this article is twofold. First it conceptualizes the transnational transfer of HRM practices as a sociomaterial process. By doing so, it brings materiality back into the IHRM debate and offers new perspectives on individual agency in MNEs. It helps in particular to enrich our understanding of how standard, local and hybrid practices result from a co-construction of knowledge in MNEs; and how HRM tools, such as forms, procedures and software, constitute both constraints and affordances for local employees in their adoption of global HRM practices. Secondly, this article intends to embrace an interdisciplinary perspective [START_REF] Doz | Qualitative research for international business[END_REF], and not only to make use of sociomaterial theory but also to contribute further to it. Sociomaterial theory has not so far been used in the IB literature, and the international perspective offers the opportunity to investigate the sociomaterial concept of "social and material entanglement" of HRM practices at meso and macro levels.

Proposition 1: The transnational transfer of Global HRM practices results from the entanglement of social and material at the macro, meso and micro levels.

Premise 1: The transnational transfer of HRM practices is a multilevel apparatus.

Premise 2: The social and the material are considered to be inextricably entangled in HRM practices.

In the first section of this article, we expand on the two above premises by introducing our multilevel model and explaining the notion of sociomaterial apparatus and sociomaterial HRM practices. We then describe the entanglement of the social and the material at the macro, meso and micro levels, and finally discuss the implications of the present theoretical framework for IHRM research.

The apparatus of the transnational transfer of HRM practices in MNEs

Figure 7: The multilevel apparatus of the transfer of HRM practices in MNEs

All along this article, I will use the example of a Western MNE transferring its performance management practices to its Chinese subsidiaries. The purpose of this example is only to illustrate the theoretical model above, and this model may be generalized to other HRM practices and different contexts. I have chosen Performance Management though, rather than a mere single HR practice [START_REF] Wright | Desegregating HRM: A review and synthesis of micro and macro human resource management research[END_REF], because Performance Management includes a wide set of practices related to most HRM functions. Chinese cultural and institutional environments have also been extensively investigated in the literature and could, I hope, provide an insightful and demonstrative context for the readership. Furthermore, it is also important to note that the disentanglement of the social and material dimensions in the above model is made only from a theoretical perspective and for the sake of clarity. Following a "critical realist" epistemological perspective [START_REF] Leonardi | When flexible routines meet flexible technologies: Affordance, constraint, and the imbrication of human and material agencies[END_REF][START_REF] Leonardi | Theoretical foundations for the study of sociomateriality[END_REF], we assume that the social and material are intrinsically entangled in the practices.

The sociomaterial "apparatus" of the transfer of HRM practices in MNEs

Up until now, the transnational transfer of HRM practices has been theorized mainly as a knowledge-based process [START_REF] Szulanski | Exploring internal stickiness: Impediments to the transfer of best practice within the firm[END_REF] or an institutional and cultural process [START_REF] Brewster | Towards a'European'model of human resource management[END_REF][START_REF] Kostova | Transnational transfer of strategic organizational practices: A contextual perspective[END_REF][START_REF] Rosenzweig | Influences on human resource management practices in multinational corporations[END_REF]. I suggest though that the concept of apparatus, central to sociomaterial theory [START_REF] Orlikowski | What happens when evaluation goes online? Exploring apparatuses of valuation in the travel sector[END_REF], offers new perspectives that may help us better understand the transnational transfer of HRM practices and especially its material dimension (Premise 1). As suggested by Foucault and Actor Network theorists [START_REF] Callon | Some elements of a sociology of translation: domestication of the scallops and the fishermen of St Brieuc Bay[END_REF][START_REF] Latour | Reassembling the social: An introduction to actor-network-theory[END_REF], the concept of apparatus first draws our attention to the role played by humans but also by non-human actors in organizational practices. An apparatus is "a thoroughly heterogeneous ensemble consisting of discourses, institutions, architectural forms, regulatory decisions, laws, administrative measures, scientific statements, philosophical, moral and philanthropic propositionsin short, the said as much as the unsaid" (Foucault, 1980, p.194). On the one hand, an apparatus has material reality. One of the most famous examples given by Foucault is the Bentham's Panopticon [START_REF] Brivot | Beyond panopticism: On the ramifications of surveillance in a contemporary professional setting[END_REF], a penitentiary building designed to observe without being observed.

Regarding the transnational transfer of HRM practices, materiality refers to the forms, software and managerial techniques used during the process [START_REF] Yu | Building a process model of local adaptation of practices: A study of Six Sigma implementation in Korean and US firms[END_REF]. On the other hand, the materiality of an apparatus goes beyond mere tools or instruments. Bentham's Panopticon is a striking illustration of modern surveillance techniques. Similarly, transnational transfer is not simply limited to objects, it also refers to the materialization of organizational relationships between subsidiaries and Headquarters. The ethnocentric or polycentric approach to HRM of a specific MNE becomes much more visible if Headquarters forces local subsidiaries to use their forms and procedures or not. Furthermore, transferring HRM practices includes "the unsaid", discourses, norms and institutions, in other words a human and social dimension, as has been extensively investigated by institutional and cultural theories.

An "apparatus is always inscribed in a play of power, but it is also always linked to certain coordinates of knowledge which issue from it but, to an equal degree, condition it. This is what the apparatus consists in: strategies of relations of forces supporting, and supported by, types of knowledge" (Foucault, 1980, p.196). Viewing the transnational transfer of HRM practices as an apparatus makes the co-construction of knowledge and the power game between Headquarters and subsidiaries more visible [START_REF] Aggeri | Qu'est-ce qu'un dispositif stratégique[END_REF][START_REF] Friedberg | Actors and systems: The politics of collective action[END_REF][START_REF] Townley | Foucault, power/knowledge, and its relevance for human resource management[END_REF]. It helps to break down the ontological difference made between what is transferred (knowledge and practices between entities) and the practice of transferring (people and power games included in the transfer).

The concept of apparatus moves us also from seeing the transnational transfer of HRM practices as resulting from a purely passive process (from a purely rational process based on universal rules or, on the contrary, resulting mainly from institutional and culture pressure) or a purely intentional process (driven by organizations or individuals), toward viewing the transnational transfer as a performative process that shapes individuals and organizations' behaviors [START_REF] Barad | Getting real: Technoscientific practices and the materialization of reality[END_REF][START_REF] Orlikowski | What happens when evaluation goes online? Exploring apparatuses of valuation in the travel sector[END_REF]. Apparatuses organize the phenomena they observe through material and immaterial imbrication. The practice of transferring HRM practices among entities in itself shapes how people and organization make sense of the whole process.

this mean for HRM practices in an international context? Firstly, HRM practices include HRM tools. When a Chinese Talent Manager works on the selection of a cohort of new talents with a Brazilian Director located in the US headquarters of a Business Unit, they use name lists and succession plans created on Excel sheets or Word documents, and arrange international meetings via Skype. These materials are interpreted differently by individuals and groups according to the international institutional and cultural environment they are embedded in. The Chinese Talent Manager may see Skype as an advanced American communication device, whereas the Brazilian Director located in the US may see Skype as a common and mainly personal communication device, depending on their experience and national contexts.

Secondly, organizational practices do not only result from an interaction between the material and the social. They result from their consubstantial entanglement, meaning that they emerge from the unique imbrication of both human and material agencies. That organizational practices are enacted by individuals and human agency is, at first glance, unquestionable. However, organizational practices also include tools and artefacts that may act without human intervention.

Materiality has its own agency. Human and material agencies differ from a phenomenological perspective [START_REF] Leonardi | Materiality, sociomateriality, and socio-technical systems: What do these terms mean? How are they different? Do we need them[END_REF]. Materiality has no consciousness and has no volition to do anything.

It cannot perceive phenomena. However, materiality may act without human involvement.

Materiality constrains or offers opportunities for action to individuals [START_REF] Faraj | The materiality of technology: An affordance perspective[END_REF][START_REF] Leonardi | When flexible routines meet flexible technologies: Affordance, constraint, and the imbrication of human and material agencies[END_REF]. In the travel sector, using online evaluation has not only changed the way hotel directors receive feedback from their customers. The "Algorithmic Valuation Apparatus" has changed the very nature of hoteliers' daily activities, and made customers' opinions a major business concern for them [START_REF] Orlikowski | What happens when evaluation goes online? Exploring apparatuses of valuation in the travel sector[END_REF]. A Chinese talent manager no longer uses MS Word nowadays as he would have used previous word processors in the early nineties [START_REF] Faraj | The materiality of technology: An affordance perspective[END_REF]. He probably doesn't even know that earlier versions, such as Wordstar or WordPerfect, existed, unlike an American senior Manager.

Materiality both constrains managers and affords them possibilities for action. What it means in the international context remains unexplored though. At the same time, international managers speak a more common technological language while using the same global word processor, and more different technological languages while using WeChat or WhatsApp mobile applications to communicate with their colleagues. A Chinese and an American manager now speak a more common HR language in an MNE than in the past decades. They have probably been trained according to the same MBA curriculum, but they also speak a different HR language as they face radically different labor market experiences. I therefore propose the following sociomaterial definition to better understand the transnational transfer of HRM practices within MNEs: HRM practices are unique ways of conducting HRM activities and using HRM knowledge resulting from the inextricable entanglement of the social and the material between Headquarters and local subsidiaries.

3.2.3

The transnational apparatus of the transfer of HRM practices in MNEs: the macro level HRM practices are designed, used and adopted by individuals. However, the transfer of these practices goes beyond mere individuals. It results from power relationships between homeand host-country entities, and these relationships are supported by knowledge [START_REF] Friedberg | Actors and systems: The politics of collective action[END_REF]. HRM practices appear as more legitimate and knowledge-based in the local subsidiaries if they come from global Headquarters. To that extend, the transfer of HRM practices can be considered as a transnational apparatus [START_REF] Foucault | Power/knowledge: Selected interviews and other writings[END_REF]. The concrete apparatus is enacted by individuals at the micro level [START_REF] Aggeri | Qu'est-ce qu'un dispositif stratégique[END_REF], but it is necessary to investigate its foundation, where HRM knowledge come from and how it is related to practices.

Scholars first investigated the transnational transfer of HRM practices through the convergence/divergence prism. Interestingly, one of the earliest arguments of the convergence theorists to explain the convergence of HRM practices worldwide was the superiority of western HRM knowledge [START_REF] Kerr | Industrialism and industrial man[END_REF][START_REF] Rogers | Diffusion of innovations[END_REF]. If we look at the history of Performance Management, it is difficult to deny that most of modern practices, such as Management by

Objectives [START_REF] Locke | The determinants of goal commitment[END_REF], appraisal scales [START_REF] Bretz | The current state of performance appraisal research and practice: Concerns, directions, and implications[END_REF]; Cardy subsidiaries. A potential explanation for this rejection is the high hierarchical distance in China [START_REF] Cooke | Postacquisition evolution of the appraisal and reward systems: A study of Chinese IT firms acquired by US firms[END_REF][START_REF] Festing | Country Specific Profiles of Performance Management in China, Germany, and the United States-An Empirical Test[END_REF]. The legislation on the internal passport in China (Hukou) limits the mobility of local managers [START_REF] Warner | Reassessing human resource management 'with Chinese characteristics': an overview[END_REF]. This legal constraint indubitably hinders the possibilities for MNEs to implement talent management programs based on internal mobility. From an epistemological perspective, divergence theorists share certain constructivist assumptions with convergence theorists. While they either use a constructivist definition of Culture as a web of meaning [START_REF] Geertz | The interpretation of cultures[END_REF][START_REF] Gould | Think glocally, act glocally: A culture-centric comment on Leung, Bhagat, Buchan, Erez and Gibson[END_REF] or a more essentialist definition of culture as collective programming of the mind [START_REF] Hofstede | Cultures and Organizations: Software of the Mind, revised and expanded 3rd ed[END_REF][START_REF] Leung | Culture and international business: Recent advances and their implications for future research[END_REF], they agree upon the idea of HRM knowledge worldwide being reinterpreted by individuals according to their institutional or cultural environment. Convergence and divergence theories may therefore be divided into three approaches to the diffusion of HRM practices, namely Instrumental, Institutional-like and Cultural, and two epistemological approaches. By contrast, the realist approach assumes that the international diffusion of HRM practices is based on universal scientific knowledge [START_REF] Kerr | Industrialism and industrial man[END_REF][START_REF] Rogers | Diffusion of innovations[END_REF].

The function of managerial discourse is to strengthen the universal nature of HRM practices and the competitive and technological advantages offered by HRM practices. Individuals are driven by instrumental rationality. They see the management tools used for HRM practices as stable and independent objects designed by practitioners, consultants or scholars to deal with a specific problem. The role of the designer of HRM practices is reinforced and users are supposed to have an unequivocal understanding of management tools. Scholars and the popular management press play an active role in the diffusion of HRM Knowledge. Heavy stress is placed on individual agency.

On the other hand, most convergence and divergence theories have built on institutional and cultural theories, which share a constructivist epistemological approach regarding the transnational transfer of HRM practices. HRM practices must appear both rational and progressive (Abrahamson, 1996;[START_REF] Abrahamson | Management fashion: Lifecycles, triggers, and collective learning processes[END_REF][START_REF] Chevalier | Cercles de qualité et changement organisationnel[END_REF]. Individuals see management tools as defined by complex interactions between objects and users. Seminal authors [START_REF] Kerr | Industrialism and industrial man[END_REF][START_REF] Rogers | Diffusion of innovations[END_REF][START_REF] Dimaggio | The iron cage revisited: Institutional isomorphism and collective rationality in organizational fields[END_REF][START_REF] Tolbert | Institutional sources of change in the formal structure of organizations: The diffusion of civil service reform, 1880-1935[END_REF][START_REF] Kostova | Transnational transfer of strategic organizational practices: A contextual perspective[END_REF][START_REF] Green | A rhetorical theory of diffusion[END_REF]Abrahamson, 1996;[START_REF] Abrahamson | Management fashion: Lifecycles, triggers, and collective learning processes[END_REF][START_REF] Geertz | The interpretation of cultures[END_REF][START_REF] Hofstede | Cultures and Organizations: Software of the Mind, revised and expanded 3rd ed[END_REF][START_REF] Ralston | The crossvergence perspective: Reflections and projections[END_REF] as stabilized or complete [START_REF] Orlikowski | Sociomaterial practices: Exploring technology at work[END_REF], and may deviate from the designers' purposes, as users interpret and enact them differently. Organizational identities and management tools consistently evolve over time in open systems and fragmented organizations. HRM practices are strongly embedded in their institutional or cultural environment, and individual agency is limited.

However, sociomaterial theorists argue that the opposition between the realist and constructivist approaches is not relevant, especially as regards the material dimension of organizational practices [START_REF] Quattrone | What is IT?: SAP, accounting, and visibility in a multinational organisation[END_REF][START_REF] Orlikowski | 10 sociomateriality: challenging the separation of technology, work and organization[END_REF]). On the one hand, realist theories limit our conception and use of modern technologies, which are in constant evolution. Realist approaches make sense in closed systems, in a laboratory for instance, where any variable is fixed and clearly identified, but they are less able to explain reality in social systems, where objects and behaviors are in constant evolution. They cannot be applied to MNEs either.

MNEs perpetually face organizational, political, cultural and technological mutations. On the other hand, the constructivist approach raises other difficulties. If there are as many "technologies-inpractices" as enactments, this calls the concept of structure into question [START_REF] Quattrone | What is IT?: SAP, accounting, and visibility in a multinational organisation[END_REF], and it ultimately leads to the denial of the reality of management tools. By contrast, Sociomaterial theory assumes that there is a consubstantial entanglement between the social and the material. It attempts to go beyond the opposition between a constructivist and a realist epistemology by highlighting how organizational practices emerge as a co-construction of the social and the material, which both constrains and affords human interpretations. I therefore propose that:

Proposition 2: The standardization, localization and hybridization of HRM practices in MNEs are driven by the co-construction of HRM knowledge resulting from the design of HRM tools by international scholars and practitioners, and extra-organizational institutional and cultural pressures.

3.2.4

The transnational apparatus in the transfer of HRM practices in MNEs: the meso level

In the nineties, the focus of IB scholars shifted. MNEs do not only face strong extraorganizational institutional and cultural pressures, but also strong intra-organizational pressures while transferring their most successful practices.

First, practices are consubstantially infused with organizational knowledge, and the ability of local entities to exploit and retain knowledge from Headquarters is crucial. However, organizational knowledge is largely tacit and naturally creates some ambiguity that may hinder the transfer of organizational practices (Jensen & Szulanski;[START_REF] Jullien | A treatise on efficacy: Between Western and Chinese thinking[END_REF][START_REF] Szulanski | Exploring internal stickiness: Impediments to the transfer of best practice within the firm[END_REF]. Secondly, the intra-organizational structure of MNEs may be an impediment to the transnational transfer of organizational practices. MNEs operate remotely in multicultural contexts, which creates difficulties of communication between entities [START_REF] Szulanski | Exploring internal stickiness: Impediments to the transfer of best practice within the firm[END_REF]. Furthermore, structurally MNEs tend to transfer their best practices, which have been carefully devised at their Headquarters. Top management spontaneously assumes that successful organizational practices in the MNE's home country should also be successful in host countries. However, organizational practices and HRM practices in particular may not fit with local institutional and cultural constraints. Hence local employees tend to only adopt Headquarters' practices ceremonially, meaning that they comply with them formally but do not see them as having any particular value in their day-to-day work [START_REF] Kostova | Transnational transfer of strategic organizational practices: A contextual perspective[END_REF][START_REF] Kostova | Adoption of an organizational practice by subsidiaries of multinational corporations: Institutional and relational effects[END_REF]. According to Kostova, the central issue in the transnational transfer of organizational practices therefore shifts from the implementation to the internalization of practices, defined as a "state in which the employee at the recipient unit attach symbolic meaning to the practice" (Kostova, 1999, p. 311).

Building on these findings, IHRM scholars have provided many evidence that the social capital shared by MNEs' headquarters and their local subsidiaries is especially important for the adoption of HRM practices [START_REF] Ahlvik | Towards explaining subsidiary implementation, integration, and internalization of MNC headquarters HRM practices[END_REF]. The role of expatriates as boundaryspanners between entities [START_REF] Harzing | The bridging role of expatriates and inpatriates in knowledge transfer in multinational corporations[END_REF][START_REF] Hocking | Balancing global and local strategic contexts: Expatriate knowledge transfer, applications, and learning within a transnational organization[END_REF][START_REF] Rosenzweig | Influences on human resource management practices in multinational corporations[END_REF], the involvement of local General Managers and their relationships with HR managers are also particularly significant [START_REF] Björkman | The determinants of line management internalisation of HRM practices in MNC subsidiaries[END_REF].

technology is not only a material resource used by MNEs and which is external to them.

Technology is one of the main reasons why MNEs exist and expand internationally. "The multinational corporation arises not out of the failure of markets for the buying and selling of knowledge, but out of its superior efficiency as an organizational vehicle by which to transfer this knowledge across borders (…) the less codifiable and the harder to teach is the technology, the more likely the transfer will be to wholly owned operations" (Kogut & Zander, 1993, p.625).

Technology is an ontological part of the MNE, and the competitive advantage given to MNEs by international technology extends to HRM practices. Global HRM practices, devised in the MNE's home country, may fit better with the MNE's original raison d'être.

Building on [START_REF] Bartlett | Managing across borders: The transnational corporation[END_REF], I propose that MNEs may be divided into three socio-technical categories: global, multi-domestic and transnational. Global socio-technical MNEs face weak pressure for local responsiveness and strong pressure for worldwide integration. From an HRM perspective, they follow the same unified strategy regardless of the local institutional and cultural context. The material agency of HRM tools depends on their seemingly intrinsic efficiency.

Global MNEs adopt the same HRM strategy everywhere in the world. They recruit, train and develop people in their different entities based on the same universal approach [START_REF] Dowling | International human resource management: Managing people in a multinational context[END_REF]. By contrast, multi-domestic socio-technical MNEs face strong pressure for local responsiveness and weak pressure for worldwide integration. Subsidiaries are still dependent on HQ for certain resources, especially financial, but they remain largely independent. The status of HRM tools depends on the local context. HRM strategies, tools and practices are localized or undergo extensive modification in the subsidiaries depending on the local institutional context [START_REF] Des Horts | Vers une gestion stratégique des ressources humaines[END_REF][START_REF] Dowling | International human resource management: Managing people in a multinational context[END_REF]. Lastly, transnational socio-technical MNEs face strong pressure for local responsiveness and strong pressure for worldwide integration. They endeavor to share financial, technological and human resources among their worldwide entities [START_REF] Bartlett | Managing across borders: The transnational corporation[END_REF][START_REF] Harzing | An empirical analysis and extension of the Bartlett and Ghoshal typology of multinational companies[END_REF]. Their HRM strategies and practices are based on collaborative relationships between headquarters and subsidiaries. The status of HRM tools depends on their global efficiency, but also on results from a collaborative exchange between entities. Hence, users interpret and enact technology differently according to their local context but seek to reach a global agreement to share best practices worldwide.

The quality of the social exchanges between headquarters and subsidiaries also plays an essential role in the transfer of HRM practices. Firstly, the local entities need to have enough human resources to exploit and retain HRM knowledge (Jensen & Szulanski;[START_REF] Jullien | A treatise on efficacy: Between Western and Chinese thinking[END_REF][START_REF] Szulanski | Exploring internal stickiness: Impediments to the transfer of best practice within the firm[END_REF]. Next, transferring practices implies intensive communication between individuals [START_REF] Szulanski | Exploring internal stickiness: Impediments to the transfer of best practice within the firm[END_REF].

Local employees need to master the materiality of the MNE's "official" language, its vocabulary, grammar and syntax. They need to possess sufficient language skills to explore and make use of the HRM knowledge underlying the practices.

Furthermore, language is not limited to simply mastering the requisite technical linguistic skills. Language also relates to intra-organizational power relationships. It impacts the status of both individuals and entities (Fedriksson, Barner-Rasmussen & Piekkari, 2006;[START_REF] Hinds | Language as a lightning rod: Power contests, emotion regulation, and subgroup dynamics in global teams[END_REF]. Headquarters can more easily control subsidiaries in which low language skills are prevalent [START_REF] Björkman | Language and foreign subsidiary control: An empirical test[END_REF] and HRM practices are more likely to be standardized. If multi-domestic and transnational MNEs aim to promote the transfer of intensive HRM knowledge between their entities, they need to have a consistent language strategy in line with their overall strategy and socio-technical structure. They need not only to train local employees to speak the language of the MNEs' home country, but also to train native speakers to communicate more slowly and clearly in their native language [START_REF] Neeley | Global business speaks English: Why you need a language strategy now[END_REF][START_REF] Śliwa | How non-native English-speaking staff are evaluated in linguistically diverse organizations: A sociolinguistic perspective[END_REF].

Lastly, the "relational context", defined as the degree of commitment, identification and trust between entities [START_REF] Kostova | Transnational transfer of strategic organizational practices: A contextual perspective[END_REF], is also essential to the quality of the social exchanges. MNEs headquarters endeavor to carefully design HRM practices in their home countries to support their activities. As highlighted by institutional theory [START_REF] Dimaggio | The iron cage revisited: Institutional isomorphism and collective rationality in organizational fields[END_REF][START_REF] Meyer | Institutionalized organizations: Formal structure as myth and ceremony[END_REF], top management tend to assume that successful HRM practices in the home country will prove to be just as effective in the host countries because of mimetic, normative and coercive isomorphisms. However, headquarters' practices may not fit with the local cultural and institutional context, and local employees tend to adopt headquarters' HRM practices only ceremonially. Hence, Kostova and her colleagues [START_REF] Kostova | Transnational transfer of strategic organizational practices: A contextual perspective[END_REF][START_REF] Kostova | Adoption of an organizational practice by subsidiaries of multinational corporations: Institutional and relational effects[END_REF] argue that the central question has shifted from the implementation to the internalization of practices, which is strongly related to the social context between entities. Even multi-domestic MNEs' local entities largely depend on headquarters' financial, human and technical resources, and they are often forced to implement the MNEs' headquarters organizational practices. If local entities identify themselves with their headquarters, the transfer will be easier. But if local entities do not trust their headquarters, local employees are less likely to internalize MNEs' headquarters organizational practices [START_REF] Kostova | Transnational transfer of strategic organizational practices: A contextual perspective[END_REF][START_REF] Kostova | Adoption of an organizational practice by subsidiaries of multinational corporations: Institutional and relational effects[END_REF].

Building on sociomaterial theory, I propose to pay more attention to materiality in the social exchanges between headquarters and local entities. For instance, [START_REF] Kostova | Adoption of an organizational practice by subsidiaries of multinational corporations: Institutional and relational effects[END_REF] argue that internalization is mainly driven by the psychological identification between headquarters and local entities or employees. They suggest adapting the scale of psychological ownership to measure internalization. However, internalization is not only a psychological process. The adoption of organizational practices, such as Enterprise Resource Planning (Quattrone & Hopper, 2002), depends highly on the individuals' involvement in the material design of practices [START_REF] De Vaujany | Pour une théorie de l'appropriation des outils de gestion: vers un dépassement de l'opposition conception-usage[END_REF][START_REF] Grimand | L'appropriation des outils de gestion: vers de nouvelles perspectives théoriques?[END_REF][START_REF] Orlikowski | The sociomateriality of organisational life: considering technology in management research[END_REF]. The materiality of practices is never stable and constantly evolves over time in modern organizations. It is therefore necessary to involve people to make sure they adopt ongoing modifications. Hence, I suggest that the more closely local entities are involved in the formal design of organizational practices, the stronger the adoption by local employees will be.

The participation of top local management in the design of HRM tools or procedures is particularly important. It strengthens the perception of procedural justice and ultimately the adoption of HRM practices such as performance appraisal [START_REF] Sumelius | What determines employee perceptions of HRM process features? The case of performance appraisal in MNC subsidiaries[END_REF]) by local employees. The participation of international assignees is also crucial.

HRM knowledge is largely tacit and expatriates have easier access to the tacit knowledge transferred by headquarters. They gain experiential knowledge [START_REF] Hocking | Balancing global and local strategic contexts: Expatriate knowledge transfer, applications, and learning within a transnational organization[END_REF] in local entities and act as boundary-spanners between home-and host-countries. Inpatriates also play a crucial role. They enhance the knowledge transfer in the opposite direction from subsidiaries to headquarters [START_REF] Harzing | The bridging role of expatriates and inpatriates in knowledge transfer in multinational corporations[END_REF][START_REF] Lazarova | Knowledge transfer upon repatriation[END_REF][START_REF] Reiche | Knowledge transfer in multinationals: The role of inpatriates' boundary spanning[END_REF]Stokes, Liu, Smith, Leidner, Moore & Rowland, 2015) and help to make sure that local entities are involved in the design of HRM tools and procedures.

These arguments, taken together, suggest that the implementation of HRM practices transferred from headquarters to local subsidiaries may be either participative or directive, to varying degrees. Participative implementation involves both local managers and employees in the change process, in a sharing of decision-making. By contrast, directive implementation is highly centralized by headquarters, using persuasion, strong process monitoring, and very few forms of knowledge transfer and participation. [START_REF] Nutt | Tactics of implementation[END_REF]. I therefore propose that: As at macro and meso levels, the above models highlight the social dimension of the transfer of HRM practices but pay less attention to the material dimension of the process. "A subsidiary's members' perceptions about the value of the practice is influenced by a highly social and interpretive process" (Kostova & Roth, 2002, p.222). Sociomaterial theory also assumes that the adoption of practices is a social interpretative process. Individuals need to make sense of practices.

However, Sociomaterial theory also suggests that individual interpretation is constrained or afforded by material agency. The ability of individuals to adapt headquarters' HRM knowledge and practices in the specific context of MNEs results from the entanglement of social and material agencies, from which four alternative modes of appropriation emerge: formal adoption, rejection, innovative and deviant adoptions (Cf. Table 8).

whereas finance managers must abide by international financial standards. By contrast, high-level positions are more sensitive to the need for global integration. They communicate frequently with headquarters and have access to more information from the MNE home-country. Local CEOs and HR directors represent their organization with local and regional institutions. They look for local institutional legitimacy and tend to decouple policies from operational practices [START_REF] Meyer | Institutionalized organizations: Formal structure as myth and ceremony[END_REF]. Expatriates, especially parent-country nationals, also have more frequent access to, and exchanges with, headquarters [START_REF] Hocking | Balancing global and local strategic contexts: Expatriate knowledge transfer, applications, and learning within a transnational organization[END_REF]. Local employees with international experience and inpatriates may also act as boundary-spanners with headquarters [START_REF] Reiche | Knowledge transfer in multinationals: The role of inpatriates' boundary spanning[END_REF]Stokes, et al., 2015) and are more exposed to the necessity for global integration.

The willingness of local employees to adapt Global HRM practices or not also results from the entanglement with material agency. Global HRM practices are transferred through material artefacts, such as HRM tools, techniques and guidelines [START_REF] Yu | Building a process model of local adaptation of practices: A study of Six Sigma implementation in Korean and US firms[END_REF]. Material agency, defined as the capability of material tools and technology to act [START_REF] Leonardi | Materiality, sociomateriality, and socio-technical systems: What do these terms mean? How are they different? Do we need them[END_REF], constrain or afford opportunities for action to local employees in MNEs [START_REF] Leonardi | When flexible routines meet flexible technologies: Affordance, constraint, and the imbrication of human and material agencies[END_REF][START_REF] Faraj | The materiality of technology: An affordance perspective[END_REF]).

On the one hand, the physical materiality of practices constrains individuals' willingness. If the German HR headquarters of an MNE requires all its Asian subsidiaries to use the same performance appraisal form that includes a box about international or national mobility, local employees and managers are compelled by the materiality of the document to check the box or not.

However, national mobility does not have the same meaning and consequences in Germany and in China. Furthermore, the materiality of practices goes beyond mere physical artefacts. It refers to the teleological principles of practices, which are external referents to individuals. The material dimension refers to "particular techniques, methodologies, and guidelines that practice users are supposed to use" (Yu & Zaheer, 2010, p. 480). If the new talent management procedure of an MNE requires local BU directors to select only 10% of their team members to be part of a new coaching program, managers are led to compete with each other so as to be seen as future high potentials.

On the other hand, the materiality of HRM practices offers opportunities for individual actions. Furthermore, if local employees perceive strong opportunities for action in global HRM practices, they are more likely to have a dynamic approach toward these practices. They will not limit their understanding of performance management practices to annual performance appraisal.

They will engage in a more holistic approach and associate other practices, such as providing ongoing feedback, daily coaching or talent management practices, based on their experience within and outside the company. If, in addition, they perceive a strong need for local adaption, they are more likely to deviate from global HRM practices as they assume they have strong decision latitude. They will change global HRM practices to such an extent than local practices will deviate from the original purpose of the designers. On the other hand, if local employees perceive a strong need for global integration they will allow themselves to slightly adapt practices according to their local needs but keep in line with the overall principles of the global HRM practices. As they are engaged in the modification and improvement of the practices, they will be more committed to them [START_REF] De Vaujany | Pour une théorie de l'appropriation des outils de gestion: vers un dépassement de l'opposition conception-usage[END_REF][START_REF] Grimand | L'appropriation des outils de gestion: vers de nouvelles perspectives théoriques?[END_REF][START_REF] Orlikowski | The sociomateriality of organisational life: considering technology in management research[END_REF].

DISCUSSION

The interaction of micro, meso and macro levels

The IHRM literature has thoroughly investigated the transnational transfer of HRM practices in MNEs from a macro and meso perspective. At the macro level, researchers argue that global HRM practices worldwide tend to either converge [START_REF] Edwards | Global standardization or national differentiation of HRM practices in multinational companies? A comparison of multinationals in five countries[END_REF][START_REF] Pudelko | Country-of-origin, localization, or dominance effect? An empirical investigation of HRM practices in foreign subsidiaries[END_REF][START_REF] Shadur | The adoption of international best practices in a Western culture: East meets West[END_REF], diverge [START_REF] Brewster | Towards a'European'model of human resource management[END_REF][START_REF] Rosenzweig | Influences on human resource management practices in multinational corporations[END_REF][START_REF] Tregaskis | Converging or diverging? A comparative analysis of trends in contingent employment practice in Europe over a decade[END_REF] or hybridize [START_REF] Chung | South Korean MNEs' international HRM approach: Hybridization of global standards and local practices[END_REF][START_REF] Davila | Humanistic leadership: Lessons from Latin America[END_REF][START_REF] Gamble | Transferring organizational practices and the dynamics of hybridization: Japanese retail multinationals in China[END_REF][START_REF] Yahiaoui | Hybridization: striking a balance between adoption and adaptation of human resource management practices in French multinational corporations and their Tunisian subsidiaries[END_REF] due to cultural and institutional pressures. At the meso level, researchers underline the need to have enough human resources to explore and exploit headquarters' knowledge [START_REF] Jensen | Stickiness and the adaptation of organizational practices in cross-border knowledge transfers[END_REF][START_REF] Szulanski | Exploring internal stickiness: Impediments to the transfer of best practice within the firm[END_REF]. They point out the importance of the relational context between home-and host-country units [START_REF] Björkman | Transferring HR practices within multinational corporations[END_REF][START_REF] Kostova | Transnational transfer of strategic organizational practices: A contextual perspective[END_REF][START_REF] Kostova | Adoption of an organizational practice by subsidiaries of multinational corporations: Institutional and relational effects[END_REF]. The micro level has received less attention but some researchers suggest different types of adoptions by local employees (Mcgaughey & De Cieri, 1999) and psychological scales to measure the internalization of organizational practices [START_REF] Kostova | Adoption of an organizational practice by subsidiaries of multinational corporations: Institutional and relational effects[END_REF].

A number of researchers have proposed multilevel models [START_REF] Kostova | Adoption of an organizational practice by subsidiaries of multinational corporations: Institutional and relational effects[END_REF]Mcgaughey & De Cieri, 1999) to integrate the macro, meso, and micro levels but, as discussed previously, they remain focused on the social dimension of the process. Furthermore, as with many international processes, the multilevel nature of the transnational transfer of HRM practices leads to seeming contradictions in the literature. In particular, the macro levels of analysis tend to focus our attention on socio-economic aspects and argue for the convergence of practices worldwide. By contrast, the micro level of analysis highlights the psychological aspects of the transfer. (Mcgaughey & De Cieri, 1999). This draws our attention to the multiple interpretations made by local employees and the potentially infinite idiosyncratic adaptations of HRM practices in local subsidiaries.

The central contribution of my research is to build on sociomaterial theory to provide an integrated approach to the transfer of HRM practices in MNEs and to bring materiality back into the discussion. Sociomaterial theory originally focuses on the entanglement of the social and the material at the micro level. However, it also provides new concepts to investigate the role of the international diffusion of HRM knowledge at the macro level. It especially helps us to better understand the impact of the techno-structure of MNEs on the transfer and the final adoption of global HRM practices by local employees in MNEs, as summarized in Table 9. [START_REF] Leonardi | Theoretical foundations for the study of sociomateriality[END_REF][START_REF] Orlikowski | 10 sociomateriality: challenging the separation of technology, work and organization[END_REF] Building on Sociomaterial theory helps us to disentangle this seeming contradiction, and I propose that, in the specific context of MNE,s the adoption of HRM practices depends on how local employees make sense of the need for global integration and local responsiveness as well as the constraints and affordances of HRM tools. MNEs, defined as socio-technical structures, tend toward global, multi-domestic or transnational forms depending on their strategy, business opportunities and technical approach [START_REF] Bartlett | Managing across borders: The transnational corporation[END_REF]. From an ontological perspective, the entanglement of social and material agencies in individual agency originates in post-modern philosophy and the rejection of the classic separation between subjects and objects. [START_REF] Leonardi | Theoretical foundations for the study of sociomateriality[END_REF] identifies two ontological currents in sociomaterial theory. Agential realism assumes that "there is no separate social interaction that is not distinct from materiality -there is only a fused 'sociomaterial' ". Critical realism assumes that "the social context and the materiality that exists in it are separate. The social and the material become 'sociomaterial' as people imbricate social and material agencies" (Leonardi, 2013, p.74). In this article, I side with critical realism. It assumes that materiality pre-exists the individual sense-making process and is of greater help in bringing materiality back into the debate. However, both perspectives share the same idea that practices should be seen as a sociomaterial apparatus of knowledge transfer, in which 'social' refers to the individual's involvement in the construction of knowledge and 'material' refers to what is conceived as being external to human interpretation (objects or universal laws).

Furthermore, seeing the transnational transfer of HRM practices as a sociomaterial apparatus highlights the performative dimensions of the process. By implementing HRM knowledge in a directive or a participative way, and by adapting or not certain given procedures, forms or software, MNEs express preconceived ideas about the role of local units and employees. As frequently highlighted by IHRM scholars, MNEs are powerful vehicles for the diffusion of western managerial ideas in the rest of the world [START_REF] Warner | Reassessing human resource management 'with Chinese characteristics': an overview[END_REF]. Local public and private companies mimic Western HRM practices in order to become more knowledgeable, to attract more talent and to gain in legitimacy on local and international markets. In return, the current rise of non-western countries in the global economy helps non-western companies to export their HRM practices worldwide [START_REF] Chung | South Korean MNEs' international HRM approach: Hybridization of global standards and local practices[END_REF].

Future research

This paper offers a number of theoretical and empirical avenues for research. Although sociomaterial theory has gained in popularity in the organizational field, this article is the first theoretical paper to investigate international organizational practices from a sociomaterial perspective. It would therefore be worth exploring, in particular, different HRM practices [START_REF] Des Horts | Typologies des pratiques de gestion des ressources humaines[END_REF] involving varying degrees of flexibility [START_REF] Wright | Toward a unifying framework for exploring fit and flexibility in strategic human resource management[END_REF], employee involvement [START_REF] Bae | Organizational and HRM strategies in Korea: Impact on firm performance in an emerging economy[END_REF], and technology. More generally, it would also be fruitful to extend sociomaterial theory to other management practices in the IB field, using both qualitative and quantitative methodologies. Sociomaterial theory offers promising avenues for empirical research. For instance, [START_REF] Kostova | Adoption of an organizational practice by subsidiaries of multinational corporations: Institutional and relational effects[END_REF] propose psychological scales to measure the internalization of international organizational practices. Building on sociomaterial theory, researchers could measure the degree of adoption by local employees as a function of their static or dynamic approach to HRM tools. In particular, they could explore the impact of HRM tools' constraints and affordance on the adoption of organizational practices by local employees. They could also measure the impact of the perception of the need for global integration and local adaption on local employees, and what the individual determinants (expatriation, international exposure, position in the hierarchy) of this perception are. These empirical developments of a sociomaterial approach to the transnational transfer of HRM practices could be extremely beneficial to organizations, especially to help them better train their employees to constructively adapt practices introduced from other entities.

In conclusion, this paper offers an integrated multilevel approach to the transnational transfer of HRM practices within MNEs, and posits the need to pay greater attention to the materiality of practices. In doing so, it seeks to contribute to both IHRM and sociomaterial literatures and provides a theoretical framework to help to better understand both the existing debate about the convergence, divergence and hybridization of practices worldwide, and the recurrent debate about individual agency in the IB field.

Sociomaterial theory [START_REF] Leonardi | Theoretical foundations for the study of sociomateriality[END_REF][START_REF] Orlikowski | Sociomaterial practices: Exploring technology at work[END_REF][START_REF] Orlikowski | 10 sociomateriality: challenging the separation of technology, work and organization[END_REF]) offers a different approach to individual agency and highlights its imbrication with material agency. Tools, object and managerial artefacts both constrain employees and offer possibilities for action.

Employees need to fill in forms. Managers need to select the number and type of talents in their teams corresponding to headquarters' procedures. Materiality also refers to the design and purpose of practices and the ontological nature of the relationship between objects and subjects. In the international context, the traditional opposition between designers and users of organizational tools [START_REF] De Vaujany | Pour une théorie de l'appropriation des outils de gestion: vers un dépassement de l'opposition conception-usage[END_REF][START_REF] Grimand | L'appropriation des outils de gestion: vers de nouvelles perspectives théoriques?[END_REF] is reinforced by cultural and institutional distance. The original purpose of HRM practices' designers may be reinforced or weakened by the local environment, leading to radically different practices. This appears clearly in this thesis, when managers of a remote entity in China decided to conduct the yearly performance appraisal of their teams together with their own managers, contrary to headquarters' recommendations. The control purpose of performance appraisal [START_REF] Cleveland | Multiple uses of performance appraisal: Prevalence and correlates[END_REF] designed by headquarters was suddenly reinforced by the local hierarchical culture, and, as a consequence, the local practice deviated strongly from the original purpose of the designers.

Building on sociomaterial theory also enables me to suggest a new definition of HRM practices in the international context, as unique ways of conducting HRM activities and using HRM knowledge resulting from the inextricable entanglement of the social and material between headquarters and local subsidiaries. HRM practices are idiosyncratic. They are interpreted and enacted by individuals. However, employees follow some patterns that emerge from the entanglement of social and material agencies. Local employees adopt, adapt or reject HRM practices because they feel constrained or afforded to act by HRM tools which have been designed

and transferred by headquarters or other entities, as described in the first chapter of this doctoral thesis.

At the macro level, HRM practices are idiosyncratic in the sense that local entities create or adapt global practices transferred by other entities. The local entities select only some of the practices transferred by global headquarters or third entities. They create or adapt practices emotional, mythological...) that compose a whole are inseparable, and there is inter-retroactive, interactive, interdependent tissue between the subject of knowledge and its context, the parts amongst themselves" (Morin, 2002, p.15). The social and the material are consubstantially imbricated in HRM practices that are becoming more and complex. Hence, it is critical for managers to better understand how HRM practices are designed, what their scientific foundations are, and how they evolve in their organization across time.

Managers and employees need to learn how the technological complexity of HRM practices goes beyond the mere materiality of HRM tools. It requires a change of paradigm and a radically different approach. Employees and managers need to understand the relationships between the social and the material, how the social constrains the material and vice versa, and how they cannot be understood separately. Individual agency is reinforced when managers perceive management practices as a mutual penetration of universal scientific rules and hands-on techniques developed by individuals and groups across time [START_REF] Chiapello | Management Tools: A Critical Social Science Perspective[END_REF][START_REF] Chiapello | Sociologie des outils de gestion: introduction à l'analyse sociale de l'instrumentation de gestion[END_REF].

Argyris and Schon postulate that employees need to develop a "double vision" and develop their practical reflexivity in order to make sure they internalize and adopt organizational practices (Argyris & Schon, 1974;[START_REF] Schon | The reflective practitioner: How professionals think in action[END_REF]. Building on this perspective, I suggest that practitioners should be trained to develop their "technological reflexivity". In questioning the reference frame, the goals and the strategies of organizational practices, employees activate their individual agency.

Double-loop learning enables them to perform a deeper analysis of their working experience and organizational context, and ultimately to better internalize organizational practices.

In a world where materiality is present everywhere, I suggest adding a material dimension to "reflective practice" [START_REF] Schon | The reflective practitioner: How professionals think in action[END_REF]. Headquarters needs to allow local employees and local entities more space and freedom to adapt and change the materiality of practices. Local employees and entities need to keep in line with the overall purpose of headquarters' practices, otherwise the whole company HRM strategy may lose its overall consistency. However, allowing employees to change forms and procedures, and allowing entities to create new practices, increases their engagement in the long term [START_REF] De Vaujany | De la conception à l'usage: vers un management de l'appropriation des outils de gestion[END_REF][START_REF] Grimand | L'appropriation des outils de gestion et ses effets sur les dynamiques organisationnelles: le cas du déploiement d'un référentiel des emplois et des compétences[END_REF]. It also reinforces individual and collective creativity and creates new hybrid practices that may be transferred to other entities. A complex balance needs to be found between following, and slightly deviating from, headquarters recommendations, and MNEs may, for instance, train their employees in new approaches such as design thinking [START_REF] Barry | Going mobile: Aesthetic design considerations from Calder and the constructivists[END_REF][START_REF] Boland | Design matters for management[END_REF].

Conclusion

Sociomaterial theory opens up promising new avenues for future research in IB and IHRM.

In this doctoral thesis, based on the transfer of PM practices from a French transnational MNE to its local subsidiaries in China, I propose that my findings may be applied to HRM practices more generally. However, the materiality of HRM practices may vary from one HR practice to another and it would be extremely interesting to investigate different HRM practices in a variety of contexts. In particular, born-global firms are now emerging all around the world [START_REF] Knight | Innovation, organizational capabilities, and the born-global firm[END_REF]Zander, McDougall-Covin & Rose, 2015). HRM practices are increasingly digitized [START_REF] Colbert | The digital workforce and the workplace of the future[END_REF]. HR and operational managers now routinely use LinkedIn and social media to select candidates and check their profiles [START_REF] Ollier-Malaterre | When worlds collide in cyberspace: How boundary work in online social networks impacts professional relationships[END_REF]. MNEs endeavour to develop and promote ongoing feedback techniques and mobile applications to renew performance management processes (Ledford, Benson, & Lawler, 2016). The materiality of HRM practices is thereby strongly reinforced. However, we need to investigate still further how employees adopt new digital HRM practices in born-global firms and different cultural contexts.

In the current age of ever-increasing digitization of organizational and HRM practices, new modes of reflexivity are central to individual and organizational learning (Argyris & Schon 1974).

Sociotechnical reflexivity [START_REF] De Vaujany | Capturing reflexivity modes in IS: A critical realist approach[END_REF] has become a key skill for future employees and La demande de DIF doit être finalisée par écrit par le salarié en remplissant au moins 3 mois avant la date du stage un formulaire de demande de DIF. Dans tous les cas, la demande de DIF doit faire l'objet de l'accord de l'employeur, qui dispose d'un délai d'un mois pour le notifier. L'absence de réponse dans ce délai vaut acceptation de la demande.

Actions entrant dans le cadre du DIF

Les actions de formation éligibles dans le cadre du DIF sont celles relevant des catégories 2 et 3 du plan de formation, c'est-à-dire :

• Catégorie 2 : actions liées à l'évolution de l'emploi ou participant au maintien dans l'emploi (perfectionnement dans l'activité professionnelle, changement d'organisation générant une nouvelle activité dans l'emploi actuel) Ø Exemples pour lesquels le DIF peut être engagé : négociation aux achats, initiation aux mesures de bruit, échangeurs de chaleur, initiation à la chimie organique, groupes frigorifiques, gestion des déchets, management, langues, ….

L'information du DIF :

Chaque année, le salarié reçoit une information écrite lui précisant l'état de ses droits acquis au titre du DIF.

1 st Order Themes -Descriptive codes PM as a control and communication tool -I have been doing performance appraisals for almost ten years in Europe and two years now here (in Asia). The format is slightly different according to each country, but the principles are the same. It is really about the measurement of the achievements, and setting objectives for next year.

(2015, APAC IT & IS Director)

-I think we are not yet where we would like to be. We do a little discrimination. In terms of bonus, we are on a scale of 80/100 now, whereas before the scale was more around 90/95. (2015, GM of an industrial unit (IU))

-The Kemike PM System is a key management tool for the construction of Kemike and the development of it strategy. Beyond the day-to-day management, the PM system is the opportunity for a formal discussion to appraise the achievements of the past year. It is a milestone to review the job description, to prepare action plans by setting concrete objectives that can be measured, and to prepare the mid-term and the long term goals. (Kemike China PPT presentation, 2005) Design of IHRM practices -It is not easy to dismiss people in china, not easier than in France. However, there is a system of short-term contracts. They usually last 2 or 3 years. (…) So we use this undetermined period [between two contract] Material affordance

Labor law -Because of labour protection some companies say: "ok, I'm not going to hire any people, I'll ask some other HR companies to provide me with employees that I can use, but they're not my employees, so any time I don't want them, I don't have the legal risks. I pay a lot of money to the HR company, but I also transfer my legal risks to them. ( … Comparison between international and national firms -French companies are always very open. Not like American companies. American companies are not very good. In American companies it is like this: you do a good job, ok, you can talk about everything, salary ... If you are not good, tomorrow you can be dismissed. American companies are like that. French companies are more, how to say, tolerant. If I make a mistake, they can tolerate it. Different culture. So this is also why a lot of people want to stay here. -We're looking to upgrade the talents, and this is one of the big challenges I had in the very beginning, I have to give you a little bit of history so you understand some of my comments: when Total first started the plant, they set it up in a manner where they made it very Chinese for the operations, meaning that there was a Chinese Plant Manager, and everybody on the facility reported to the Chinese Manager. (…) From a safety perspective, this was very challenging for us because nobody in the plant wanted to take personal responsibility for safety because that was the HSE Manager's job and the Plant Manager 's job. (2015, GM of -[Talent] they are so scarce, so you pay them very high, sometimes higher than the same talents at the same level in Europe. We have to compete against other companies for them. But for the lower level the job skills, you can easily find a replacement, so you don't pay them much. I think it's pretty specific in China. Maybe a little bit somewhere else in Asia, but in other places like Japan, Singapore, the market is pretty mature there, so you don't see that kind of big gap. -For the moment, we have received a lot of investments so, I would say, we are relatively independent from the head office. However, we are very dependent on the business units. They are the true decision makers about investments. They are even very coercive about human resources investments since they directly recruit staff and plan budgets, and this creates quite a few problems. -If we had a system, even more detailed, like a checklist: "this (behavior) is maybe 0.2 and another one is 0.1" this would be good. Enterprises by expanding another central concept to sociomaterial theory: the notion of "apparatus". This dissertation aims therefore at contributing both to International Human Resources Management literature and to the literature of the sociology of management tools.

  que ce soient celles des responsables ou des chercheurs. Je conduisis ainsi plusieurs dizaines d'entretiens, tout en menant des observations sur le terrain et en collectant des données d'archives pendant 3 ans entre 2012 et 2015. En comptant mon expérience professionnelle initiale, j'ai ainsi collecté des données sur période d'observation de dix ans, allant de 2005 à 2015, dans cinq entités d'une des principales entreprises de Chimie française établie en Chine.

  d'agir du matériel et du social. Certains employés se sentent contraints par la capacité d'agir du matériel. En d'autres termes, ils ne voient qu'une seule façon d'utiliser les formulaires, les logiciels ou les procédures, voire se sentent contrôlés quand ils les utilisent. Si ces salariés perçoivent également un besoin d'intégration globale élevé et un besoin d'adaptation locale faible, alors ils ont tendance à voir les pratiques de GRH transférées par le siège, telles que les entretiens annuels ou les pratiques de gestion des talents, comme supérieures aux pratiques locales et ils les adoptent formellement. A l'inverse, si ces salariés perçoivent un besoin d'intégration globale faible et un besoin d'adaptation locale faible, ils ont tendance a rejeté les pratiques du siège. Dans certains cas, par exemple, les responsables signent les formulaires d'entretien annuel sans avoir conduit ces entretiens au préalable. Parallèlement certains employés locaux perçoivent une forte « affordance » ou « potentialité » matérielle d'action dans les pratiques de GRH transférées par le siège. Ils voient les formulaires, logiciels et procédures conçus par le siège comme des opportunités d'action. Quand ces salariés perçoivent également un besoin d'intégration globale fort et un besoin d'adaptation locale fort, ils ont tendance à dévier légèrement des recommandations du siège tout en respectant les principes généraux. Les salariés locaux tendent alors à créer des pratiques innovantes. Cependant, si ces mêmes salariés perçoivent un besoin d'intégration globale faible et un besoin d'adaptation locale fort, ils ont alors tendance à dévier fortement des recommandations du siège.

3. 2 .

 2 The Apparatus of the Transnational Transfer of HRM Practices in MNEs 3.2.1. The sociomaterial "apparatus" of the transfer of HRM practices in MNEs 3.2.2. The sociomaterial approach to HRM practices in MNE 3.2.3. The transnational apparatus of the transfer of HRM practices in MNEs: the macro level 3.2.4. The transnational apparatus in the transfer of HRM practices in MNEs: the meso level 3.2.5. The transnational apparatus in the transfer of HRM practices: the micro level 3.3. Discussion 3.3.1. The interaction of micro, meso and macro levels 3Chinese templates of the performance appraisal forms -Additional representative descriptive codes

  Figure 1Dissertation summary

  -neither the managers' nor the researcher's espoused theory. I conducted several dozen interviews, made field observations, and collected archival data over 3 years between 2012 and 2015. Including my initial 5-year work experience, I gathered data over a 10-year observation period, from 2005 to 2015, in five entities of a major French Chemical Company established in China.

Figure 2 :

 2 Figure 2: Kemike's expansion in China

  have been doing performance appraisals for almost ten years in Europe and two years now [in Asia]. (…) It is really about the measurement of the achievements, and setting objectives for next year" (2015, APAC IT & IS Director). The control purpose is also clearly emphasized in the global and local annual performance review guides. Both in China and in France, the section dedicated to the measurement of employees' objectives encroaches heavily upon the section dedicated to training and development in the performance appraisal forms (8 pages versus 1 page in China, and 4

  For instance, contrary to the widely assumed collectivist orientation of Chinese culture, we gathered clear evidence of the rise of individualistic behaviors in the field of evaluation at work. Local employees clearly tend to favour an individually based performance rated reward system at Kemike (Bozionelos & Wang, 2007), and the younger generation in particular. "The 80s generation, they have a different state of mind. They speak very frankly, and sometimes compared to people of the 70s generation, they really need more coaching to open their mind, help others, and work as team members, not individually. It really requires more energy to train them and coach them". (Supply chain manager of an industrial unit, 2012)

1Figure 3 :

 3 Figure 3: The four archetypes of HRM practices adoption

  practices. Local employees are also embedded in a different context and global practices are quickly compared with local practices. Global tools, procedures and guidelines are quickly compared with those currently existing or used by local competitors. This triggers a dynamic understanding of HRM tools, which leads local employees to deviate strongly or slightly from the original purpose of the practice designer and adopt deviant or innovative HRM practices. The material environment sets the cognitive boundaries for individual agency.

  adapt global HRM practices to the local sociocultural environment in order to fulfill the operational needs of individuals, MNEs also need to set the material boundaries of HRM practices to avoid individuals and local units deviating significantly from headquarters' original principles, resulting in HRM practices purely and simply vanishing.We do not suggest reinforcing the ethnocentric orientation of MNEs. Instead, we would suggest that MNEs focus on the materiality of HRM practices at the micro level, and coach their employees on how to use HRM tools. Human and material agencies are intertwined. The use of HRM tools results neither solely from the interpretations of users, nor solely from the designer's intentions. These tools are the result of the co-experience of the designers and the users. Individuals need to express their own agency in order to make HRM practices their own. Allowing them to slightly deviate from headquarters recommendations is an effective strategy. As suggested byStiles and his colleagues (2015), "by focusing on the inherent flexibility of schema change, (…) managers can influence the schema without this being portrayed as a deviation or an undermining"(Stiles, Trevor, Farndale, Morris, Paauwe, Stahl & Wright, 2015, p. 63). From a sociomaterial perspective, we suggest managers should also pay attention to the inherent material flexibility of organizational practices. In return, MNEs need to design flexible sets of tools to ensure local employees are able to enact their individual agency to internalize HRM practices.

(

  I.B.) literature and the International Human Resource Management (I.H.R.M.) literature in particular[START_REF] Chung | South Korean MNEs' international HRM approach: Hybridization of global standards and local practices[END_REF][START_REF] Davila | Humanistic leadership: Lessons from Latin America[END_REF][START_REF] Gamble | Transferring organizational practices and the dynamics of hybridization: Japanese retail multinationals in China[END_REF][START_REF] Gould | Think glocally, act glocally: A culture-centric comment on Leung, Bhagat, Buchan, Erez and Gibson[END_REF][START_REF] Pudelko | Cross-national learning from best practice and the convergence-divergence debate in HRM[END_REF][START_REF] Pache | Inside the hybrid organization: Selective coupling as a response to competing institutional logics[END_REF][START_REF] Yahiaoui | Hybridization: striking a balance between adoption and adaptation of human resource management practices in French multinational corporations and their Tunisian subsidiaries[END_REF] over the last two decades. It emerged from the longstanding debate over the convergence and the divergence of organizational practices in MNEs[START_REF] Edwards | Global standardization or national differentiation of HRM practices in multinational companies? A comparison of multinationals in five countries[END_REF][START_REF] Rosenzweig | When can management science research be generalized internationally?[END_REF]

Figure 6 :

 6 Figure 6: The hybridization process of PM Practices in MNEs

  market and we can't afford losing too many people. It's true though that it's not really good because objectives are relatively easy to reach. GM (a) of an industrial site near Shanghai (2012) I don't know how it works in France, but in China there are many head-hunters. They keep calling employees on the phone and this encourages them to look for new opportunities when they are dissatisfied at work. Technical department Manager of an industrial site emergence of two hybrid performance management practices at Kemike China PM is a set of practices by means of which an organization identifies, measures, develops and aligns individual performance with its strategic objectives (Aguinis, 2009). At Kemike, the global HR department initiates the overall PM process. It rolled out two major practices between 2005 and 2015: the Annual Performance Review and the Talent Management Program. However, local entities have also developed their own PM practices. The combination of these global and local practices resulted in two sets of hybrid PM practices in the various entities of the Chinese

  . Hence, managers at the Jiangsu industrial platform, compared with other managers of Kemike China, are more likely to use coaching and focus on the well-being of their team members. They endeavour to be open to criticism and to become role models for their subordinates: As a team leader, first you need to make sure you are a model for your team. Secondly, you need to coach your team to do things the right way. Production manager (a) of the Jiangsu industrial platform (2015) First I need to check what's the reason [for the problem]. Then I ask myself "What can I do?","How can I help them?". Production manager (b) of the Jiangsu industrial platform (2015)

  promoted as shift leaders and then as shift supervisors. But if you go back in their education, they went through high school, then 2 years at technical school, and afterwards they started working in chemical plants, and they've always been working like this: "The boss tells me what to do and I do it." GM of an industrial site in Guangdong (2015) In the PM system, there are two sheets [self-evaluation and evaluation by the manager]. But since last year, we don't need the second sheet because people usually don't care about self-evaluation. They only care about their boss's evaluation. Hence the form has been updated and self-evaluation has been abolished. Production manager of an industrial platform (2012) 2.5 DISCUSSION At Kemike, two new hybrid PM practices emerged between 2005 and 2015: what I have called the "harmonious Confucian" PM practice, and the "harmonious instrumental" PM practice.

  visible through hybrid practices. Organizational practices are in constant material evolution. To apprehend the overall Kemike PM practices, which are not given a common definition even by top managers in the local branches, it is necessary to investigate how the material dimension sets boundaries to individual interpretations. What are the affordances of managerial tools and technologies? How do tools and technologies have their own potential for action to drive human enactments[START_REF] Leonardi | Social Media and Their Affordances for Organizing: A Review and Agenda for Research[END_REF]? At Kemike, the seminal ambiguity of the multiple tools launched by the Head Office led local employees and entities to reinterpret PM practices, and these finally became hybrid.

  Proposition 3(a): The standardization, localization or hybridization of global HRM practices within MNEs worldwide is driven by the entanglement of their socio-technical structure (Global, Multi-Domestic or Transnational) and their implementation process (participative VS directive). Proposition 3(b): Global socio-technical MNEs that implement HRM practices in a directive (participative) way will tend to standardize (hybridize) their global HRM practices in their local subsidiaries. Proposition 3(c): Multi-domestic socio-technical MNEs that implement global HRM practices in a directive (participative) way will tend to reject (localize) their global HRM practices in their local subsidiaries. Proposition 3(d): Transnational socio-technical MNEs that implement HRM practices in a directive (participative) way will tend to reject (hybridize) their global HRM practices in their local subsidiaries (and diffuse them among other units worldwide).3.2.5 The transnational apparatus in the transfer of HRM practices: the micro levelThe global diffusion process of HRM knowledge and intra-organizational pressures drive the standardization, localization, or hybridization of practices within MNEs. The adoption of HRM practices is though, by definition, enacted by individuals at micro level. Building on the opposition between convergence and divergence forces,Mcgaughey and De Cieri (1999) propose four modes of appropriation resulting from the opposition between the need to preserve the core characteristics of HRM practices (convergence forces) and the attractiveness of alternative local practices (divergence forces).[START_REF] Kostova | Adoption of an organizational practice by subsidiaries of multinational corporations: Institutional and relational effects[END_REF] suggest four alternative modes of adoption (active, minimal, assent and ceremonial) based on the extent to which local employees implement, and perceive added value in, headquarters' practices. These different models, although based on different theoretical frameworks, highlight two central ideas. Firstly, HRM practices may be implemented by MNEs without them being internalized by local employees, thus making it necessary to investigate how individuals make sense of HRM practices. Secondly, any deviation from headquarters practices' may be detrimental to MNEs when employees wholly reject the core principles of the HRM knowledge being transferred by headquarters, but this deviation may also generate innovative practices when, at local level, individuals internalize global HRM knowledge and have enough freedom to adapt practices to their local environment.

  Proposition 4(a): The formal, innovative, deviant adoption or rejection of global HRM practices by local employees results from the entanglement of material and individual agencies. Proposition 4(b): Local employees who perceive constraints from global HRM tools and a high need for local adaptation (global integration) are likely to reject (formally adopt) global HRM practices. Proposition 4(c): Local employees who perceive affordances from global HRM tools and a high need for local adaptation (global integration) are likely to strongly modify (adapt) global HRM practices.

  Global socio-technical MNEs tend to implement more standardized practices and implement practices in a directive way, whereas socio-technical multi-domestic MNEs prefer to maintain their own local practices and tools. The implementation process of HRM practices, either directive or participative, therefore offers local employees varying degrees of opportunity to internalize practices. If it echoes the socio-technical structure of the MNE, it strengthens the standardization or localization of HRM practices, and offers fewer opportunities for individuals to enact individual agencies. On the other hand, if the implementation process is not aligned with the socio-technical structure of the MNE, it opens space for individual agencies and may lead individuals to either slightly or extensively adapt global HRM practices, in line with their personal needs.

  managers, and it deserves to be further investigated in future research projects. Technology creates different modes of reflexivity. It also triggers the internal conversation required by the reflexive process, yet many unanswered questions remain, concerning the adoption of socio-technological practices in an international context. Digital tools such as WeChat or 微信 (wēixìn), from both • What are XXXX (Worldwide and China) expectations about your team members (regarding results/behaviours)? How do they cascade organizational objectives (Values/Financial objectives/safety objectives …)? Do you sometimes face contradictions between local and global objectives? • According to you, what are the main contradictions or challenges when you assess the performance of your team members? How do you manage these contradictions? • More specifically how do you manage the oppositions between: individual/team objectives; talking about development and sanctions (results/money) during the performance appraisal; short term VS long term (of the your team performance); focus on intrinsic or extrinsic motivation; focus on results/behaviours Capacité à anticiper Capacité à former, faire évoluer son équipe Capacité à fixer des objectifs et à évaluer leur réalisation Capacité à régler des conflits Capacité à piloter des axes de progrès Capacité à conduire des projets de changement Capacité à porter et transmettre les valeurs de l'entreprise DÉFINITION DES OBJECTIFS POUR L'ANNEE N+1 SOIT L'ANNEE 20.. OBJECTIFS ET PLAN D'ACTION POUR LA PÉRIODE A VENIR Pour chaque objectif : quels sont les résultats à atteindre ? les prestations/services à fournir ainsi que les délais et les moyens ? Quels sont les indicateurs qui permettront de mesurer les résultats (chiffres ou critères caractérisant le résultat : coût, qualité, délai…) Lorsque le poste est occupé à temps partiel, il est important que les objectifs soient adaptés -Un objectif de management devrait être précisé pour toutes les personnes ayant une équipe. -Un objectif HSEQ est également essentiel pour les managers ou les experts de ce domaine. -Un objectif comportemental en lien avec les 4 valeurs d'XXXX est à déterminer (cf le guide de l'EIA) OBJECTIF DESCRIPTION, MOYENS, DÉLAIS, INDICATEURS : OBJECTIF DESCRIPTION, MOYENS, DÉLAIS, INDICATEURS : OBJECTIF DESCRIPTION, MOYENS, DÉLAIS, INDICATEURS : La décision d'utilisation du DIF fait l'objet d'un échange entre la hiérarchie et le collaborateur, afin d'évaluer la pertinence et la possibilité d'inscrire une action de formation dans ce cadre.

•

  Catégorie 3 : actions ayant pour objet le développement des compétences (acquisition d'une compétence au-delà de l'attendu dans l'emploi) Ø Exemples pour lesquels le DIF peut être engagé : BP CAIC, langues, développement personnel (prise de parole en public, renforcer son leadership,…), … Parmi ces catégories, les actions définies comme étant prioritaires par accord de branche sont notamment les suivantes : • Acquérir une certification (diplôme, titre à finalité professionnelle, qualification validée par la CPNE de branche) Ø Exemple : BP CAIC • Acquérir de nouvelles compétences pour changer d'emploi ou de métier Ø Exemple : un technicien de laboratoire suit une formation en génie chimique pour évoluer vers la fabrication • Accompagner mon évolution de carrière Ø Exemple : un adjoint au chef de poste suit le dispositif Passeport 5 pour accompagner une évolution vers un emploi de chef de poste. • Faire un bilan complet de compétences • Préparer la validation d'une nouvelle compétence par la VAE • Améliorer ma connaissance des accords de branches en tant que membre d'une organisation syndicale de salariés ou membre d'une organisation professionnelle d'employeur

  )" So the government says: "ok, we're going to control that, so you can you use dispatched labourers, but only up to 10%." (2015, China HRD) -From a contractual point of view, it's much simpler in China. Concretely people have what we call a permanent contract after 7 or 8 years, meaning they have 1 or 2-year contracts in the first years, and you can dismiss them between two contracts (…) Individual performance is really assessed at that time. (2015, APAC IT & IS Director)

  launched a very efficient share program for every employee. They give the shares to employees based on their position, their job ratings, their seniority in the company. Then everyone holds a certain percentage of the shares of the company.(…). I think it's a very good point. I read that in the paper this morning when I woke up. (…) In Kemike we launch such shares program every 2 years but it is very limited. (2015, Finance Director of an IU)Institutional pressuresHierarchical distance -Here I may have a wrong idea but it is really unlikely that someone is going to tell me I am wrong. (…) They [his subordinates, mainly managers] may give you some feedback but at a very low level of intensity. You really have to keep your eyes and your ears wide open to eventually perceive that they disagree with you or they think it is not the right idea. (2012, GM of an IU)

  PM tools -The Mentoring Program, at the very beginning, was for new projects. As I mentioned for each project,Kynar project, Panda projects, Flower project, you need around 40, 60 and 80 people. You need to have an experienced person to train them. That's why you need mentors, to train all these people. (…) The mentor will evaluate the mentees competencies and performance. They are required to grade A, B or C and then the A, B or C is linked to the bonus of the mentor. (2015, deputy GM of an IU) -Back in Paris they decided to do some changes. I mean they designed something and the COMEX didn't like that. So when they moved back to China … it was a little bit complicated to do it [implement the variable remuneration for top executives] because of well … different views. (…) It might have created internal problems because one year could have been very good but another year pretty bad … and that kind of difference would have created some problems. At least it's not the culture of Kemike. (2015, HR Manager of an IU) Local expansion of PM tools Implementation process and relationship between headquarter and local subsidiaries -First I collect information from the girls [his direct subordinates] on the [local] situation, and then I sell a first proposal to Nicolas (APAC president). (…) [Afterwards] the budget results from a negotiation between Nicolas and Paris. (…) Once it's all done, we just give that [final] proposal to the BU department heads, for example 10% increase for this year. Then you cannot exceed that budget for the whole department. (2012, China HRD director)

  (2012, APAC President) Relationships between the HQ and the local units Stability of PM tools & Focus on the materiality of the tools -First the Plant Manager sets the target for me, like what's the quantity of your product, 7000 tons this year? Then I will separate the total amount to every Supervisor Assistant in Production ... And every time we set this objective, we will have a group meeting. I will give them shift by shift the BU objectives, like PSI, the lost injuries. (2015, operation Manager of an IU) -Firstly, of course there's numbers. I'm a very results oriented person. So first is numbers, ok. The sales number you achieved. (2015, China Global Market Manager) Static approach Multiple tools in mind & Holistic approach of the PM tools -The market salary survey is quite important. Because if your salary is out of line with the market, then your employees will find better opportunities in other companies. (2012, Technical department Manager of an IU) -It's not easy because we don't how to do to help people grow within the company, it's hard for us to move senior people. So we always had a [succession] plan in mind. Me, I like it, I check regularly, every six month, for each key position … if this manager, this guy leaves the company what should I do? Do I have a back up? (2015, APAC Director of 2 BU) Dynamic approach

185 -

 185 (…) I prefer to avoid personal feeling and judgment towards your subordinates, or even your boss or colleagues. (2015, Process engineering manager of IU) -Actually during PM interviews, you really get feedback from your manager: what he thinks about you and what others think about you. So the PM system is very good. Not only because of the tool … but also because you have the opportunity to say what you want. For example, I can talk about my training needs or my career development plans for the next year and my manager will think about that. (…) First we have the company's objectives, then the department's objectives, and finally the employees' objectives. (2012, Supply chain manager of IU)Formal Appropriation-I saw from most of the companies that mentoring requires that kind of sharing, learning culture. Without that kind of culture, you do a mentoring program that is doomed to fail. In China, for example, we have a very famous company in China Alibaba. They have a very good kind of system and they have a culture that the senior leaders share, teach, and coach the youngsters. (2015, China HRD director) -Some people complain. (…) Let's say there are 2 guys in one shift (…) if the shift Leader likes one guy, he will give a good score for him. But if he doesn't like the other guy, this is different ... (2015, Production Manager) Ceremonial Appropriation -In the PM system, there are two sheets [self-evaluation of the subordinate and evaluation by the manager]. But since last year, we don't need the second sheet because people usually don't care about the self-evaluation. They only care about their boss' evaluation. Hence the form has been updated and the self-evaluation has been deleted. (2012, Production Manager of an IU) -Shift leaders prefer that. Because, if 2 managers or more [do the performance appraisal and] think the behavior of the subordinate is not good, the decision is not only based on their own personal opinion. (2015, HRM of an IU)Deviant appropriationIn the end the line manager and HR will review the remaining targeted bonus. I think that today it is only in Changshu. (…) For this, there is no written policy. I mean for the remaining bonus distribution, what we call the second distribution.[But] for the first distribution of the bonus we strictly follow the policy. (2015, deputy GM of an IU)-In 2013 with the input from all the Production Managers, the General Managers, and also the HR Managers, we finally came out with this kind of new organization. Then to make sure we can run this new organization smoothly, we defined this joint performance review system for the site Maintenance Managers. (en français) La gestion de la performance : une technologie américaine dans une entreprise multinationale française implantée en Chine.Mots clés: Gestion de la performance, Chine, entreprises multinationales, Gestion Internationale des Ressources Humaines, Sociomatérialité, Sociologie des outils de gestion.Résumé : Cette thèse examine l'imbrication du social et du matériel dans les entreprises multinationales, lors du transfert transnational des pratiques de gestion des ressources humaines, et plus particulièrement le transfert des pratiques de gestion de la performance. En me basant sur l'étude de quatre entités chinoises locales d'une entreprise transnationale comme cadre de mon étude de cas, j'explore comment les salariés locaux s'approprient les pratiques de gestion de la performance en internalisation les pratiques globales et en innovant pour les adapter à leur environnement local. Cette étude se fonde sur 60 entretiens, des données secondaires et des observations collectées sur plus de dix ans. Dans la première partie de cette thèse j'explore plus particulièrement l'appropriation des pratiques de gestion des ressources humaines au niveau micro et j'identifie quatre archétypes de l'appropriation des pratiques de gestion des ressources humaines : formelle, cérémoniale, déviante et innovante. Dans la deuxième partie de cette thèse, je me concentre sur l'appropriation des pratiques de gestion des ressources humaines au niveau meso. En me fondant sur la théorie de la Sociomatérialité, je propose une nouvelle définition de l'hybridation comme le processus par lequel des pratiques uniques émergent dans des filiales locales à partir de l'imbrication du social et du matériel entre le siège et les filiales locales des entreprises multinationales. Cette définition me permet d'identifier deux nouvelles formes de gestion de la performance dans les quatre entités de l'entreprise multinationale étudiée que j'ai appelées la pratique harmonieuse confucéenne de gestion de la performance et la pratique harmonieuse instrumentale de gestion de la performance. Dans le troisième chapitre, je me base sur les résultats empiriques des deux chapitres précédents pour conceptualiser un modèle multiniveau intégré du transfert transnational des pratiques de gestion des ressources humaines, en développant un autre concept central de la théorie de la Sociomatérialité: la notion de « dispositif ». Cette thèse a ainsi pour objectif de contribuer à la fois à la littérature en gestion internationale des ressources humaines et à la littérature sur la sociologie des outils de gestion.Title : Performance Management: An American Technology in a French Multinational Enterprise Established in China.Keywords: Performance management, China, Multinational Enterprises, International Human Resource Management, Sociomateriality, Sociology of organizational tools.Abstract :The present dissertation examines the entanglement of the social and material in Multinational Enterprises during the transnational transfer of Human Resource Management Practices, especially Performance Management Practices. Using 4 local Chinese entities of a transnational firm as my case study, I explore how local employees make Performance Management practices their own, both internalizing global practices and innovating to adapt to local environments. This research is based on 60 interviews, secondary materials and direct observations over more than 10 years. In the first chapter of this dissertation, I explore more specifically the adoption of Human Resource Management practices at the micro level, and I identify four archetypes of the adoption of Human Resource Management practices: formal, ceremonial, deviant and innovative. In the second chapter, I focus on the adoption of Performance Management practices in Multinational Enterprises at a meso level. Drawing on sociomaterial theory, I propose a new definition of hybridization as being a process by which unique practices emerge in local subsidiaries from the entanglement of the social and the material at Headquarters and in local subsidiaries. This definition allowed me to identify two new hybrid performance management practices in the four Chinese entities of the Multinational Enterprises under investigation, which I have called the "harmonious Confucian" Performance Management practice and the "harmonious instrumental" Performance Management practice. In the third chapter, I build on the results of the two previous empirical chapters to conceptualize an integrated multilevel model for the transnational transfer of Human Resource Management practices in Multinational

Table 4

 4 Overview of the data collection process

Table 5

 5 Evolution of the PM practices at Kemike China between 2005-2015

Table 6

 6

1.4.1. The sociomaterial context of the adoption of PM practices at Kemike.

		HQ /
		Subsidiaries	2005	2007	2008	2012	2014
		relationships
		Very strong		Failure
	Regional HQ	relationships with the HQ	Annual Performance Review	of the new variable remuneration practice for top	Special Benefit Scheme	/	Talent Managemen t program
				executives.
		Strong
	Industrial platform 1	relationships with the HQ and other subsidiaries	Annual Performance Review	Outstanding Performance Award Program	Mentoring program	/	Talent Managemen t program
		worldwide
	Industrial platform 2	Loose the HQ relationships with	Annual Review Performance	/	/	/	/
	Industrial platform 3	Very loose relationships with the HQ		NA (Acquired in 2011)		Annual e Review Performanc	/
		Initiated by the Global HQ		Local initiative

Table 2 :

 2

Major PM tools in the Chinese entities of

Kemike (2005Kemike ( -2015) )

1.4.2. The material context PM includes a complex set of practices including various tools, such as performance appraisal interviews, individual objective setting techniques, behaviorally anchored ratings scales, Forced Distribution Rating Systems (F.D.R.S.), 360-degree evaluations, or mentoring programs

Table 3 :

 3 The entanglement of the social and material agencies in the adoption process

1.4.4.1.Formal and ceremonial adoptions of global PM practices at Kemike China You

cannot imagine that they [my subordinates] come directly to see me to ask me questions.

(…) So, it is quite good that they can ask me some questions during the yearly performance

appraisal. (Finance manager of an industrial unit, 2015)

" Then the talent manager told me: "oh, we're only going to deal with level 12 and above on the first go around". But all my management staff was lower down than where her cut-off point was! So I'm not sure if that was fair or not. (

GM of an industrial unit, 2015)

Deviant and innovative adoptions of global PM practices at Kemike China.

  . What is more specific to the global context is that if there is neither pressure for global integration nor pressure for the adaptation to local needs, the process purely and simply vanishes. If there is low pressure from the global parent company and local managers do not see any added value in the practice, they simply reject the whole process. If the materiality of the for global integration and a low need for local responsiveness, they tend to conceive of organizational tools coming from headquarters as superior to local practices. They put forward the international dimension of PM tools, perceiving global PM tools as better designed and more scientific than traditional local ones. PM practices are perceived as strategically defined and objective, in the sense that they are independent from individual interpretations[START_REF] Des Horts | Vers une gestion stratégique des ressources humaines[END_REF]. Some of these employees therefore feel extremely comfortable with global practices. It is easy for them to identify and cascade organizational goals, and easy to align their own goals with global goals and guidelines. They use PM tools and enact PM practices exactly as prescribed by the global PM handbook. They assume that they are using and controlling organizational tools and thus adopt global practices formally.

	1.4.4.2.

organizational practice disappears and it becomes only a social process, if PM is not based on any document or formal evaluation but "only depends on how close he or she is to the big boss and how much the big boss likes her or him", then the whole foundation of the process disappears. "Then what's the whole point of the PMS?"

(China Logistic Manager, 2012)

.

The constraint on human willingness is not necessarily negative from the headquarters' point of view.

« I think the PM system is a good tool, because this tool will force you to have this kind of official interview regularly ». (Technical department Manager, 2012)

Frankly speaking, before, I worked in two companies and we never had this kind of PM system… So when I joined Kemike and saw this PM system I thought it was a good one. It's fair, more fair than in my previous companies. Because before, we never had this kind of document to make the evaluation. (…) I think the PM system is objective, it's very clear. And it's very, very fair to evaluate every person, because it is based on data. It's really more objective. (Production Manager, 2012) Constraints limit individual intentionality, but they do not prevent individual agency

[START_REF] Leonardi | When flexible routines meet flexible technologies: Affordance, constraint, and the imbrication of human and material agencies[END_REF]

. When employees feel constrained by PM tools but at the same time they perceive a strong need [Performance management] is quite a routine job. First, HR needs to check how managers set goals, if they follow the principles and the format. Then HR needs to cooperate with linemanagers to review objectives every year. Afterwards, line managers may help HR to improve the situation. (HR Director of an industrial unit, 2015)

We adapted safety indicators (such as PAO) locally. (…) Before, we focused more on the quantity. As the number of PAOs was related to our bonus, many employees did a lot of PAOs.

But the quality was very bad. People even didn't go on the site. They stayed in their office! (…) Before, there were maybe 600 items, (…) and we decided to select only 60 (

HSEQ manager of an industrial site, 2015)

  They define the evaluation of performance at work as a social practice that may differ from one individual to another. They refer to a large number of PM tools and do not limit their perception solely to annual performance review, enacting a holistic definition of performance. Performance management situations become an opportunity for discussion between HR managers and front-line managers about expected performance levels. Local managers use performance indicators, such as safety indicators or plant reliability, coming from the Business Units' headquarters located in Europe or in the US, but they decide to modify them and adapt them to the local situations.

	Tools, techniques, forms and procedures also offer affordances for action. "Technologies
	have material properties, but those material properties afford different possibilities for action based

on the contexts in which they are used"

(Leonardi, 2012, p.153)

. Material affordances in the context of performance management situations offer local employees a dynamic understanding of PM tools, meaning they have a broader and more flexible understanding of PM tools. Local employees do not set clear boundaries on PM tools.

If faced with weak pressure for global integration combined with high pressure for local adaptation, employees who perceive material affordances are likely to deviate from global HRM practices. Their dynamic approach to PM tools leads them to lose sight of the coherence of the PM process as a whole. They tend to assume that everyone interprets PM tools according to their own criteria. This allows them to easily depart from global HRM practices.

You don't think the Supervisors or the Shift Leaders can be fair or have the confidence to do that (performance appraisal). So you need a N+2 (director) to be involved. That is basically the background for that kind of methodology. (...) Why should people listen to him (N+1, front line manager -. I mean, they can talk to the big boss directly? (

China HRD, 2015)

  You should create an environment to make sure people feel comfortable. But you should also make sure people feel the need to work hard[laugh]. It's a kind of balance. As we say

	in China "shā jī jǐng hóu" (杀鸡儆猴). Killing the chicken, to "teach" [scare] the
	monkeys. China Sales Manager of Kemike (2012)

Table 4 :

 4 Overview of the data collection process

		Observations	Formal	Formal	Formal
			interviews	interviews	interviews
		2005 -2008	2012	2014	2015
	Regional HQ	Yes	13	1	11
	Changshu platform	Yes	9		9
	Shanghai platform	Yes			6
	Guangzhou platform	No			8
	Other		1	1
	Total		23	2	34

Table 5 :

 5 Evolution of the PM practices at Kemike China between 2005-2015

  But in reality, this is not at all how the mentoring program is designed the Jiangsu industrial platform. As underlined by the

Kemike

Asia-Pacific Talent Manager (2015)

: "the mentoring program at Changshu is more a tutoring program for newcomers. It is not about the soft skills of employees. (…) A mentor is not supposed to teach you your job". Hence, these two PM practices, although seemingly standard, do not exist anywhere else in the 133 entities of the group worldwide.

China Sales Manager of the regional Headquarters (2012)

  the monkeys. [let me explain that to you]A farmer wants to teach a lesson to his monkeys. But if he beats the monkeys directly, they will rebel and won't listen to him. So he decides to kill a chicken in front of the monkeys.

	To manage people, you need to find the right balance, sometimes being strict, sometimes
	being kind. Operation manager of an industrial unit in Shanghai (2015)
	Some American companies give very high pay, and their HR policy is very aggressive. (…)

but after 1 or 2 years you are fired. It happens. So you have to balance the reward and the risk. (…) It reminds everybody that Kemike needs to create a harmonious working atmosphere for everybody in a team or a company. China Sales Manager (b) of the regional Headquarters (2015)

Table 6 :

 6 The global diffusion of HRM knowledge

	Theoretical	Instrumental	Institutional-like	Cultural
	framework		(Neoinstitutional, Ecological,
			Rhetoric theories)
	International	-Based on scientific	-Depends on institutional distance	-Depends on cultural
	diffusion of	approach	between countries	distance between countries
	HRM	-Discourse	-Shaped by social relations,	-Culture is either defined
	knowledge	strengthens or	markets, professions, competition,	as a web of meaning
		weakens the	the state, and by rhetorical	(Constructivist paradigm)
		perception of	justifications: pathos (emotions),	or "the collective
		technological	logos (logic), ethos.	programming of the mind
		advantage	-HRM practices must appear both	that distinguishes the
			rational and progressive	members of one group or
				category of people from
				others"
				(Realist/essentialist
				paradigm)
	Epistemological	-Realist	-Constructivist & realist	-Constructivist & realist
	approach
	MNE	-Organizational	-Organizational structure is	-Organizational structure
	(Ontological	structure is stabilized	shaped by its institutional	is shaped by its cultural
	status)	and clearly identified	environment	environment
	HRM tools	-Realist	-Constructivist	-Constructivist
	(Ontological	-The nature of HRM	-The nature of HRM tools	-The nature of HRM tools
	status)	tools depends on the	depends on institutions	depends on culture
		efficiency of the tool

  Management tools are never considered

	Individual	-Active role of	-Limited role of Scholars in the	-Limited role of Scholars
	Agency	Scholars and popular	diffusion of HRM Knowledge	in the diffusion of HRM
		management press in	-Active role of expatriates as	Knowledge
		the diffusion of	boundary spanners	-Active role of expatriates
		HRM Knowledge	-Decoupling between top	as boundary spanners
		-Creators design	management and low-level	-Technology can deviate
		management tools to	employees (Ceremonial	from designer
		solve a problem	practices)	-Users interpret and enact
		-Technology is a	-Technology can deviate from	technology differently
		managerial tool for	designer
		executing	-Users interpret and enact
		instigators' or its	technology differently
		users' intentions

  The design of practices may provide different degrees of opportunity to local employees to adapt global practices or not. Headquarters often have more human, technological and financial capital than local entities. They have more experience in the core business than local entities. They are frequently based in western countries and may benefit from the common preconceived idea that western practices are superior[START_REF] Chung | South Korean MNEs' international HRM approach: Hybridization of global standards and local practices[END_REF]. Hence, local managers may perceive HRM practices coming from the global headquarters as more advanced and rigorous than local practices.These arguments, taken together, lead me to make the following propositions. If local employees perceive strong material constraints imposed by global HRM practices, they are more likely to have a static approach toward these practices, meaning that they will be more reluctant to deviate from their original purpose and design. If, in addition, local employees are receptive to the need for the global integration of organizational practices within the MNE, they are likely to formally and faithfully adopt global HRM practices. On the other hand, if local employees perceive a high need for local adaption because of the specific context in which they are embedded, and they do not have enough decision latitude to adapt practices, they will most likely reject global MNE practices.

Table 9 :

 9 The sociomaterial transfer of HRM practices Local employees may formally adopt, reject, or slightly or extensively adapt global HRM practices designed by headquarters. In other words, they use individual agencies to act, to use and to make sense of the practices designed, transferred and implemented in multiple environments.

	However, institutional and cultural IHRM theorists advocate that local employees are strongly

embedded in their environment. By contrast, expatriates and local employees have more room and freedom to adapt headquarters' practices because they work in remote locations, far from any observation and control by headquarters

[START_REF] Gamble | Transferring organizational practices and the dynamics of hybridization: Japanese retail multinationals in China[END_REF]

.

GM of an industrial unit, 2015)

  to get rid of people. (-Here [in china], it is completely different. Teams they pay extreme attention to the grade. (…) You have to put coefficients for each objective. If they do not reach an objective, you must clearly write it down why and what has been done instead. (…) Grading is extremely important here. (

Finance Manager of the local head Office, 2012)

  -The Chinese way of conducting the performance appraisal is "You give me the frame and I follow it." (

Sales and marketing manager of the local head Office, 2012)

  Material constraint -We have the KPI for the plant and then we cascade them. I think it's working pretty well at the managerial level. But each manager has his/her own judgment. It's never exactly the same, to be honest. It is not a mathematical calculation. Sometimes, it's true, it requires adjustments. (

GM of an industrial unit, 2015)

  -It is helpful to have records for your next [performance appraisal] interview. Because when you do the interview, you talk about what happened 3 months ago. In fact, I already forget what I told you 3 months ago. (…) So with this kind of system, it's easy for you, if you have some records (

Production manager of an industrial unit, 2015)

an IU)

  Cultural pressuresIndirect communication-Chinese guys are very shy, they don't want to go directly to you or to the boss to ask questions ... (…) The foreigners, they like talking and the discussion between us is not limited to the PM system. (…) But the subordinates, they don't really want to come to me directly. So PM system is the only chance to talk with them, so I appreciate it very much. (

2015, Finance Manager of an IU

) -You know, if you're working for a foreign company, you are encouraged to be friendlier, to speak out what you think, what is your opinion. (

2015, Finance Director of an IU)

  National labor market practices & business environment-I don't know how it works in France, but in China there are many head-hunters. They keep calling employees on the phone and this encourages them to look for new opportunities when they are dissatisfied at work. (

2015, Technical department Manager of an IU)

Aristote, Métaphysique, A,

2, 982 b 10, trad. Tricot. Paris : Vrin, 1970, pp. 17-18

Translation by the author with contributions from Ian Atkins.

Aristotle, Metaphysics, translated by W. D. Ross, in The Complete Works of Aristotle, edited by Barnes, J. (1984), 2 vols. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

La formation Passeport Managers et Experts s'adresse à un public mixte d'encadrants. Elle est composée de 5 modules, le parcours pouvant être composé de tout ou partie de ces modules en fonction du profil de l'apprenant : 1. Tour de l'usine -2. Maîtriser les fondamentaux du management -3. Manager en proximité en usine -4. Maîtriser la dimension financière de l'entreprise -5. Manager en sécurité

Remerciements

Research Design & Sample

Although noteworthy progress has been made, the notion of hybridization still lacks solid theoretical foundations in the IB literature. A longitudinal case study design was therefore adopted for this research. Firstly, qualitative research is uniquely designed to help theory enhancement [START_REF] Burgelman | Bridging history and reductionism: A key role for longitudinal qualitative research[END_REF][START_REF] Doz | Qualitative research for international business[END_REF][START_REF] Welch | Theorising from case studies: Towards a pluralist future for international business research[END_REF], as the process of constant comparison, among others, "can provide the basis for the use and possible synthesis of multiple theories into new conceptual development" [START_REF] Doz | Qualitative research for international business[END_REF]2011, p.584). Secondly, a longitudinal perspective was especially important for this research [START_REF] Pettigrew | Longitudinal field research on change: Theory and practice[END_REF][START_REF] Burgelman | Bridging history and reductionism: A key role for longitudinal qualitative research[END_REF]. Studying organizational phenomena over a long period of time enables researchers to gain a holistic perspective [START_REF] Pettigrew | Longitudinal field research on change: Theory and practice[END_REF][START_REF] Burgelman | Bridging history and reductionism: A key role for longitudinal qualitative research[END_REF]. Furthermore, the main purpose of this research was to investigate hybrid practices, which need to evolve over time. Building on the practice turn [START_REF] Orlikowski | Practice in research: phenomenon, perspective and philosophy[END_REF][START_REF] Schatzki | Peripheral vision: The sites of organizations[END_REF][START_REF] Tsoukas | On organizational becoming: Rethinking organizational change[END_REF], it was also extremely important for this research to constantly bear in mind the need to focus on how people enact performance practices. The objective of this research was not to investigate organizational changes resulting from the implementation of new management practices from a Head Office perspective, but on the contrary from a local perspective. I therefore adopted an open time-frame instead of following the rollout of a new PM program over several years.

I chose to investigate more specifically the case of hybrid PM practices in the Chinese subsidiaries of a large chemical MNE for three main reasons. Firstly, PM practices are currently going through numerous changes, such as the introduction of talent management practices, ongoing crowd-sourced feedback, and ratingless reviews [START_REF] Aguinis | Performance management[END_REF][START_REF] Lawler | A Study of Cutting-Edge Performance Management Practices: Ongoing Feedback, Ratingless Reviews and Crowdsourced Feedback[END_REF]. Secondly, PM is a comprehensive process, which includes numerous sub-practices such as talent management practices, performance appraisal or management by objectives techniques. These practices are therefore more likely to hybridize than more standardized management practices such as recruitment practices or quality management practices [START_REF] Kostova | Adoption of an organizational practice by subsidiaries of multinational corporations: Institutional and relational effects[END_REF]. Thirdly, China and Western countries display large cultural and institutional differences. The observation of PM Local PM practices in Kemike are also deeply constrained by institutional pressures, such as the legal environment and the structure of the job market [START_REF] Björkman | Transferring HR practices within multinational corporations[END_REF][START_REF] Kostova | Transnational transfer of strategic organizational practices: A contextual perspective[END_REF][START_REF] Kostova | Adoption of an organizational practice by subsidiaries of multinational corporations: Institutional and relational effects[END_REF][START_REF] Mcgaughey | Reassessment of convergence and divergence dynamics: implications for international HRM[END_REF]. The Chinese "Hukou" legislation, which limits the mobility of local managers [START_REF] Warner | Reassessing human resource management 'with Chinese characteristics': an overview[END_REF], makes it more difficult to offer career development opportunities to talent. The shortage of talents on the job market also makes it more difficult to set up high performance standards. Employees are constantly being solicited by head-hunters, and managers prefer to avoid setting over-challenging objectives, so as to retain their employees.

We've reached out to them [regional Headquarters] for some talent management exchange, but We would like to set more challenging objectives, meaning that people may not automatically reach 95% of their objectives. But we have to move slowly. We still face a very stretched labor

Ultimately, when managers have successfully implemented harmonious Confucian PM practices, employees feel they are part of a family. Family order is the model for Confucian harmony [START_REF] Cheng | Histoire de la pensée chinoise[END_REF]. Rites, routines and interpersonal relationships are clearly defined. In the organizational context, there is no difference between professional and personal life. Managers share their lunch with their teams. They organize team-building events to enhance individual performance. There is no impediment to communication. People can talk about anything, just as in the inner circle of the Family. Corporate culture shifts into a family culture and each employee feels he's in the right place within the organization.

We have parties, once a quarter, to make sure everybody feels like they're a family member in the team. However, the concept of harmony is polysemic [START_REF] Depierre | L'harmonie. Vices ou Vertus[END_REF]. Chinese managers may also use the notion of harmony as a matter of policy, as a diplomatic tactic to further their personal objectives and self-interest [START_REF] Leung | A dualistic model of harmony and its implications for conflict management in Asia[END_REF]. Hence, harmonious but instrumental PM practices emerged in two local Kemike units: the regional headquarter and the industrial platform located in Shanghai. As with "harmonious Confucian" performance management, this is a new approach to individual performance at Kemike China. It emerged from the everyday practices of managers and employees and it groups together practices such as the special benefit scheme and the annual performance review conducted by the direct supervisors and the manager of front-line employees.

Through "harmonious instrumental" performance management, managers aim to maintain their own power and leadership. They do not hesitate to both support and threaten their subordinates in order to control their performance in their own interest.

Chapter 3

THE TRANSNATIONAL TRANSFER OF HRM PRACTICES IN MNES:

A SOCIOMATERIAL FRAMEWORK.

2002) and surprisingly, the micro level has received scant theoretical attention by IHRM scholars.

The recent trend toward "micro-institutional theory", which investigates how the individual legitimizes and recontextualizes organizational practices in MNEs, is still emergent in the IB and IHRM Literature [START_REF] Värlander | Enacting a constellation of logics: How transferred practices are recontextualized in a global organization[END_REF]. This gap in the literature has left a number of important questions unresolved, especially concerning individual agency [START_REF] Gamble | Transferring organizational practices and the dynamics of hybridization: Japanese retail multinationals in China[END_REF], which is traditionally seen in the IB and IHRM literature as deeply rooted in the cultural and institutional environment.

Furthermore, with very few exceptions [START_REF] Yu | Building a process model of local adaptation of practices: A study of Six Sigma implementation in Korean and US firms[END_REF], past research (has focused on the social dimension of the transnational transfer of practices in MNEs. Cultural and institutional paradigms assume, by definition, that individual behaviors are rooted in culture and institutions, implying social constructs. Szulanski (1996, p.28) states that organizational practices are "embedded partly in individual skills and partly in collaborative social arrangements". Kostova (1999, p. 309) sees "organizational practices as particular ways of conducting organizational functions that have evolved over time under the influence of an organization's history, people, interests, and actions and that have become institutionalized in the organization". However, organizational practices are deeply infused with materiality. The astonishment expressed by [START_REF] Orlikowski | 10 sociomateriality: challenging the separation of technology, work and organization[END_REF] that technology and materiality are present everywhere in our daily life but, surprisingly, are largely absent in management literature may be extended to the IB and IHRM literatures. This absence of technology in the current IHRM debate is even more surprising when we think of the seminal IHRM researchers, who explained the prevalence of western management practices as stemming from the technological superiority of western countries [START_REF] Kerr | Industrialism and industrial man[END_REF][START_REF] Rogers | Diffusion of innovations[END_REF]. Although their instrumental and ethnocentric approach to organizational practices may have lost its relevance in the current context of globalization, these authors are there to remind us that materiality cannot be neglected.

I therefore suggest drawing on Sociomaterial theory [START_REF] De Vaujany | If these walls could talk: The mutual construction of organizational space and legitimacy[END_REF]Leonardi, Nardi & Kallinikos, 2012;[START_REF] Orlikowski | Sociomaterial practices: Exploring technology at work[END_REF][START_REF] Orlikowski | 10 sociomateriality: challenging the separation of technology, work and organization[END_REF] to address these two gaps in the IB and IHRM literature. Sociomaterial theory originates from the sociotechnical literature

The sociomaterial approach to HRM practices in MNEs

HR practices are traditionally defined as activities carried out by individuals while playing leadership, managerial, and operational roles in planning, staffing, learning and development, performance management, compensation and benefits, employee relations and administration issues [START_REF] Schuler | Strategic human resources management: Linking the people with the strategic needs of the business[END_REF]. This functional approach is indubitably the most widely shared approach to HRM practices [START_REF] Armstrong | Armstrong's handbook of human resource management practice[END_REF]. It is taught in every business school in the world and makes HRM practices visible and easy to understand. However, MNEs are very specific types of organization (Gligor et al., 2016), and a purely functional approach fails to take account of many organizational nuances in the international context. MNEs employ different types of employees (expatriates and inpatriates) compared to domestic companies. They use different languages, which impact their strategy and provide more power and higher status to employees who master languages [START_REF] Neeley | Language matters: Status loss and achieved status distinctions in global organizations[END_REF]. They operate in multiple institutional and cultural environments, which impacts their daily practices [START_REF] Doz | Qualitative research for international business[END_REF]. All these organizational specificities deeply impact the very nature of HRM functions and purpose, and as a consequence HRM practices.

IHRM scholars traditionally build on a knowledge-based theory of the firm [START_REF] Grant | Toward a knowledge-based theory of the firm[END_REF][START_REF] Szulanski | Exploring internal stickiness: Impediments to the transfer of best practice within the firm[END_REF] or institutional and cultural theory to investigate HRM practices in the international context [START_REF] Brewster | Towards a'European'model of human resource management[END_REF][START_REF] Kostova | Transnational transfer of strategic organizational practices: A contextual perspective[END_REF][START_REF] Rosenzweig | Influences on human resource management practices in multinational corporations[END_REF]. By doing so, they strongly highlight the social dimension of HRM practices. Szulanski (1996, p.28) defines organizational practice as "the organization's routine use of knowledge" [that] "often has a tacit component, embedded partly in individual skills and partly in collaborative social arrangements". Kostova (1999, p. 309) states that organizational practices are "particular ways of conducting organizational functions that have evolved over time under the influence of an organization's history, people, interests, and actions and that have become institutionalized in the organization".

Hence, HRM practices are seen as effective once they have been institutionalized and taken for granted by individuals. HRM knowledge is seen as being embedded in individuals and groups.

According to Sociomaterial theory, organizational practices result from the entanglement of the social and material [START_REF] Leonardi | Theoretical foundations for the study of sociomateriality[END_REF][START_REF] Orlikowski | Sociomaterial practices: Exploring technology at work[END_REF][START_REF] Orlikowski | 10 sociomateriality: challenging the separation of technology, work and organization[END_REF]. What does & Dobbins, 1994;[START_REF] Keeley | A social-justice approach to organizational evaluation[END_REF], 360° evaluation or even more recent practices, such as ongoing Feedback and Ratingless Reviews [START_REF] Lawler | A Study of Cutting-Edge Performance Management Practices: Ongoing Feedback, Ratingless Reviews and Crowdsourced Feedback[END_REF] were developed in the U.S.A by American scholars [START_REF] Denisi | Performance appraisal and performance management: 100 years of progress?[END_REF]. The ethnocentric approach of the earliest convergence theorists is questionable [START_REF] Ailon | Mirror, mirror on the wall: Culture's consequences in a value test of its own design[END_REF]. However, their main argument is not based on a cultural rationale. Building on a realist or a critical realist paradigm [START_REF] Mir | Strategic management and the philosophy of science: The case for a constructivist methodology[END_REF], they mainly advocate the existence of universal rules and management principles. These are based on scientific foundations and are applicable all around the world, independently of local culture and institutions [START_REF] Kerr | Industrialism and industrial man[END_REF][START_REF] Rogers | Diffusion of innovations[END_REF].

Another argument of the convergence scholars concerns the similar institutional and cultural pressure faced by organizations, both MNEs and local companies [START_REF] Edwards | Global standardization or national differentiation of HRM practices in multinational companies? A comparison of multinationals in five countries[END_REF][START_REF] Pudelko | Country-of-origin, localization, or dominance effect? An empirical investigation of HRM practices in foreign subsidiaries[END_REF][START_REF] Shadur | The adoption of international best practices in a Western culture: East meets West[END_REF]. They agree with divergence scholars that HRM practices need to fit with local institutions and cultures in order to be adopted by employees and organizations. However, according to convergence scholars, local cultures and institutions are moving toward the same model, which reinforces the converging trend of HRM practices worldwide. For instance, the last Chinese labor law reforms in 1994 and 2008 strongly encouraged MNEs and local companies to implement labor contracts and performance-linked rewards systems [START_REF] Cooke | Human resource management in China: New trends and practices[END_REF][START_REF] Warner | Reassessing human resource management 'with Chinese characteristics': an overview[END_REF]. It is also widely agreed that individualism is rising worldwide [START_REF] Oyserman | Rethinking individualism and collectivism: evaluation of theoretical assumptions and meta-analyses[END_REF]. This would explain why Chinese managers are now eager to use individually based performance management tools and techniques [START_REF] Froese | Work values, job satisfaction and organizational commitment in China[END_REF]. Contrary to the earliest convergence theorists, this explanation built on a constructivist epistemological paradigm [START_REF] Mir | Strategic management and the philosophy of science: The case for a constructivist methodology[END_REF]. It is not by applying universal scientific principles that individuals make sense of the HRM knowledge infused in the practices and transferred by the MNEs' Headquarters, but by taking account of local contingencies.

The divergence scholars, on the other hand, argue that HRM practices remain largely localized because organizations are embedded in their unique local institutional or cultural environment [START_REF] Brewster | Towards a'European'model of human resource management[END_REF][START_REF] Rosenzweig | Influences on human resource management practices in multinational corporations[END_REF][START_REF] Tregaskis | Converging or diverging? A comparative analysis of trends in contingent employment practice in Europe over a decade[END_REF]. For instance, many Western MNEs fail to transfer their 360-degree evaluation practices to their Chinese Knowledge-based views and institutional approaches have deeply enriched our understanding of the intra-organizational pressures face by MNEs. However, as highlighted previously, they strongly emphasize the social dimension of organizational practices [START_REF] Yu | Building a process model of local adaptation of practices: A study of Six Sigma implementation in Korean and US firms[END_REF]. "As our research suggests, what really matters for internalization is having social knowledge about a practice (shared cognitive categories), which helps people understand the practice correctly, and having a set of societal values and beliefs consistent with the practice as well" (Kostova & Roth, 2002, p. 228). I therefore propose that we pay equal attention to both the material and the social dimensions of the transnational apparatus in the transfer of HRM practices in MNEs, and more specifically and especially, to the socio-technical structure of the MNE and the implementation process of global HRM practices. The material dimension of the transnational transfer of HRM practices is not limited to the objects or material artefacts, which are necessary during the process. It also concerns the intraorganizational structure of MNEs, which are best described as socio-technical systems [START_REF] Rosenzweig | When can management science research be generalized internationally?[END_REF]. MNEs, like any organization, may be described as "social structures created by individuals to support the collaborative pursuit of specified goals" (Scott & Davis, 2015, p.11).

Socio

They also need technical tools and knowledge to run their businesses and operations. However, (Abrahamson, 1996;[START_REF] Abrahamson | Management fashion: Lifecycles, triggers, and collective learning processes[END_REF][START_REF] Chevalier | Cercles de qualité et changement organisationnel[END_REF]. They roll out these practices in their subsidiaries according to their socio-technical structures. Afterwards local employees adapt them depending on how they make sense of the MNE's needs for global integration and local responsiveness [START_REF] Bartlett | Managing across borders: The transnational corporation[END_REF]. They may vary in their interpretation according to their hierarchical level in the organization, job position and past international experience within the MNE. Some positions are more sensitive to the need for local responsiveness. HR managers, in particular, are more strongly embedded in the local cultures and institutions than finance managers are. They must adapt to the local rules and regulations, and to local labor markets [START_REF] Brewster | Towards a'European'model of human resource management[END_REF] Writing a doctoral thesis is a long journey. After the seminal wonder [START_REF] Aristotle | The Complete Works of Aristotle[END_REF], come the first questionings, doubts and disappointments [START_REF] Weick | Theory construction as disciplined imagination[END_REF], the criticisms of your supervisors and journal peer reviewers, but also, fortunately, the first results and contributions to science. To my knowledge, this doctoral thesis is the first to propose a sociomaterial approach to the transnational transfer of organizational practices, and more broadly to build on sociomaterial theory in the field of International Business. It is sometimes risky to bring a new theory into an academic field, as it may not have been introduced earlier for good reasons. However, I see several reasons to believe that using sociomaterial theory makes a significant contribution to international human resources management and International Business.

Theoretical Contributions

Firstly, sociomaterial theory helps bring technology and materiality back into the heart of the academic debate. Technology has always been present in the International Business literature.

The "raison d'être" of MNEs is often technological, as many MNEs expand internationally to benefit from technological transfer on local markets [START_REF] Kogut | Knowledge of the firm and the evolutionary theory of the multinational corporation[END_REF]. The spread of western technologies is one of the earliest arguments to support the idea of the standardization of HRM and management practices worldwide [START_REF] Kerr | Industrialism and industrial man[END_REF][START_REF] Rogers | Diffusion of innovations[END_REF].

Surprisingly however, technology has received relatively scant attention in the recent IB and IHRM literature [START_REF] Yu | Building a process model of local adaptation of practices: A study of Six Sigma implementation in Korean and US firms[END_REF], especially regarding the issue of the transnational transfer of practices.

This thesis deals with the following overall research question: How do local employees adopt Human Resource Management practices, and Performance Management practices in particular, in MNEs? As highlighted hereinbefore, past IB and IHRM researchers have mainly focused on the social dimension of the adoption process, meaning the quality of the relationships shared by headquarters and subsidiaries [START_REF] Ahlvik | Towards explaining subsidiary implementation, integration, and internalization of MNC headquarters HRM practices[END_REF], and the role played by key employees such as local HR and general managers [START_REF] Björkman | The determinants of line management internalisation of HRM practices in MNC subsidiaries[END_REF] or expatriates [START_REF] Harzing | The bridging role of expatriates and inpatriates in knowledge transfer in multinational corporations[END_REF][START_REF] Hocking | Balancing global and local strategic contexts: Expatriate knowledge transfer, applications, and learning within a transnational organization[END_REF][START_REF] Rosenzweig | Influences on human resource management practices in multinational corporations[END_REF]. Individuals are key boundary-spanners between entities to explain organizational practices and make sure that local employees internalize headquarters' practices. The social focus also refers to the cultural and institutional impediments to the transnational transfer of HRM practices. For instance, in China, the prevalent high hierarchical distance is a strong obstacle to the transfer of 360-degree evaluation practices commonly adopted in Western countries [START_REF] Cooke | Postacquisition evolution of the appraisal and reward systems: A study of Chinese IT firms acquired by US firms[END_REF][START_REF] Festing | Country Specific Profiles of Performance Management in China, Germany, and the United States-An Empirical Test[END_REF]. Local rules and regulations, such as the Chinese internal passport legislation [START_REF] Warner | Reassessing human resource management 'with Chinese characteristics': an overview[END_REF], strongly constrain the adoption of HRM practices [START_REF] Brewster | Towards a'European'model of human resource management[END_REF][START_REF] Tregaskis | Converging or diverging? A comparative analysis of trends in contingent employment practice in Europe over a decade[END_REF], such as talent management programs.

In this thesis, I have investigated more particularly the technical and material dimension of performance management practices. I scrutinized forms, Word and Excel files, PowerPoint presentations, and internal notes and procedures. I observed how these objects evolved over a tenyear period, and more specifically how employees used them; how they adapted them; how they adopted them or, on the contrary, rejected them. On the basis of these observations, I suggest that the adoption of HRM practices by local employees is not only constrained by cultural and institutional pressures, but also results from a sociomaterial process, meaning that unique practices emerge from the entanglement of the social and the material.

This sociomaterial approach offers a radically different approach on individual agency in MNEs. On the one hand, it is generally agreed that local managers and expatriates enjoy more autonomy and freedom in local subsidiaries, simply because they operate remotely from headquarters [START_REF] Gamble | Transferring organizational practices and the dynamics of hybridization: Japanese retail multinationals in China[END_REF]. This greater decision latitude may vary according to the organisational structure of the MNE and the degree of ethnocentricity in the HRM approach [START_REF] Tarique | International Human Resource Management: Policies and Practices for Multinational Enterprises[END_REF]. On the other hand, it is also commonly agreed that local managers and employees are embedded in their local cultural and institutional environment. They are less likely to adopt and internalize headquarters' practices when there is a high institutional and cultural distance between headquarters and local subsidiaries [START_REF] Kostova | Transnational transfer of strategic organizational practices: A contextual perspective[END_REF][START_REF] Kostova | Adoption of an organizational practice by subsidiaries of multinational corporations: Institutional and relational effects[END_REF]. As a consequence, individual agency depends mainly on the structural, cultural and institutional distance between headquarters and local subsidiaries.

according to their local needs, leading to a new and unique set of practices. Across time, the overall purpose of the practices may deviate from headquarters' objectives. In the local entities of the MNE under investigation, performance management practices shifted slightly towards two different sets of hybrid practices. The former, "Harmonious Confucian" performance management, was developed in one entity, which is now the company's largest plant worldwide. This entity created its own sets of tools, leading to new practices such as a local mentoring program, which is different from both traditional Chinese practices and headquarters' mentoring practices. This mentoring program is a unique practice which cannot be found in exactly the same form anywhere else in the company's other entities worldwide. The mentoring criteria are unique to the specific context of this entity, and they cannot be directly transferred to other entities. In the end, the overall approach to performance management in this entity has moved towards the development of collective performance while still recognizing individual performance [START_REF] Li | An exploration of the HRM values of Chinese managers working in Western multinational enterprises in China: Implications for HR practice[END_REF]. Local managers develop their team members' performance by exemplarity and they do not reject conflict as long as overall harmony is maintained. The second hybrid practice, "Harmonious instrumental performance management", refers to a radically different approach and is based on different tools. The local managers have developed a highly top-down approach to company performance appraisal and the notion of harmony is frequently used to maintain the power and leadership of managers. Harmony is used to avoid any kind of conflict and make sure that leadership cannot be questioned [START_REF] Chew | A Confucian perspective on conflict resolution[END_REF][START_REF] Cheng | A framework for strategic decision making and performance among Chinese managers[END_REF][START_REF] Leung | A dualistic model of harmony and its implications for conflict management in Asia[END_REF][START_REF] Tjosvold | Constructive conflict in China: Cooperative conflict as a bridge between East and West[END_REF].

Practical Contributions

The second contribution of introducing Sociomaterial theory into the IHRM field concerns managerial implications. As highlighted by [START_REF] Orlikowski | 10 sociomateriality: challenging the separation of technology, work and organization[END_REF], technology and materiality are present everywhere but surprisingly, they are largely absent in the recent management literature, including IB literature. We live in a world of "technological complexity"

and employees need to better understand how to deal with managerial technologies. "There is complexity whenever the various elements (economic, political, sociological, psychological, western and non-western countries, are propagated worldwide almost instantaneously. At first glance, they appear to be less culturally embedded, since all managers and employees use the same mobile phones, computers and basic electronic devices everywhere in the world. They offer fewer opportunities to be either slightly or extensively adapted by local managers. New digital tools and practices therefore face even more issues regarding their long-term adoption. This raises new challenges for international business and international human resource management fields, but also many new opportunities for sociomaterial theory to help describe and explain current organizational phenomena. This doctoral thesis has enabled me to suggest some ways to enrich our understanding, but the more we know, the more we also realize the limits of our own knowledge, and there still remains an exciting research journey ahead of us.

APPENDICES Interview handbooks

• -Analyse de la charge de travail :

-Bilan de l'organisation du travail -pistes de réflexion concernant l'organisation individuelle et l'organisation collective

COMPORTEMENTS ET CAPACITES DEMONTRES DANS LE POSTE

-En fonction du poste, des objectifs à réaliser pour l'année et des compétences métier à maîtriser dans le poste, il s'agit de mettre en évidence les comportements mis en oeuvre. Quels sont les points forts et les axes de progression ?

-Les comportements mis en oeuvre sont-ils en lien avec les 4 valeurs d'XXXX : Solidarité, Simplicité, Performance, Responsabilité ?

-Les comportements sont-ils en lien avec la démarche Sécurité et le respect des Essentiels ?

-Les comportements induisent-ils soutien et qualité de vie au travail au sein de l'équipe ? -Synthèse des points positifs et des points à améliorer dans le cadre de la mise en oeuvre des pratiques de management opérationnel en usine

BILAN DES COMPORTEMENTS pour les fonctions opérationnelles usine COMPORTEMENTS ET CAPACITÉS DÉMONTRÉS DANS LE POSTE :

En fonction du poste et des objectifs à réaliser pour l'année, quels ont été les comportements mis en oeuvre. Quels sont les points forts et les axes de progression ?

SUPERVISOR COMMENTS (N+1)

Date: Full name -Signature :

SUPERVISOR COMMENTS (N+2) -if applicable -

Date :

Full name -Signature : List of achievements

OBJECTIVES ACHIEVED, ANALYSIS OF RESULTS

Has employee achieved the objectives and improved in the areas discussed in the previous interview?

To assess this, please refer to the report of the previous year's interview.

SKILLS AND BEHAVIOUR DEMONSTRATED IN THE JOB:

The following skills and behaviour are suggested, but may be adapted according to the specific needs of the job position. You can use the list of skills from the Annual Performance Review Guide to select those you believe are vital for the job, and to assess key strengths and areas of improvement.

Factors

SKILLS AND BEHAVIOUR DEMONSTRATED IN THE JOB:

The following skills and behaviour are suggested, but may be adapted according to the specific needs of the job position. You can use the list of skills from the Annual Performance Review Guide to select those you believe are vital for the job, and to assess key strengths and areas of improvement.

Factors

SKILLS AND BEHAVIOUR DEMONSTRATED IN THE JOB:

The following skills and behaviour are suggested, but may be adapted according to the specific needs of the job position. You can use the list of skills from the Annual Performance Review Guide to select those you believe are vital for the job, and to assess key strengths and areas of improvement.

Factors

SKILLS AND BEHAVIOUR DEMONSTRATED IN THE JOB:

The following skills and behaviour are suggested, but may be adapted according to the specific needs of the job position. You can use the list of skills from the Annual Performance Review Guide to select those you believe are vital for the job, and to assess key strengths and areas of improvement.

SKILLS AND BEHAVIOUR DEMONSTRATED IN THE JOB:

The following skills and behaviour are suggested, but may be adapted according to the specific needs of the job position. You can use the list of skills from the Annual Performance Review Guide to select those you believe are vital for the job, and to assess key strengths and areas of improvement.

Factors