1 Published in Team Performance Management, 2014, Volume 20, Issue 7/8, pp. 343-356 DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1108/TPM-03-2014-0023 Monica Rolfsen, Stine Skaufel Kilskar and Nina Valle: “We are at day one of a new life”: translation of a management concept from headquarter to a production team Introduction There has been a growing interest in the literature on how multinational corporations (MNC) transfer practices across borders. One theoretical position is that MNCs standardize their practices to all subsidiaries (Ritzer, 1996). Another position claims that even the most global companies remain deeply rooted in their own national business systems (Almond, 2011), and that practices are complicated, if not impossible, to transfer, because of variations in institutional and cultural contexts. In addition, the process of implementing management concepts in organizations has been widely studied, mostly from the supplier’s position, and seeing the client organization as a passive consumer. Later, a more active perspective began to be developed in which the client organization is seen as a co-consumer (Heusinkveld et al., 2011) or even as a co-constructor (Rolfsen, 2011). Our aim is to combine the two theoretical positions and study an MNC transferring a concept across borders, using a team perspective on the shop floor in one of the company’s subsidiaries. The plant is a part of a global production company with its own production system. Our research question is: What possible explanations are there for the difficulties faced by MNCs in transferring a management concept into a local team? Our literature review will start by considering research on management concepts and implementation, explaining the management concept applicable to our case, and discussing earlier research on the transfer of concepts within MNCs. The methodological issues will then be discussed, and the case and results presented.