Tradition With a Global Appetite: The Michelin Guide’s Entry and Evolution in New York City

Research has highlighted that tradition can be beneficial for organizations when it allows them to leverage their past to address new and emerging challenges. However, scholarship has also shown that tradition may act as a detriment to organizational progress when it obfuscates recognition of new opportunities or limits potential actions. This article examines this duality of tradition within the context of the Michelin Guide’s 2005 entry into New York City, which marked the first steps outside of Europe in a global expansion of Michelin’s restaurant evaluations. Accordingly, this study contributes to our understanding of tradition by disentangling its simultaneously enabling and constraining elements and by providing insights about the strategic malleability of tradition – in particular, that organizations may embrace or distance themselves from some elements of their tradition in order to engage with new environments or changing circumstances. Ultimately, this work advances a nuanced perspective about what constitutes organizational tradition, its double-sidedness, and the dynamics of tradition’s strategic use.