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In Germany, scientific qualifications and an academic career in medical disciplines require mastering and balancing clinical, research and teaching activities. Systematic interdisciplinary human resource development is rare in German medical faculties. The purpose of this paper is to describe the MediMent programme, which is a model for systematic interdisciplinary support of early‐ and mid‐phase career development for medical academics. It comprises mentoring, training and networking modules tailored for pre‐ and post‐doctoral students at the Medical Faculty. It contributes to organisational development and reducing gender inequality by an affirmative action programme for women. The programme supports individual career‐building, teaches networking skills for an interdisciplinary workplace and assists in conflict resolution.

Mentors and mentees provided feedback via standardised forms. Additional open‐ended questions were interpreted by content analysis. Statistics were prepared using SPSS.

Evaluation of the first six‐year programme run revealed several benefits, indicating the trio of mentoring, networking and the accompanying seminar series efficiently supports career development of young medical academics. Participating mentees felt they achieved career goals within the mentoring programme. Evaluations indicated a strong potential for future investment in the organisation through better training, improving institutional visibility and stimulating recruitment of excellent students.Originality/value – The success of the MediMent programme described in the paper recommends it for implementation at other institutions.

Research on institutional logics has missed the opportunity to understand how and why societies may fundamentally differ in their material and symbolic systems. In this chapter, the authors offer a qualitative examination of the implementation of infrastructure public–private partnership (PPP) projects in the Arab state of Qatar. The authors illustrate how the macrofoundations of Qatari society are rooted in the notion of tribe, an inter-institutional system under which the intertwined institutional orders of the state, the market, and the family have historically developed and operated. Their study sheds light on how these macrofoundations shape the processes and mechanisms that underpin the resistance to the introduction of innovative organizational forms. The chapter makes two contributions. First, it identifies how “foreign” organizational forms rooted in Western institutional orders trigger adverse reactions from societies characterized by different institutional orders. Second, it demonstrates the challenge of implementing PPPs in an institutional context that is unfavorable to them and where actors seek to preserve the supremacy of the extant inter-institutional system.

Drawing on a case study of the adoption of an American organizational form – the “Academic Health Science Centre” (or “AHSC”) – in English healthcare, the authors develop a model of the “translation work” required to translate an organizational form from one organizational field to another. The findings contribute to the literature on translation and shed light on the microfoundations of institutions by examining the complex relationship among agency, meaning, institutions, and temporality that underpin the translation of a contested organizational form. The authors also show the important, but limited, role of agency when translation occurs at the broad field level and argue that the translation of organization forms can, in at least some situations, best be understood as a “garbage can” rather than the linear and agentic view usually described in the translation literature.