The literature on institutional translation has examined how actors purposefully incorporate, adapt, and disseminate foreign organizational forms across misaligned institutional contexts. However, the involvement of institutional custodians such as authoritative political actors in translation processes remains largely unexplored. To address this gap, we conduct a longitudinal case study on how the Chinese government has engaged with the introduction and widespread adoption of social enterprises in China. Imported from the West, social enterprises focus on market-based solutions to social issues, which contrasts sharply with China’s traditional state-directed provision of social services. Our analysis identifies three phases in this process: assessing the foreignness of social enterprises, cautiously enabling them, and finally, selectively and regionally editing them. Reflecting on the interplay between custodial and translational work in our Findings, we build a process model that contributes to the institutional translation literature by illustrating how power dynamics and multi-tiered governance shape distributed translation processes across diverse regional contexts. We also extend institutional custodianship literature by revealing how custodians employ subtle approaches to pragmatically ‘tame uncertainty’ as translation unfolds, and by demonstrating how the heterogeneity of motivations within a custodian leads to the decentralization of custodial work.
