In the reunified Germany, municipalities and professional associations have reacted differently to the introduction of foreign private operators into the water sector which is traditionally regarded as public and local. This fact leads us to question the relevance of the analysis of organizational change put forward by both new institutionalism in sociology and policy transfer approaches. Indeed, these two approaches overlook the importance of political dynamics in the acceptance or the rejection of a foreign standard. By highlighting the conflicting legitimacies and organizational combinations that have arisen in the German water sector following the attempts to partially privatize the urban services, this article suggests that the decision of whether or not to import foreign private management practices in this sector should be correlated to the local issues and interests at work. The authors therefore show how much the process of the institutionalization of an organizational change, through a transfer of norms coming from abroad, is something that can hardly be taken for granted depending as it does on local configurations.