This article argues for the systematic incorporation of power and interests into analysis of the cross-border transfer of practices within multinational companies (MNCs). Using a broadly Lukesian perspective on power it is argued that the transfer of practices involves different kinds of power capabilities through which MNC actors influence their institutional environment both at the 'macro-level' of host institutions and the 'microlevel' of the MNC itself. The incorporation of an explicit account of the way power interacts with institutions at different levels, it is suggested, underpins a more convincing account of transfer than is provided by the dominant neoinstitutionalist perspective in international business, and leads to a heuristic model capable of generating proposed patterns of transfer outcomes that may be tested empirically in future research.

The debate as to the effects of globalization on organizational forms and management practices is well known. Our paper focuses on two institutionalist traditions in organization theory which make a significant contribution to this discussion: new institutionalism and the business-systems approach. Both emphasize the adaptation of organizations to their institutional environments but come to very different conclusions as to the global standardization of organizational forms and management practices. Our paper aims to move them beyond the convergence-divergence dichotomy to account for signs of both global standardization and continued persistence of national differences. We do so by systematically comparing the two traditions, suggesting how they can be cross-fertilized and developing an agenda for future empirical research. We also highlight that they cannot learn from each other on the issue of agency and point to structuration theory as a way in which they can integrate agency into their accounts of the global standardization debate. Copyright Blackwell Publishing Ltd 2006.

New institutionalist studies of human resource management in multinational companies argue that subsidiaries are faced with institutional duality-pressures to conform to parent company practices and to the local institutional environment in which they are based. To date, they have concentrated on how subsidiaries respond to parent company pressures. This article considers how subsidiary management responds to both parent company demands and host country pressures in trying to reconcile the challenges of institutional duality. It focuses on how such responses are shaped by the interdependence of subsidiary management with the parent company and the local environment. It does so by comparing case study evidence of collective representation practices in US-owned subsidiaries in Britain and Germany.

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