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We explore determinants of subsidiary autonomy in setting HRM practices within US parented MNEs, in Europe and Australia. We examine both the effect of strategic context, and the effect of the institutional location of the subsidiary. We find that US MNEs show greater centralization of control over HRM where the subsidiary faces global markets, in coordinated market economies versus liberal market economies, and where union density is low.Keywords: International HRM, subsidiary management, neo-institutional theory, strategic context, centralized control, multinationals 3 HRM IN US SUBSIDIARIES IN EUROPE AND AUSTRALIA: CENTRALIZATION OR AUTONOMY?Although an important source of competitive advantage for multinational enterprises (MNEs) may lie in their ability to deploy organizational and management capabilities worldwide, many MNEs have chosen, for strategic reasons, to concede considerable autonomy to their subsidiaries in designing their own management systems (Kostova and Roth, 2002;Noorderhaven and Harzing, 2003;Myloni et al., 2004). As Harzing (2000) has demonstrated, subsidiary autonomy in human resource management (HRM) is a feature of MNEs that are generally classified as multi-domestics; that is, MNEs whose subsidiaries have domestic mandates involving a local market scope accompanied by considerable latitude to engage in local product modification and local adaptation of marketing.On the other hand there are those, such as Birkinshaw and Hood (1998), who view subsidiary autonomy as not only determined by the relationship of the head office to its subsidiaries, but also by the nature of the local institutional environment in which the subsidiary operates. They argue that the nature of local legal conditions, the cultural environment, and the influence of the local authorities will all impinge on the degree to which subsidiaries have local control over their HRM systems.The aim of this paper is to combine these two perspectives by simultaneously examining the effects of the strategic role of the subsidiary and the institutional environment in which the subsidiary is located, in relation to the degree of centralization of control of HRM policies imposed by corporate headquarters. We examine the influence of the strategic role of the subsidiary in the sense of whether it has a purely local market orientation or whether it serves international markets. At the same time we investigate the impact of the environment in which the subsidiary is located by differentiating between the response of the MNE to the broad institutional setting at the level of national business systems (Whitley, 1992;Lane, 1992;Sorge, 1995;Foss, 1999;Hollingsworth, 2003;Redding, 2005) in which the subsidiary is located and, separately, the impact of labor unions on MNEs' ability to exert centralized control (e.g., Ortiz, 1998;Giardini et al., 2005;Singe and Croucher, 2005).We argue that US MNEs operate in relation to host country environments on the basis of both "economic rationality" and "normative rationality" (Oliver, 1997). ...

SummaryWe report on a qualitative investigation of the influence of emotions on the decision making of traders in four City of London investment banks, a setting where work has been predominantly theorized as dominated by rational analysis. We conclude that emotions and their regulation play a central role in traders' decision making. We find differences between high and low performing traders in how they engage with their intuitions, and that different strategies for emotion regulation have material consequences for trader behavior and performance. Traders deploying antecedent-focused emotional regulation strategies achieve a performance advantage over those employing primarily response-focused strategies. We argue that, in particular, response-focused approaches incur a performance penalty, in part because of the reduced opportunity to combine analysis with the use of affective cues in making intuitive judgments. We discuss the implications for our understanding of emotion and decision making, and for traders' practice.

Tim Morris, Helen Lydka and Mark Fenton O'Creevy present data on a group of graduates during the first five years of employment. Dividing the sample into those who have remained with their original employer and those who have changed, they examine attitudinal commitment and tenure intentions against a set of human resource policies measured at three points in time. They find that those policies significantly associated with high commitment change over time; that attitudinal and behavioural commitment are conceptually distinct constructs; and that behavioural commitment is a less stable construct than attitudinal commitment. Generally, it appears that employee commitment is more provisional than is implied by much of the literature. Tim Morris is a Lecturer at the London Business School, Helen Lydka a researcher at the Henley Management College, and Mark Fenton O'Creevy a Research Fellow at the LBS Centre for Organisational Research.

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