We are grateful for valuable comments from Stephen R. Barley, Olav A. Kvitastein, and three anonymous ASQ reviewers as well as for the financial support of the Norwegian Research Council and the Ministry of Labor in Norway. Our names are listed in alphabetical order. This paper tests predictions from institutional and rational perspectives about the adoption of organizational practices through a comparative study of human resource management in firms located in six European countries. Distinguishing between calculative practicesaimed at efficient use of human resources-and collaborative practices-aimed at promoting the goals of both employees and employer-the paper predicts differences in adoption across countries. Results show that institutional determinants, as indicated by the national embeddedness of firms, have a strong effect on the application of both calculative and collaborative human resource management practices. Firm size, a rational determinant, has a considerable impact on calculative practices, whereas the effect of industrial embeddedness is quite modest for both practices.' Despite their very different assumptions, both rational and institutional explanations of organizational structure and management practices predict similarity among firms that operate in the same industry within the context of a single country. From a rational perspective, firms pursue economic advantage through decision making and actions guided by unambiguous preferences and bounded rationality. Although one may expect differences between industries, within industries firms will implement organizational practices that promote the maximization of economic goals. Thus, discounting sluggishness in the diffusion of best practices, it would be reasonable to expect that intraindustry management systems are to a large degree uniform.Although new institutionalism in organizational theory implies a rejection of rational actor models, emphasizing instead the pressures for acquiring and maintaining legitimacy in relation to the environment (see, e.g., DiMaggio, 1983; DiMaggio and Powell, 1983; Powell and DiMaggio, 1991), it shares the broad expectation that uniform pressures will lead to uniform intraindustry structure and organizational practices. Through various mechanisms of coercion, normative regulations, and imitation, organizations sharing the same environment are believed to become structurally similar as they respond to like pressure; that is, they will demonstrate isomorphism. Since these early formulations, a number of theoretical and empirical studies examining isomorphism and diffusion processes have been conducted, most of which have been carried out within discrete organizational fields or sectors.The two models' predictions diverge radically, however, when the setting is broadened to comprise different countries. While the rational model assumes that organizational practices are universal across national borders, institutionalism is sensitive to the possibility of cross-national institutional differences, which in turn...

The purpose of this article is to study the implication of financial liberalization to the heavy reliance of firms to the indirect finance in Japanese experience. In order to analyze the goal of this article, we start to examine the causes of the main bank system in Japan before and the prewar period. Then, this article discusses the impacts of financial liberalization to the to the heavy reliance on the indirect-financing for business firms in the light with Japan's financial market, particularly the main bank system. Finally, this article also discusses the implication of loose relationship of big firms and major banks (main bank system) to the recent financial condition in starting from the early of 1990s until now. This article discovered that financial liberalization, which started at the latter half of 1970s, has shaken the foundation of the main bank system. The major firms started to less dependent on the major banks and they issued the securities in domestic and international market. As a consequence, the SMBS still depend on the banks as their source of indirect financing. However, the competitiveness in the SMBS market turned to erode the bank profits that induced them to enter the risk activities, such as real estate. In addition, the bubble burst economy also triggered the boom in real estate. Naturally, as a nature of risk asset, loan to the real estate became the potential of bad loans that also was exacerbated the bubble burst in economy. Then, the financial crisis has revealed in 1990s.

This article presents a study of the degree to which national institutional settings impact on the application of management practices in foreign subsidiaries of multinational companies. Applying the national business systems approach our study centres on the use of calculative human resource management (HRM) practices by subsidiaries of US multinational companies in the UK, Ireland, Germany, Denmark/Norway and Australia, respectively, in comparison with these countries’ indigenous firms.The analysis indicates that while US subsidiaries adapt to the local setting in terms of applying calculative HRM practices, they also diverge from indigenous firm practices.

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). ...

In this article focus is set on competences as productive resources in firms. The concept of competence is defined, and central properties of competences outlined. Thereafter the notion of the competence portfolio of the f i r m is introduced and ways of extending the portfolio through external alliances delineated. This leads to a discussion of the relationship between individual and collective competences on the one hand and competence mobility and competitive advantage on the other. Finally, implications for practice are highlighted through contrasting a traditional perspective on management of competence resources with an alternative, future-oriented perspective.