Suchergebnisse

This paper integrates the study of contextual influences on job autonomy as a key workplace practice with the growing literature on intra-country variation (ICV) versus between-country variation (BCV) in international HRM. While contexts such as industry and country are widely recognized to affect workplace practices such as job autonomy, the influences of different extra-organizational contexts are seldom examined simultaneously or their relative influence systematically compared. Similarly, while much research considers the importance of BCV vis-a-vis ICV in international HRM, little attention is paid to variation that occurs between sub-national or supranational contexts. To move forward on both these counts, we use multilevel analysis and empirically assess the comparative importance of industry as a sub-national context and politico-institutional clusters as a supranational context in addition to country context as sources of differences in job autonomy. Results indicate that inter-cluster variation can be substantially larger than inter-country variation, but that inter-industry dissimilarities tend to exceed both inter-cluster and inter-country dissimilarities. Hence, the main finding of our analysis is that dissimilarities in job autonomy associated with crossing country borders are not exceptionally large as employers and employees face larger dissimilarities in job autonomy when they move across industries. Implications of this finding both for international HRM and for international business and cross-cultural management more broadly are discussed.

Extant institutional research has failed to make a distinction between the effects of institutional profile and institutional distance on MNEs. The problem stems from the fact that, due to the use of a single reference country, variation in institutional distance between the reference country and partner countries is essentially equal to variation in the institutional profiles of these partner countries, making institutional distance and institutional profile effects indistinguishable. This research begins by demonstrating that the problem of profile - distance conflation is relevant for virtually all possible countries as reference points, and then showing how this problem is mitigated by using more than one country as reference points from which to calculate institutional distance. We conclude that current institutional research in international business is unable to explain how institutions matter for MNEs and that a more careful theoretical and empirical distinction between the effects of institutions and institutional distance on cross-border business activities is essential for pushing the institutional perspective in international business studies forward. Multiple reference point research designs are required to achieve this.

This paper explains the observed combination of relatively low levels of democracy and positive attitudes towards it in the Muslim world. It argues that this democracy paradox is understandable from the perspective of the principle of diminishing marginal utility: people value highly that of which they have little. This reasoning implies, however, that surveys like the World Values Surveys (WVS) elicit circumstance-driven marginal preferences rather than culturally determined attitudinal traits. Empirical evidence showing that individuals living in undemocratic societies have much more favorable inclinations towards democracy supports our argument.