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Das Dissertationsprojekt wurde im Rahmen der Mitarbeit im Forschungsprojekt EUROPUB entwickelt, das von der EU durch das 5. Rahmenprogramm finanziert wurde. Von April 2004 bis März 2005 erfolgte die Finanzierung durch das Doktorandinnen-Programm des WZB. Die Dissertation wird von Prof. Dieter Rucht (WZB) und Prof. Ruud Koopmans (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam) betreut.

Stock exchanges are receiving increasing attention both as markets where securities are traded and as organizations which take on the form of multinational corporations. At the same time, they are experiencing a number of changes due to the rising importance of trading technology, international competition and regulatory decisions. Today, after a consolidation at the national level, the biggest exchanges are looking across borders to improve and extend their business model. These stock exchange operators are internationalizing their activities and are reorganizing trading, clearing and settlement activities, potentially with great impact on national socio-economic configurations.

Social inequalities in educational attainment are an inherent feature of modern societies. However, the degree to which individual educational outcomes are affected by social origin varies across institutional contexts (Blossfeld and Shavit 1993; Erikson and Jonsson 1996; Breen et al. 2009). The comparably strong educational inequalities existing in Germany are often attributed to the rigid structure of its school system, where students are channeled early on into distinct school tracks that define the boundaries of their future educational pathways. In recent years, a number of reforms have introduced elements of flexibility in the German tracking system, with the purported aim of reducing inequality of educational opportunities.

Small and medium sized enterprises have increasingly turned into multinationals. Yet, paths of internationalization have depended on contracts, contacts and information at least originating in the home context. There are different types of SME multinationalization strategies. Based on the assumption that relative resource scarcity in SMEs makes a resource dependency approach desirable, more than for the commonly investigated larger MNEs, we investigated the internationalization profile and autonomous versus cooperative use of resources of SMEs in France, Germany, Italy, Austria and the Netherlands, in six regions, in engineering and software firms, under the influence of size and age of the firm, regional embeddedness, regional properity, and the product life cycle, for 58 enterprises.

Airbus Industries is a distinctive case of a large and complex transnational enterprise that did not arise from one clearly dominant centre and origin in one country. It has been subject to pressures for both international concentration and integration, on the one hand, and conservation of national and local facilities and responsibilities on the other, responding to conflicting pressures for international efficiency and for the distribution of expertise across many sites in many countries. Furthermore, enterprise organisation has changed substantially over time. The study analyses such countervailing pressures, how they were resolved and kept Airbus from falling apart and helped it grow.

The goal and innovative aspect of this project is the integration of different discussions which up to now have been treated separately:

This project is primarily concerned with the emerging European system of corporate governance. This ongoing "field experiment" is a unique opportunity to observe the complex process of constructing a new corporate governance system, including a new set of relationships between stakeholders. Key questions here include the following:

The creation and implementation of corporate governance codes (CGCs) is visibly affected by national context. Cultural characteristics of a country have considerable influence on how early a country develops codes of practice, and how many codes it develops. Specifically, we also explored the process of institutionalization of corporate governance best practices, reflected by CGCs in the UK. The UK codification process is distinctively characterized by the comply-or-explain principle, the role of business elites, the large number of CGCs and the unique characteristics of the UK organizational field. Moreover, these particular characteristics intertwined together reflect wider institutional and cultural features of British society.

An important question is to what extent local subsidiaries of companies in highly globalized markets, subject to demanding quality requirements, are ‘footloose’ or locally rooted. A case in point for this setting is the development, manufacture and maintenance of jet engines. We studied the most prominent makers of jet engines in Germany, which are companies of entirely different types that would not be able to exist in the way they do without foreign headquarters and other sites, or without foreign alliance partners. To this extent, they are unmistakably parts of global companies, with high HRM internationalization in some technical and managerial brackets. But on the other hand, they are also marked by national and local profiles.

A common view is that when multinational enterprises set up subsidiaries, organization, industrial relations and human resources in a subsidiary will be more or less hybrid phenomena. This refers to a fairly wide and ambiguous field of characteristics and does not explain much. As a result of this study of multinational automobile companies in India, it is possible to see that organization and human resources depend on the market segment concerned, the cultural and institutional distance between the country of origin and the host country, vertical integration of the subsidiary, and the presence of a supranational production concept within the larger multinational enterprise.