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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.

s project examines the market strategies, personnel policies and professionalisation activities in the business consulting sector in Germany in the context of the increasing tendency towards internationalisation. At the centre of the study is the question of in how far associations and businesses appreciate that an increasing number of qualified women is available to them and in how far they view them as a target group for their strategies and activities.

The theoretical basis of the study combines three strands:

This project, conducted by Sigrid Quack and Sebastian Botzem, looks at the internationalisation of knowledge-intensive service intermediaries using the example of law and accounting firms. We hope to gain a better understanding of co-evolutive processes characterised by the mutual influence of institutional conditions and actor behaviour. In particular, we analyse:

Die Durchführung des Dissertationsprojektes erfolgt in Kooperation mit dem vier Länder (BE, NL, D, FR) und die EU-Ebene umfassenden Projekt „Access and Legitimacy“ an der Katholischen Universität Leuven, Belgien sowie in Zusammenarbeit mit Dr. Bernhard Wessels (WZB). Finanziert wird das belgische Projekte durch den Forschungsfonds Flanders, Belgien. Die Finanzierung der deutschen Teilstudie bzw. des Dissertationsprojektes erfolgt durch das WZB im Rahmen des Doktorandinnen-Programmes.

PD D Project
Prof. Barbara Pfetsch
Prof. Ruud Koopmans

How does industrial work develop in the emerging markets of Brazil, Russia, India, and China (BRIC)? The project examines whether multinational companies contribute to a convergence of the development paths of industrial work in the triad countries and the emerging markets through standardization of human resource systems, or whether a divergence of separate “worlds of work” can be recorded.