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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.