This paper examines the role of institutional analysis within the field of international business (IB) studies. Within IB, institutions matter, but the view of institutions tends to be “thin”, utilizing summary indicators rather than detailed description, and thus approaches institutions as...

A small but significant stream of research has emerged on how changes in corporate governance impact labour management, particularly in countries with stakeholder-oriented corporate governance. This paper briefly reviews existing empirical and theoretical literature on the links between...

This article examines institutional linkages between corporate governance and labour management in Germany. German corporate governance was characterised by the importance of banks, ownership concentration, long-term investment, and stable corporate networks. This system displayed important...

This article examines the role of ambiguity in processes of institutional change. One challenge for understanding institutional change is to overcome the rather "oversocialized" view of action within Institutional theory. Drawing upon recent work in sociology, the paper introduces a...

This paper investigates how employee representation affects, and is affected by, the way corporations structure themselves. In the analytical framework employed in the paper, the structure of the corporation and national labour institutions constitute key constraints on the goals of unions and...

This paper compares the characteristics of M&A in 1991-2005 across five countries: Japan, France, Germany, the UK and USA. We ask what factors explain the growth of M&A markets across these countries, and what similarities and differences exist in the ways the M&A market operates. We find that...

While stakeholder models of corporate governance support long-term employment, recent reforms have promoted shareholder-oriented corporate governance worldwide. Will reform cause employment to converge on a market system? This paper presents a comparison of the linkages between corporate...

Debates regarding corporate governance have become increasingly important in Japan as the post-war model of bank-based, stakeholder-oriented corporate governance faces the new pressures associated with globalization and growing investor demands for shareholder value. Bringing together a group of...

This essay reviews the development of approaches within the comparative capitalisms (CC) literature and points to three theoretical innovations which, taken together, define and distinguish these approaches as a group. First, national economies are characterized by distinct institutional...