Introduction: Multinationals and the Multilevel Politics of Cross-National Diffusion

Over the last decade or two, scholars in the fields of international employment relations and organizational behaviour have devoted considerable energies to arguing that systematic differences in the behaviour of multinational companies (MNCs) are significantly shaped by their embeddedness in distinctive national-institutional complexes, both of their country of origin and of the host business systems in which their subsidiaries operate. More recent analyses have explored MNCs’ behaviour as the complex outcome of the interaction between influences from the parent national business system (NBS) and those deriving from the host NBS. Such work has drawn heavily on the comparative institutionalist perspective whose variants include the ‘societal effects’ school (e.g. Maurice and Sellier, 1986), national business systems theory (e.g. Whitley, 1992), and the ‘varieties of capitalism’ approach (Hall and Soskice, 2001a).