ABSTRACT
For many decades, scholars have noted that technological, economic and, more recently, institutional forces provoke homogeneity in practices and even reduce cultural differences between nations. These studies have reported similarities between organizations operating in diverse cultural and industrial settings (e.g. Fröbel and Marchington, 2005; McMillan et al., 1973). Controversially, there is a long tradition of work affirming that nations’ cultural and institutional idiosyncrasies outweigh the significance of any similarities in the formal structures and processes of organizations (e.g. Richardson, 1953; Tayeb, 1987; Wade, 1996). These studies have reported considerable differences between organizations operating in similar task environments but different societies, which have been underpinned (implicitly or explicitly) by contingency (e.g. Burn and Stalker, 1961; Thompson, 1967; Woodward, 1965) or divergence (e.g. Child, 1972; Donaldson, 2001; Gallie, 1978; Maurice et al., 1980) paradigms. The purpose of this study is to understand how the level of technology that a firm has and the country where the firm operates shape certain HRM policies and practices. In this paper, we aim to analyse both the contingency and the divergence theories, in an attempt to demonstrate that these two theories do not compete with each other as is commonly assumed. Rather they complement each other. The principal question to be discussed in this paper is whether there are consistent patterns of differences and similarities of firms with the same level of technology operating in different countries. Our proposition is that the level of technology that a firm has affects the way HR managers devise HRM policies and practices; however, the technology impact is regulated by country factors where the firm is located.
