ABSTRACT
Throughout history, people from different countries and different walks of life have traded and made productive deals while pursuing their own very different goals. In international trade, differences in goals are useful to know but not an impediment. Mergers announced with great enthusiasm crash after some years, leaving a trail of broken careers and even ruined personal health of major proponents. One hurdle to be overcome is different traditions of corporate governance. Equally developed and sometimes neighboring countries maintain very different ownership and governance systems, with little sign of convergence. Barkema, Bell and Pennings analyzed survival rates of foreign entries by Dutch companies and found these to decrease with cultural distance, but more for joint ventures and acquisitions than for Greenfield starts, and more for partly owned than for wholly-owned subsidiaries. They explained this by the need for “doublelayered acculturation” in the riskier cases.
