ABSTRACT
In socio–economics, management and law, considerable attention has been devoted to the questions of national business systems and the convergence in local corporate governance institutions under the pressures of globalization in financial and real markets (Berger and Dore 1991; DiMaggio 2001; Djelic and Quack 2003; Gordon and Roe 2004; Hall and Soskice 2001; Plihon and Ponssard 2002; Whitley 1999). Three competing interpretations of on–going change processes can be identified. It was proposed that national business systems will retain their distinctiveness, because of path dependencies (Bebchuk and Roe 2004) or of comparative economic advantages of national institutional arrangements (Hall and Soskice 2001), and that this will lead to persistence in national corporate governance structures. Others argue that because of efficiency considerations, competition and globalization, national business systems will align on an Anglo–Saxon type of institutional arrangement (Easterbrook and Fischel 1991; Useem 1998). A third view, investigating the characteristics of change processes at the national, regional and global levels, stresses that while new ideas, methods and practices follow a translation process when they are imported in a national context, the repeated diffusion of imported features into a national business system will lead to the gradual transformation and hybridization of the institutional arrangement of the latter (Djelic and Quack 2003).
