This article examines the rise of foreign ownership in France and Germany. I argue that the firm-level institutional arrangements of workplace organization constitute the most significant variable to account for the greater attractiveness of French firms over their German counterparts to short-term, impatient capitalnamely, hedge and mutual funds. I demonstrate how key notions of the Varieties of Capitalism perspective-institutional interaction, institutional latency, and the distinction between institutional framework and the mode of coordination that follows from these institutions-provide important theoretical insights to account for the different structures of foreign ownership in France and Germany.

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Embedded in the literature on financialization and institutional approaches, this study is an examination of the causal factors of employee downsizing in two institutionally dissimilar settings, France and the UK, using the fuzzy sets variant of Qualitative Comparative Analysis. The findings show that the roughly equivalent use of large-scale lay-offs in the two countries is coupled with strikingly different causal factors. Our argument suggests the importance of complex causation whereby employee downsizing reflects the growing influence of financial considerations in the governance of companies, but its diffusion across countries is shaped by different configurations of institutional arrangements.

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