A culture theory commentary on Meyer and Peng’s theoretical probe into Central and Eastern Europe

Abstract

Meyer and Peng's Decade Award article and Retrospective integrate economic and sociological theories of transaction costs, firm resources, and institutions and apply them to firms in Central and Eastern Europe in ways that can inform and be informed by culture theory. Culture theorizing in IB typically uses dimensions of values and norms to analyze the IB implications of the underlying logics that characterize patterns of thought, action and interaction of countries and other large societies. Transaction cost theorizing helps explain the social forces that link cultural group boundaries with country boundaries. Firm resource theory can be informed by the toolbox metaphor to understand cultural patterns in the resources that firms in a particular locale have most readily available. Neoinstitutional theory, particularly its political science thread, cautions IB scholars to represent governmental arrangements and policies as arising from cultural norms and values rather than as independent variables that spring de nova from government leaders. Integrative analyses, like the Decade Award article and Retrospective, point out links and complementarities among diverse theories, but need to take care lest superficial similarities in how terms like institution and culture are used in different theories mask fundamental conceptual differences.

Theories of the (state-owned) firm

“…The institution-based view distinguishes between formal institutions and informal institutions (Estrin & Prevezer, 2011;Holmes, Miller, Hitt, & Salmador, 2013;North, 1990;Peng, 2003). Both formal institutions (such as state regulations) and informal institutions (such as historical norms) affect SOEs, making the institution-based view a fertile new ground on which to develop new theoretical understanding (Kostova & Hult, 2016;Meyer & Peng, 2016;Peterson, 2016). This direction is consistent with Mahoney's (2005: 223) call Bfar greater attention to the interaction^between institutions and organization-level governance.…”

“…This is because giving more control to already powerful controlling shareholders-in our case, state agencies-may further intensify such conflicts (Young et al, 2008: 210). Abolishing concentrated state ownership via mass privatization, with the aim of distributing shares to all citizens, is challenging, as indicated by the CEE experience in the 1990s (Djankov & Murrell, 2002;Meyer & Peng, 2005, 2016.…”

An overview of Hofstede-inspired country-level culture research in international business since 2006

“…Country is not the same as culture, but instead of abandoning value-based research completely the real challenge is how we integrate intra-country cultural diversity empirically, and even more importantly, in our theorizing on culture effects. So far, the literature has not provided an overall theoretical framework reconciling intra-country cultural diversity with the notion of national cultures (Peterson, 2016), although significant steps forward are made.…”

Theoretical Foundations

“…These concepts correspond to the distinction between formal (= regulatory) and informal (= normative and cognitive) institutions (Peng, 2003;. While economists tend to emphasize clearly defined rules, especially formal ones, organization theorists (and even more so anthropologists, see Peterson, 2016) focus on implicit and not clearly articulated normative and cognitive forces.…”