compelling, they can be addressed as institutions. Whether these would or
would not have given rise to the adaptation of mental programs is a secondary
consideration. The main point is that different rules of the game make indi-
viduals move in different directions, even if their mental programming is the
same. It may well be that different rules provoke the adaptation of individual
mental programs through a process of learning about context-specific factors
associated with success (such as physical well-being, social recognition, profes-
sional and social advances, and personal development).
Faced, for example, with organizational outcomes in Japan, compared with
other societies, such an approach would play down the role of Japanese culture
to the extent that this refers to individual mental programs and general sociali-
zation processes. Proponents would argue that the specificity of Japanese prac-
tices resides in a different construction of professional careers, labor markets
(lifelong employment), payment systems, industrial relations, etc. They would
argue that, if Europeans and Americans were to be transplanted into a Japanese
type context, they would reproduce or generate the same organizational
patterns. The outcome would have to be traced back to the institutionalized
rules of the game. Such proponents would also point to instances where
Japanese-type management and organization practices have been transplanted
successfully to other countries.
This institutionalist approach is very much in evidence in industrial socio-
logy or more narrowly sociological cross-national comparisons. It is forever on
the look-out for system characteristics to explain organizational outcomes,
whether mental programs are adapted in due course or not. The evidence in
favor of institutionalism is by no means weaker than that in favor of cultural-
ism. In their study comparing attitudes and social rules in similar US and
Japanese enterprises, Lincoln and Kalleberg (1990) came to the conclusion – sur-
prising to many but methodologically well substantiated – that work commit-
ment is not greater in Japanese workers, if measured as an individual mental
program. Differences in organizational commitment in practice are explained
by different rules of the game, rather than by ascertainable individual mental
programs. The authors do show how enterprises have to some extent adapted
towards congruence with cultural predilections, as they call it; but the main
factor is the design of system characteristics, and the role of culture is considered
to be indirect and additive. This should warn us against assuming that culture
is the fundamental determinant of international differences in management,
organization and human resources. Too many textbooks commit that fault.
But the gap between culturalism and institutionalism can be bridged in the
manner indicated by Crozier and Friedberg (1977) and Giddens (1986),
through what the latter called structuration theory. This is an erudite explana-
tion of how actors and systems constitute each other reciprocally. They are
simply two sides of the same coin. To examine an actor means discovering
systems (s)he has in mind and takes for granted; to examine a system means to
discover the precise meaning that actors give it.
122 International Human Resource Management