can be extended in business system terms. In France, more of a state organized
business system, corporate governance and social relations in the enterprise
were to a greater extent influenced by templates taken from the public sector
into the rest of the economy. Hence, vocational education and training became
public domains. Corporatist economic governance in Germany, however, in a
collaborative business system, resulted in the establishment of basic vocational
education and training as both a private enterprise and public education mat-
ter, governed by employers and trade unions in conjunction with the govern-
ment and executed within enterprises according to generally applicable
schemes.
In order to properly analyse and explain any given country’s profiles, the
types presented usually have to be combined. Societies are usually mixtures of
differently weighted types applying to a greater or lesser extent in specific sec-
tors or regions. It is not the only typology that we have, either. Just as Hofstede’s
culture dimensions have competitors presented by other scholars, so are there
other typologies of business systems. In organization studies, however,
Whitley’s is the most frequently used and most differentiated one. We have to
realize however that such typologies are very crude. They explain in what way
Korea is different from Japan, or France from Germany, or many societies from
Britain and the USA. But countries and business systems change over time, and
there are more specific differences, say between Sweden and Germany, France
and Belgium, or Singapore and Hong Kong, which the interested observer or
practitioner will find hard to derive from such a typological scheme.
In the last instance, any such typology, or map of cultural dimensions for
that matter, is a bit like a Swiss knife: a fairly universal and supposedly all-
purpose tool, which allows you to do many essential (cutting, filing, screwing
etc.) jobs in an elementary way. It fails on more demanding jobs, but it does
point the way to more specific tools and you are best advised not to leave home
without it. There are no limits to refining business system typologies. Their
value lies in forcing us to state linkages between different institutional domains
which have the effect of tying dynamics in one institutional domain to those
in others. That institutions in different domains evolve in their inter-
relationships is fairly indisputable. But how this happens is still a rather tricky
issue.
4 SOCIETAL ANALYSIS BEYOND THE
INSTITUTIONALISM–CULTURALISM SPLIT
After discussing examples of the institutionalist approach in some detail, this
section presents a simplified summary of societal analysis as a way of integrating
institutionalism with culturalism. It is proposed that this framework will be
Cross-national Differences in Human Resources 131