for instance, found that the parent company’s insistence that the plant operate
the system termed ‘High Involvement Management’ clashed with the expecta-
tions of British managers who were not used to devolving responsibility for
operating decisions to shop-floor workers. This illustrates the way in which the
institutional and cultural features of national business systems constrain the
scope for transfer, and the way in which actors in host countries may be able
to block transfer when they see it as challenging their interests.
In other cases, however, the constraints may be only partial. In many
cases, a practice may be adapted to fit the new national business system as it is
transferred. In this way, a particular practice ‘may not operate in the same fashion
in the recipient as in the donor unit but, rather, may undergo transmutationas
actors in the recipient seek to adapt it to pre-existing models of behaviour,
assumptions and power relations’ (Edwards and Ferner, 2000: 13). One exam-
ple is the adoption by many US MNCs of Japanese-style lean production. These
practices have been implemented in a distinctive system of employment
relations, involving a reliance on the external labour market and a pronounced
hierarchy-within-work organisation. Maccoby (1997: 165) argues that US com-
panies have concentrated on the use of lean production to eliminate waste and
defects, and downplayed the Toyota-style emphasis on the creation of ‘trust’
and facilitating ‘learning’.
While the peculiarities of the host business systems may present con-
straints to transfer, whether absolute or partial, these constraints will often be
open to the influence of large MNCs. By appearing to be mobile rather than
dependent on a particular set of operations, senior managers in large MNCs can
pressure governments to relax regulations and prevail upon unions to make
concessions in collective bargaining. Accordingly, Muller’s (1998) study of
American and British MNCs in Germany found that a significant number had
opted out of the systems of sector-wide collective bargaining and vocational
training. In this way, actors in the HQ may be able to break down resistance to
transfer from those at national or plant level.
However, the role of host country effects in the transfer of practices is not
simply a matter of managers at HQ trying to break down resistance. To operate
effectively, a particular practice may be dependent on workers possessing high
levels of skills and knowledge. Without these abilities, organisational actors
may be unable to operate the practice in question. In this case, the host coun-
try is not ‘receptive’ to transfer, but this lack of receptiveness is not due to any
opposition. An example of this is the implementation by Japanese MNCs of
amended versions of lean production in Brazil; the amendments reduced the
requirements for workers to rotate across a range of tasks since the Brazilian
workers tended to lack the breadth of necessary skills (Humphrey, 1995).
Moreover, where resistance to transfer occurs it will not necessarily be con-
fined to the implementation of practices. Resistance can also occur at an ear-
lier stage, namely during the search for practices that have the potential to be
diffused. Where managers at HQ set up mechanisms designed to identify practices
Transfer of Employment Practices Across Borders in MNCs 403