Organizations and Nations: from Universalism to Institutionalism?

This article scrutinizes and explores recent tendencies of giving a salient role to national characteristics in the explanation and prescription of events inside and surrounding organizations, and examines the problems in re‐specifying the relations between national and firm levels of analysis. It is shown that there are significant zones of manoeuvre for organizations within the host society, which express themselves in an ‘ownership effect’, and that organization strategies must address the issue of matching international best practice to national predispositions, both directly and indirectly, through lobbying the local level and nation state. A multi‐level learning framework is proposed.