This cross-disciplinary study examines the way national culture affects consumption patterns of life insurance across countries. Life insurance is a service that is abstract, complex, and focused on unsure future benefits. Because of the uncertainty and ambiguity inherent in the life insurance product, consumers are more likely to respond according to their cultural prescriptions. Our research hypotheses are tested empirically using Hofstede's cultural dimensions, and data from 1976–2001 across 41 countries. The findings show that individualism indeed has a significant, positive effect on life insurance consumption, whereas power distance and masculinity/femininity have significant, negative effects. The results are robust, even after controlling for economic, institutional and demographic determinants.

This paper contributes to the debate on the performance impact of “added cultural distance” in the multinational enterprise's (MNE's) expansion path. Our research focuses on the ability of MNEs to handle complexity associated with added cultural distance in international expansion, and on the effect this may have on profitability. We hypothesise that firms that make expansion moves involving a high level of added cultural distance per unit of time, and those that expand in culturally distant countries in an irregular fashion, that is, with a higher variability, will be less profitable. We test these hypothesised relationships using detailed data on 2404 expansion moves undertaken by our panel of 91 German MNEs, whose expansion paths we tracked during periods ranging between 5 and 20 years.

We hypothesize that expatriate deployment is a control function predicted by home country culture dimensions with transaction cost and agency repercussions (rather than culture in the aggregate). This departure from the traditional conceptualization and measurement of cultural impact also yields a hypothesized asymmetrical effect, which is tested for a multi-country sample of 236 multinational subsidiaries. Using multiple measures of national culture, hypotheses are supported, with assertiveness and power distance confirmed as prime predictors of expatriate deployment.

This paper examines how social capital and organizational innovativeness influence business performance through their separate, indirect, or interactive effects, and how these effects differ across the institutional contexts of a transition economy and a market economy. In line with institutional theory, our findings show that the effects of social capital are more extensive and probably more malignant in a transition economy than in a market economy. Furthermore, different types of organizational innovativeness, as corporate culture, can be cultivated by different forms of social capital in different institutional contexts. The implications for institutional theory and social capital theory, and the managerial implications, are discussed.