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This book addresses some of the major contemporary issues in comparative business and employment relations. At its core are the findings of a four-year international exploration of the management of employment relations in American multinational companies in the UK, Germany, Ireland, and Spain. Data from detailed case studies are used to illuminate the tensions between the forces of globalization and the continuing distinctiveness of national business systems. It looks at what is distinctively American about US multinationals, asking how the US business system’s particular features influence their management of human resources across national borders. It shows that the transfer of ‘Americanness’ is not a technical, top-down, managerial process, but a highly political and ‘negotiated’ one in which groups and individuals at different levels within the company try to influence the terms of transfer. The book uses a wealth of empirical material to explore the ways in which US multinationals manage international employment relations in different host countries. Four areas of policy and practice are considered in detail: pay and performance; collective employee representation; the management of workforce ‘diversity’; and managerial careers. It shows how global HR policies are made; how they are diffused internationally; and how they are adopted, adapted, or resisted by overseas subsidiaries. It also explores some of the structures and processes that characterize US multinationals: the changing balance between centralization and subsidiary autonomy; the management of international learning; and the structure and role of the international human resource function.

This book examines the intersections of life and work for expatriates in Kathmandu, Nepal, and the many changes to their experience of overseas labor in the last sixty years. Western elite transnational laborers are the nominal centerpoint of Mediating, yet the text uses this base as opportunity to explore other populations and practices. Bureaucracy and audit practices constrain the work and lives of expatriates, being also their medium of exchange with many local coworkers and friends. Changes in best practices have transformed the ideologies of overseas labor as well as the lives of workers themselves. New racialized and gendered labor, forms of expertise and ideas of security have altered the work of experts and their relationships to Nepalis. This book examines such diverse phenomena as global business, international politics, gendered labor practices and Nepal's own history through the lens of the world of transnational elite labor in Kathmandu.