employee relations at asian subsidiaries in Hungary: Do home or host country factors dominate?

Abstract

Asian foreign direct investment is substantial in Hungary in regional comparison. Multinationals from China, India, Japan, and Korea are important investors in the Hungarian economy. The main aim of this article is to describe how home and host country institutions and business and management culture influence the operation of the companies in question, first of all in the various areas of human resource management. In the analysis, we rely mainly on the Varieties-of-Capitalism approach, given its emphasis on the organizational and related cultural differences that result in different types of capitalisms in the world economy. The article is based on company interviews conducted with the representatives of seven Asian subsidiaries in Hungary (1-10 interviews per company) that are operational in the automotive and/or electronics industry. Our conclusion is that management and labor relations in these companies evolve under the influence and through the interaction of related home and host country business culture, thus they contain elements of both. However, we found the clear dominance of host country impacts, which has become more pronounced over time.