This volume looks at how multinational companies manage their workforces across borders. Its focus is on the shaping of multinationals' employment practices through the interplay of structural forces: divergent national business systems, evolving supranational institutions, and the dynamics of global competition. But it also scrutinises the multinational as an arena in which contending actors pursue their own active interests and strategies within the constraints of these broader forces. Its combination of innovative empirical and theoretical material will appeal to postgraduate students and researchers in the fields of international business and comparative employment relations.

Nicholas Anderton is a highly respected neurosurgeon at the top of his field. But behind the successful facade all is not well. Tormented by a toxic marriage and haunted by past mistakes, Anderton has been eating to forget. His wife, meanwhile, has turned to drink. There are sniggers behind closed doors - how can a surgeon be fat? When mistakes are made and his old adversary steps in to take advantage, Anderton knows things are coming to a head...

This text considers how multinationals transfer structures, policies and practices across national borders. It is contributed to by experts in the field of employment relations, and combines empirical material with a theoretical approach. The essays advance comparative institutionalist theory at both the macro-level and the micro-level.

Some of the key questions in employment relations, comparative business, and globalization revolve around the extent to which businesses embody a national business system, and what happens when these employment models are exported to other national settings. By exploring the variety of ways in which US multinationals deal with these issues, and their reception, when operating in Europe, Phil Almond, Anthony Ferner, and their contributors examine the interaction between globalization and national 'Varieties of Capitalism'. Using the findings of a four-year international exploration of the management of employment relations in US multinationals in the UK, Germany, Ireland, and Spain, this book examines what is distinctively 'American' about these companies, and how this notion is exported. The process is shown to be one that is not a technical managerial one, but one that is highly political, and 'negotiated', in which groups and individuals at different levels within the company try to influence the terms of transfer. These questions are not only of theoretical importance, but also of practical significance in terms of the transfer of management knowledge and 'best practice'. The book will be of interest to academics, researchers, and advanced students of HRM, International Business, and Organization Studies, as well as HR practitioners concerned with US multinationals operating in Europe.

Winegarden recounts episodes in the life of Jacob Winegarden, an agnostic Jewish professor of theoretical physics whose speciality is 'thought experimentation'. A burly, vague, distracted man, a fan of popular films such as Toy Story and Fantastic Voyage, Jacob is still forlornly infatuated with his enigmatic wife, Miriam. She brings him back to reality: he is in a world of his own, she says, but there are things that need doing in this one.Winegarden operates at the elusive boundary between physics and metaphysics, trying to understand what the world of quantum mechanics can tell us about the soul, the existence of God, the meaning of love and memory; about how those who are absent can also be present. He uses pencil and paper, and classic aids to thought such as cats, zombies or occasionally Golems, because these creatures occupy ambiguous spaces between states of being and not-being and can thus illuminate the nature of the universe. His apparently whimsical thought experiments are revealed to have a deadly serious purpose. Making connections between his life and his work is his way of coping with the uncertainties of love, the trailing tendrils of his Jewish heritage, and the trauma of a devastating loss. Winegarden fears certainty: if the truth is bleak, it may be better not to know, to be uncertain. And if it has to be known, then there will be thought experiments that can imagine other universes where things might be different.Moving backwards and forwards in time and touching on different parts of Winegarden's life and thoughts, the stories are designed to fit together as a novella. Together they tell a larger personal story of grief and survival, the ambivalence and persistence of love, and the meaning of being Jewish.

The narrator looks back on the muddle of his life as a literary translator. He dreams of finding literary fame while toiling away at his translation of an important but dauntingly bleak Peruvian novel. At one point he earns a living by working for a large multinational company whose hidebound hierarchy infuriates him. With his professional ambitions frustrated, his dead-end jobs take him London and Lima, Paris and Madrid, Leiden and back to London. His edgy relationships with friends, family, colleagues and lovers seem to go nowhere. The story is told through a mosaic of interlinked episodes that together create a picture of the narrator's bumpy road to maturity. Finally, he realises, painfully, that he, a translator, is prone to `misreadings': of his own strengths and weaknesses, of the women in his life, of the viability of his translation career, of the options open to him. Can a chance meeting in a Dutch town with a key figure from his past bring some much-desired clarity?