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Program Session #: 471 | Submission: 10813 | Sponsor(s): (IM)
Scheduled: Saturday, Aug 2 2014 5:30PM - 7:30PM at Pennsylvania Convention Center in Room 107 B

The expansion of multi-national organizations across the world leads to an interesting set of issues for managers. Organizations must take into account the institutional and cultural environment of the country in which a subsidiary is based when designing management policy and practice. This means that there is a need for high quality comparative research that can identify the commonalities and differences in practice between countries and their root sources. The question remains as to how we can best produce rigorous and valid comparative management research. This workshop will examine the opportunities and challenges that comparative research presents to international management researchers, and will discuss specifically the use of networks to conduct such research. Using the experience of a network of scholars (Cranet) that have conducted comparative research into HRM over a 21-year period in some 44 countries, this workshop aims to exchange knowledge around comparative management work, identify the difficulties inherent in such research and, based on the accumulated experience of this long-running collaborative network, offer an agenda for future improvements to research design in this area. The workshop will use a combination of short presentations and roundtable discussions to achieve this aim.