The corporate nationality: A question of culture and community?

Many scholars in management and business history are using nationality as a core criterion to classify corporations and to explain their behaviour, values, and strategy. In this perspective, being born in a specific country defined by its frontiers and institutions explicates the values and behaviour of its inhabitants—and companies within this context are described as more ‘German’, ‘Italian’, or ‘French’. However, it does not help to analyse in depth the complex and various differences between what is observable in day-to-day business life and what is in underneath. A better understanding of corporation nationality imposes to use the concept of culture. It implies to underline the fact that ‘nation’ is often delimitated by frontiers and most of the time is the result of political choices. If nationality explains some element of corporate culture, it cannot explain all cultural dimensions. One reason is that culture does not stop at national frontiers. This article has several aims: (1) it discusses the use of nationality as a means to describe and analyse the organizational behaviour of companies and their communities; (2) it interrogates ‘nationality’ as a powerful factor which enables to aggregate different communities within large corporations; and (3) it analyzes how ‘nationality’ is influencing managerial practices. Most of the time, ‘nationality’ is mobilized to describe the global strategy or practices of big corporations. The author argues that nationality is a crucial factor for corporate culture in many ways—not as a ‘given’ fact but as a larger part of the institutional design of a company (and its development).