Inhaltsangabe: Abstract: Despite crises and uncertainty in international
capital markets, foreign direct investment (FDI) by multinational
enterprises (MNE) is booming. The buzzword is globalization. The
business world is expected to be moving closer together through more or
less recent developments in communication technologies and
transportation facilities. The political ideal of democracy along with a
liberalization of national economies seems to have finally gained the
recognition it deserves as the system that in the end allows for the
best utilization of wealth creating endowments. Besides differences in
economic development, cultural differences remain as a single important
means of distinguishing between people from several nations. The
critical issue is that this situation is being recognized and mankind
restrains from emphasizing distinctions, and instead focuses an working
out compatibility between cultures. Culture has been given the attribute
of being responsible for economic performance by several scholars over
the past decade. The original aim has been at explaining the continuous
growth of the economies of Asian NICs which, however, came to an abrupt
and widely unexpected end an 2 July 1997. Still the importance of
culture seems to have been underestimated, otherwise the crisis might
have been foreseeable. If cultural factors are of significant importance
for overall economic performance, i.e. an the macro-economic level, they
must be of at least the same importance for the performance of companies
that work within the particular culture, i.e. an the micro-economic
level. In this case, not only local but international investors in
particular are affected by their respective cultural environment as
two - or even more - different cultures have to be brought to work
together. Obviously, a consensus has to be found between influences from
home and host country culture. This situation often is expected to be a
threat to the economic performance of the
