WHAT DIFFERENCES IN THE CULTURAL BACKGROUNDS OF PARTNERS ARE DETRIMENTAL FOR INTERNATIONAL JOINT VENTURES

An international joint venture implies that a firm has to cooperate wi th a partner with a different cultural background. In this study, hypo theses about which differences in national culture are most disruptive for international joint ventures were developed and tested using Hofs tede's five dimensions. The study focused on how these dimensions affe ct the survival of international joint ventures, as well as their inci dence relative to wholly owned subsidiaries. The hypotheses were teste d on longitudinal data about 828 foreign entries of twenty-five Dutch multinationals in seventy-two countries between 1966 and 1994. The dat abase, which spans almost three decades, was also used to provide new evidence on a key assumption of Hofstede's work: that cultural values are stable over time.