1. What happened at Mercedes-Benz in East London? What is the relationship between changes in the plant, and broader institutional transformation? 

2. What are the limitations of cultural approaches to comparative HRM for understanding what happened at Mercedes-Benz? 

3. Did the fact that the plant was owned by a large multinational have any effect on outcomes? If so, what were these? 

In the case narrative, we note that American MNCs tend to be more ethnocentric than MNCs of other nationalities. If you want to explore this point further, the work of Anthony Ferner and colleagues is illustrative (see Edwards and Ferner, 2000; Ferner et al. 2004). For the most recent research on HRM and IR practice in American MNCs in Ireland see Gunnigle et al. (2005) and Collings et al. (2008).