 Students, we are discussing about international human resource management. So in that, we are talking about mergers and acquisitions, how companies from different countries, they come together in cross-border alliances, and for that, we would like to see a comparison of the HRM policies or HRM features of different national cultures. So this topic is comparing the HRM practices of different national cultures. The comparison is made between top economies of the world, which is America, Japan, Germany, France, and UK. So in this comparison, it was found that performance-related pay is more popular in the USA. So if you are planning to go for USA, for merging with a firm in USA, then you need to know that performance-related pay, they like to be paid according to performance. Then in USA, recruitment tends to be rather short-term. So it's not a long process, it's not a lengthy process, it's done quickly. Recruitment is a short-term process. Then in Japan, there is more lifetime orientation. It has, with the passage of time and with the change in overall culture of the world, with the rapid changes, with globalization, the lifetime orientation of Japanese culture has reduced, but it is still higher than other countries. So Japanese people, they want to plan, they do things with a lifetime orientation rather than short-term orientation. So they like to do things in a structured way, they like to plan ahead of something, they like to go for contingency planning, and things which are related with long-term planning. So in Japan, you cannot have a short-term plan, you always need to have a long-term plan about your organization. Then another feature, training, which is an important feature of human resource. Training costs are highest in the US. So if you want to train your people, if you want to invest on your people, that is most, that is something which is most expensive in the US than the rest of the world. The study also found out that convergence is taking place across nationalities towards performance-related pay, PRP, training, and team-based product development. So convergence means that people and companies from different countries, they are converging towards this uniform approach. So more and more people from different countries, more and more companies from different countries, they are going for performance-related pay, although it is most significant in the US culture. Then companies, they are going for the feature of training. So all over the world, training is something which is taking place more significantly. And then team-based product development. So product development is not done by individual people. It is something which is taken up as a team initiative. Then another feature of the merger and acquisition related to HR is that acquirers, whatever is their national identity, the acquiring firms, they make adjustments to suit local cultures. They do not impose their culture because the world is going towards a culture of equity. It is going towards a culture of human rights. It is going towards a culture of justice and fairness. And there are international organizations like United Nations and other organizations which are looking after the fact that nobody is imposing anything on the other person. Coercion should not be, oppression should not be, otherwise in history we can see that East India Company was a commercial organization who took over the entire subcontinent by imposing by coercion and oppression. So acquirers, they try to, in the new world, in the new world environment, people who are coming from abroad, from foreign countries, although they are holding big, huge multinationals, they try to adjust to the local culture. Overall, we see that when we look at the culture of these countries, the US HRM reflected a short term individualistic and national business culture. So the human resource policy or the human resource function of US was short term, as we just saw, that recruitment is short term, training cost is very high, pay is performance rated. So short term, it is individualistic. They don't go for teams. They don't share responsibilities in teams. They do things individualistically. And national business culture, US has its own national business culture which deviate. Then in Japan, HRM, although they are adopting the US methods, they have an approach of long term approach, a consensual approach in which they collaborate and discuss with each other and then decide according to consensus, team based and collectivist national philosophies. These are the features of the Japanese human resource culture. In France, the French companies, they are showing more openness but they still have an ethnocentric approach, which means that they try to, they hold their own culture right. They think that their own culture is correct and they show less flexibility and openness towards other cultures. So French are still more ethnocentric. Because on the other hand, they are the most anxious to adopt international practices in their acquisitions. They try to adopt to the other countries' culture and their practices. Even if it conflicts with their national tendencies, as we saw in the merger of Daimler Kressler, that people coming from Germany, they try to adopt the informal culture of the US setup, although Germans, they had a lot more formality in their setup and in their culture. So the Germans, they try to adopt the international culture, they try to adopt the practices of that firm with which they are merging or which they have acquired or they have been acquired by. So they are most flexible and responsive, open towards accepting the culture and practices of other companies. So these are the different features which come up related to the human resource function which is being practiced in various different countries of the world.