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Suggests that youth unemployment is seen in East Germany as a critical life event because not only may it “scar” individuals’ careers but there is the fear that it may be a cause of other social problems such as criminal and racist behaviour. Bases the study on event‐history and optimal‐matching analysis. Considers seven hypotheses about the impact of unemployment on social mobility career transitions. Findings suggest that unemployment can raise those chances of upward, downward and lateral mobility.

Outlines the experiences of East Germany as unification takes place. Presents the findings of a study analysing three groups of East Germans in their transitions from education to employment and subsequent careers from 1985 onwards. Suggests that the findings indicate that changes in macro structure and life courses are closely interrelated. Covers mobility, unemployment, retraining, competition, fertility rates and coping strategies.

Explains that the following articles provide the opportunity to look at how the concept of social exclusion develops when it is approached sociologically. Outlines the content and briefly comments on each of their themes.

The purpose of this paper is to conduct a study on the articles published in the four top international business (IB) journals to examine how four cultural models and concepts – Hofstede’s (1980), Hall’s (1976), Trompenaars’s (1993) and Project GLOBE’s (House et al., 2004) – have been used in the extant published IB research. National cultures and cultural differences provide a crucial component of the context of IB research.

This is a bibliometric study on the articles published in four IB journals over the period from 1976 to 2010, examining a sample of 517 articles using citations and co-citation matrices.

Examining this sample revealed interesting patterns of the connections across the studies. Hofstede’s (1980) and House et al.’s (2004) research on the cultural dimensions are the most cited and hold ties to a large variety of IB research. These findings point to a number of research avenues to deepen the understanding on how firms may handle different national cultures in the geographies they operate.

Two main limitations are faced, one associated to the bibliometric method, citations and co-citations analyses and other to the delimitation of our sample to only four IB journals, albeit top-ranked.

The paper focuses on the main cultural models used in IB research permitting to better understand how culture has been used in IB research, over an extended period.