Paul M. Lane zyxwvu Department of Marketing, Haworth College of Business, Western Michigan University, Kalamazoo, Michigan 49008, USA Carol Felker Kaufman School of Business, Rutgers University, Camden, New Jersey 081 02, USA The perception and use of time is extremely complex and frequently necessitates changes and adjustments when doing business in cross- cultural contexts, such as joint ventures that range from contract manufacturing, manage- ment contracting, shared ownership, franch- ising and licensing to alliances. Time is one of the major resources available to corpora- tions. Furthermore, time permeates culture. The cultures of organizational units are nested within organizational cultures, which are nested within national cultures. Joint ventures must bridge these nested cultures. A common perception of time is essential for smoothly running joint ventures or alliances. The traditional definition of joint venture is that of two corporations together forming a third unit. Thus, a firm from North America and one from Europe might form a third firm in Hungary, or Czechoslovakia. In Eastern Europe, a new definition of joint ventures is evolving. It has been observed that many Eastern Europeans use the term joint venture to mean an investment by a foreign firm in a company or an individual. This might include an outside company making a direct investment in an existing Hungarian com- pany, in a company that is being privatized or in setting up an operation based on working with an individual in Hungary. zyxwv Time in joint ventures his is an expanded version zy of a T paper delivered at Budapest, Hungary, in November 1990. This paper presents a review of four areas of time study, which could be very sig- nificant to those involved in human resource management across corporate cultures. The four areas for which there are currently taxonomies are: time approaches, time pro- cessing, activity levels, and time use and commitment. In addition, the concepts of time and time discrepancies will be discussed. The examination of these taxonomies can help to pinpoint differences for corporate management when time concepts differ, whether across corporate boundaries, hierarchical levels within the same corporation, or, most importantly, when crossing cultural boundaries. The topic of time in joint ventures is particularly relevant to the changing situation in Eastern Europe. Joint ventures will be confounded not only by corporate culture problems, but also by the fact that they will be operating in a turbulent and unpredictable environment. It Joint ventures will be operating in a turbulent and unpredictable environment