Journal of Management Policy and Practice Vol. 20(4) 2019 111 American MNEs: In Search of Legitimacy When You’re WEIRD Craig V. VanSandt University of Northern Iowa Matthew C. Mitchell Drake University Mukesh Sud Indian Institute of Management Ahmedabad Presuming that American Multinational Enterprises (AMNEs) prefer to be viewed as legitimate, socially responsible firms in their host countries, we seek to provide answers to the question of how they can best determine ethical standards when faced with multiple, frequently conflicting operating environments? After exploring many of the reasons why identifying and understanding hosts’ moral matrices is extremely confounding, the authors review prior and existing efforts to bridge them and suggest specific steps that AMNEs can employ to better accommodate their ethics to the vastly different cultures in which they operate. Keywords: /egitimacy, 0oral 0atrices, 0ultinationals, WEIRD INTRODUCTION Why do American (specifically US-based) multinational enterprises (AMNEs) 1 regularly have difficulty understanding local cultural and moral standards, thereby offending local sensibilities and damaging their legitimacy to conduct business operations in host countries? We contend that AMNEs face greater difficulties establishing institutional legitimacy than do their counterparts from other nations. For reasons we will explicate in this paper, AMNEs may understand less about the local cultures and ethics of host countries than do other MNEs. Studies of disparate societies show that Western, educated, industrialized, rich, democratic (WEIRD) people are, in many ways, significantly different than the rest of the human species. Domains in which differences manifest range from visual perception to spatial reasoning to self-concepts to, most pertinent to the current research project, moral reasoning. Americans are even more exceptional—in the sense of “different” rather than “better”—when compared to the unusual populations of Westerners. Americans are essentially outliers among outliers (Henrich, Heine, and Norenzayan 2010). As a result of this WEIRDness, AMNEs are more likely to have difficulty establishing corporate legitimacy in culturally distant host cultures and even more likely to have greater complications creating normative legitimacy. 2