The Roman Catholic Church is among the oldest and biggest global institutions in the world offering salvation, guidance and hope for almost two millennia. Starting in 500 the Roman Catholic Church came up with the formation of Religious Catholic Orders and their monasteries (Schmidtchen, and Mayer, 1997). The friars of these new institutions could, by their way of life, rapidly gain a reputation. This outstanding success allowed the Religious Catholic Orders with their monasteries to spread in a short period of time throughout the world and to become one of the first multinational enterprises. Catholic Religious Orders and their monasteries offer an excellent example to study one of the critical issues faced by multinational enterprises: the establishment and maintenance of legitimacy in their multiple host environments. We study the survival rates of Multinational Catholic Orders and pure Domestic Catholic Orders and their monasteries depending on their historical conditions of complexity stemming from the environment, the organization itself and the interaction between organizations and the environment. Such propositions have never been empirically tested because longitudinal data on multinational enterprises and their subunits operating in multiple institutional environments are difficult to collect or rarely available. The motivation of the study is to fill this research gap and thus to contribute to a theory of multinational enterprises.
