International Business

Multinational companies need to manage their relationships with multinational customers with a globally integrated approach. This book provides a systematic framework for developing and implementing such global customer management programmes. It draws on in-depth research at over twenty major US and European multinational companies, such as ABB, Bechtel, BP, Bosch, British Airways, Carrefour, Daimler–Chrysler, Hewlett–Packard, HSBC, IBM, Schlumberger, Shell, Siemens, Tesco, Unilever, Vodafone, Wal–Mart, and Xerox. The book teachers how to think about managing global customers in the context of their overall global strategy, develop effective global customer management programmes, overcome barriers to implementation and success, build better relationships with important customers, and get the entire company to engage with managing global customers. This book takes a strategic, total business, and not just sales, approach to managing global customers. It also takes a customer as well as a supplier perspective. The book provides guidance on both strategy and implementation. It takes a systematic and logic driven approach, yet provides many creative insights and practical advice. The book highlights the rewards of taking a step beyond global account management to create a Global Customer Management approach, integrating globally all aspects of the relationship between supplier and customer. The book gives a framework that guides international companies in using their relationships with global customers to their full potential.

This book describes and analyzes the transformation that occurred in retailing in the last half of the twentieth century and demonstrates that this transformation has substantially changed the global economy. This transformation is both obvious and largely unrecognized. It is obvious, because the transformation is a part of our everyday lives. In the United States, in 1954, there were only 500 shopping centers across the country, most of which were by today’s standard very small. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, the shopping centers in the USA alone number over 50,000, many of which are gargantuan. This same expansion is happening throughout the world. In fact, the largest shopping centers are no longer in the USA, but are scattered around the globe. Many of the newest and largest of them are now in Asia. As pervasive and obvious as these changes are, there has been surprisingly little research on the global effects of retailing. This book is among the first books to address this important topic in a systematic and highly readable manner. The authors demonstrate that retailers and merchandisers increasingly organize the global economy by developing two types of markets, consumer markets and supplier markets. Using point-of-sales information, retailers anticipate and try to create consumer markets for the goods they sell. Based on this information, retailers also create and maintain supplier markets for the goods that they buy from manufacturers and that they in turn sell to consumers. Retailers attempt to “make” both types of markets, by setting prices and the terms and conditions of exchange. The extraordinary success that retailers and merchandisers have enjoyed in making both types of markets has had far-reaching consequences on how all national economies perform in an age of global retailing.

The crisis in Asia has caused economic hardship and brought an end to the ‘economic miracle’ of fast economic growth in the region. This book asks whether the 1997/8 crisis marks a break with the past and signals an end to ‘Asian’ ways of running economies. During the period of rapid growth there were strong connections between governments and business in the region. ‘Cronyism’, or close connections between family, business, and government, was exposed when the stock markets and currencies dived. Pressure from overseas investors and international organisations has produced reforms in the region. The book examines the social, economic, and political modes of governance in the region. It finds that there is a shifting balance between rule by the market, rule by connections, and rule by force. In the sphere of economic management, it shows that the period of the ‘developmental state’ in Japan and Korea has come to an end, but that it has not yet been replaced by a liberal market. Elsewhere the close connections between governments and business have been weakened but not yet broken. There are still special ‘Asian’ characteristics in economic management and in politics. The forces of ‘globalisation’ are strong, but they are confronted with political and economic cultures that are not rooted in liberal market ethics.

The international dimension of business networks has remained relatively unexplored, mainly because international business writers focus upon multinational enterprises and network writers ignore international issues. This book bridges the literature on networks and multinationals by introducing the new concept of the flagship firm. In each business network strategic leadership is provided by the flagship firm, which is defined as a multinational enterprise. It has other partners: key suppliers; key customers; key competitors; and key partners in the non-business infrastructure. These business networks are usually located in the ‘triad’ regions of the European Union, North America, and Japan. There are strong cross-border network linkages within these regions, but less globalisation than regional economic integration. The theory of the flagship firm/five-partners model is applied to the telecommunications, chemicals, automotive, and electronics sectors, amongst others, and the book reports on both empirical studies and field research of the international competitiveness of these sectors.

This book studies the way that British, American, and German firms in the clothing industry (manufacturing and retail) co-ordinate and govern their global production networks/value chains. It offers a multi-level analysis, concerned with processes of economic interaction between international, regional, and national economic institutions and actors. This combines an analysis of international/regional regulatory systems, global markets, and conditions in the developing countries where suppliers are found with a focus on the recent development of the clothing industry in three western countries. The book's study of firms' global networks focuses on the power relationships between western producers and retailers on the one hand and between buyer firms in developed and supplier firms in developing countries on the other. The book additionally investigates their impact on labour. Utilizing over a hundred interviews in six countries on three continents, it follows the value chain from developed to developing countries and studies the many issues which confront students of globalization at the current time. The book combines theoretical perspectives from economic sociology, political economy, and management and seeks to utilise the complementary strengths of the Varieties of Capitalism (VoC) approach and that of Global Production Networks/Value Chains.

This book addresses some of the key issues in the field of comparative political economy and institutional theory: the role of history in institutional analysis, the dynamics of slow institutional change, the limitations of rational design and economic-functionalist explanations of institutional stability, and the recurrent difficulties of restraining the effects of capitalism on social order. In the classification of the ‘Varieties of Capitalism’ school, Germany has always been taken as the chief exemplar of a ‘European’, coordinated market economy. The book explores to what extent Germany actually conforms to this description. Its argument is supported by original empirical research on wage-setting and wage structure, the organization of business and labor in business associations and trade unions, social policy, public finance, and corporate governance. From this evidence, this book traces the current liberalization of the post-war economy of democratic capitalism by means of a historical approach to institutional change.

As we enter the twenty-first century, one of the dramatic shifts in the world system is the increasing openness and interpenetration of national economies and sovereign states. This shift is associated on the one hand with the beginnings of a progressive transfer of certain economic and political functions upward to the pluri-national and global levels; and on the other hand with a countervailing trend to the reinforcement of economic and political life at the sub national, regional level. This book is a wide-ranging exploration of the economic logic and political meaning of these developments, with special reference to a reconceptualisation of the economic geography of the modern world as an emerging global mosaic of regional systems of production and exchange. The steady globalisation of economic activity over the last few decades has intensified the re-assertion of the region as a critical locus of economic order and as a potent foundation of competitive advantage. As a corollary, many regions in the modern world are also beginning to acquire an intense self-consciousness of themselves as socio-political and economic entities, and all the more so as they increasingly find themselves bound together in both competitive and collaborative relationships across national borders. The significance of these tendencies for new kinds of political mobilisation is explored, and their potential impacts of substantive forms of democracy and citizenship in the new world order are assessed.

All firms wrestle with restructuring that involves consolidation through mergers and acquisitions on the one hand, and fragmentation through outsourcing and spin-offs on the other. Corporate restructuring is a major driver in transforming labour markets, engendering concerns about employment security. The framework introduced in this book analyses shifting organizational boundaries, i.e., structural changes within corporations resulting from a series of strategic interplays between management and labour unions. This framework is used to investigate the symbiotic adjustments in firm and union boundaries in the automobile and electronics industries in Japan. The book draws upon interview and survey evidence to show how the strategic interplay between labour and management led to incremental changes in Japan's national institutions, including lifetime employment, coordinated wage bargaining, and enterprise union networks. The gradual introduction of diversity and flexibility in markets is thus linked directly to the role management and labour played in bringing about institutional change. The book also demonstrates that adding labour to the Chandlerian analysis of corporate strategy and structure leads us to a view that boundary decisions are often contested.