Business and Management

The 1997 Asian financial crisis principally affected Thailand, Indonesia, Malaysia, and Korea, as well as other East Asian countries heavily dependent on intra-regional trade. Banks and other financial institutions quickly became insolvent, and heavily indebted industrial firms went bankrupt. Many of these firms were affiliated with the business groups of this region, yet most groups did not immediately collapse, indeed they proved remarkably robust, some surviving and even prospering. This book examines these East Asian business groups and their subsequent restructuring following the Asian Crisis. East Asian nations embarked on very different trajectories in response to this common external shock. The Asian Crisis affected the inter-relationships among the socio-cultural environment, the state, and the market of each country quite differently and had distinct effects on the operations of these countries’ business groups. This slow yet divergent pattern of development counters globalization theorists’ arguments about rapid global convergence. Yet East Asian business groups face an uncertain future. The influence of foreign investors has increased substantially since the crisis. Governments supervise banks more closely and have loosened restrictions on mergers and hostile takeovers, further strengthening the discipline of the market. Various entry barriers that had inhibited foreign multinationals from competing in national markets were lifted. Under these new conditions, business groups in East Asia should reconfigure their business structures and adjust their corporate governance systems to regain momentum for further growth. This book concludes that business groups will continue to be important vehicles for the sustained future growth of East Asia.

This book brings together chapters from the leading historians of British business. The contributors were asked to consider the renaissance in the British economy during the closing decades of the 20th century. In doing so they were also asked to reconsider the debates and assertions relating to relative economic decline in Britain since the end of the 19th century. Chapters range across the economy, from banking, retail, high technology and staple industries, transport, to sports and leisure industries. In addition, key themes such as foreign investment, government policy, managerial characteristics, marketing, business, ethics, and so on have their own chapters. What emerges is a picture of complexity and reappraisal bringing into question the accuracy or applicability of much of the writing and axioms surrounding British business in the 20th century. Both the nature of economic recovery, the depth and periodization of relative decline clearly do not stand up to scrutiny. If nothing else the book disposes with the notion that a simple re-injection of market forces ideology in the 1980s changed and modernised the British economy. The book has identified both a need for a broad reappraisal to take into account the complexity underlying ideas of renaissance in the late 20th century, in addition to a need to reject unicausal explanations for the fate and possibilities of the British economy in the 21st century.

In the past decade or so, systems integration has become a key factor in the operations, strategy, and competitive advantage of major corporations in a wide variety of sectors (e.g., computing, automotive, telecommunications, military systems, and aerospace). In the past, systems integration was confined to a technical, operations task. Today, systems integration is a strategic task that pervades business management not only at the technical level, but also at the management and strategic levels. This book shows how and why this new kind of systems integration has evolved into an emerging model of industrial organization whereby firms and groups of firms join together different types of knowledge, skill, and activity as well as hardware, software, and human resources to produce new products. The business of systems integration has fundamental implications for the capabilities of firms. Firms have made a transition from being vertically integrated to being the integrator of somebody else's activities. The book delves deeply into the nature, dimensions, and dynamics of the new systems integration, deploying research and analytical techniques from a wide variety of disciplines including, the theory of the firm, the history of technology, industrial organization, regional studies, strategic management, and innovation studies.

Twenty-first century capitalism has been marked by an increasing international economic independence, and considerable differences between dominant economic systems of coordination and control. In this context, national competition and coordination within industries has increased, but the governance of leading firms and the kinds of competences they develop remains quite diverse. This book suggests how we can understand this combination of diversity and integration by developing the comparative business systems framework in three major ways. First, by identifying the particular circumstances in which distinctive business systems and innovation systems become nationally established and reproduced, as well as how changing endogenous and exogenous pressures have affected the major kinds of business systems that developed in many OECD states during the post-war period. Second, by showing how variations in authority sharing with employees and business partners and in the provision of organizational careers lead institutional regimes to affect the nature of organizational capabilities that dominant firms develop and enable them to deal with different kinds of risks and opportunities in particular technologies and markets. Third, by identifying the circumstances in which multinational firms are likely to develop distinctive transnational organizational capabilities through such authority sharing and careers, and so become different kinds of companies from their more domestically focused competitors. In many if not most cases of cross-national managerial coordination, these conditions rarely exist, and so the extent to which multinational firms do indeed constitute distinct organizational forms and strategic actors is much less than is sometimes claimed.

In many discussions of globalization and growth, attention focuses on Asia, notably China, South Korea, and India. In contrast, this book looks at business developments in another key emerging market region, Latin America. It examines the success and failure of Latin American firms in their own markets and elsewhere in the world, the reasons behind these outcomes, and these firms' future prospects. Contributors to this book draw on concepts from organization theory, industrial organization, economics, marketing, sociology, and political science. The book includes sections on the broad themes of competitiveness in Latin America, micro-level strategies of firms in specific sectors, and the competitiveness of firms in specific countries and competing in emerging markets. The cases examined range in size and sector, and include some of the largest firms in Latin America, such as as Embraer in Brazil, Quiñenco (Luksic) in Chile, Techint in Argentina, Grupo Carso in Mexico, Cisneros in Venezuela, and Grupo Empresarial Antioqueño in Colombia.

This book provides a series of inter-disciplinary perspectives on how capitalism and national capitalisms are changing in the twenty-first century. It aims to bring perspectives on how the international economic order is changing as a result of the rise of emerging economies countries, the increasing influence of regional organizations such as the EU, NAFTA etc. and new forms of private and public international regulation together with analyses of how states are adapting their economic policies and processes and what the consequences of these are for adaptations for different societies. In turn, it links these changes to how firms are developing new strategies for organizing global value chains and applying scientific knowledge to the commercialization of products. The book contextualizes these processes in a world where financial markets have become increasingly uncertain and crisis prone at the same time as demands from different social groups for new forms of corporate governance and corporate social responsibility are emerging. It draws on examples from Europe, North and Latin America as well as Asia in order to illustrate the complex ways in which different forms of national capitalism are adapting and changing their institutions. The book builds on earlier comparative accounts of how institutions, firms, and markets co-devolve to analyze current changes in these relationships and suggest likely developments in them, and in this way move the frontiers of research forward to a global and inter-disciplinary perspective on twenty-first century capitalism and capitalisms.

Over the last decade, the neo-institutionalist literature on comparative capitalism has developed into an influential body of work. This book assesses this literature and proposes a major re-orientation of the field. It critiques many aspects of this work and finds a way of modelling how creative actors trying to achieve change — institutional entrepreneurs — tackle these constraints. Central to the account is the concept of governance, as it is by recombining governance mechanisms that these entrepreneurs must achieve their goals. In seeking how to analyse the spaces in which they operate, the book criticises and deconstructs some dominant approaches in socio-political analysis: to typologies, to elective affinity and complementarity, to path dependence. It develops a theory of governance modes, which includes potentially decomposing them into their core components. Finally, it proposes a reorientation of the neo-institutionalist research programme to take more account of detailed diversity and potentiality for change. The book is primarily theoretical, but it makes liberal use of examples, particularly from studies of local economic development and politics.

This book provides the first in-depth analysis of how four innovative Chinese electronics enterprises — the Stone Group, the Legend Computer Group, the Founder Group, and the China Great Wall Computer Group — transformed the Chinese computer industry over the past decade. It explains how indigenous Chinese business enterprises that developed during the era of economic reform gained the high-technology capabilities and modern marketing know-how to compete domestically and internationally with powerful foreign multinationals. Through case studies based on first-hand access to company records and personnel, this book reveals how, building on technological capabilities accumulated during the central planning era, the institutional transformations of the economic reform era unleashed a unique pattern of organizational learning and innovative enterprise. This book also draws out the implications of the developmental experience of the Chinese computer electronics sector for understanding the institutional and organisational foundations for a successful transition from a centrally planned economy toward a market-oriented one.

This book examines the origins and emergence of technology-based industrial clusters — regional concentrations of related firms and organizations — in order to understand the forces that promoted economic development. Many places attempt to emulate the world's most famous industrial cluster Silicon Valley, with its rich institutional landscape of engaged and leveraged research universities, high-flying local venture capitalists, world class supporting business and legal consultants, and rich collaborative networks. While mature clusters may look similar, what really matters is the process by which clusters come into existence. But there is little understanding of such processes, and little guidance provided on the role of policies in promoting cluster emergence. The book attempts to bridge this gap in the literature by focusing on the early origins of high-technology cluster in Europe, the United States, and China, and the ensuing policy implications. The book is organized around three main themes: Creation Myths Revisited, Considering the Development Cluster Context, and Crafting Cluster and Economic Development Policy. The empirical analyses suggest that clusters that grow rapidly as compared to the less successful ones are distinguished by vigorous entrepreneurial activity and the active building of institutions aided by the forces of agglomeration economies.

Every nation likes to believe myths about itself. Americans' belief in the superiority of their managerial know-how seemed to be among those most solidly based in reality. Yet, the author argues, despite its universal claims, American managerialism has never been more than a cultural peculiarity, one moreover whose claims to superiority had not been proved but assumed, on the premise that the best economy must have the best management. That premise, moreover, has not served American managerialism particularly well, for in the 1970s a gap opened up between the mystique of American management and the reality of a mediocre American managerial performance. The ‘mystique’ collapsed and those looking for best practice began to look elsewhere. The author provides a thorough examination of alternative forms of management that grew up in West Germany and Japan during the past decades. He argues that these alternative management forms have done a better job managing capitalist economies since the 1970s than has American managerialism. In fact, he asserts that American managerialism has become so dysfunctional that it threatens to undermine the prosperity of the American people, and America's role in the future world order. In the final chapter the author suggests ways that American management can follow in order to fulfil its original promise. Looking forward, he urges American management to unlearn much of the received wisdom and learn from the successes of others in order for the nation to enter the 21st century with a management equal to the social and economic challenges.