International Business

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.

This book is about the renaissance of cities in the 21st century and their increasing role as centers of creative economic activity. It attempts to put some conceptual and descriptive order around issues of urbanization in the contemporary world, emphasizing the idea of the social economy of the metropolis, which is to say, a view of the urban organism as an intertwined system of social and economic life played out through the arena of urban space. The book opens with a review of some essentials of urban theory. It aims to re-articulate the urban question in a way that is relevant to city life and politics in the present era. It then analyses the functional characteristics of the urban economy, with special reference to the rise of a group of core sectors such as media, fashion, music, etc. focused on cognitive and cultural forms of work. These sectors are growing with great rapidity in the world’s largest cities at the present time, and they play a major role in the urban resurgence that has been occurring of late. The discussion then explores the spatial ramifications of this new economy in cities and the ways in which it appears to be ushering in major shifts in divisions of labor and urban social stratification, as marked by a growing divide between a stratum of elite workers on the one side and a low-wage proletariat on the other.

The term ‘glocalization’ has been coined to indicate that globalization consists of two connected but opposite processes: it homogenizes ideas and practices, but also induces local adaptation and multiplication of differences. City management, with its complexities and international context, offers a paradigmatic example of glocalization. This book is based on fieldwork conducted in three European capitals: Warsaw, Stockholm, and Rome. City management has been conceptualized here as an action net which includes various organizations — municipal, state, private, and voluntary — as well as citizens who organize themselves ad hoc. At the outset of each study, leading politicians and other key figures in each city were asked to list their city's major problems and projects. Comparable projects were then selected for a detailed study in the field. The results revealed a fascinating combination of global influences and local adaptations.

This book analyses changes in enterprises in seven European countries since 1989 — Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Romania, Russia, and Slovakia. Economic trends have differed vastly between these countries, but nevertheless, there are common objectives, common problems, and significant similarities in developments. This book shows the continuities, as well as the discontinuities, between the Socialist and post-Socialist periods. It argues that Central and Eastern European countries are developing a distinctive, hybrid form of post-Socialist economic system, largely dominated by enterprise managers in alliance with state administration DS politicized managerial capitalism. Privatization has not transformed management practices, but competition has.

Since the end of the eighteenth century, the insurance industry has cast a safety net around the world, first in the British Isles and then further afield, irrespective of cultural, political, and ideological divides. This book focuses on the creation of networks across borders from the end of the eighteenth century to the present day. The chapters draw upon examples from twenty countries across the continents to demonstrate how what was called the ‘British system’ of risk management spread out in waves, and describes the forces that made this possible — first among them migration from Europe and international trade. The book explores the economic, political, religious, and cultural obstacles that blocked the path of this European invention — not only religious law and traditional practices, but above all protectionism, inflation, and political ideologies. It examines the process of transformation through which modern insurance supplanted traditional forms of protection against perils and risks and was able to keep on offering new ways of dealing with the risks of modern life. As well as discussing primary insurance, it also considers the role played by reinsurance, without which the losses arising out of today's natural and man-made disasters would be immeasurably greater. Finally, taking modern-day disaster scenarios as examples, the book shows just what the limits of insurability are and what risks worldwide networks entail.