International Business

Throughout the evolution of the modern world economy, new models of productive efficiency and business organization have emerged — in Britain in the 19th century, in the US in the early (and perhaps late) 20th century, and in Japan in the 1980s and 1990s. At each point, foreign observers have looked for the secrets of success and best practice, and initiatives have been taken to transmit and diffuse. This book looks in detail at ‘Americanization’ in Europe and Japan in the post-war period. The processes, ideologies, and adaptations in a number of different countries (the UK, France, Italy, Japan, Sweden, Germany) and different sectors (engineering, telecommunications, motor vehicles, steel, and rubber) are explored. This book details theoretical analysis of the complexities of the diffusion of business organization and the powerful influences of Americanization in this century.

This book uses research on Japanese firms in the UK to contribute to broader debate about the role of international firms in reconstructing contemporary work and employment relations. Japanese manufacturing subsidiaries in Britain have often been portrayed as carriers of Japanese best practice models of work organization and employment relations. This research challenges this view on the basis of intensive comparative workplace case studies of several Japanese manufacturing plants in Britain. It develops an analysis of system, society, and dominance effects to identify the competing pressures upon such firms, and argues that factory managers have to negotiate the implications of these cross pressures. Thus, the analysis focuses on the ways in which Japanese and British managers have sought to construct distinctive production and employment regimes in the light of their particular branch plant mandates and competencies, the evolving character of management-worker relations within factories, and the varied product and labour market conditions they face. It also explores the scope and bases of consent and dissent among employees working in these modern workplaces. On this basis, it highlights the constraints as well as the opportunities facing managers of such greenfield workplaces, the uncertainties that arise from intractable features of capitalist employment relations, and the ways in which employment and production regimes are adapted and remade in specific corporate and local contexts. Finally, it assesses the strengths and weaknesses of three competing contemporary images of international subsidiaries, as transplants, as hybrids, and as branch plants.

The innovative strength of the world's two largest economies, the United States and Japan, are based on two different forms of industrial and social organization. For the United States, venture companies play a key role in technical and economic progress, while in Japan they have only a minor role. This book argues that without vibrant new high technology companies, Japanese industry will decline inexorably. At the same time, if the favourable yet delicate environment in America is undermined, America will face collapse of its innovative and economic strength. Japan has done much to improve its environment for high technology ventures. It has some promising new high technology companies and gradually increasing numbers of entrepreneurial scientists and managers. But they continue to swim against the current. One reason is that large, established companies dominate high technology fields and pursue an autarkic innovation strategy-relying on research in-house or in affiliated companies. Another reason is that these same large companies still have preferential access to university discoveries, largely because of government policies. Thus, high technology ventures are deprived of niches in which to grow, skilled personnel, and their natural customer base. In the field of university-industry relations, steps can still be taken to improve the environment for high technology ventures-steps that would also increase the quality of university science. The American–Japanese innovation dichotomy represents a broader dichotomy between so-called liberal and coordinated market economies. The lessons from these two countries' experiences are applicable to many industrialized countries, and to developing countries shaping their innovation systems.

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.

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 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.

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.

This book compares processes of entrepreneurship, specifically of high-tech manufacturing, in the UK and Japan — countries associated with liberal market economies and coordinated market economies respectively. Similarities are found in approaches to opportunity and business creation which are strikingly different from recent policy emphases in the UK and Japan, inspired by Silicon Valley. Differences — in the backgrounds of entrepreneurs, founding teams, attitudes to growth and risk, innovation, competitive advantages, HRM, and collaborations — are summed up by the concepts of ‘project entrepreneurship’ and ‘lifework entrepreneurship.’ This study brings insights from entrepreneurship to comparative institutions and varieties of capitalism, and vice versa, and draws on two surveys and twenty-five case interviews in both the UK and Japan. It concludes with a discussion of dilemmas for entrepreneurship policy in the UK, Japan, and other countries.

Modern constitutions are relatively recent instruments of rule and are closely associated with the formation of national states from the eighteenth century onwards. So what is this term doing in respect to global business practices and corporate affairs? This question is the one the book sets out to explore. The argument is that with the advent of globalization — where corporate organizations and the commercial relations that accompany them are argued to have become increasingly transnational — the locus of powers, authorities, and responsibilities has shifted to the global level. The nation-state arena is losing its capacity to regulate and control commercial processes and practices as a transformational logic kicks-in, associated with new forms of global rule making and governance. And it is this new arena of global rule making can be considered as a surrogate form of global constitutionalization, or ‘quasi-constitutionalization’. But as might be expected, this surrogate process of constitutionalization is not a coherent program or a set of rounded outcomes but is full of contradictory half-finished currents and projects: an ‘assemblage’ of many disparate advances and often directionless moves — almost an accidental coming together of elements. Thus, the book is about governance, law, and constitutional matters. these are discussed in the context of international corporate constitutional governance. So, the emphasis is upon how and why the business world, commercial relations, and particularly company activities have increasingly become subject to legal and constitutional forms of regulation and governance at the international level. The questions asked is how to characterize the process that has seen the international corporate sphere increasingly subject to juridical and constitutional-like regulatory initiatives and interventions. Does this amount to a new attempt to subject international commercial relations to the ‘rule by law’ and, indeed, to rule the world through these very means?

The corporate governance systems of continental Europe have traditionally been quite different to those of the liberal market economies (e.g., the United States and the United Kingdom). Company ownership has been dominated by incumbent blockholders, with a relatively minor role for minority shareholders and institutional investors. However, since the mid‐1990s, European corporations have adopted many of the characteristics of the Anglo‐American shareholder model. Furthermore, such an increased shareholder orientation has coincided with a significant role for the Left in European government. This presents a puzzle, as conventional wisdom does not conceive of the European Left as the natural ally of pro‐shareholder capitalism. This book provides an analysis of this paradox by arguing that the postwar support of the European Left for the prevailing blockholder‐dominated corporate system depended on the willingness of blockholders to share economic rents with employees, both through higher wages and greater employment stability. However, during the 1990s, product markets became more competitive in many European countries. The sharing of rents between social actors became increasingly difficult to sustain. In such an environment, the Left chose to relinquish its traditional social partnership with blockholders and embraced many aspects of the shareholder model. The hypothesis is initially explored through a panel data econometric analysis of fifteen non‐liberal market economies. Subsequent case study chapters examine the political economy of recent corporate governance change in Germany and Italy.