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Emerging economies are characterized by weak institutions but also a very dynamic competitive landscape. This chapter proposes that MNE subsidiaries may have to adjust their geographic market strategies as a response to the rise of local competitors. Information on 25,161 manufacturing subsidiaries exporting from China during 2005–2007 was analyzed to show that the export intensity of an MNE subsidiary first increases and then decreases with the export volume of the subsidiary’s local Chinese competitors in the same industry and with the same destination country. Subsidiaries that are older or more tightly controlled by their MNE parents are less likely to respond to the exporting of their Chinese competitors by changing their exporting intensities. Better developed market-supporting institutions make MNE subsidiaries more sensitive to the impact of Chinese local exporters.

Co-operatives have played a significant role in the agricultural sector in China, particularly since the promulgation of a first national co-operative law in 2007. This chapter offers an analysis of the evolution, diversity, and dynamics of agricultural co-operatives in contemporary China and the institutional environments in which the development of these organizations took place. A multi-dimensional typology of co-operatives is proposed in order to provide a framework of analysis. This analysis enables one to understand the diversified driving forces, the operational patterns, and the organizational missions of agricultural co-operatives in China. The significant contributions provided by each type of co-operative to poverty reduction, work integration, and local community development is emphasized. The chapter concludes with a discussion on the challenges and opportunities for Chinese co-operatives’ future development.

The developmental state model was proposed in the early 1990s as a better means of understanding the mechanisms underlying the rapid growth of the Asian Tiger economies, when compared to classic economic models. The national skills systems of South Korea and Singapore are examined in order to consider how the Asian developmental state approach has worked in practice. It is shown that, whilst the state identifies and firmly guides the direction of economic development, the market plays a fundamental role in the concrete delivery of long-term economic objectives. Within this approach, education and training act as a vehicle to achieve broader economic and social development goals. Examples are used to consider how these systems changed throughout the industrialisation process. We reflect on some of the challenges faced over time, which have put the long-term viability of the developmental state approach in question. Most notable is the gradual erosion of the state’s ability to lead capital and labour in order to achieve long- rather than short-term goals, particularly in the face of globalisation.

There is a widespread belief that co-operatives are small-sized enterprises. However, some reports highlight that co-operatives have larger dimensions in certain areas than other types of companies. Starting from this premise, this paper contributes to the existing literature by providing empirical evidence on the size of co-operatives in different areas of the world, and by analysing data from approximately 2,000 co-operatives and mutual organizations from fifty-six different countries. These data are taken from the World Co-operative Monitor, a project promoted by the International Co-operative Alliance (ICA) in collaboration with the European Research Institute on Co-operative and Social Enterprises (Euricse). The purpose of the project is to take a step forward in measuring the dimensions of co-operatives and to make an initial attempt at quantifying the economic and social impact of the largest co-operatives worldwide.

This chapter of the Oxford Handbook of Asian Business Systems presents a synthesis and summary of the preceding chapters. It undertakes an institutional comparison of thirteen major Asian business systems—China, Hong Kong, India, Indonesia, Japan, Laos, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, Korea, Taiwan, Thailand, and Vietnam—with one another and five major Western economies—France, Germany, Sweden, UK, and the USA. We find five major types of Asian business systems: (post-)socialist, advanced city, emerging South-East Asian, advanced North-East Asian, and Japanese. Except Japan, all Asian forms of capitalism are distinct from Western types. We conclude that the Varieties of Capitalism dichotomy is not applicable to Asia; the existing major frameworks do not capture all Asian types of capitalism; and Asian business systems (except Japan) cannot be understood through categories identified in the West. Our analysis further suggests a need to invest in research on social capital, culture, informality, and multiplexity.

This concluding chapter of the Oxford Handbook of Asian Business Systems presents implications growing out of the handbook, for managers working across the business systems of Asia. It focuses on eight areas: understanding the business context; regional organization; the problem of ‘same bed, different dreams’; trust, mistrust, and corruption; employment relations; finance; government involvement; and the contrast between modern and traditional societies. For each of these areas, the chapter summarizes the key insights relevant to managerial practice and links them to common issues in Asian varieties of capitalism.

This chapter outlines the creation and development of the Australian Future Fund (FF), showing how and why policy makers adopted this option to manage the challenges presented by the “good economic fortune” that occurred in Australia from the mid-1990s to 2010. It discusses the politics behind the governing structure of the FF, which is copied from its neighbor, New Zealand. Despite its initial emphasis on independence, political influence was inevitable when selecting and appointing the chairman of the Board of Guardians. The chapter examines the two key issues of “ethical investment” and “ethical operation” and shows the difficult balance of demands between diverse constituents; it identifies the space created by the expectation that the FF will behave in a similar fashion of all profit-maximization investors.

This article examines the changes that have occurred in the domestic economies of Japan, Taiwan, and Korea in the past two decades. It examines, first, the process through which these three economies have changed from relatively insulated manufacturing economies to multi-sector economies whose capacities are closely tied to regional and global economic currents. It then examines how these economies have gone through major economic events—recessions, depressions, and global economic crises—and how these changes have led business groups to refocus on domestic markets. It particularly focuses on the development of the retail sector of these economies, on the adoption of lean retailing techniques, and on the variation in business strategies across the three markets. This examination shows how firms and business groups structure the economies of which they are part. The article contributes to the literature on business systems and varieties of capitalism.

Brokerage roles in creative industries have been widely recognized but rarely studied systematically. In the research that has been done, the term gatekeeper has been used to define actors at many different positions in the networks that connect creative producers with audiences for their products. Using the concept of brokerage from social network theory, we clarify existing research on gatekeepers and cultural intermediaries by distinguishing among different structural positions, functions and motivations of brokers in creative industries. In addition to the familiar tertius gaudens and tertius iungens orientations identified by Burt (1992) and Obstfeld (2005), we add a third tertius transferens (‘the third who translates’) brokerage motivation which captures the translation and symbolic work of intermediaries in creative industries. We offer several empirical examples from the music industry and new service professions that highlight unanswered questions about the operation of modern cultural brokers.

This article presents the origins and recent evolution of Argentine business groups. It provides a brief basic profile of these business groups in terms of size, ownership, governance, and structure. For that, this article reviews the origins and evolution of business groups, addressing in particular the way they have responded to recent transformations in the business environment. In short, this article is intended to offer research on an exploratory basis on the experience of business groups in emerging countries, in an attempt to enrich the understanding of their strategic decisions and behaviors. One interesting feature of this study is that it combines qualitative and quantitative data, collected both through in-depth interviews and from public information sources on Argentine business groups.

This article provides an overview of business groups in Asia. It reviews leading economic, sociological, and political-economy theories of business groups and describes the projection each theory makes about the interaction between business group functioning and institutional change. The article also presents meta-analytical data on how business group profitability and prevalence in national economies vary over time. The article concludes with a framework of competing propositions about the effect of institutional change on business group profitability and prevalence. This article contributes to the business systems and varieties of capitalism literatures as well as to the literature on the institution-based view of the firm.

As in many other countries, business groups in Brazil are typically owned by families and owe much of their evolution and weight in the national economy to government policies. Nonetheless, their structures and strategies seem to present some idiosyncrasies. Focusing on the context wherein business groups in Brazil emerged and have evolved, this article endeavors to shed some light on why their structures and strategies exhibit some peculiarities. As a rule, the current main Brazilian business groups typically originated before 1960; were either founded or strongly supported, through various types of subsidies, by the state; have one ultimate controlling shareholder owning a great number of firms through pyramidal schemes; started to target more systematically export markets only in the 1970s and 1980s; and only after 1990 have pursued a strategy of direct investment abroad.

Chilean business groups tend to be structured as a collection of listed and non-listed companies presenting highly concentrated ownership and hanging under a listed holding company. These characteristic pyramidal structures are used to obtain funding from minority shareholders without losing control. Many of the large companies affiliated to Chilean business groups have traded in a relatively developed capital market with a considerable participation of institutional investors since 1986. Most Chilean business groups are relatively young and are successfully run by the second or third generation of the founding families. However, in some cases, control has passed to teams of executives and to foreign companies. This article looks at the main features of Chilean business groups and tries to find some stylized factors that help in an understanding of their dynamic evolution.

Apart from some incidence in the early twentieth century, modern-style business groups emerged in China in the mid-1980s as a consequence of the reform and restructuring of state-owned enterprises, which aimed at increasing economies of scale and specialization. Since their early emergence, a substantial number of Chinese business groups have succeeded in becoming major players in the world economy, and the Chinese government has played an important role in the formation and development of these business groups. This article provides a descriptive analysis of the business groups in China, extending and updating the recent literature. It discusses a basic profile and history of these business groups. It also focuses on the role of the state in the emergence of these groups. Finally, it discusses the problems of ownership structure and agency costs in these business groups, and deals with their business structure and diversification.

The ubiquity and diversity of business groups make the study of this institution fascinating. Conceptually, this hybrid organizational form between firm and market can shed new light on the theory of the firm and its boundaries. This article attempts to make three contributions to the literature on business groups. The first is motivated by the view that the diversity of business groups around the world is due to the diversity of the underlying conditions leading to their formation. The second contribution of the study is the presentation of new stylized data and evidence on several facets of business groups that go beyond the existing literature. The third contribution of this study is to question some of the conventional wisdom in the literature. The rest of this article is organized around the taxonomy of business groups around the world.

The objective of this article is to examine the evolution of family business groups in India, one of the fastest-growing emerging economies in recent times and a country where business groups have been an integral part of the economy ever since formal industrial activity took its roots in the country around the latter half of the nineteenth century. This article seeks to provide a historical overview of the process of evolution of Indian business groups in economic activity, focusing specifically on the dynamics underlying its persistence and resilience as a dominant organizational form despite significant changes in the institutional environment from time to time. In doing so, this article seeks to highlight, in light of the existing theoretical and empirical literature on business groups, important elements of their organizational structure, diversification strategies, their governance and performance, and finally on changes in their competitive capabilities, if any, over time.

Business groups of various forms and types have existed in Israel almost constantly since its independence. This article begins with a brief summary of the relevant institutional and economic characteristics of Israel, and proceeds to provide a broad historical overview of Israel's business groups, focusing primarily on forces that facilitated their growth, and on the evolution of privately owned business groups in parallel to the demise of government-controlled ones. It also discusses the privatization and ownership changes since 1990 and the evolution of Israel's business elite. Furthermore, it presents a detailed picture of the major business groups in Israel, their economic activity, ownership and control structure, and performance using panel data on 650 public companies from 1995 to 2005. It defines a business group as a group where at least three public companies are controlled by the same (ultimate) shareholder.

The purpose of this article is to reveal the reasons behind the growth of large Mexican business groups and the changes in their characteristics under the neo-liberal economic reforms and intensified competition that have occurred since the second half of the 1980s. Mexico experienced the emergence and growth of business groups during the process of import substitution industrialization (ISI). They are generally called grupos económicos, or economic groups, and have played important roles as actors of economic development. In the literature on Mexican business groups that focused on their growth in the period of ISI, as in the standard arguments for the emergence of business groups, their emergence was explained as a response by Mexican capitalists to conditions imposed by economic underdevelopment. Business groups also benefited from protection from international competition because of the government policies on trade and foreign direct investment.

The objective of this article is to examine the evolution and economic function of business groups, often referred to as zaibatsu, in prewar Japan. It should be noted, however, that, in spite of the prominence of the zaibatsu as economic actors, the share of business groups in the prewar economy was not as high as is often assumed. While the share of business groups in an economy varies depending on definitions of business groups and dates of estimation, their prewar share was also modest when compared to the shares of their counterparts in developing economies. In prewar Japan, most large firms operated as stand-alone entities, and most of them were listed on the stock exchange. Focusing on the three established zaibatsu and Nissan, this article examines how business groups evolved in prewar Japan, and what functions they served.

This article tracks the evolution of Russian business groups since their emergence during privatization in the 1990s and the restructuring and consolidation that followed. As in other economies, the growth of business groups in Russia has been a natural response to multiple market and government failures that gave rise to “institutional economies of scale.” This article argues that some of the business groups will grow into major multinational companies while others will be acquired by foreign multinationals (either unit by unit or wholesale). Few are likely to remain diversified conglomerates. Furthermore, this article also discusses the phenomenon of government-owned business groups and so-called state corporations. While the focus of this article is on private business groups, understanding their evolution is virtually impossible without reference to state-owned groups, or the large state-owned firms (which may be bigger than many business groups but essentially have one business unit).