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date: 04 August 2020

Abstract and Keywords

Business groups have incurred both frustrating confusion as well as heated discussion regarding their organizational nature and economic contributions. In addition to the conceptual discrepancies regarding business groups that different academic disciplines target and examine, even the definition of business groups that is customarily employed varies across nations and regions. The overall negative undertone that is attached to business groups, however, need not hinder the systematic examination of this business organization. Nor do the variations in national conventions as well as in academic disciplinary orientations regarding the definition of business groups mean that business groups cannot be examined coherently in different nations across time periods. Rather, these suggest a need to classify the primary “business group” forms and to clarify the critical issues pertaining to that organization model before research advances any further. This task is what this article aims to accomplish.

Keywords: business groups, business organization, national conventions, disciplinary orientations, organization model

Asli M. Colpan

Asli M. Colpan is Associate Professor and Mizuho Securities Chair in Strategy and International Business at the Graduate School of Management, Kyoto University. She is also Adjunct Associate Professor of the Kyoto Consortium for Japanese Studies at Colombia University. Her research interests include corporate strategy, corporate governance, and especially the evolution of large enterprises in industrial and emerging economies. Her work has been published in Industrial and Corporate Change, Asia Pacific Journal of Management, and Asian Business and Management.

Takashi Hikino

Takashi Hikino is Associate Professor of Business and Industrial Organization at the Graduate School of Economics and the Graduate School of Management at Kyoto University. His recent publications include Big Business and Wealth of Nations, Cambridge University Press, 1997 (co-edited with Alfred D. Chandler and Franco Amatori), Competing Policies for Competitiveness: Microeconomic Policies During the Golden Age of Capitalism, Oxford University Press, 1998 (co-edited with Hideaki Miyajima and Takeo Kikkawa), and The Global Chemical Industry in the Age of the Petrochemical Revolution, Cambridge University Press, 2006 (co-edited with Louis Galambos and Vera Zamagni).

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