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This book provides a historical study of the International Accounting Standards Board (IASB) from 2001 to 2011. During this period, the IASB and its International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRSs) acquired a central position in the practice and regulation of financial reporting around the world. As a unique instance of a private-sector body setting standards with legal force in many jurisdictions, the IASB’s rise to prominence has been accompanied by vivid political debates about its governance and accountability. Similarly, the IASB’s often innovative attempts to change the face of financial reporting have made it the centre of numerous controversies. The book traces the history of the IASB from its foundation as successor to the International Accounting Standards Committee (IASC), and discusses its operation, changing membership and leadership, the development of its standards, and their reception in jurisdictions around the world. The book gives particular attention to the IASB’s relationships with the European Union, the United States, and Japan, as well as to the impact of the financial crisis on the IASB’s work.

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.

From illegal drugs, stolen artwork, and forged trademarks, to fraud on financial markets—the phenomenon of illegality in market exchanges is pervasive. Illegal markets have great economic significance, have relevant social and political consequences, and shape economic and political structures. Despite the importance of illegality in the economy, the field of economic sociology unquestioningly accepts the premise that the institutional structures and exchanges taking place in markets are law-abiding in nature. This volume seeks to challenge this. Questions that stand at the center of the chapters are: What are the interfaces between legal and illegal markets? How do demand and supply in illegal markets interact? What role do criminal organizations play in illegal markets? What is the relationship between illegality and governments? Is illegality a phenomenon central to capitalism? Anchored in economic sociology, this book contributes to the analysis and understanding of market exchanges in conditions of illegality from a perspective that focuses on the social organization of markets. Offering both theoretical reflections and case studies, the chapters assembled in the volume address the consequences of the illegal production, distribution, and consumption of products for the architecture of markets. It also focuses on the underlying causes and the political and social concerns stemming from the infringement of the law. This book provides insights into the trades in diamonds and counterfeit clothing, rhino horn and human organs, alcohol and doping products, marihuana and smuggled goods, stolen antiquities and personal information, and illegal practices in finance and price setting.

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.

This volume aims to explore the long-term evolution of different varieties of large enterprises in today’s developed economies. It focuses on the economic institution of business groups and attempts to comprehend the factors behind their rise, growth, struggle, and resilience; their behavioral and organizational characteristics; and their roles in national economic development. The volume seeks to enhance the scholarly and policy-oriented understanding of business groups in developed economies by bringing together state-of-the-art research on the characteristics and contributions of large enterprises in an evolutionary perspective. While business groups are a dominant and critical organization model in contemporary emerging economies and have lately attracted much attention in academic circles and business presses, their counterparts in developed economies have not been systematically examined. This book aims to fill this gap in the literature and is the first scholarly attempt to explore the evolutional paths and contemporary roles of business groups in developed economies from an internationally comparative perspective. In doing so, it argues that business groups actually rose to function as a critical factor of industrial dynamics in the context of the Second Industrial Revolution in the late nineteenth century. They have adapted their characteristic roles and transformed to fit to the changing market and institutional settings. As they flexibly co-evolve with the environment, the volume shows that business groups can remain as a viable organization model in the world’s most advanced economies today.

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.

By tracing historically the evolution of Korean state-led capitalism and comparing it with other economies, this book criticizes prevalent theories including neoliberalism, the developmental state, and institutionalism, while proposing a theoretical alternative focusing on endogenous changes and institutional adaptability through elite competition within the state. Unlike the arguments of the neoliberals, the state can still play an active role in reconstituting the national economy in globalization. The Korean state successfully fosters economic growth by nurturing industrial commons even in globalization, rather than change toward a neoliberal free market system. In order to better account for sustainable economic growth over a long time, this book emphasizes institutional adaptability through elite competition, rather than offering neoliberal celebrations of the free market and the statist emphasis on the stringent Weberian state. The Korean economy, as well as the East Asian developmental state (DS) economies, could have sustainable development over a long period, not because of an apparent and standardized growth formula, or because of some institutional elements of a stringent Weberian state, but because they have adjusted their methods and strategies of development through competition among elites inside and outside the state, as new challenges, never met with an apparent solution, have continuously emerged. In order to better account for the evolution of state-led developmentalism in Korea, as well as in other countries, this book proposes changes by competition among elites within as well as outside the state, which causes changes in developmentalism and more flexible adjustments in new contexts.

This book examines the changing patterns of economic organization across Northeast and Southeast Asia against the backdrop of market liberalization, political changes and periodic economic crises since the 1990s. It provides an interdisciplinary account of variations, continuities and changes in the institutional structures that shape business systems and practices and govern innovation patterns, together with analyses of their impact on established systems of economic coordination and control. It makes important contributions to current theoretical and policy debates on the comparative analysis of socio-economic institutions and dominant forms of economic organization by: (1) mapping recent changes in the major business systems of Northeast and Southeast Asian economies; (2) developing a range of causal propositions about how changing institutions and socio-political coalitions are affecting the nature of Asian business organizations; and (3) illustrating the causal pathways through which changing business systems have shaped the development of innovation patterns and strategies in the region.

Advances in technology are critical for the transformation of a nation from a relatively low-wage to a relatively high-wage economy. Leading national economies are invariably global leaders in technology. In the last three decades, China has changed from one of the most impoverished countries on the planet to becoming the world largest economy with hundreds of millions of people being pulled out of poverty. Yet the question of China’s progress toward global technological leadership remains an open and hotly debated subject. Each chapter of this book focuses one high-tech industry exploring questions concerning technological trajectories and innovative capacities, historical evolution of the structures of industrial organization, international technology transfer, the role of the state, product-market conditions, the dynamic interaction of supply and demand, global competition, national policies, and regional industrial eco-systems. Taken together, these chapters provide the most complete picture to date of China’s technological development, with insights into the dynamics of innovative enterprise, and the roles of the state and globalization in supporting the development process.

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?

This book examines the construction of capitalisms in Poland, the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Romania after 1989, within a national business systems framework. Four elements of capitalism are analysed—property ownership, capital accumulation, production relations (specifically, international), and relations between the state and the economy. This book shows how the capitalisms constructed did not match the expectations of the early 1990s. Economic assets were privatized, but the exercise of shareholders’ rights was more limited in practice than in shareholder value theory. Blockholders dominated boards of directors in all four countries, often aligned with corporate management. Capital markets were developed, but played a greater role symbolically than as sources of finance. Enterprises in all four countries were incorporated into international production chains, with expansion in export and import of intermediate products, especially in motor vehicles. Despite the transition’s aim to reduce the role of politics in the economy, constructing capitalisms was heavily dependent upon political initiatives, nationally and internationally. Labour played only a supporting role in constructing capitalisms, through participation in tripartite forums; union membership declined, and industrial conflict primarily involved state sector workers. The capitalisms that developed were segmented, analysis of Hungary indicating four segments—state, privatized, de novo, and international—with different patterns of ownership, finance, product market relations, and links with the state. Capitalisms in the four countries thus never corresponded to liberal market models. The incentive to follow liberal market models declined further with the financial crisis of Western capitalisms in 2008, and growing investment in the region by sovereign wealth funds, Russian and Chinese.

Throughout history humans have commonly organized to prevent or mitigate risks, or to compensate for losses caused by risk events. Given the infinite variety of risks that existed, it is unsurprising that insurance—the primary modern risk mitigation industry—developed through a wide range of organizational forms. Yet we know little about why different forms of organization were chosen in the past, or why they survived or disappeared. This book represents the first attempt to explore the foundation, co-existence, and performance of multiple organizational forms in the history of insurance, to situate these forms in an international comparative context, and to relate the results of historical analysis to modern organizational theory. Fourteen leading scholars examine the development, performance, regulation, and governance of different insurance organizations in eight major markets around the world from the eighteenth century to the present. Their findings indicate how the history of insurance requires organizational theory to be supplemented or corrected in important ways. The book highlights the role of political and cultural preferences, regulatory intervention, technological change, and historical contingency in shaping the organizational structures of insurance markets. It points to the importance of a culture of mutualism and the role of entrepreneurship in driving the early growth of insurance in uncertain risk environments such as settler or frontier societies. It presents evidence for the historical efficiency of mutual life insurers. Agency theory alone cannot explain the complexity and great variety of organizational forms co-existing in different political, legal, and economic contexts in the past.

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.

This book analyses the role that the diaspora play when returning as entrepreneurs to their homeland. Returnee entrepreneurs are defined as individuals who have moved away from their home country and lived as part of the diaspora, and have later returned home to live, invest, or both. With increased movements of people around the world, the role of transnational economic activity is becoming ever more significant, yet little is still understood about the motivations and contribution of those who return to their homeland to undertake entrepreneurial activity. The book examines return to post-conflict economies, with the returnees initially forced to move due to war. In doing so, it examines policy approaches to return and the intentions of returnees, and highlights the important role that emotional attachment plays in harnessing return. The book recognises the undoubted potential of diaspora entrepreneurs to benefit their homeland. Yet it also recognises the challenges in doing so. Not all diaspora entrepreneurship will be beneficial. Not all policy interventions will be effective, despite good intentions. Yet the lessons contained within this book are that by understanding the challenges and opportunities associated with diaspora return entrepreneurship, more effective strategies can be put in place.

This book, Dividends of Development: Securities Markets in the History of US Capitalism, 1866–1922, explains how securities markets became central to the institutional fabric of US capitalism. After the Civil War, these markets had a narrowly circumscribed relationship to the country’s real economy, being largely dominated by railroad securities. Moreover, their role in the US financial system was of limited significance given the relatively modest resources that financial institutions committed to investment in, and lending on, corporate securities. That situation was to undergo fundamental change from the Civil War through the end of the First World War but the development of US securities markets did not occur as a result of a smooth, or even linear, process. Instead, the book shows that the transformation of US securities markets was a process that was volatile and time-consuming, unscripted by powerful actors, and driven, above all else, by the dramatic and unstable character of the nation’s economic development. These claims about the trajectory, the operation, and the underlying dynamics of the development of US securities markets are brought together in a novel synthesis that portrays the historical evolution of securities markets in the United States as the ‘dividends’ of the country’s distinctive trajectory of economic development.