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Over the years, I have reviewed a number of
scholarly books for various purposes. This page brings together
these book reviews. For more leisurely readings click
here.
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Working Across Cultures, by John
Hooker,
Stanford Business Books, 2003.
John Hooker has set
himself the ambitious task to ”prepare Western professionals for
otherness of other cultures”. With a solid grounding in cultural
anthropology, he aims to provide an intellectual grounding as
well as practical advice for managers confronted with
cross-cultural management tasks. He largely succeeds. Moreover,
his comprehensive treatment of the topic also provides a highly
readable overview of the key literature, and thus a starting
point for thinking about future directions for research.
The book reflects the author’s rich personal experience in a
variety of quite different countries, which enables him to
connect theoretical lines of reasoning with personal examples
and in-depth discussion of selected countries. This
interconnectivity of the theoretical and the practical issues
are the main strength of the book.
(Download
full book review)
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Rising above Sweatshops: Innovative
Approaches to Global Labor Challenges, Edited by Laura
Hartman, Denis Arnold and Richard E. Wokutch, New York: Praeger,
2003.
In a world of disaggregated but global supply
chains, the responsibility of consumers and upstream
distributors for the lower end of their product chain has
increasingly captured the minds of the interested public as well
as corporate executives. Multinational enterprises are under
pressure to increase the labor, health and environmental
standards in not only their operations abroad, but in the
operations of their suppliers and sub-suppliers.
Hartman, Arnold and Wokutch present the state
of the art of the scholarly debate on international labor issue
and provide case studies of companies that have taken innovative
initiatives that may serve as best practice for others wishing
to raise their labor standards, and thus their corporate
reputation. The focus of this book is on actions to be initiated
at corporate headquarters, and on global management practices
that may amend their conditions faced by those at the bottom of
the supply chain. The editors
have overall done a great job in bringing together the current
state of the debate, and providing ideas and management tools
for corporate executives. |
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Business Restructuring in Asia: Cross-Border M&As in
the Crisis Period, by James Zhan and Terutomo Ozawa,
2001.
This book takes up a hot issue
of policy analysis revolving around the behaviour of
multinational enterprises: The wave of mergers and acquisitions
in the aftermath of the Asian crisis of 1997. The authors set
the ambitious objective of documenting the evidence, analysing
the causes and outlining the consequences of the sudden surge of
M&A.Zhan
and Ozawa tackle a region of particular interest, the five
countries most affected by the Asian crisis of 1997: Indonesia,
Republic of Korea, Malaysia, Thailand and the Philippines. The
total value of cross-border M&A in these countries rose from an
annual US$ 7 billion before the crisis to an annual average of
US$20 billion during the crisis years 1997 to 1999. This has a
profound impact not only on the industrial structure of the host
economies but on international business across Southeast Asia.
(Download
full book review)
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Learning from the Asian
Tigers. Studies in Technology and Industrial Policy, by
Sanjaya Lall,
Houndsmills and London: MacMillan Press, and New York: St.
Martin’s Press, 1996.
In two widely cited studies,
the World Bank (1993, 1994) spelled out its understanding of the
role of industrial policy in economic development. The Bank
acknowledges a positive role of functional, or market-friendly,
interventions in Asia, but sees no evidence of a positive
contribution by selective governmental intervention. In his new
book, Sanjaya Lall of Oxford University gives a critical
assessment of the method of analysis as well as the theoretical
foundations of these studies. His response is a formidable
challenge not only for the World Bank, but for many development
and transition economists in the neoclassical tradition.
(Download a
full book review) |
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The Russian
Capitalist Experiment: From State-owned Organizations to
Entrepreneurships, by Sheila M. Puffer, Daniel J. McCarthy
and Alexander I. Naumov, Cheltenham, UK and Northampton, USA: E.
Elgar, 2000.
Puffer, Naumov and
McCarthy report Russian case firms from the perspective of
the local top managers, with amble citations. The cases include
two firms still in state-ownership, three firms undergoing at
least partial privatization, and five newly established
entrepreneurial firms. In true longitudinal research, the
authors follow the firms over the years, interviewing the same
managers every year from 1993 to 1996, some up to 1998. The
emerging story tells not only of objective changes in the firm
throughout the 1990's, but changing subjective views of managers
of both their business and the environment. Initially,
interviewees’ assessments do not show a solid understanding of
economics, especially the role of financial markets, competition
and corporate governance, i.e. the role of shareholders.
Moreover, it seems that Russian managers prefer to talk about
their plans rather than about hard facts.
(Download full book review)
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Going Global: Transition from Plan to
Market in the World Economy, edited by Padma Desai,
Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1997.
The transition of the 1990’s in Central and Eastern Europe had
to accomplish not only a change of the domestic economic system,
but the reintegration into the international economy. Padma
Desai presents the first major research project analyzing the
interrelationship between the two processes: economic transition
and international opening. The study has been conducted under
the auspices of the World Institute of Development Economic
Research at the United Nations University (UNU/WIDER) in
Helsinki, Finland. It is based on individual countries studies,
which are brought together and related by a comprehensive
discussion of the issues in Desai’s introduction. (Download
full book review)
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European Union Direct Investment in China:
Characteristics, Challenges and Perspectives, by
Daniel van den Bulcke, Haiyan Zhang and Maria do Céu Esteves,
2003.
European businesses have often been scolded
for missing the opportunities arising in East Asia. As China
began to open to foreign investment in the early 1990s, European
businesses seemed more occupied with European integration and
the 1992 project. Europeans accounted in 1996 for only 4% of
inward foreign direct investment (FDI) in China, though this
share has risen to 7.5% by 2000. Motivated by a concern that
Europe misses the business opportunities of China, van den
Bulcke, Zhang and do Céu Esteves have launched a major research
initiative in 1997 to investigate the patterns and
characteristics of European FDI in China. They teamed up with
local research teams in seven Chinese provinces to collect
survey data. The present book reports the results of this
research effort, with analysis of both official data and the
original survey data. (Download
full book review)
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Foreign Direct
Investment in Central Eastern Europe: Case Studies of Firms in
Transition, edited by Saul Estrin, Xavier Richet and Josef
C. Brada, Armonk, New York, USA and London, UK: M.E.
Sharpe, 2000.
Estrin,
Richet
and Brada present a major case research project on
foreign investment in three transition economies (funded by
ACE). The cases follow a common structure to describe the
restructuring of acquired firms under new, foreign ownership.
They report changes in production, marketing and organizational
structure as well as the integration in the investors global
organization. These case reports provide a valuable source of
inspiration for researchers interested enterprise restructuring
in the crucial early years of transition.
(Download full book review)
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Foreign Direct Investment in Transitinal
Economies. A Case Study of China and Poland, By Michael
Du Pont, Macmillan Press Ltd, 2000.
Poland and China have been the star performers among the
transition economies with the highest macroconomic growth in
their respective parts of the world. In both countries, foreign
direct investment (FDI) is attributed an important role, yet not
as much as in Hungary or Estonia where privatization has been
achieved to a large extent by selling state firms to foreign
investors. Michael Du Pont provides a comparative perspective on
FDI with very rich data on both countries, their policy context,
their macroeconomies, and their FDI trends. The core of his
study is an empirical study based on interviews with 100
excecutives in each of the two countries focusing on investment
motivations, investment climate, and on performance in terms of
profitability, technology transfer, export propensity and
employment.(Download
full book review)
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