Business Groups in the West Origins, Evolution, and Resilience

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 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.

Asli M. Colpan is Associate Professor of Corporate Strategy at the Graduate School of Management and Graduate School of Economics, Kyoto University, Japan; and Visiting Associate Professor at Koç University, Turkey. Previously she was the Alfred Chandler visiting scholar at Harvard Business School and visiting scholar at the Department of Political Science at MIT. Her research interests include corporate strategy, corporate governance, and especially the evolution of large enterprises in developed and emerging economies. Her work has been published in such journals as Industrial and Corporate Change, Journal of Management Studies, Strategic Management Journal, Asia Pacific Journal of Management, Business History and Corporate Governance: An International Review. She co-edited (with Takashi Hikino and James Lincoln) The Oxford Handbook of Business Groups (Oxford University Press, 2010). Takashi Hikino is Mizuho Securities Endowed Chair Professor at the Graduate School of Management at Kyoto University, Japan; and Visiting Professor at Koç University, Turkey. His major publications include Big Business and Wealth of Nations (co-edited with Alfred D. Chandler and Franco Amatori, Cambridge University Press, 1997), Competing Policies for Competitiveness: Microeconomic Policies During the Golden Age of Capitalism (co-edited with Hideaki Miyajima and Takeo Kikkawa, Oxford University Press, 1998), The Global Chemical Industry in the Age of the Petrochemical Revolution (co-edited with Louis Galambos and Vera Zamagni, Cambridge University Press, 2006), and The Oxford Handbook of Business Groups (co-edited with Asli Colpan and James Lincoln, Oxford University Press, 2010).