In spite of surging interest in the business group organization among business scholars, economists and historians in recent years, academic research on business groups has to date remained within the boundary of emerging markets.
The major aim of this volume is to explore the long-term evolution of different varieties of large enterprises in today's developed economies in the West. More specifically, the volume focuses on the economic institution of the business group and aims at understanding the factors behind its rise,
growth, resilience, and/or fall; its behavioural and organizational characteristics; and its contributions to national economic development.
While business groups, especially those with widely diversified product portfolio, are a dominant and critical enterprise model in emerging and developing economies and have lately attracted much attention in academic circles and business presses, interestingly, their counterparts in developed
economies have not been systematically examined. This contempt for business groups in mature market settings stands in sharp contrast to the intensive research that has been conducted on other major models of large modern enterprises in those economies, such as functionally-organized firms with a
clear product focus and multidivisional enterprises that have diversified into related product lines. The present book aims to fill in this gap in the literature by adopting a coherent approach to this elusive subject.
Asli M. Colpan is Associate Professor of Corporate Strategy at the Graduate School of Management and Graduate School of Economics, Kyoto University, Japan. She was the Alfred Chandler Visiting Scholar at Harvard Business School in 2016. Her research interests include corporate strategy, corporate governance and business history. Her work has been published in such journals as Industrial and Corporate Change, Journal of Management Studies, Asia Pacific Journal of Management, Strategic Management Journal, Business History and Corporate Governance: An International Review. She is the co-editor of the Oxford Handbook of Business Groups, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010. In 2010 she was awarded the Tachibana Prize for the most outstanding female scholar at Kyoto University.
Takashi Hikino is Mizuho Securities Endowment Professor at the Graduate School of Management at Kyoto University. His research interests include business history, industrial organization and corporate governance. 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) and
Oxford Handbook of Business Groups, Oxford University Press, 2010 (co-edited with Asli M. Colpan and James R. Lincoln).
