Business Systems in East Asia
Firms, Markets and Societies
- Richard Whitley - Manchester Business School, UK
At the level of the firm he looks at such areas as management styles and structures, decision-making processes, owner-employee relations, and patterns of company growth and development. He also discusses market development, customer, supplier and inter-firm relations, and the roles of the financial sectors and the state in market and industry development.
The book also examines the ways in which key social institutions in each country have affected the evolution of business. Finally, the author makes a comparison of East Asian business systems with dominant Western practices.
`Whitley has produced a valuable work on a topic important for scholars interested in understanding business systems in East Asia' - Choice
`Useful general background for anyone concerned with that part of the world' - Long Range Planning
`Overall, this is a worthwhile contribution to the literature, not least because many of its findings are suggestive of directly testable hypotheses.' - European Management Journal
`I do recommend this book.... It marks an important step in developing an adequate conceptualization and analysis of the organization of entire economies, and that is a significant accomplishmen.' - Contemporary Sociology
`Whitley writes in the `Preface' that the impetus for the book came from organizing a doctoral program in Management Studies at Hong Kong University. This is of interest, given that most books in development are written by scholars from the fields of economics, political science, anthropology, etc. Hence the book provides a valuable insight into how developing societies differ in their business systems.' - Canadian Journal of Development Studies
`For the student of comparative management and organizational behaviour this is a very interesting book indeed, and for those interested in East Asia it deals with precisely those subjects about which one would like to know more. In particular, the comparative perspective, that Whitley uses, gives a deeper and more detailed understanding of similarities and dissimilarities between the variety of organizational phenomena in the East.... This is an interesting book, not only because of the rich presentation of relatively inaccessible material, but also because of the scientific and practical questions it raises' - Organization Studies
