Business groups - large, diversified, often family-controlled organizations with pyramidal ownership structure, such as the Japanese zaibatsu, the Korean chaebol and the grupos economicos in Latin America - have played a significant role in national economic growth, especially in emerging economies. Earlier variants can also be found in the trading companies, often set up in Britain, which operated in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Business groups are often criticized as premodern forms of economic organization, and occasionally as symptomatic of corrupt 'crony capitalism', but many have shown remarkable resilience, navigating and adjusting to economic and political turbulence, international competition, and technological change. This Handbook provides a comprehensive analysis of business groups around the world. It examines the adaptive and competitive capabilities of business groups, and their evolutionary dynamics. 16 individual country chapters deal with business groups from Asia to Africa, the Middle East to Latin America, while overarching chapters consider the historical and theoretical context of business groups. With contributions from leading experts, The Oxford Handbook of business groups provides a comprehensive, empirically and theoretically rich guide for scholars and policy-makers.

Auteur

Asli M. Colpan is Associate Professor and Mizuho Securities Chair in Strategy and International Business at the Graduate School of Management, Kyoto University. She is also Adjunct Associate Professor of the Kyoto Consortium for Japanese Studies at Colombia University. Her research interests include corporate strategy, corporate governance, and especially the evolution of large enterprises in industrial and emerging economies. Her work has been published in Industrial and Corporate Change, Asia Pacific Journal of Management, and Asian Business and Management. Takashi Hikino is Associate Professor of Business and Industrial Organization at the Graduate School of Economics and the Graduate School of Management at Kyoto University. 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). James R. Lincoln is Mitsubishi Professor of International Business and Finance in the Walter A. Haas School of Business, University of California at Berkeley. His primary research interests include organizational design and innovation, Japanese management, and inter-organizational networks. He is the author of Culture, Control and Commitment: A Study of Work Organization and Work Attitudes in the U.S. and Japan, (with Arne L. Kalleberg), Cambridge University Press, 1990, and Japan's Network Economy: Structure, Persistence and Change, Cambridge University Press, 2004 (with Michael L. Gerlach).