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Business Groups in the West: Origins, Evolution, and Resilience

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 August 2019

Mira Wilkins
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Extract

This is an important book. For business historians writing about the late nineteenth century to the present, it offers a kaleidoscope of ways to study the history of the forms and organizational structures of modern big business. Its handle for doing so is the business group. The book is a sequel to Asli Colpan, Takashi Hikino, and James Lincoln's edited, pathbreaking Oxford University Press volume published in 2010 and entitled The Oxford Handbook of Business Groups. The latter opened up new horizons.

Type
Review Essay
Information
Business History Review , Volume 93 , Issue 3: Entrepreneurship and Philanthropy , Autumn 2019 , pp. 599 - 609
Copyright
Copyright © The President and Fellows of Harvard College 2019 

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References

1 Colpan, Asli, Hikino, Takashi, and Lincoln, James R., eds., The Oxford Handbook of Business Groups (Oxford, 2010)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

2 Chandler, Alfred D., with the assistance of Hikino, Takashi, Scale and Scope: The Dynamics of Industrial Capitalism (Cambridge, MA, 1990)Google Scholar. Chandler not only put Hikino on the title page but also wrote in the acknowledgments, “without Takashi Hikino, it [the book] could not have been written” (p. vii).

3 See, for example, Amsden, Alice H., Asia's Next Giant: South Korea and Late Industrialization (New York, 1989)Google Scholar. In the index of this volume there is an entry, “Chaebol (diversified business groups in Korea).”

4 And Geoff Jones's work on British trading companies indicated their role in emerging nations, as did his contribution to Business Groups in the West.

5 In terms of competition policy, what was unacceptable in the United States from the 1890s forward was accepted in the European countries studied in this book until well beyond World War II, when there was major rethinking of antitrust.

6 In 1986, I published an article in which I explored the question of what constituted a firm. I did not contrast the firm with a business group, but a number of the structures that I included in what was a firm fit what in this volume would seem to be placed in the category of business groups. Wilkins, Mira, “Defining a Firm,” in Multinationals: Theory and History, ed. Hertner, Peter and Jones, Geoffrey (Aldershot, 1986), 80–95Google Scholar.

7 Chandler, Alfred D., The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business (Cambridge, MA, 1977)Google Scholar and Chandler, Alfred D., Strategy and Structure: Chapters in the History of the American Industrial Enterprise (Cambridge, MA, 1962)Google Scholar.

8 Hausman, William, Hertner, Peter, and Wilkins, Mira, Global Electrification: Multinational Enterprise and International Finance in the History of Light and Power, 1878–2007 (Cambridge, U.K., 2008)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

9 “Court Dismisses Claim by Ecuador vs Chevron,” New York Times, 6 Apr. 2019.

10 Cameron, Rondo and Bovykin, V. I., eds., International Banking 1870–1914 (Oxford, 1991)Google Scholar.

11 Alexandra Alter, “E.L. James, Now Tied to Fame,” New York Times, 13 Apr. 2019.