Japanese retailers in Southeast Asia: strong local partners,shopping malls,and aiming for comprehensive internationalization

Japanese retailers have a long and mixed history in Southeast Asia with a period of expansion in the 1980s and 1990s being followed by a long period of decline and stagnation. Recently, some Japanese retailers have renewed their interest in Southeast Asia. Based on an overview of the major retail trends in Southeast Asia and identification of those Japanese retailers that are currently expanding in the region, this article develops propositions about the underlying factors and processes. It argues that the interest in Southeast Asia, while being mostly justified by retailers through reference to the growing middle-class populations in host countries, is as much based on developments in Japan itself, such as the saturation and stagnation of markets and the emergence of exportable, flexible, and comprehensive business models. Japanese retailers are intensifying activities at a time when strong domestic companies with retail interests have established themselves in host countries and therefore partnerships with them seem to fulfill more than the need to comply with investment regulations or deal with complex environments. Shopping malls play a role as locations for specialty stores but are also transplanted from Japan. Companies are making efforts toward more comprehensive internationalization and this involves human resources in headquarters in Japan as well as working together with other Japanese companies, thus satisfying the need for local embeddedness but at the same time maintaining corporate identity and advantages.     

South Korean social enterprises and their networks: On their organizational linkages at the interstice between the third,public, and corporate sectors

Social enterprise and government interactions have become an increasingly prominent theme in the literature on social entrepreneurship, due in part to the pressures confronting the welfare state and the rise of precarious work. This analysis is motivated by the efforts of the government of South Korea to incubate social enterprises since 2007. The constant scaling of the South Korean government's monitored social enterprise certification scheme had led to the registration of approximately 3440 social enterprises as of May 2021. This study documents the interorganizational network behaviour of these enterprises relative to the public sector, corporate sector, and civil society and the social economy. A cluster analysis approach is utilized to analyse network data obtained from a self-administered survey of 103 government-certified social enterprises operating in South Korea. We find that a sizeable number of government-certified social enterprises have diversified networks, as opposed to public sector-centric networks, although such social enterprises are in the minority. This study references social innovation cluster theory to argue that the aforementioned scheme has attained a partial degree of success in facilitating the emergence of social enterprises with diversified networks.However, the majority remain quasi-governmental implementers of government contracts and, generally, do not engage in networking.