The regional character of Asian multinational enterprises

In recent issues of this Journal a debate has raged concerning the appropriate nature of academic research in the Asia Pacific region. While we support the desire for both rigor and regional relevance in this research, we wish to demonstrate a strong commonality between the performance of large Asian firms and others from Europe and North America. This prompts us to question the need for a new theory of the MNE based on the experience of Asian firms. Like their counterparts elsewhere, the large Asian firms mostly operate on an intra-regional basis. While in the literature it has been assumed that the path to success for Asian firms is globalization, we show that the data supporting this is confined to a handful of unrepresentative case studies. We also present a bibliometric analysis which shows an overwhelming case study sample selection bias in academic studies towards this small number of unrepresentative cases.

Alan M. RugmanEmail: URL: http://www.kelley.indiana.edu/rugman

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Simon Collinson   (D.Phil., SPRU, University of Sussex) is Associate Professor (Reader) of International Business at Warwick Business School and the Lead Ghoshal Fellow at the Advanced Institute of Management (AIM), UK. He has held visiting positions at NISTEP in Tokyo and AGSM at the University of Sydney, and was Visiting Professor at the Kelley School of Business, Indiana University. His research interests include global innovation strategies, knowledge management and adaptability in multinational firms, and FDI and collaborative innovation in Japan and China. He has published widely, such as in Organization Studies, the International Journal of Technology Management, Management International Review, R&D Management and Organizational Dynamics, and has received funding awards from the ESRC, EPSRC, DTI, Royal Society and CEC. With Professor Alan Rugman, Simon is also co-author of the FT Pearson International Business (4th Edition, 2006) textbook. Alan Rugman   holds the L. Leslie Waters Chair of International Business at the Kelley School of Business, Indiana University, where he serves as Professor of International Business and Professor of Business Economics and Public Policy. He is also Director of the IU CIBER. He was Thames Water Fellow in Strategic Management at Templeton College, University of Oxford where he remains an Associate Fellow. Dr. Rugman has published widely in leading refereed journals that deal with economic, managerial, and strategic aspects of multinational enterprises and with trade and investment policy. His forty plus books include: The End of Globalization (Random House 2000; AMACOM 2001); (co-ed) The Oxford Handbook of International Business (Oxford University Press 2001) and, The Regional Multinationals (Cambridge University Press 2005). He has served as a consultant to major private sector companies and as an outside advisor to two Canadian Prime Ministers. Dr. Rugman served as President of the Academy of International Business from 2004–2006.