Note: Pankaj very kindly agreed to speak about
the differences between Japan and China in anticipation of the unit's trip to
China. These differences will not only affect the kinds of things we would look
for during the trip but perhaps the potential research questions as well.
Abstract
The first paper, Semiglobalization and International Business Strategy, is forthcoming in the next issue of the Journal of International Business Studies. The first half of this paper basically reviews evidence on the degree of cross-border integration of markets of various types and concludes that we are currently and will likely continue for decades to be in a state of semiglobalization--of intermediate cross-border integration. The second half of this paper contains a (brief) discussion of the implications for market-level as well as firm-level analysis.
The second paper, Semiglobalization and Competitive Strategy (March 2003 version) is a work in progress, although based on recent discussions, some subset of this--most likely the front end plus the discussion of arbitrage on pages 19-28--will run soon in HBR. Basically, this paper expands (from an intendedly practitioner-oriented perspective) on the firm-level implications of taking semiglobalization seriously.
In addition to reviewing the basic argument about the importance of semiglobalization (quickly I hope), I intendto use the differences between the generic strategies discussed in these papers (particularly the second one) to draw a little bit of a comparison between Japan and China. To be very loose, the Japanese firms that were competing on the global stage by the 1980s had developed competitively superior products/processes that allowed them to pursue scale-oriented (aggregation or standardization in my terminology) strategies. In contrast, most firms serving world markets from China are following arbitrage-based strategies, even though they may (or may not) eventually evolve in the same direction as their Japanese predecessors. By implication, the TOM group that visits China may want to look for/at very different sorts of things than the TOM group that visited Japan more than a decade ago.