刊行物
｜ ENGLISH ｜
Asli M. Colpan
Business groups, which are collections of legally independent companies interconnected by multiple economic and social ties that exhibit widely diversified product portfolios, are the prime and leading economic organization in today's emerging markets. Business groups at the core of economic dynamics in those late-industrializing economies critically differentiate themselves from the modern industrial enterprises in all the three aspects that Alfred Chandler emphasized as the core of competitive capabilities. First, the ownership of business groups usually remains with the family that controls and often manages their business empire. Second, those groups employ the strategy of unrelated diversification for their long-run growth. Third, in response to that diversification conduct, they adopt the structure of “business groups.” The business groups represent the organizational design in which most often a holding company owns individual operating units as legally-independent corporations. For each of these three characteristics, business groups have remained different from the Chandlerian multidivisional enterprises that we often observe in mature industrial economies.
Interestingly, within the Chandlerian framework, none of the three characteristics of business groups does provide a positive connotation. Family ownership and control eventually prohibit the development of salaried and professional management that stands as the core of competitive dynamics of modern industrial enterprises. Product domains should be technologically-related, it has been argued in strategy literature, so that an enterprise exploits the benefits of accumulated intra-organizational knowledge that c an be t r a n sf e r r ed t o r e l a t ed pr o d u c t c a te gor i e s , e n sur ing in t he lowe r- t h a n -m a r k e t c o s t o f pr oduc t ion. Unr elate d diversification encounters t he “ c on g l ome r a te discount” problem, i.e. the market value of the whole group as a whole is lower than that of the sum of the individual operating c om p a n i e s . B u si ne s s group structure hinders the inter-business transfer of accumulated knowledge that remains the core of the competitive advantages of large industrial enterprises.
A critical question in the business group literature however remains unexplored: How have diversified business groups allegedly marked by unrelated product diversification, subpar corporate governance systems and frequent lack of professional management remain a viable and representative organization model in many emerging economies? A straightforward economics perspective points to the short time span that has passed since the market liberalization drive got institutionalized since the early 1980s. This line of thinking implies that diversified business groups will surely disappear as the dominant business organization, as societal institutions will become more market-supporting and therefore competitive forces will function to make those groups less effective and then obsolete. Nevertheless, the reality suggests otherwise in that the diversified business groups are resilient, collectively if not individually, even when economies develop.
This conventional thinking lead me to another and more persuasive argument that comes from a firm- level behavioral perspective focusing on the investment behavior on the part of business groups. My current research, following my co-edited volume Oxford Handbook of Business Groups published by Oxford University Press in 2010, is to systematically explore the intra-group resources and capabilities that represent the prime source for the survival and resilience of business groups. By thorough theoretical examination and careful empirical fact-finding regarding the resilience of the business group organizational form, I aim to identify the exact conditions under which business groups can make positive contributions to the economy.
（あすり ちょるぱん）
