Abstract
China's present reforms have been conducted against the backdrop of rapid economic growth and social change. Tangibly, this means Chinese enterprises must likewise quicken to the pace of reform. Set in this background, Brown and MacBean bring together practitioners and scholars to examine present and future trends in China from a management perspective. Based on contributions from a 2003 conference, throughout eleven chapters, topics such as State Own Enterprise (SOE) reforms, corporate governance, value creation and organisation culture are discussed in depth.
The first few chapters highlight issues of corporate governance and the subsequent problems of achieving an adequate level. Wei-qi and Lawton's chapter on SOE reform and governance is particularly useful in clarifying the main problems, but also suggesting practical and realistic reforms within the domestic framework. In fact, many of the chapters do not shy away from presenting social and historical reasoning to explain the difficulties in using foreign models in the Chinese context – which often is the fault of many books of this kind.
The latter chapters deal with approaches to strategic management. The Li et al. chapter is very instructive in discussing the practicalities of utilising guanxi as a structured marketing approach. Williamson, on the other hand, attempts to tease out a comparison between China and the UK, with respect to examining the interaction of managers who seek to gain control assurances. The chapter has the potential to be useful, but falls short in the presentation of materials and, at times, argument. This shortcoming is balanced by the final chapter, written by Fang, who lucidly discusses differences in domestic business styles in three major centres, Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou.
The sheer pace of change in China's management and regulatory environment means that the high degree of specificity drawn from this edited book may not be relevant in the near future. Yet, there are important and useful dialogues, tangible advice and, for many chapters, insightful domestic perspectives, which will be beneficial for academics and businesspeople who want to be immersed in the dialogue of China's development from a public and private enterprise standpoint.
Reza Hasmat
(University of Cambridge)
The post-communist trajectories of Central Asian states have befuddled a number of commentators. The reason for such confusion has more often than not been associated with the difficulty of conceptualizing the informal political actors pervading the regional social, economic and political relations. In this respect, Collins has provided probably the most sophisticated account to date of the clan networks spanning the Central Asian states. While establishing the relationship between clan politics and the entrenchment of authoritarian regimes in the region, she also traces the historical and conceptual context of such informal networks.
Collins' achievements, therefore, derive from her decision to take the notion of ‘clan’ seriously. In this respect her book makes two main contributions. On the one hand, she elaborates the relevance of the meanings and practices of clan politics to the general literature on political science. On the other, while observers of Central Asian politics have used the term descriptively, Collins applies it analytically and establishes its conceptual clarity to the dynamic contexts of the region. Clan networks, thereby, are presented as neither exotic, nor primordial, nor inherently undemocratic. Instead, they reflect idiosyncratic institutional arrangements based on the rational calculations of individuals made within a collectivist cultural and institutional context. Clans, at the same time, are distinct both from ethnic ties and states (p. 56).
In her analysis, Collins details three dominant reasons why clans have persisted as viable forms of political organization in Central Asia: the late process of state formation in the region, accompanied by the late formation of national identity, and the existence of ‘economy of shortages’ substituting the absence of market relations (p. 44). Thus, while most other commentators have been perplexed by the informal nature of Central Asian politics, Collins argues that the institutionalization of clan politics plays a central role in understanding the post-communist dynamics in the region. In this respect, she suggests that it is the establishment of ‘clan pacts’ – mechanisms for uniting clan factions against external threats and for ensuring the stability of clan governance – that underwrites the uncertain dynamics of democratization in Central Asia (p. 103).
Collins, therefore, argues that by focusing narrowly on elite socialisation and formal political and economic institutions, most commentators miss out most of the undercurrents of post-communist transformations. Thus, her volume would be riveting not only to scholars of Central Asian affairs, but to all those fascinated by the dynamics of post-Soviet transitions and comparative politics.
Emilian Kavalsk
(University of Alberta)
Since the publication of Barbara Harriss-White's fascinating book, India Working, there is an emerging field of study in social science that may be termed economic anthropology. Economic anthropology is a micro-level analysis of the challenges of economic liberalisation that local-level actors face in an era of globalisation. This work is a notable contribution to this intellectual field. Moreover, this book is also influenced by James Scott's Seeing Like a State. This book, however, offers an analytically distinctive view by showing how citizens view the state at the household level in rural villages in India.
In the early chapters of the book, the authors present various perspectives on what the state is and how individuals perceive the state. Henceforth, Seeing the State is roughly divided into two broad sections. The first section provides a refreshing interpretation of some of the key categories in the analysis of politics and the state, specifically through a detailed examination of the concept of participation, governance and civil society. The second section of the book then utilises these redefined categories by focusing our attention on four sub-regions in India. This examination is placed within the framework of an effort to understand the politics of resistance from India's rural underclass. In this sense, this book successfully combines mid-range theory about governance with domain-specific explanations of important developmental phenomena. Although an impressive scholarly achievement, Seeing the State also succeeds in informing the reader on the ethical dimensions of combining scholarly work with consultancy projects. Replicating ongoing epistemological debates in cultural anthropology, the authors also attempt to determine what the impact of consultancy projects may be for the stakeholders under examination.
Even though the book has four separate authors, it is very elegantly written, moving seamlessly from chapter to chapter without a decline in analytical rigour. This intellectual work is highly democratic in that the specific authorship of no single contributor can be identified. Nevertheless, it is worth pointing out that the authors conducted substantial individual fieldwork in the districts of Bihar, Jharkhand and West Bengal and it may be possible to determine each empirical contribution to this mosaic. Overall, Seeing the State will prove to be a landmark book in development studies.
Lawrence Sáe
(London School of Economics and Political Science)
Engaging the World is a collection of essays that aims to provide ‘fresh and critical perspectives on India's foreign policy’ as India ‘engages with contemporary political circumstances in world politics’ (p. 3, emphasis added). The volume includes 25 essays by well-known scholars divided under six broad sub-topics: the impact of the post-Cold War global setting on India; nuclear weapons and India's foreign policy; India's relations with the big powers (the US, Russia and China); India's relations with its neighbors in South and Southeast Asia; regional cooperation in South Asia and the Indian Ocean; and India's interests and challenges in West Asia and Africa. However, the collection disappoints as the perspectives provided are not contemporary. The volume is the outcome of a three-day national seminar held in 1998 to commemorate the 50th anniversary of India's independence (p. xi). Many of the essays have not been updated to reflect the current state of relations, and the few that do mention subsequent events have failed to analyze the developments seriously. For example, there is no mention of India's renewed diplomacy in Afghanistan after the toppling of the Taliban in late 2001. India's active role in Kabul has emerged as an important component of Indian diplomacy and security strategy, and deserves scholarly attention. Another serious shortcoming of the volume is that it assumes the post-Cold War global scenario to be dominated by an association between capitalism and globalization without seriously considering (or disregarding) alternative scenarios such as the rise of religious fundamentalism (observed both within and outside India in the 1990s), and the rise of transnational terrorism (characterized globally by 9/11 and within India by a series of terrorist attacks for over a decade including the 2001 attack on the Indian Parliament). Even the treatment of the globalization scenario is inadequate. While some of the essays do explore how the growing Indian economy is engaging with the ‘world capitalist system’, the collection lacks a serious study of the impact of the search for energy to fuel its economy on India's foreign policy. The one important purpose the book does serve is in providing a wealth of information due to the sheer range of topics covered.
Manjeet S. Pardes
(Indiana University)
Pakistan continues to attract a significant amount of political, academic and media attention, often spawning reports and studies of doom and gloom. This volume, despite contributions by three Islamabad-based academics, largely includes Indian specialists on Pakistan along with Lawrence Ziring – a long-time analyst – and the Canada-based Saleem Qureshi. The editors apply terms such as ‘missed opportunities and misplaced priorities’, ‘Fifty Years of Insecurity’ and ‘political economy of borrowed dollars’, which, while partly true, focus only on the negative side of a rather complex situation. In addition, the majority of the chapters are state-centric.
Mohammad Waseem holds the Punjabi-Muhajir axis responsible for misguiding Pakistan from its very inception, and since the military coup by General Pervez Musharraf, the MQM and its leadership have again assumed a centre-stage role. Saleem Qureshi widens the debate to discuss the ambiguities underwriting the civic and Islamic contours of Pakistan. Tariq Rahman's piece offers less familiar empirical information on lingual groups, though it could have discussed the role of class over ethnicity in identity transformation. Ayesha Siddiqa pinpoints the burgeoning political economy of defence which leads to ever-escalating expenses for a massive defence establishment, engendering serious dysfunctions. Kukreja's rigorous analysis of the Pakistani economy, although based on some older sources, offers useful details and does not shirk from calling Pakistanis ‘a nation of tax evaders rather than taxpayers’ (p. 163). Her critique of Musharraf's exclusion of land reforms from his modernisation project is laudable. Ziring's chapter teases out the ideological polarisation between the Islamists and secularists, within which he locates the backdrop for claims on Kashmir, support for Pushtun Afghans and nuclearisation. J. N. Dixit places Pakistan within a macro South Asian perspective, in which similar challenges face all states, and greater realism and bolder initiatives could help tackle pervasive poverty and underdevelopment. Satish Kumar zeroes in on a supposedly failing state, often bailed out financially by the United States. For Kumar, the Kargil conflict of 1999 vindicated Pakistani belief in the nuclear umbrella as the ultimate and tested deterrence. Rajen Harshe's chapter restates the presumed nexus between drugs, militancy and terror: ‘Pakistan has been canalising the money illegally earned from the sale of heroin to fund the activities of terrorist outfits’ (p. 253).
The verdict of the conclusion remains grim: ‘The two decades of terrorism and violence that engulfed Pakistan's polity cannot be erased overnight’ (p. 281). The prospects for Indo-Pakistani peace are seen as bleak by the editors because of the vested interests of the Pakistani generals. Yet one also wonders about the hawks across the borders! There is urgent need for fresher, comparative and more detached studies.
Iftikhar H. Mali
(Bath Spa University)
This edited book by Lam Peng Jr addresses a core issue in East Asian political economy: how is a stagnating but slowly recovering Japan responding to a steadily rising China?
The book, whose contributors include some of the best Japan scholars, has several unique features – its pluralistic views of the bilateral relationship at different levels of bilateral interactions; its attention to historiography and the burden of history in Japan's ties with China; its selective case studies to examine the capacity of the two countries to manage their differences pragmatically; and the perspectives from third parties such as the United States, Russia and Malaysia.
A notable observation by the contributors is that ‘national governments in Beijing and Tokyo do not monopolize China-Japan relations; local governments and non-state actors in their own ways and at their own pace do enhance better neighbourly relations’ (p. 12). This is evidenced by the fact that despite the cold political ties between the two countries in recent years, economic and cultural exchanges have remained dynamic. The role of societal forces in promoting international relations cannot be overlooked.
China and Japan have never been strong at the same time in recent history. With the rise of Chinese power and the stagnation of Japan since the late 1980s, the political and economic landscape in East Asia has drastically changed. Both have to adjust to the new circumstances. Love and hate largely characterize the relationship between these two rival Asian powers.
As the two countries have grown increasingly closer in trade but drifted apart politically, they need to manage their complex relations cautiously. Peace and prosperity in Asia hinges to a large extent on how these two rivals get along in the future. With the new leadership taking charge in Tokyo at the end of 2006, the bilateral relationship seems to be in better shape. However, as the contributors point out, several issues, such as Japan's plan to amend Article 9 of the constitution, Japan's relations with Taiwan and China's attitude toward Japan's bid for a UN Security Council seat, all have the potential to jeopardize bilateral ties. The biggest challenge for both sides is to overcome these difficulties, form a habit of cooperation and jointly promote development and stability in the region.
Zhiqun Zh
(University of Bridgeport)
The book addresses a fundamental question in comparative political economy, namely whether the process of globalisation has undermined the capacity of the developmental state. In her book, Aseema Sinha postulates that it is sub-national units that are key drivers in both understanding the developmental functions of national governments as well as dynamic actors in the process of greater global integration. It is in this sense that the book's subtitle, A Divided Leviathan, acquires its significance.
The examination of sub-national and infranational institutions in development has been understudied, so this volume will be an extraordinarily useful theoretical and empirical work that will set the standard for future research in this area. The author's focus on India is of theoretical importance because India is often characterised as an example of a failed developmental state. In this reader's opinion, Aseema Sinha has produced the most comprehensive, yet succinct, analysis on the patterns of India's regional industrial policy.
The book is divided into four main sections. In the first section, the author sets out the basic theoretical framework, one which captures her definition of developmentalism. She also introduces the reader to a concept, polycentric hierarchy, where she develops a model of decentralisation that combines differing levels of regional capacity with vertical models of confrontation and intergovernmental cooperation. The second part of the book analyses the problems of developmentalism from the perspective of the central government. It is, however, the third section of the book which introduces the core of her analysis. The author deftly maps out substantial variants in the sub-national developmental tasks of these critical sub-national units in India (i.e. the states of Gujarat, Tamil Nadu and West Bengal). The author supports her claims with extensive fieldwork, including interviews with policy-makers and business investors. The final section of the book attempts to extend her analysis of sub-national variation in India towards common problems faced by other emerging market federations. The reader will intuit that Aseema Sinha's next scholarly work will make an extensive examination of the relationship between cooperative federalism and interjurisdictional competition.
Aseema Sinha is one of the most exciting young scholars working on development politics in the United States. Although this is her first book, it sets out a brilliant scholarly path. Students of Indian politics and development alike will eagerly anticipate her forthcoming scholarly output. Together with Rob Jenkins' seminal book, Democratic Politics and Economic Reform in India (Cambridge University Press, 1999), Barbara Harriss-White's India Working (Cambridge University Press, 2003) and Stuart Corbridge et al.'s Seeing the State (Cambridge University Press, 2005), this book will be essential reading for those who want to understand the dynamics of microinstitutional variables as well as the effect of central and regional political elites. In doing so, Aseema Sinha adds a political dimension to the literature on market-preserving federalism and public finance.
Lawrence Sáe
(London School of Economics and Political Science)
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