Schulich School of Business, York University, EWestney@schulich.yorku.ca
Eleanor Westney joined the Schulich School of Business in July 2007, after twenty-five years on the faculty of the M.I.T. Sloan School of Management, where she held the Sloan Fellows Chair in the Strategy and International Management group. After a B.A. and an M.A. in Sociology from the University of Toronto, she received a Ph.D. in Sociology in 1978 from Princeton University, and began her teaching career in the Department of Sociology at Yale University. She moved to M.I.T. and into the International Business field in 1982.
Her first book, Imitation and Innovation: The Adoption of Western Organizational Forms in Meiji Japan (Harvard University Press, 1987), explored the patterns of cross-border organizational learning, a theme that has continued to be a major focus of her interests. With Sumantra Ghoshal, she edited Organization Theory and the Multinational Corporation (Macmillan, 1993; second edition 2005), and with several of her M.I.T. colleagues has written a text on organizational processes, Managing for the Future (Southwestern, 3rd edition 2005). She has written extensively on Japanese organizations, on the internationalization of R&D, and on institutional theory and multinational enterprise. She is a Fellow of the Academy of International Business and is currently the Dean of the AIB Fellows.
World Time, Industry Time, Firm Time: Imprinting and the Organization of Economic Activity in Asia
The global economy has entered a period when the globally dominant form of capitalism, financial/market capitalism, is losing its legitimacy, but not its power: the global institutions of M&A, consulting, and so on continue to flourish. Japan's postwar reconstruction coincided with the heyday of American managerial capitalism, and the much-lauded patterns of firms like IBM, AT&T, and GE deeply imprinted Japan's large firms, which in turn were part of the global capitalism modes that influenced both Korea and Taiwan. Later-developing China and India emerged in a different era of global capitalism and have been able to take advantage of its institutions to expand internationally very early in their development. This paper examines the influence of imprinting on the future evolution of Asia’s business firms, with a special focus on international and regional institutional contexts.
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