Gary G. Hamilton

Market, culture and authority: A comparative analysis of management and organization in the Far East.

Three frameworks purport to explain industrial arrangements and practices: a market approach that emphasizes economic characteristics, a cultural approach that sees organization as the expression of patterned values, and an authority approach that explains organization as a historically developed structure of domination. The efficacy of each approach is tested in explaining the organizational structures of three rapidly growing East Asian economies: Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan. The paper argues through comparative analysis that organizational growth is best explained by market and cultural factors but that authority patterns and legitimation strategies best explain organizational structure.

Patriarchy, Patrimonialism and Filial Piety: A Comparison of China and Western Europe

Authority relations identified by the terms patriarchy, patrimonialism, and filial piety represent very different complexes of action in imperial China and Western Europe. Two sets of comparisons (developmental and configurational) demonstrate these differences in the institutional patterning of authority between China and Europe. The author argues, on the one hand, that in Western society legitimate domination is seen as the intentional, directional, and consequential acts of individuals acting within the boundaries of their jurisdictions. In China, on the other hand, it is seen as an aspect of specific sets of social roles, and hence as impersonal, non-intentional, and harmony-seeking. Some of the implications of these differences for social institutions are explored.

An institutional theory of leadership

Most theories of leadership are rooted in a psychological paradigm that treats leadership as an individual attribute, although one that may be situationally activated or constrained In this article, the authors propose a theory of leadership inspired by the institutional school of organizational analysis. Using an approach based on Weberian sociology, the authors link leadership to the legitimating principles and norms of the social structure in which leadership occurs. Four hypotheses are presented; (1) leadership strategies in any one sociocultural setting will have strong underlying similarities, (2) as an organization changes over time, strategies of leadership will also change, (3) organizations performing the same tasks-but based on different substantive principles-will exhibit different strategies of leadership, and (4) occupational and organizational subgroups based on distinctive norms will exhibit similar leadership styles across organizations, and will differ from other subgroups within a single organization. 7he authors conclude by proposing a research agenda based on institutional theory.

Why People Obey Theoretical Observations on Power and Obedience in Complex Organizations

Recent sociological studies of power in organizations, although oriented toward practical ends, offer promise for a general sociological theory of power. Empirically grounded organizational studies examine social life as practiced by actors and preserve the tension between structure and action. Exchange theory and structural theories of power, in contrast, are abstract and theoretical; by asserting the primacy of structures (structural theories) or action (exchange theory), they cannot account well for the dialectic of human agency and structural constraint. We suggest the theoretical implications of organizational analysis and compare this perspective with traditional sociological approaches to power.

Patterns of Inter-Firm Control in Japanese Business*

Studies of inter-firm relations in modern capitalism have often relied on either an exchange theory or a structural theory of control. Both paradigms prove inadequate in explaining non-Western patterns of inter-firm relations. This study adopts an institutional theory of power to explain the peculiar patterns of horizontal control that obtains in inter-firm relations within and among large Japanese business groups. We develop our argument in four steps. First, we review and assess the adequacy of three different theories of power in capitalist business; second, we describe our case study: two major types of Japanese business groups, third, we identify forms of vertical and horizontal control through our analysis of patterns of inter-firm shareholding, and we show how additional means of control are adopted to reinforce the existing organizational patterns; fourth, we compare and contrast the highly structured and cohesive inter-firm relations in Japanese business with the more loosely organized pattern that is characteristic in the U.S., and we conclude that the current research on capitalist organizational forms will advance by emphasizing not the unchanging, universal nature of capitalist domination, but rather its varied institutional nature and its apparent cross-cultural diversity.

A Market-Power Based Model of Business Groups

We propose an model of vertically and horizontally-integrated business groups that allows the number and size of each group to be determined endogenously. We find that more than one configuration of groups can arise in equilibrium: several different types of business groups can occur, each of which are consistent with profit-maximization and are stable. We suggest that the strongly-integrated groups arising in the model characterize the chaebol found in South Korea, whereas the less-integrated groups describe those found in Taiwan.

The Market Makers: How Retailers are Reshaping the Global Economy

Introduction: The Retail Revolution PART I. THE MARKET MAKERS: A GENERAL PERSPECTIVE 1. Retailers as Market Makers 2. Technology and Public Policy: The Preconditions for the Retail Revolution PART II. MAKING CONSUMER MARKETS 3. U.S. Retailing and Its Global Diffusion 4. Globalization of European Retailing 5. Online Retailers as Market Makers PART III. MAKING SUPPLIER MARKETS 6. Supplier Markets and the Asian Miracle 7. Global Logistics, Global Labor 8. Making the Global Supply-Base 9. Transnational Contractors in East Asia PART IV. INDUSTRIES AND MARKET MAKING 10. The Global Spread of Modern Food Retailing 11. Market Making in the Personal Computer Industry

Patriarchalism in imperial China and Western Europe

ConclusionMy analysis suggests that Webers typology of domination - the cluster of patriarchalism, charisma, and law - does not fit Chinese history as it does European history. The typology has particular relevance in Europe because Weber purposefully developed types of domination that reflected and synthesized essential elements of Western historical experience: the struggles between kings and nobles, between popes and priests, between leaders and followers of all types. Deeply aware of the patterns of Western history, Weber understood that his concepts of analysis constituted “historical summaries,” not simply ideas and abstract beliefs but distillations of patterns of actions and of the justifications supporting and channeling those patterns.Roth, “Introduction,” xxx. Although Weber fashioned these ideal types from his knowledge of Western history, he wanted to make them genuinely “trans-epochal and transcultural” so that he could test, through “comparative mental experiment and imaginative extrapolation,” causal explanations about the course of Western history.Ibid. That the generations of students of Western society continue to learn from and struggle with Webers concepts and historical theories demonstrates that Weber was hugely successful in his work.But are Webers typologies as useful in the analysis of non-Western societies as they are in that of Europe? I have only dealt with Chinese society, but for this society my analysis suggests that the answer to this question is no. As Weber defined them, patriarchalism, charisma, and law do not apply to China in the way that they apply to Europe. They do not represent summaries of Chinese history; they do not distill the debates and struggles of two millenia; they do not tap those shared understandings that informed Chinese patterns of action. And because they do not gain an equivalent grasp of Chinese as they do of Western history, they are less useful and often very misleading when one uses them to analyze and explain the course of Chinese history. If those concepts do not get at the same reality in China, what is the logical status of the conclusions drawn from using them to analyze China? As I have attempted to show in this paper, they can be used to indicate through comparison what configurations are absent from China. But they are less useful in developing a genuine understanding of Chinese history. Therefore, to understand China, and perhaps most non-Western societies, Webers typology of domination and particularly his analysis of traditional domination, should not be used directly as a summary of an underlying reality. Webers warning about the “perniciousness” of Marxian concepts and theories when “they are thought of as empirically valid or real ‘effective forces’” should be applied with particular vigor to Webers own concepts and theories when applied to non-Western societies.Max Weber, The Methodology of the Social Science (Glencoe, 111.: Free Press, 1949), 103. But, by equal measure, if one assumes that Webers typology of domination misrepresents non-Western societies in some regard, it still provides an example of the sort of conceptual framework needed to analyze the historical development of state structures in any society. Weber championed comparative research, because he believed without comparisons it was impossible to examine rigorously the course of history and to develop theories of historical change. Weber rightly believed that comparisons were only possible with generalized historical concepts. But to Weber, historical research does not lead to better or more general sociological theories. Instead, sociology, as Weber put it to a noted historian, “can perform ... very modest preparatory work” to an adequate historical analysis.Economy and Society, lviii. Concepts must lead the way to historical explanations and not the reverse. Similarly, Webers analysis of the West provides the preparatory work for a better understanding of non-Western society. In this sense Webers concepts are indispensable for the analysis of non-Western society, not because they are the last word, but because, along with other products of Western sociology, they are the first word, words that are used only to have their meanings altered by subsequent research.This, too, is the conclusion of Wolfgang Schluchter (Max Webers Studie über Konfuziasmus und Taoismus) 17: “Weber did not understand his terminology as a final one. This does not mean that it is unsystematic or only useful to specific problems, but the sequence of terms is not always obvious in its ramifications, and therefore it sometimes needs an explication or interpretation. A critically productive evaluation of Webers work has to include a clarification of terminology and the investigation of the historic content.”

Reciprocity and Control: The Organization of Chinese Family-Owned Conglomerates

To poke fun at themselves and at their own branch of science, aeronautical engineers once proved that bees could not fly. With considerably more seriousness, organization specialists, applying sound principles of management, have demonstrated that Chinese family-owned firms cannot grow large and cannot undertake sizeable and complex projects. This reasoned conclusion leads to a second one: because Chinese firms cannot succeed in enterprises requiring scope or scale, those economies in which large Chinese family firms are found in some numbers must, therefore, be examples of ‘ersatz capitalism’ (Yoshihara, 1988) — speculative economies that are hollow at the core. This conclusion implies that an economy organized by Chinese firms cannot flower and bear the fruits of a capitalist way of life. Both conclusions, however, ignore the simple reality that Chinese family-owned firms do grow very large, that they do undertake sizeable and serious projects, and that the economies in which they exist have flourished in the last quarter of the twentieth century and will continue to flourish in the twenty-first. Like the allusion in Peyton Houston’s wonderful poem, the impossibility of the existence of large Chinese family firms belies their success throughout much of the capitalist world. Clearly, there is a gap between theory and fact.

Neither states nor markets. The role of economic organization in Asian development

This article shows that economic organization has independent and direct effects on the course of economic development. Most existing theories of economic development ignore the dynamic role of inter-firm interactions and, instead, stress state policies and macro-economic forces as the decisive factors creating a countrys industrial structure. Our research shows that developing economies have emergent organizational dimensions that, once they become going concerns, create momentum and trajectory. Using South Korea and Taiwan as case studies, this article demonstrates that the divergent economic outcomes of these two countries can best be explained by emerging differences in the organization of economies.