Shige Makino

Resource Commitment, Entry Timing, and Market Performance of Foreign Direct Investments in Emerging Economies: The Case of Japanese International Joint Ventures in China

This study examined whether early movers and technology leaders attained superior performance in emerging economic regions. We assessed the determinants and performance consequences of two key aspe...

Local Ownership Restrictions, Entry Mode Choice, and FDI Performance: Japanese Overseas Subsidiaries in Asia

This study examines the moderating effects of a host governments local ownership restrictions on the linkage between the choice of foreign entry mode and its performance, using a sample of 917 Japanese foreign subsidiaries in Asia. The study focuses on two foreign entry modes, joint ventures (JVs) and wholly-owned subsidiaries (WOS), and two performance measures, financial performance and termination rate. The results suggest that the extent of local ownership restrictions is negatively and significantly associated with the financial performance of WOS, whereas it does not directly influence that of JVs. There is no clear association between the extent of local ownership restrictions and the termination rate for the JV and WOS samples.

The Timing of International Expansion: Information, Rivalry and Imitation Among Japanese Firms, 1980-2002

Sociological-based information theory and economics-based competitive rivalry theory operate as the dominant theories of interorganizational mimetic behaviour. Recent work has sought to integrate the ideas in these theories, or determine which has greater explanatory power. In this study, we juxtapose the concepts in these two theories, to illustrate the complementary nature of information-based and rivalry-based theories of mimetic behaviour. Specifically, we consider how the predictions of information-based theories are moderated by the home competitive context of the industry of a firm making an international expansion. Using a 1980 to 2002 sample of 4949 manufacturing plant entries made into 71 foreign countries by 783 publicly-listed Japanese manufacturing firms, we find that the competitive context in the home industry influences the propensity of a focal firm to imitate the actions of rival firms. Our results support our contention that the two theoretical approaches are complementary, with the complementarities extending from the limitations of each approach.

Timing of Entry and the Foreign Subsidiary Performance of Japanese Firms

Delios and Makino adopt a contingency approach to analyze the relationship between timing of entry and a subsidiarys relative size and its survival. Using a sample of 6955 foreign entries of 703 Japanese firms, the authors develop and test hypotheses about asset-based competitive advantage moderators of timing of entrys influence on a subsidiarys relative size and survival. The results show that early entrants not only have a larger relative size but also have greater exit likelihood than do late entrants. The magnitude of these effects depends on the type of asset advantages a foreign investing firm possesses.

Knowledge Management of High-Tech Firms

Based on an analysis of six high-tech firms in mainland China, this chapter examines knowledge management issues by focusing on its acquisition, dissemination, and commercialization. We found that most firms emphasized knowledge acquisition. SOE-based firms relied more on their parents for early key technologies, confirming that institutional support and social capital are influential in knowledge acquisition. Social capital also help firms to overcome barriers to organizational knowledge dissemination. Its role in knowledge commercialization is also identified. Absorptive capacity is important for knowledge dissemination, since appropriate organizational arrangements have not been purposely designed.

Outward FDI does not necessarily cost domestic employment of MNEs at home: Evidence from Japanese MNEs

Whether outward foreign direct investment (FDI) projects boost or shrink domestic employment of multinational enterprises (MNEs) in home countries has long been a subject of debate. On the one hand, when MNEs implement projects abroad, it is often to replace their exports of goods and tradable services with FDI in production abroad to serve foreign markets, which reduces employment at home. 1 On the other hand, MNEs’ foreign operations may enhance production efficiency and global market access, generating greater demand for their final outputs. As a result, MNEs need to hire more employees in several production-related activities that are retained in their home countries to serve the additional foreign customers. 2 Reflecting these countervailing forces, numerous empirical studies have reported mixed and/or inconclusive findings on this subject. 3

Performance Impact of Technological Assets and Reconfiguration Capabilities: The Case of Small Manufacturing Firms in Japan

The purpose of this study is to investigate the relationships between firm resources and performance. We divide firm resources into two types: primary resources and support resources. Primary resources include technological assets and reconfiguration capabilities, which directly contribute to a firms competitive advantage. Support resources include internal human capital, interfirm collaboration, and managerial vision, which contribute to the development of primary resources. Using a sample of 302 small-and-medium manufacturing firms in Japan, our analysis revealed that both technological assets and reconfiguration capabilities significantly enhanced firm performance, that the firms with superior technological assets tended to possess superior reconfiguration capabilities, and that most of the support resources significantly contributed to the development of both technological assets and reconfiguration capabilities.

Three Important Perspectives for Understanding National Context

Abstract The world consists of diverse and distinctive economic systems. Due to the unique historical, cultural and location-specific contexts embedded in each economy, a comparison of strategic behaviors across economies is unlikely to provide a causal estimate of the influence of these contextual factors on strategy–performance relationships. In this paper, I outline three approaches to researching multinational firms that address this dilemma. They include the multilevel, historical and variance-centered perspectives, all of which can help international-business (IB) researchers develop stronger theoretical foundations from which to explain why country-specific contexts matter in designing IB action and research.

Timing of Entry and Foreign Subsidiary Survival

We adopt a two-stage, contingency approach to analyze the relationship between timing of entry and subsidiary survival. We develop and test hypotheses concerning determinants of the timing of entry, and hypotheses about asset-based competitive advantage moderators of timing of entrys influence on subsidiary survival. Our results show that subsidiary survival was positively related to late entry, but the magnitude of this effect was dependent on the assets possessed by the investing firm.

Effect of Non-conventional FDI on the Domestic Employment of MNEs

This study examines the relationships between MNEs’ three most commonly observed forms of non-conventional outbound FDI – i.e., as means to obtain tax breaks, to counter trade friction, or to achie...