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In his review of the book Trust: The Social Virtues and the Creation of Prosperity, by Francis Fukuyama, Robert Solow makes the following remarkably candid comment: … I, for various reasons, would like him to be right. Academic economics likes to pretend that economic behavior is pretty much the same, always and everywhere, almost uninfluenced by socially conditioned perceptions and norms. If Fukuyama's thesis could be proved to be right, it might help to loosen up the profession's view in other contexts as well. Unfortunately, the book does not meet Solow's criterion of proof, and he concludes: I believe that the sorts of things that Fukuyama wants to talk about are more important than my colleagues in economics are willing to admit. I would rather they are talked about imprecisely than not discussed at all. But imprecision is not a virtue, and “for example” is not an argument. To convince economists that organizational structure matters, it is necessary to point to objective measures of economic performance that are affected. We have argued at length that the business groups in South Korea and Taiwan are different, and that these differences are rooted in the exercise of authority and market power in the two countries. We have also shown that the predictions of the authority/market power model – in terms of the size, vertical integration, and horizontal diversification of business groups – match up remarkably well with contrasting structure of the groups in South Korea and Taiwan: this was our first test of the model, in Chapter 4. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For most analysts, it is an unexamined article of faith that the so-called “Asian miracle” is a push rather than a pull story, a supply-side narrative in which the administrative efficiency, entrepreneurial energy, and productive capacity of a select group of Asian economies created rapid economic growth. Drawing on new data that allow us to examine disaggregated trade data as if they are historical documents, we find clear evidence that pull factors relating to the organization of intermediary demand and the demand responsiveness of Asian manufacturers must be counted among the most important causes of growth in, and divergence among, Asian economies beginning in the initial period of industrialization and continuing through today. A level of economic activity that we call “intermediary demand” (by which we mean a range of market-making activities that include, among other things, merchandising, retailing, and the infrastructure of product procurement) had, and continues to have, a major impact on the organization of Asian economies and has, in interaction with local conditions, decisively shaped the different rates and divergent trajectories of growth throughout the region. Using our revised Walrasian framework to conceptualize Asian firms, we not only need to examine the interconnectedness of markets within countries, as we did in Chapters 3 and 4, but we also need to examine the interconnectedness of markets between countries. Part I shows that differences in the interconnectedness of markets within countries had systemic repercussions for the organization of those economies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the last chapter, we offer what we believe is a new hypothesis for the industrialization of South Korea and Taiwan: A primary force driving not only the emergence, but also the divergence of these two economies is the development of intermediary demand growing out of the U.S. retail revolution, to which Korean and Taiwanese firms were able to respond successfully, but in different ways. This claim will certainly be controversial because the existing explanations for East Asian industrialization consistently ignore factors relating to demand. To be more specific, existing explanations do not consider the interconnectedness of global markets in explaining industrialization. They do not consider how changes in the growth and organization of one economy, the U.S. economy, can shape the growth and organization of other economies, the Asian economies. The possibility of this proposition is implicit in our revised Walrasian perspective that we outlined in Chapter 1. Insofar as markets are interconnected, then a change in one market should result in changes in other markets. Within this perspective, theoretically speaking, markets should not be confined artificially to only markets within a national economy. Rather, the test of the extent of interconnectedness is empirical: Are markets actually linked in fact, and if so, with what consequence for all markets so linked? We demonstrated in the last chapter that changes in the organization of retailing in the United States is directly related to changes in the composition of international trade between the United States, on the one hand, and South Korea and Taiwan, on the other. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Two decades of difficulty for the British and American cotton industries were followed by the outbreak of the Second World War, which did nothing to balk the trend of Lancashire's collapse or the shift of the United States cotton industry from North to South. The Lancashire cotton industry became far more automated in the 1960s, with the scrapping of redundant machinery, yet this did little to halt the inexorable decline of the industry. Accordingly, in the next 20 years Lancashire's demise was virtually complete, as Table 8.1 shows, with almost the last vestiges of a dying industry vanishing in the 1981 recession. In the United States, between 1950 and 1970, 300,000 textile jobs were lost in New England alone, whilst an increasingly capital-intensive industry, which was based upon multi-fibres, continued to develop in the South. In the 1970s and early 1980s, however, unemployment in the Southern states began to rise at an alarming rate and numerous businesses closed or were taken over (Gaventa and Smith 1991: 182). Nevertheless the cotton and related industries survived, albeit on a diminished scale and, by 1983, the United States had the distinction of being home to the world's most ‘productive’ textile industry. The shifting role of business communities has been inseparable from the evolution of cotton manufacturing from the eighteenth century. Similarly, in the second half of the twentieth century the decay of communities based upon cotton and the demise of industrial districts, deprived of their dynamism, is a reflection of the collapse of the industry. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite the dramatic expansion of United States cotton manufacturing in the late nineteenth century, Lancashire remained the home of the world's largest cotton industry before the First World War. Yet, during the war and afterwards the increased capacity and continued labour productivity growth in the United States meant that by 1924, the United States had overtaken Britain as the largest producer of cotton cloth (see Table 7.1). During the 1920s and more especially the 1930s, on the other hand, both industries encountered the increasing competitive threat of Japan at home and abroad. The Japanese share of world cotton textile exports outstripped Britain by 1933, a lead which she sustained throughout the 1930s, as Figures 7.1 and 7.2 demonstrate. By the outbreak of the First World War, despite common technological origins, the British and American cotton industries had developed along quite different trajectories. Distinctiveness in the experience of industrialisation, in government–industry relations, in commercial policy and in the characteristics of product and factor markets meant that the historical forces shaping business strategy were strikingly dissimilar. The sharpest contrast came in the product and market orientation of the two nations, with Britain having the world's most export-oriented cotton industry. On the other hand, efforts to penetrate the Far Eastern market had only marginally reduced the legendary reliance of the United States cotton industry on its domestic market. The divergent evolution of the two industries and the resultant contrasts in organisation and capabilities make the shared experience of difficulties and decay in the interwar period all the more remarkable – their explanation is one of the principal themes of this chapter. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The preceding four chapters have explored the forces which shaped the evolution of business attitudes and the emergence of networks in the British and American cotton industries before 1860. Their findings are summarised in Table 6.1 which demonstrates that, whilst sharing the common concerns of production, profitability and market penetration, businessmen on either side of the Atlantic often displayed differences in priorities, perceptions and behaviour. These were born of the varying social, political and economic forces to which they were subject, and in turn were translated into the culture of business. For example, the production-driven strategies, detected in much of the United States cotton industry, clearly only partly resulted from resource allocation. Rather they derived from a combination of collective approaches to community development traceable even to the colonial period, from a faith in the power of technology which was rarely contradicted by the workforce and the habitual transience of the workforce plus a confidence in a protected domestic market. Yet in Britain eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century infant industry protection against cheap colonial imports allowed the successful development of cotton manufacturing. However, the constraints of a small, but strongly differentiated domestic market, combined with overseas opportunities, brought with it greater market complexity than was then the case in America and significantly enhanced the relative power of mercantile groups, as opposed to manufacturers. This factor, combined with a need for cheap imported raw materials, a reliance on overseas markets for business expansion and the social and political forces which brought free trade, led to a shift in government policy in favour of liberalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Themes This book is an analysis of the long-term forces shaping the British and American cotton industries over two hundred years, from the eighteenth to the twentieth century. The choice of a very long-term perspective deliberately highlights both the continuities and changes in the forces shaping business behaviour and the evolution of business culture, which may be obscured when shorter historical periods are studied. Inevitably this means that this is a work of critical synthesis, which tries to make sense of general trends, rather than being based on an extensive use of primary sources, which are used instead to fill inevitable gaps in the secondary literature. This multidisciplinary study derives insight from management, political economy and industrial sociology as well as from the methodologies and empirical studies of business, economic and textile history. Contemporaries began commenting on the differences between cotton manufacturing in Britain and the United States during the second quarter of the nineteenth century. This began with an awareness that New England industrialists were producing cotton cloth in ways that were quite different from those found in Lancashire and with dissimilar social consequences. Attention has been particularly focused on the variations which occurred in organisation, technology and most particularly in labour productivity. Diverging experience, particularly from the late nineteenth century onwards, has been explained in terms of resource allocation, of relative product and factor market conditions, of differences in entrepreneurial energy and in institutional development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Introduction Most indigenous communities of the Venezuelan Andean region were located, by preference, in the fertile intermontane valleys, where the adoption of appropriate agricultural techniques made possible the development of stable population centers based upon intensive agriculture. Most became established between 1000 and 1500 AD, that is just before the arrival of the Spanish in America, a period in which the pre-Hispanic cultures of the Central Andes reached a comparatively high level with respect to agricultural technology, pottery-making, and ceremonial center construction, factors which significantly influenced the northern Andean area. The irrigation system used by the Indians of the Mérida region has suggested to some the possibility that they enjoyed a centralized administration and a special type of family structure upon which their agricultural economy depended. Whatever the specifics of the internal social structure of these native groups, the Spanish encountered a densely populated area with rich agricultural and labor resources, both attributes that attracted the attention of the conquerors. The arrival of the Spanish in this area brought about immediate modifications in the human landscape: it signified a reorganization of the Indian settlement structure after their population had been seriously affected by introduced diseases; it also witnessed the introduction of new crops and animals which also brought about significant changes in the physical environment. The encomiendas and land grants (mercedes de tierras) which derived from the rights of the conquerors rapidly became fundamental elements in the new socio-spatial formation of colonial Mérida. Under Crown authority new villages (pueblos de encomiendas, pueblos de naturales), pueblos de doctrina became established. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Introduction In the history of Latin America the study of city-based regions has received a good deal of attention. For example the historiography of the Guadalajara region provides an abundance of evidence in that regard. Such studies emphasize the ties that united the regional capital to its rural agrarian structures, the evolution of a regional credit market, and the flows of migrants and capital between the city and its dependent hinterland. Here, I shall extend the perspective of urban-focused regionalism to examine the characteristics of a very special type of migration to two urban centers: students attending colleges in Guadalajara (Mexico) and Lima (Peru). For Guadalajara the analysis will use data for the entire eighteenth century; for Lima, for the period 1587 to 1621. The students who migrated to the Colegio Seminario Tridentino del Señor San José of Guadalajara, and those of the Colegio de San Martín of Lima, will be analyzed in terms of their origins, their ages, and the date of their inscription. Although obviously limited in scope, this study may serve to assist our understanding of some of the reasons that explain the attractiveness of cities like Guadalajara and Lima for young creoles who migrated over long distances, as well as to more precisely monitor their migration patterns in time and space. Only by better understanding the motivations of migrants shall we be able to fully understand the evolution of population change in specific regions. Such a study might also assist in our understanding of the centralizing tendencies that characterized the colonial period, especially in the cases of Guadalajara and Lima; the migration of students should also allow us to at least partially measure the zone of influence of each of these centers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The urbanization of Latin America since the Second World War, much of it characterized by the migration of impoverished rural people to primate cities, has attracted a great deal of scholarly analysis, so much that influential hypotheses, such as the “culture of poverty” and “marginality, ” are periodically posited and tested against prevailing studies and that syntheses of the considerable literature are composed. Although studies of recent migration may attempt some sort of historical overview in their introductory chapters, their treatment is handicapped by several factors. The first is that there is relatively little literature on migration to major cities in Latin American history. While some excellent studies of aspects of migration do exist, they usually cover rural areas and towns and villages and emphasize the origins of marriage partners or movement back and forth between Indian villages or small towns and the surrounding hinterland. These subjects are certainly worthy of serious study, but neither in their findings nor in the implications do they suggest what we might expect to find in patterns of migration to the major cities. The second failing is an assumption that in the past as in the present the most important component of urban migration was that conducted by the rural poor. In fact, it constituted merely one aspect of a broader and long-maintained movement by elements from a variety of socioeconomic and occupational groups towards the large cities. Finally, these studies do not appreciate the extent to which modern-day migration represents the continuation of traditions and patterns determining who within the family migrates, when, to what destination, and what relationship the migrants maintain with those who do not move. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent works in historical demography have demonstrated that migration and geographical mobility were fundamental components of life in colonial Hispanic American society. Studies using vital registers to trace migration between parishes have revealed a record of mobility that was truly ubiquitous. In New Spain, among the isolated settlements of the periphery and throughout the more established towns and villages of the settled core, people frequently changed residence. In the colonial jurisdictions of Central America, migration was common. Towns were often abandoned as resources and locational advantages played out and movement into and out of the region remained constant. Similar patterns of mobility persisted at all scales throughout the pueblos and provinces of South America. Entire native communities were displaced while within the Hispanic cities of the empire, populations fluctuated widely and persistence rates remained low. In no part of the colonies, however, was geographical mobility as pronounced as it was in the mining regions, the centers of exploitation, settlement, and expansion. On the northern periphery of New Spain, where free labor was the rule and where the silver centers competed with each other for workers, migration was especially widespread. The purpose of this chapter is to uncover some basic patterns and relationships that characterized migration in this northern mining economy. After exploring the ecological basis and economic context for migration in the north, two key issues are examined: (1) the relationships between the patterns of development that mining centers followed and (2) the dimensions of the migration fields that formed around the centers; and the selective nature of migration as displayed in the socio-economic and demographic characteristics of migrants. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the publication of Rolando Mellafe's groundbreaking study on the importance of migration in the Viceroyalty of Peru, demographers have emphasized the significance of the city as a factor in colonial Latin American migration patterns. The city has figured prominently in various efforts to characterize general population trends and migrants have been important subgroups in analyses of the censuses of specific cities. Rather than emphasizing the role of the city in migration patterns, this study attempts to address the role of the migrant within the colonial city by utilizing a different data source: the conciertos de trabajo, or labor contracts, governing indigenous workers in seventeenth-century Cuzco. These conciertos yield a variety of data on job descriptions and distributions, periodic crises in the labor market, regional economic patterns, changing family relationships, and growing occupational identification. The detailed information from these valuable notarial documents adds a new and important dimension to the analysis of indigenous migration in colonial Peru. Although this study emphasizes migrations to the city of Cuzco, such migration did not take place in a vacuum. The city was also an important source for an urban-to-rural population outflow, as urban natives moved into depopulated lands in the countryside. Moreover, broader patterns of indigenous migration affected the provinces surrounding Cuzco. Migration within the bishopric of Cuzco varied dramatically according to regional labor trends and mita obligations, but much of that population movement involved short-scale relocation by individuals who remained within rural society. These various interrelated patterns of migration had a profound impact on the indigenous communities and played a major role in the formation of colonial society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]