Industries and Global Competition is the outcome of two international research projects that involved a large number of leading business historians from several countries. It is often said that the transnational and comparative perspective is important; nonetheless, in practice, it is not easy to carry out in-depth comparative work. Therefore, international collaboration is fruitful—as evidenced by this edited volume.
The overarching goal of the book is to analyze the ways in which globalization has affected industries in developed economies over a long period and the strategies that individual firms in certain industries have developed to overcome challenges from globalization, growing international competition, and structural transformations. A particular focus is on internationalization strategies.
The book takes an industry history perspective; that is, the authors do not primarily study individual firms, although case studies and some big multinationals are covered, but instead look at industries. The contributions examine not only manufacturing industries that are common in studies of global economic transformation, such as textiles and fashion, pulp and paper, and the shipping industry, but also industries less often addressed in international business history, including the watch industry, publishing industry, and smaller firms with specific competencies.
The authors analyze the ways these industries adapted to change, the strategies they adopted, and the reasons these strategies differed. There is a particular focus on localization strategies: Did increasing global competition demand that the firms increasingly “go global” themselves? This is an interesting and very timely topic. The role of space and place in industrial transformation is increasingly finding itself on scholars’ agendas in economic history research. One point of departure in this book is that an industry's specificity is significant with respect to its location strategies.
As the book's focus is primarily on industries, one important question that it needs to address is the changing boundaries of an industry. How do we define an industry, when structural change occurs? Moreover, as Bram Bouwens and Pierre-Yves Donzé discuss in the concluding chapter, the geographical boundaries of an industry change with international expansion.
The book is divided into three sections, based on the strategic choices of these industries. The first section, “FDI and Global Competition,” focuses primarily on multinational firms (MNFs). Nonetheless, these MNFs can be seen as representing specific industries. These large multinational enterprises opted for international strategies to remain competitive. The second section, “Localized Knowledge as a Lasting Competitive Advantage,” discusses industries that remained tied to the local environment from which they emerged, but succeeded in remaining competitive because of localized special competencies. Nonetheless, as is shown, their success was often dependent on, for example, state actions, often in the form of institutional transformations.
The third section, “Shifts in Global Value Chains,” investigates industries that adopted an outsourcing and value chain strategy. Here one finds many traditional industries from the internationalization literature, such as pulp and paper and the textile and garment industries, but also a smaller and highly specialized industry, namely the watch industry. Aside from the watch industry, these industries did not bring about any radical innovations; instead, outsourcing and the building of value chains were the core strategies used in resilience and maintaining competitiveness.
The individual chapters are based on in-depth research and each one provides interesting and valuable insights into an industry (firm), its transformation, and its strategic choice with respect to localization issues. While the “usual suspects,” like technological transformation, are often identified as the key driving forces of change, the role of institutional changes and the state is also emphasized.
Moreover, the complexity and variations in the development of the strategies are well described and, as is emphasized in the concluding chapter, many industries were both resilient and adaptable, although in different ways and by means of different strategies in different circumstances.
The chapters are written by leading business history scholars and overall the essays are of high quality. The book provides strong evidence that business historians can combine a strong empirical (and historical) approach with theoretical insights, while at the same time taking into account both national features and global development trends. Personally, I found the section on localized knowledge the most interesting—but this is a purely subjective view. The very flexible strategies toward internationalization in the dredging, publishing, and specialty chemicals industries, less frequently covered in the international business history literature, was illuminating to read. For example, the extremely interesting chapter by Nuria Puig and María Fernández-Moya addresses the case of the publishing industry, which experienced quite specific market conditions during the postwar decades, combined with ways of doing business quite different from manufacturing.
Of course, one can always raise some criticism. First, while forming a quite coherent book in terms of both topics and themes, the chapters do not refer to one another to any great extent. Having compiled edited volumes myself, I recognize that this problem is common and often a result of a shortage of time in the publication process. Nonetheless, both the introductory and the concluding chapters offer insightful syntheses of the individual chapters. The introduction, authored by Takafumi Kurosawa, is a thorough and thoughtful overview of the core questions and themes in the book. The concluding chapter, authored by the two other editors (Bouwens and Donzé), provides clear general conclusions and answers.
Small errors appear here and there that a tight copyediting process would have dealt with. However, apart from common printing errors, some more unfortunate lapses can be found. For instance, in the text of the pulp and paper chapter, the export-to-production ratio for Finland and Sweden is mixed up with the self-sufficiency ratio (both are correct in table 2). Nonetheless, the errors are few and do not disturb the reader.
Another question is of the coverage of countries, that is, mainly western European countries, Japan, and Canada. This can be explained by the contributors. When authors take a truly global perspective on industry, other regions and countries will be covered. Moreover, as we all know, not everything can be included in one book. Overall, the book can provide a starting platform for further discussions and comparisons by scholars in other regions.
The final words need to be spent on outlooks. The book starts with concerns of a growing deglobalization trend, primarily originating in increasing international political instability. Elsewhere, the “weak signals” of increasing relocation, and even home or near sourcing, of production are increasingly discussed. “Old” industries—for example, the garment industry—are gradually moving parts of their production back to Europe. The explanations for this new trend are many: economic (changing consumer demand, a growing need to be near the markets) and technological (new means of production, e.g., artificial intelligence), but also political and related to sustainability. It is too early to know whether a transformative shift in this respect will occur over the decades to come, but if this is the case, it is safe to say that industry studies will be fruitful again when seeking answers to new shifts. The book is indeed a timely volume worth reading not only by scholars interested in international business history, but also by those interested in both the past and the future of the global economy.
