ASIAN FINANCIAL CRISIS-REGIONAL CAPITULATION OR RE-DIRECTION?, THE

THE ASIAN FINANCIAL CRISIS-REGIONAL CAPITULATION OR RE-DIRECTION?

McKee, David L., Garner, Don E., and McKee, Yosra AbuAmara. Crisis, Recovery, and the Role of Accounting Firms in the Pacific Basin. Westport, CT: Quorum Books, 2002.

Richter, Frank-Jiirgen. Redesigning Asian Business. Westport, CT: Quorum Books, 2002.

Richter, Frank-Jurgen (ed.). The Asian Economic Catharsis: How Asian Firms Bounce Back from Crisis. Westport, CT: Quorum Books, 2000.

July 2, 1997 is widely cited as the start date of East and Southeast Asia's financial crisis, when the Bank of Thailand had exhausted its foreign currency reserves in a futile attempt to maintain the then fixed baht-dollar exchange rate. The ensuing lack of international investor confidence in this once "miracle" economy produced panic among international lenders of shortterm deposits. Capital flight, estimated at over $340 billion by the first half of 1999 (Woo, Sachs, Schwab 49), generated a devolutionary multiplier effect that caused economies to shrink, businesses to go bankrupt and banks to become insolvent, with a compounding of attendant social ills.

With the publication of the following three "aftermath" titles by Quorum Books, a 1000+ list organization that underwrites books in business and economics, the publishing industry has taken another turn in Asian reportage and analysis. Corporate managements that were once lauded and copied throughout the Western world became "non-transparent" entities run by "crony capitalists". The media propensity for the grandiose and definitive-once upon a time to the esteem of Asian economies and now to their derision-is no less evident in these three works, but there are some salient treatments of the topic.

The Asian Economic Catharsis: How Asian Firms Bounce Backfrom Crisis ("Catharsis"), edited by Frank-Jurgen Richter, is a compilation of papers from two disciplinary threads-managerial economics and cultural anthropology-that are not woven together. Treatment of the subject is occasionally practitioner-oriented, as in the case of the chapters written by international business consultants, on the one hand, and more pedantic, though accessible, chapters written by academics, on the other. Nevertheless, for those disciplinary hybrids among us who delight at the prospect of intellectual rigor finding a niche in the popular press, this book delivers a diversity of views and methods. Some of the papers, particularly those in section II, "Organizational Restructuring and the Management of the Firm", extend the international coverage in managerial economics or organizational behavior classrooms. Country consultants, school counselors, and others who attempt to make East-West personal interactions productive will appreciate the "transferable, reciprocal, intangible, utilitarian, and personal" meanings of guanxi, or "social capital" in Chinese, found in "Venturing Jointly: Oriental and Occidental Perceptions" by John Kidd (p. 135), for example. Moreover, there is no shortage of country expertise among its 19 contributing authors.

Redesigning Asian Business ("Redesigning") by Frank-Jurgen Richter (2002) synthesizes some of the insights of his edited work into an expansion on the paradigm of the emergent "hybrid" organization in Asia, which does not copy wholesale the "Anglo-Saxon" model, but neither does it overborrow, over-extend its operations, nor continue to ignore shareholders, like prototypical Asian firms. Western firms that picked up bargains in assets, from Allianz Insurance to General Motors, Pfizer Corporation, Volvo and others, will also correspondingly change. Richter urges that they not become Confucian, but rather that they update their learning through selective adoption of Asian management practices. He shows how Asian commonalities, such as the primacy of relationships, have already infiltrated Occidental culture with, e.g., the notion of "relationship" banking, a trend that will likely continue. As such, the title of this work might best be changed to Redesigning World Business.

Richter suggests that it is indeed possible that the crisis led to restructurings and realignments that will make Asian businesses all the more competitive going forward; in this sense, the crisis may have been "cathartic"-the word chosen for the title of his edited volume. In turn, the author examines the pre- and post-event industrial groupings and speculates on their ultimate configuration. The Japanese keiretsu, Korean chaebol, overseas Chinese business groups, and managers in Mainland China, each merit their own chapter coverage. A short chapter on "Women and Asian Management" makes a mildly persuasive argument for women's increasing entrepreneurial drive, putatively an outcome of limitations in their husband's careers. Frequently, in discussions on globalization, the costs that women bear (e.g., provision of more market services, e.g., health care, at home rather than through doctor's visits) are conveniently externalized, and thus ignored in the corporate business press (Ellwood 106). Here, this tribute to Women Studies, one-sided though it may be, shows another facet of accommodation and change in the region.