Since 1998, I have been teaching a course called The Business Environment: Comparative and International Perspectives, at Birkbeck College, University of London. The course is designed for students are doing a master’s degree in International Business. It covers a range of topics: international political economy, comparative political economy, the history of modern industry and big business, and e economic development.
For me, teaching the course has provided an opportunity to return to topics I had studied in the past. My BS, at the University of California at Berkeley, was in the Political Economy of Natural Resources. This exposed me to development, agricultural, and environmental economics, as well as a good bit of history. While studying for that degree, and for several years afterwards, I had the opportunity to work in a number of management positions in a large cooperative providing housing and meals for university students, to serve as a director of other consumer cooperatives in grocery retailing and wholesaling, and to work as a management consultant for both housing and grocery cooperatives. In addition to acquainting me with those particular lines of business and with the workings of cooperatives, this experience instilled an interest in the workings of business generally – in problems of coordination and control, and problems of governance. I did my PhD in the Department of Economics at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Like my first degree, this combined a training in formal economics with strong doses of political economy and history. My thesis dealt with CEO pay and corporate takeovers, and this led me to a two-year post-doctoral position at the Centre for Business Research in Cambridge, England. Following that, I moved to what was then the new Department of Management at Birkbeck.
Teaching the course on the business environment gave me the opportunity to keep reading on topics that were, at the time, outside of my area of research. One is international political economy, which is at the intersection of studies of international relations (a specialism within political science), international economics (ditto, economics), and international business (that part of business studies that focuses on the multi-national corporation). Another, comparative political economy, studies not relations between countries but differences between them: specifically, differences in political and social institutions, business systems, methods of production, and international product specialization among the world’s industrial countries. Like international political economy, comparative political economy operates on a border between economics, political science, sociology and business studies. A third, the study of the relationships between companies within specialized agglomerations (clusters, or industrial districts) is studied in geography, business studies, and other social sciences. A fourth, development studies, deals with problems of poorer countries as they become richer (or as they fail to become rich), and operates similarly across academic disciplines. All three of these areas of study delve into questions of change in institutions, business organization and technology, and in doing so all three draw on historical as well as contemporary studies.
To approach the study of today’s world from so many angles – international, comparative, spatial, and historical; market relationships, the internal organization of business enterprises, social and political institutions; economic, political, geographical and sociological theory – is an ambitious undertaking. Sometimes it may seem to be biting off more than one can chew: many students have thought so while studying it, and I have certainly felt that way while turning it into a book. In the end I think it is digestible; I would like to say delicious, but that is for you, dear reader, to judge. The proof of the pudding – and this book is a rich, variegated, colossal pudding in the tradition of the English trifle – is in the eating.