Management Geography: Asian Perspectives Focusing on Japan and Surrounding Regions

Management geography explores the spatial characteristics of management-related issues, especially of firms. This book discusses management geography in Japan and other Asian countries from Asian perspectives. The field has made significant contributions to the global economy but has not been deeply investigated in English-language geographical literature to date. The book addresses the following critical questions:

• What kinds of challenges do multinational corporations in Japan and other Asian countries face?
• How are managerial actors in multinational enterprises (MNEs) embracing boundary-spanning activities in a global context?
• How do firms and related entities cultivate business pipelines and ’buzz’ within and beyond local regions?
• How do actors in Japanese MNEs, small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) and related institutions embed various managerial processes at overseas locations?

This book consists of two parts: Part I discusses the application and roles of Japanese and international managerial practices in the globalizing world. Part II examines changing business communities in the industrial and rural spaces of East Asia, focusing primarily on Japan and China. This work will interest readers in a wide range of fields, including geography, management studies, economics, urban planning and sociology. The book is also suitable for upper-level undergraduate students and graduate students in geography, management studies and related fields.

Atsushi Taira is a Professor of Human Geography at Kagawa University, Japan. He obtained his BA from Waseda University, and his MA and PhD from the University of Tsukuba. He also studied at the University of Wisconsin-Madison during his PhD program. His early research interests were in cultural and social geography. His work on the transformation of the urban community in downtown Tokyo was published in the Geographical Review of Japan. He then turned his interest towards economic geography. His main themes are the locational strategies of Japanese-affiliated firms in developed and developing countries, the transformation of local industrial clusters, and glocal strategies of small- and medium-sized firms located outside the major metropolitan areas. His articles have been published in books and in international academic journals such as Geographical Journal, Geographical Review of Japan and Annals of the Japan Association of Economic Geographers. He currently is a steering committee member of the Commission of Local and Regional Development of the International Geographical Union and a co-chair of the Association of Japanese Geographers research group of spaces of international economy and management with Rolf D. Schlunze and other young scholars.

Rolf D. Schlunze holds a professorship for intercultural management at Ritsumeikan University, Japan. To our knowledge, he was the first German geographer to receive his Ph.D. from the University of Tokyo. His doctoral thesis was published in the book series of Wirtschaftsgeographie from LIT Verlag. Honoured with awards by the European Commission, he conducted his post-doctoral research based at universities in the UK and Japan. For almost two decades, his postdoc research focused on the hybridization of managerial systems and subjects sponsored by the Japanese government, and his work regarding the embeddedness of the hybrid factory and the hybrid manager has been published in peer reviewed journals. He has been promoting the agenda of management geography for more than a decade at academic associations such as the Association of American Geographers (AAG), Association of Japanese Geographers (AJG), Euro-Asia Management Studies Association (EAMSA) and Global Conference of Economic Geographers (GCEG). Via the ManGeo Research Group website, he provides a new platform for further dissemination of the concept of management geography especially aimed at young economic geographers and scholars of international business and adjacent disciplines.