Remapping East Asia: The Construction of a Region (Cornell Studies in Political Economy Series)
Author: T J Pempel
An overarching ambiguity characterizes East Asia today. The region has at least a centurylong history of internal divisiveness, war, and conflict, and it remains the site of several nettlesome territorial disputes. However, a mixture of complex and often competing agents and processes has been knitting together various segments of East Asia. In Remapping East Asia, T. J. Pempel suggests that the region is ripe for cooperation rather than rivalry and that recent "regionbuilding" developments in East Asia have had a substantial cumulative effect on the broader canvas of international politics.This collection is about the people, processes, and institutions behind that regionbuilding. In it, experts on the area take a broad approach to the dynamics and implications of regionalism. Instead of limiting their focus to security matters, they extend their discussions to topics as diverse as the mercurial nature of Japan's leadership role in the region, Southeast Asian business networks, the war on terrorism in Asia, and the political economy of environmental regionalism. Throughout, they show how nationstates, corporations, and problemspecific coalitions have furthered regional cohesion not only by establishing formal institutions, but also by operating informally, semiformally, or even secretly.
Author Bio: T. J. Pempel is Director of the Institute of East Asian Studies and Professor of Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author or editor of many books, including Regime Shift: Comparative Dynamics of the Japanese Political Economy and The Politics of the Asian Economic Crisis (both from Cornell).
Foreign Affairs
This volume brings a variety of perspectives to the emergence of East Asian regionalism. Objective factors would suggest that East Asia lacks the prerequisites for regional cohesion, for it is characterized by great cultural and religious diversity, both among the countries and within them. Yet regional institutions and practices have successfully emerged and matured. State-level cooperation has produced institutions such as the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) and Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC), and dynamic regionalization by nongovernmental social and economic networks has driven other regional developments. Meanwhile, the advance of East Asian regionalism has made leaders more secure about their role in world politics. In December 2005, Malaysian Prime Minister Abdullah Badawi will chair a meeting of the ten ASEAN states plus Japan, China, and South Korea to discuss the formation of a new East Asian community — a development clearly foreseen by this book's authors.
Book review: Reporting Vietnam or Consumer Driven Health Care
Strategic Human Resources: Frameworks for General Managers
Author: James N Baron
Human Resources are the most important resource that a firm commands and should be regarded as capital, a factor of production in which managers invest today in order to realize future profits. This book deals with the strategic implications of Human Resource Management as an important strategic asset and emphasizes its importance within the overall strategy of the firm. The book covers issues such as job design, evaluation, recruitment, training, career concern, and outsourcing and downsizing. The linkage between the various pieces of HRM policy are stressed and how the policies are related to management issues such as TQM, just-in-time manufacturing, and others. The book is aimed at the general manager, not the HRM practitioner and it stresses conceptual frameworks, not procedural methodology.
Table of Contents:
| Ch. 1 | Introduction | 1 |
| Ch. 2 | The Five Factors | 16 |
| Ch. 3 | Consistent HR Practices: The Whole Can Be More than the Sum of the Parts | 38 |
| Ch. 4 | Employment and Economics | 62 |
| Ch. 5 | Employment as a Social Relation | 95 |
| Ch. 6 | Voice: Unions and Other Forms of Employee Representation | 118 |
| Ch. 7 | Employment, Society, and the Law | 153 |
| Ch. 8 | Internal Labor Markets | 167 |
| Ch. 9 | High-Commitment HRM | 189 |
| Ch. 10 | Performance Evaluation | 210 |
| Ch. 11 | Pay for Performance | 243 |
| Ch. 12 | Compensation Systems: Forms, Bases, and Distribution of Rewards | 284 |
| Ch. 13 | Job Design | 313 |
| Ch. 14 | Staffing and Recruitment | 338 |
| Ch. 15 | Training | 369 |
| Ch. 16 | Promotion and Career Concerns | 404 |
| Ch. 17 | Downsizing | 421 |
| Ch. 18 | Outsourcing | 446 |
| Ch. 19 | HRM in Emerging Companies | 471 |
| Ch. 20 | Organizing HR | 503 |
| App. A | Transaction Cost Economics | 537 |
| App. B | Reciprocity and Reputation in Repeated Interactions | 548 |
| App. C | Agency Theory | 566 |
| App. D | Adverse Selection and Market Signaling | 577 |
| Index | 587 |
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