Much of our existing knowledge about business and management has evolved in the West, but the emergence of Asian firms as major players in the world economy is challenging business and management scholars to widen their focus.

Asia represents a major source of variations in structure, behaviour and context - from cultural, institutional and political to social and economic. This affords new opportunities for testing existing theories of business and management and for driving the development of new ones. Japan has already provided a precedent for this, with much of the current state of the art in technology and operations management resting on Japanese management foundations.

This major work presents a collection of seminal works on Asian business and management, carefully chosen by the editor on the basis of impact and expert nominations.

The set consolidates key contributions from diverse sources and organizes articles by themes to enable better understanding of key areas. The editor's introduction reviews the included articles and identifies major streams of research within each theme.

Volume One: Alliances, Joint Ventures

Volume Two: Business Groups; Corporate Governance

Volume Three: Context and Politics

Volume Four: Culture

Volume Five: Entry

Volume Six: General Reviews, Perspectives, Methodology; Outward Foreign Direct Investment

Volume Seven: HRM

Volume Eight: Networks, Trust

This major reference work includes a foreword by Ron Dore - a British sociologist specialising in Japanese economy and society and the comparative study of types of capitalism. He is an associate of the Centre for Economic Performance at the London School of Economics and is a fellow of the British Academy, the Japan Academy, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. The citation for his eminent scholar award from the Academy of International Business describes him as "an outstanding scholar whose deep understanding of the empirical phenomena he studies and ability to build on it to develop theoretical contributions are highly respected not only by sociologists but also by economists, anthropologists, historians, and comparative business systems scholar".