China is poised to gain global importance as a growth engine for the world economy on a par with Europe and the USA. Japanese multinational enterprises are increasingly active in relocating to China their R&D and capital- and knowledge-intensive production for both export-platform and target market reasons. It is at the juncture of the growing impact of China-related activities of Japanese corporations on the transformation of Japanese management philosophies, on the one hand, and the transformation of the Japanese economy more generally, on the other, that this book is situated.

As Japanese corporations re-align activities to increasingly accommodate the growing importance of China as a business location, inter-regional expansion will integrate more deeply the Chinese economy within their global strategies, business structures and decision-taking. By presenting current research and thinking on the significance of corporate Japan's growing engagement with China, the book explores the following immanent questions: What is China's future position in the global corporate activities of Japanese firms? How has China's investment profile changed and how and with what purpose do Japanese firms enforce their Chinese presence? The book sheds light on the implications for European businesses and policy-makers of the consequences of deepening integration of these two economic powerhouses.

Once a purely sociological concept, social capital has become a tool of economics along the lines of human capital. In the process, according to the contributors of these six papers, social capital has taken on empirical qualities that make it self-contradictory. They understand social capital to be primarily a social phenomenon residing in human relationships. They also hold that social capital generates costs as well as benefits. They describe the phenomenon and how it behaves, comment upon its use and misuse in economics, examine how social capital relates to institutions and trust, and reconstruct its links with entrepreneurship. Studies here measure the phenomenon in the UK, Sweden, Vietnam and Ethiopia, and together the collection supports a new social economic theory of social capital. This material was previously published as a special issue of The Review of Social Economy. Annotation ©2008 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

This book challenges the mainstream conception of social capital as an individual resource. In its place it offers an understanding of social capital as a social phenomenon, residing in human relationships.