and along with this a pronounced flexibility to convert the firm from one
product or service to another. The exemplary instance is Hong Kong.- Coordinated industrial district business systems exhibit greater links
between competing firms and/or in the industrial chain, and across sec-
tors. Economic coordination is more geared to long-term perspectives,
and cooperation, commitment and flexibility are emphasized in the
sphere of work relations and management. But economic coordination
is not necessarily achieved via trade unions. Examples are Italian indus-
trial districts or other regional districts in European countries. - Compartmentalizedbusiness systems feature large enterprises which integrate
activities between sectors and in the industrial chain, also through share-
holdings, but there is little cooperation between firms, and in both com-
modity and labor markets, more adversarial competition or confrontation
abounds. Owner control is exercised at arm’s length, through financial mar-
kets and shareholding. Firms are islands of authoritative control in a sea of
market competition. This mainly occurs in Anglophone economies and
societies, i.e. countries which have been part, colonies or dependent territo-
ries of the UK and populated more extensively by European immigrants. - State organizedbusiness systems may be more or less socialist, but they
are in both cases dependent on state coordination and support, to
integrate across and within production chains and arrange corporate
governance. Where state organization occurs in a capitalist order, it
may even entrench family ownership of firms, through the support it
extends. Prominent examples are France in Europe and Korea in Asia. - Collaborativebusiness systems depend on substantial associative coordina-
tion (through industrial, employer and employee association and quasi-
government of the economic order by semi-private organizations such as
chambers). In such societies, credit financing of enterprises, alliances of
share ownership rather than dispersed ownership, long-term interests,
and generation of relative trust between actors of different types tend to
reinforce each other. Prominent examples are to be found in Western
Continental Europe, in both German-speaking countries and Scandinavia. - Highly coordinatedbusiness systems have alliance forms of owner control
and, in addition, extensive alliances between large companies, which
usually are conglomerates, and a differentiated chain of suppliers.
Employer–employee interdependence is high, and a great part of the
workforce is integrated into the enterprise in a more stable way. Japan is
the model example for this.
Such a typology leads to further explanations of interaction between the
dimensions of business systems (see Whitley 2002 and other literature quoted
therein, by the same author and others). Our comparison of France and Germany
130 International Human Resource Management