Asia Research Community

Introduction

The manufacturing capacity of the world has shifted to Asia, in particular China. Moreover, as we have long come to associate China with an astounding growth rate, India and Indonesia are expected to surpass China in growth within foreseeable future. In short a global change of historic proportions is currently taking place. This entails new and great opportunities for the Danish business community, in the form of exports, offshoring of productions, and in the planning of the global production chain for enterprises. At the same time, the superiority of the Anglo-Saxon model of economic organization and corporate governance is drawn into question by Asian forms of economic organization and management. The era of the Washington Consensus seems to be over and it remains to be seen whether a new global consensus will emerge or whether more particularized and culturally specific models will emerge based on regional patterns of cooperation and exchange. In Asia, the drivers of this process will not only be the emerging economies of China, India and the region of Southeast Asia, especially Indonesia. Japans industrial and technological capacity as well as large overseas investments will continue to play a major role.

ARC is a specialized research group within Copenhagen Business School offering high-quality research on important aspects of the tectonic shifts in the global economy and the rise of Asia. The strength of our community is its broad range of disciplines and geographical competence. This is a core competence which sets ARC apart from research centers in Asian Studies in Europe and provides the basis for high-quality interdisciplinary research. We aim to undertake relevant research on challenges within the community’s particular areas of strengths on China, India, Japan, the Koreas and the region of Southeast Asia, especially Vietnam, Malaysia and Indonesia.

ARC strives to provide up-to-date research and reliable analysis of current political, social, economic and business developments to understand and come to grips with the implications of the immense changes in the Asian region. Furthermore, we aspire to maintain CBS as a key research community for Asian studies in the Nordic region.

To do this we:

• Deepen and upgrade Asia-related research activities at CBS as a whole and establish research projects and networks focusing on Asia, which have international reach and impact.
• Contribute with research based educational inputs to the International Business in Asia (BSc.) Program and introduce relevant Asia-related materials in other courses at CBS, including Executive Education.
• Disseminate our results to the international research community, to the business world and to the public.
   

Research

The research undertaken by ARC falls broadly within four geographical areas. These are:
•    China
•    India
•    East Asia (Japan and the Koreas)
•    Southeast Asia

However, these geographical areas do not function as boundaries, as research initiatives within each of these areas are also oriented towards regional and comparative contexts. ARC emphasizes its interdisciplinary approaches to studying Asian countries, regions, and issues that link them to each other and the global system.  The community values the synergies and inspiration created by visiting scholars from especially Asia and will encourage exchange and visiting arrangement with collaborating research institutions.
It is our ambition to integrate our different research projects, both collective and individual research projects, to form a coherent but not monolithic research community. It is the aim of the community that a majority of our research initiatives operate within the following key areas: changing state-business relations in Asia and their embeddedness in specific political, cultural and economic contexts.  This includes ownership structures, state preferential policies in the form of favorable bank loans and hidden subsidies, the political framework including party-state-business relations in state capitalist countries, indigenous forms of Asian management, etc.