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Organizational learning continues to be an important issue for all types of firms. Managerial accounts of organizational learning are in high demand; for example, Senge’s The Fifth Discipline (Senge, 1990a) has sold over 500,000 copies in the U.S. Studies exploring the nature of knowledge creation, intellectual capital, and knowledge management have been on the rise, with recent papers being published for academics (McElroy, 2000; Nahapiet & Ghoshal, 1998; Nonaka, 1994), and practitioners (Brown & Duguid, 1998; Fryer, 1999). According to some experts, the ability to transform information into knowledge through organizational learning is a critical success factor for all businesses in the current knowledge-based economy (Davis & Botkin, 1994; Lei, Slocum & Pitts, 1999).

Performance of the multinational firm in the special conditions of emerging market economies has become a critical issue in business research. This is because the special conditions of these economies, such as dynamism coupled with uncertainty, rapid change in the structures of firms and economic institutions along with firm and government inertia, and spells of economic growth often simultaneous with phases of deterioration, have all made the measurement of firm performance next to impossible. This chapter develops a conceptual framework and measures that might be used in such performance assessment. It also reports findings from research conducted on multinational companies operating in Turkey. These findings indicate interesting conceptual and managerial implications about competitive marketing, organizational values, and strategy formulation in emerging economy contexts such as Turkey.

This chapter uses new data sets to analyze labor market integration between 1882 and 1936 in an area of Asia stretching from South India to Southeastern China and encompassing the three Southeast Asian countries of Burma, Malaya, and Thailand. We find that by the late nineteenth century, globalization, of which a principal feature was the mass migration of Indians and Chinese to Southeast Asia, gave rise to both an integrated Asian labor market and a period of real wage convergence. Integration did not, however, extend beyond Asia to include core industrial countries. Asian and core areas, in contrast to globally integrated commodity markets, showed divergent trends in unskilled real wages.