State strategy, firm strategy, and the strategic alliance: Evidence from United States-Asian collaboration in commercial aircraft manufacturing (Japan, China, Korea)

Why in recent years have US prime manufacturers of commercial aircraft sought to include Asian subcontractors in more and more closely integrated strategic alliances? Two competing explanations dominate the academic and policy debates surrounding these collaborative partnerships. The first explanation argues that the reason for this phenomenon is to be found in the increasing “globalization” of international business—itself driven by the rapidly rising cost and risk of high-technology development and production. From this point of view, collaboration is undertaken voluntarily by firms in an effort to adapt to changes in the international business environment. The second approach is a more traditional, state-level explanation which maintains that the explanation for these alliances lies in the “technology for market access” regimes imposed red by host governments on foreign corporations. In this conception, collaboration is undertaken to satisfy host country demands for offsets and lucrative technology transfer.; These competing approaches are evaluated by examining collaborative agreements between US prime manufacturers and their Japanese, Chinese, and South Korean partners. An analysis of the cases, however, shows that there is insufficient evidence to clearly support one explanation over the other. Instead, all of the cases show traces of both approaches simultaneously. In response to these findings, a more “contingent-generalizable” approach is offered to try and identify the conditions under which collaboration will be relatively more “mandatory” and those under which it will be relatively more “voluntary” in nature. The cases themselves are then placed along a sliding scale in which “mandatory” and “voluntary” are identified as ideal types rather than realistic descriptions of international collaboration in their own right. Furthermore, two additional variables not considered by either approach—host country market size and geopolitics—are shown to have a significant intervening effect on observed outcomes.; Following the comparative case study, this contingent explanation is considered in light of the US policy debate on offsets in aerospace trade. In the final chapter, it is argued that ultimately, the Asian economic crisis may have the de facto effect of pushing the collaborative environment closer to the “voluntary” end of the spectrum as Asian host states seek to attract foreign capital by liberalizing market access and foreign ownership requirements.