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Strategic Management in Developing Countries by James E. Austin and Tomas O. Kohn. New York: Free Press, 1990, 691 pp., $40.00, cloth [ISBN: 0-02-901105-1].
Reviewed by Frances M. Amatucci, Salem State College, MA
James E. Austin's Strategic Management in Developing Countries is well worth careful consideration for courses related to international strategy, international business or a separate stand-alone elective. The author, in collaboration with Tomas 0. Kohn, presents a persuasive argument for the relevance and value of a casebook focused on firms operating in less developed countries (LDCs.) The primary objectives of the book are to: (1) increase understanding of LDCs and their similarities and differences and, (2) enable readers to systematically evaluate business problems in this context through strategic management activities.
The importance of learning how to navigate in the turbulent waters of LDC environments is clearly evident-four billion people who occupy two-thirds of the world's surface area and who present an exponential growth in demand for products and services. Typically, LDCs display relatively lower levels of economic and industrial development and are located in Africa, Asia or Latin America. But the author emphasizes they are actually a very diverse lot and exhibit a wide range of geographic attributes, sociocultural characteristics, levels of economic growth and development, industrial structure and resource endowment, political and economic stability, and quality of life.
This casebook may be used in conjunction with an earlier book, Management in Developing Countries: Strategic Analysis and Operating Techniques, which introduced Austin's Environmental Analysis Framework (EAF) in greater detail. This field-tested analytic tool was developed to enable managers in LDCs to systematically conduct strategic environmental analysis preceding the issue identification and strategy formulation stages of strategic management activities. Since Strategic Management in Developing Countries is primarily a casebook, the EAF is summarized briefly, but sufficiently, for application in the cases. Initially, it involves evaluation of the economic, political, cultural, and demographic environmental sectors that commonly have been called "societal/general environment" or "macroenvironment" in popular strategic...