Technological underdevelopment, strategies, politics and management structure :
[Thesis]
Haraguchi, Nobuya.
a case study of the Thai automobile industry
School of Oriental and African Studies (University of London)
2002
Ph.D.
School of Oriental and African Studies (University of London)
2002
This thesis tried to unravel the causes of the technological underdevelopmentof the Thai automobile industry by examining the institutions, the actors and theirinteraction. The principal characteristic of each actor was a product of where it camefrom, when it developed, and how it adapted to· historical events. Having only evolvedslowly, these characteristics have conditioned the behaviour of the actors - thestrategies of multinational corporations, the policies of the Thai government and themanagement structures of Thai firms - during the last 40 years of the 20th century.The minimal intervention of the Thai government helped promote the activitiesof multinational corporations, and they brought wide-ranging manufacturing know-howto Thailand. On the one hand, the relatively unfettered operation of multinationalcorporations was a driving force in the quantitative expansion of the automobileindustry. On the other hand, this pattern of development was not conducive to thecreation of a linkage between the technologically superior foreign [ums and local rums,and the promotion of learning activities in the latter. The situation was also aggravatedby the management structure of local firms and their lack of effort to upgradetechnology under the environment of the existence of the only weak market pressure.However, the technological underdevelopment cannot be simply attributed tosome aspects of one or all of these actors. A case study of the Thai automobileindustry suggested we could understand the root causes of the underdevelopment onlyby examining how the interaction of the actors set a certain path of technologicaldevelopment and how their behaviour was conditioned by their underlyingcharacteristics.
Internal and EU commerce & consumer affairs
Haraguchi, Nobuya.
School of Oriental and African Studies (University of London)