East Asia

Asia is the largest continent in the world, for a long time it has been considered as the Far East, but it is just a European appreciation because it is actually the close west if we look from America.

Asia is really extensive and for that reason we are going to focus this part of the blog in the eastern part of the continent that includes: China, Hong Kong, Japan, Macau, Mongolia, North Korea, South Korea, and Taiwan.

This region is known for its culture that includes some similar aspects such as religion (most of the countries practices Buddhism, Confucianism (not a religion), Taoism, and Shinto). The history of the region is pretty similar in all he countries; it includes a lot of invasions from other countries inside the region and from other parts of the world. Another characteristic important for the region is the fast development process in the last century, if we take into account that some years ago they were colonies.

For this topic we are going to focus in South Korea that could be considered as the faster in the developing process in the region, even though Japan is one of the largest economies in the world, the fast growing of Korea makes us get interested in this country.

South Korea is a small country placed in the Korean peninsula, is rich in culture and history because of all the things that have happened in this territory like different wars, invasions and some more.

South Korea is also considered as a center of services for the international business, also is one of the world´s factories, with the production of a lot of technological products and other, coping the model from the Japanese production system.

Samsung is a Korean company and is the perfect example of the Korean economy; it is a “Chaebol”, which consist in a conglomerate of enterprises that manages almost everything in the country. The Samsung group is known worldwide and represents the 15% of the South Korean GDP (according to the slides presented in class by: Johan Mejia Saenz and Carlos Torres Muskus).

The Chaebol model was taken from the Japanese system applied in the 60´s after the Second World War.

Bibliography:

1. slides presented in class by: Johan Mejia Saenz and Carlos Torres Muskus

2. http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corea_del_Sur

Answer

The Japanese and the Korean management styles are very similar because we could say that the second one was copied from the first one, they have the same bases and they both were very helpful for the development and the growing of the two countries, but they have some differences as well, even though they started from the same base, they have had to assume different changes in order to get adapted to the culture and make the process easier for each country, as we have been saying, there aren´t two equal countries, fir this reason what works in some place could not be so productive in another.

As some similarities we could mention some aspects as the cultural heritage (Confucianism, Buddhism) and other historical aspects that make the systems look alike.

For the differences we are going to make a comparison box in where we are going to include all the most relevant aspects of the manager styles in Korea and Japan and we are going to compare how different they are.

	Japan	Korea
Workers	Lifetime employment, all the employees expect to get retired from the company	Free changes, employees can easily move from a job to another
Managerial style	Workers are important and taken into account	Authoritarian style, only the manager takes the decisions
Managed by	External managers are uncharged of the company, those are selected because of the experience	Family members, are uncharged of managing the companies, in most of the cases the position in a company is taken by the family members
Working style	Groupism. The work in teams is very accepted in Japan in were the collectivism is better that individualism	Individualism is accepted for the workers who works for their owns and not for the group

Bibliography:

1. Class notes