The experience of British business in Iran between the 1860's and the 1970's is one example of the changing importance of British enterprise in Asia as a whole. Before 1914 British business established and dominated Iran's modern industrial and financial sector; in the 1920's this domination began to wane; by the 1960's British enterprise was of little importance in the Iranian economy. While in Japan and India the decline of British business was primarily a function of the rise of strong indigenous business groups, in Iran, by contrast, the government played a large role in both challenging British commercial interests and stimulating locally owned enterprise. Periodic surges of intense Iranian economic nationalism must be understood partly as a reaction to the close relations between British business in Iran and the British government. In retrospect, it is possible to see the uneasy and ambiguous nature of this relationship. It is true that the British Imperial Bank in Iran was never entirely a tool of the British government, and that the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company did not take its orders from the British government, despite the 51 percent government shareholding. However, the relationship between British business and the British government was sufficiently close that many Iranians understandably viewed the oil company and the bank as symbols of a British imperialist policy.

(This passage was excerpted from materialpublished in 1993.)

    Like many other industries, the travel industry is under increasing pressure to expand globally in order to keep pace with its corporate customers, who have globalized their operations in response to market pressure, competitor actions, and changing supplier relations. But it is difficult for service organizations to globalize. Global expansion through acquisition is usually expensive, and expansion through internal growth is time-consuming and sometimes impossible in markets that are not actively growing. Some service industry companies, in fact, regard these traditional routes to global expansion as inappropriate for service industries because of their special need to preserve local responsiveness through local presence and expertise. One travel agency has eschewed the traditional route altogether. A survivor of the changes that swept the travel industry as a result of the deregulation of the airlines in 1978—changes that included dramatic growth in the corporate demand for travel services, as well as extensive restructuring and consolidation within the travel industry— this agency adopted a unique structure for globalization. Rather than expand by attempting to develop its own offices abroad, which would require the development of local travel management expertise sufficient to capture foreign markets, the company solved its globalization dilemma effectively by forging alliances with the best foreign partners it could find. The resulting cooperative alliance of independent agencies now comprises 32 partners spanning 37 countries.