Strategy and Circumstance: the Response of American Firms to Japanese Competition in Semiconductors, 1980-1995

The transistor was an American invention, and American firms led the world in semiconductor production and innovation for the first three decades of that industry's existence. In the 1980s, however, Japanese producers began to challenge American dominance. Shrill cries arose from the literature of public policy, warning that the American semiconductor industry would soon share the fate of the lamented American consumer electronics business. Few dissented from the implications: the only hope for salvation would be to adopt Japanese-style public policies and imitate the kinds of capabilities Japanese firms possessed. But the predicted extinction never occurred. Instead, American firms surged back during the 1990s, and it now seems the Japanese who are embattled. This striking American turnaround has gone largely unremarked upon in the public policy literature. And even scholarship in strategic management, which thrives on stories of success instead of stories of failure, has been comparatively silent. Drawing on a more thorough economic history of the worldwide semiconductor industry (Langlois and Steinmueller 1999), this essay attempts to collect some of the lessons for strategy research of the American resurgence. We argue that, although some of the American response did consist in changing or augmenting capabilities, most of the renewed American success is in fact the result not of imitating superior Japanese capabilities but rather of taking good advantage of a set of capabilities developed in the heyday of American dominance. Serendipity played at least as important a role as did strategy.

All Alone, Without Money, No Language--Just Yiddish": An Immigrant's Letters from Missouri to Galicia

In June 1891, Shimshon Gerye, a Jewish immigrant from Galicia (a region that now falls across the border of Ukraine and Poland) living in Sedalia, Missouri, received a letter from a cousin back home. The content of the letter was probably rather mundane (a request to send money, inquiries about health), but its timing was somewhat unusual: in the thirty-five years that Shimshon had been living in America, this was apparently the first he had heard from his family in Europe. What survives of the ensuing correspondence, written in Yiddish and spanning a one-year period, provides an interesting view of the situation of the immigrant and the pressures of assimilation, as well as the Yiddish language in America at the end of the nineteenth century.