LAIXIANG SUN is Professor-Chair of Chinese Business and Management at the Department of Financial and Management Studies, SOAS, University of London; Project Director at the United Nations University, WIDER, Helsinki, Finland; Economist at the International Institute for Applied System Analysis, Laxenburg, Austria; and Senior Research Fellow at the Guanhua School of Management, Peking University. He has written a number of articles which have been published in several international peer-reviewed journals.

'This book, edited by Laixiang Sun, has evidently analyzed and compared emerging unorthodox ownership and governance structures in a knowledge intensive, informative and insightful format and has been designed in an elegant and accessible way towards both specialists and non-specialists. These works contain up-to-date case studies, development assessments, policy analyses, and literature reviews, and will be of interest to various business people, policy-consultants, regulators, policy-makers and scholars.' - Larry H.P. Lang, Chair Professor of Finance, Chinese University of Hong Kong and Cheung Kong Graduate School of Business in Beijing'In the main the conventional wisdom predicts an economic landscape in which key institutional arrangements surrounding enterprises are expected to be fairly homogeneous and stable. The existence and evolution of diverse ownership configurations and varying forms of corporate governance in firms around the world presents enormous challenges to this view. This stimulating volume examines several interesting examples of 'real world heterogeneity' including the Mondragon Cooperative Consortium, U.S. ESOPs and Chinese TVEs. The volume provides rich institutional detail that meshes well with an eclectic theoretical framework. Students of the modern enterprise and policy makers in the fields of development and transition will find much thought-provoking material in this well-written and accessible volume.' - Derek C. Jones, Irma M. and Robert D. Morris Professor of Economics, Hamilton College, Clinton, NY and Research Fellow, Davidson Institute, University of Michigan

• List of Tables List of Figures Preface Acknowledgements List of Abbreviations Notes on the Contributors Adaptive Efficiency and the Evolving Diversity of Enterprise Ownership and Governance Forms: An Overview; L.Sun Institutional Investors, Corporate Ownership and Corporate Governance: Global Perspectives; S.L.Gillan & L.T.Starks New Institutional Arrangements for Product Innovation in Silicon Valley; H.Takizawa Sharing Ownership via Employee Stock Ownership; J.C.Sesil, D.L.Kruse & J.R.Blasi Hardening a Soft Budget Constraint through 'Upward Devolution' to a Supranational Institution: The Case of the European Union and Italian State-Owned Firms; E.Bertero & L.Rondi Evolving and Functioning Mechanisms of Employee Stock Ownership in China's Township and Village Enterprises; L.Sun Network Externalities and Cooperative Networks: Stylized Facts and Theory; S.C.Smith Network Externalities and Cooperative Networks: A Comparative Case Study of Mondragón and La Lega with Implications for Developing and Transitional Countries; S.C.Smith Index