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Despite a crying need for more Japanese competence in the American business community, bilingual businesspeople are still surprisingly rare. Members of a specially convened focus group—American businessmen in Japan—discuss the reasons why this is so. They include the difficulty of learning the language while employed full-time, suspicion of bilinguals on the grounds that they have gone native, and the negative influence of an international stint on many American corporate career paths. In fact, American bilinguals find their best job prospects with Japanese companies at home or abroad or with American companies in Japan. There are few opportunities waiting for them in American company headquarters. In the future, we need to prepare our young Asian studies majors more realistically for the job market, to demonstrate to corporations the potential rewards of long-range commitment to the Japanese market, and to become more aware of our changing place in the international order.

Since 1995, the James Irvine Foundation has invested more than $11 million to support the growth and development of Collaborative Regional Initiatives (CRIs) throughout the state -- nonprofit organizations that engage key players from business, environmental, and a variety of other advocacy groups with players from local governments and public agencies to create improvements in their regions. CRIs work on issues ranging across transportation, land use, housing, and economic development. They work in a variety of ways from developing legislation to media campaigns to practical work on particular projects. All are directed at building civic capacity and filling in gaps where government does not or cannot act. Some CRIs have been in place for years; others are more recently formed. They represent experiments in regional governance. Recently, the Irvine Foundation tapped a team of Berkeley faculty to perform an assessment of the CRIs so the foundation can target its resources in order to make them effective and sustainable over time and assist them in producing valuable outcomes for their regions. City planning professor Judith Innes, who led the complex evaluation, teamed with city planning professors AnnaLee Saxenian, Karen Christensen, Karen Chapple and political science professor Judith Gruber to focus on the projects and programs that a sample of CRIs engage in, asking which are most successful and why. In particular, the researchers examined how variables like leadership, resources, diversity of participation, processes of dialogue and collaboration, and the ways problems have been framed contribute to the degree of success in each program. The work is designed to assist the CRIs with strategies to select and build the successes of their programs and to help them overcome obstacles and identify opportunities for effective work. Together the researchers published case studies of four major CRIs -- the Bay Area Alliance for Sustainable Communities, Joint Venture: Silicon Valley, the San Diego Dialogue and the Sierra Business Council -- as well as an analysis of regional workforce development collaboratives in California. Since 1970, the Sierra Nevada has undergone significant economic and social change as the population of this vast 18-county region has more than doubled, traditional industries in timber and natural extraction have declined and a major tourist industry has evolved. These changes have led to political conflict between long-time residents concerned about property rights and economic development and the new arrivals who tend to be more concerned about the environment. Enter the Sierra Business Council, a Collaborative Regional Initiative (CRI) established in 1994 to address these conflicts and help assure the sustainability of the Sierra. The council developed the novel strategy of helping the business community understand how environmental quality is an essential component to the potential success of the economy. "Their fundamental theory of change at the outset was basically to transform businesspeople into environmentalists so they would take different positions in the political debates over the Sierra's future," says city planning professor Judith Innes in a new report on CRIs in California. "The Sierra Business Council overall has been a highly successful organization," she says, "gaining high marks from participants in most of their activities and being able to demonstrate outcomes from their many initiatives." Among the council's notable achievements have been the development of the Sierra Nevada Wealth Index, which provides and explains indicators on each of the types of capital -- natural, social and financial -- in the Sierra. It has been so widely used that demand has grown for parallel indexes for smaller regions. The council was also instrumental in creating the Sierra Nevada Conservancy recently signed into law by the governor.

Chapter 1: Global Competition – The Battlefield -- Chapter 2: Marketing – Position Yourself -- Chapter 3: Innovate – Generate and Evaluate -- Chapter 4: Using Information – Leverage Resource -- Chapter 5: Technology – Upgrade -- Chapter 6: Human Resources/Cross-Cultural Communication – Breed Success -- Chapter 7: Strategic Alliance - Strength in Numbers -- Chapter 8: Customer Service – Listen to What They Say -- Chapter 9: Implementation, Monitoring & Evaluation – Now What Do We Do? -- Chapter 10: Social Responsibility – Giving Something Back.

Do businesspeople who win elected office use their positions to help their firms? Business leaders become politicians around the world, yet we know little about whether their commitment to public service trumps their own private interests. Using an original dataset of 2,703 firms in Russia, I employ a regression discontinuity design to identify the causal effect of firm directors winning seats in subnational legislatures from 2004 to 2013. First, having a connection to a winning politician increases a firm's revenue by 60% and profitability by 15% over a term in office. I then test between different mechanisms, finding that connected firms improve their performance by gaining access to bureaucrats and not by signaling legitimacy to financiers. The value of winning a seat increases in more politically competitive regions but falls markedly when more businesspeople win office in a convocation. Politically connected firms extract fewer benefits when faced with greater competition from other rent-seekers.

Extensive literature shows that businesspeople thrive on political connections. Most research, however, does not differentiate between types of political connection, thus effectively assuming that economic return on being connected should not differ systematically between federal and regional, legislative and executive, formal and informal connections. We collect a unique comprehensive dataset on Russia's richest businesspeople in 2003–2010 and demonstrate that only certain types of connections work, depending on the political context. Our analysis shows that as Russian politics became centralized and the federal executive more powerful during the 2000s, businesspeople with informal connections to the federal executive increased their fortunes much faster compared with everyone else—including those with any other type of connections. Businesspeople's wealth thus dynamically reflected these important political changes. This suggests a procedure for inferring nominally unobservable changes in the political system from politically connected businesspeople's fortunes, while also shedding additional light on the institutional origins of informality in Russian politics today.

Heretic merchants, pedlars in divinity, and other colonial characters -- The black regiment, Boston men, and other revolutionary characters -- Too little help from the pulpit: clergy and businesspeople in the Antebellum era -- The gospel of Christ and the gospel of wealth in the Gilded Age -- Jesus as salesman, socialist, savior: Christianity and business in the progressive era -- Honored but ill-defined: Christianity and business in depression, war, and beyond -- From segregation to social responsibility: 1960-2010.