During the past decade, multinational companies (MNCs) have made radical institutional changes: instead of generating research and development (R&D) knowledge solely in central laboratories in home countries, they have shifted their strategy to developing the capability to absorb and utilize cutting-edge technologies worldwide. Based on over 80 interviews with mainly electronics and pharmaceutical companies in Europe, Japan and the United States, this presentation addresses the question: How have MNCs developed their capability to evaluate, internalize, and utilize external R&D knowledge from abroad? Still a work in progress, this research provides an understanding of the evolutionary process of internationalization of R&D as well as the various strategies of Japanese and European high technology MNCs to absorb new technologies from US and Europe.

Biography: Seiko Arai is a doctoral student at the University of Oxford, UK, and currently a visiting scholar at Shorenstein APARC, Stanford University. She obtained a bachelor's degree in law and political science from the University of Tokyo, Japan, and a Masters in public policy from Harvard University. She has worked for the Japanese government and the headquarters of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), France, in the areas of science and technology and education policies.

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Over the last two years in Southeast Asia, acts of terror done in the name of Islam have divided analysts into two broad camps. Academic specialists on Islam in Southeast Asia have tended to emphasize the moderation of the vast majority of Muslims in the region and the local roots of so-called jihadist violence there. While not denying the moderation of most Muslims, Western journalists and officials have relied more on intelligence reports and detainee confessions to situate Southeast Asian jihadists within a global terrorist network organized and inspired by Al Qaeda. Compared with Western journalists and officials, scholars have also tended to portray Islam as a basically tolerant religion and to seek nonreligious explanations and motivations for seemingly Islamist violence. If the scholars have had faith in explanatory contexts--distinctively local, historical, cultural, socioeconomic, and political--their counterparts in media and policy circles have been more inclined to showcase conspiratorial texts: interrogation transcripts, recordings of clandestine conversations, and the selectively Koranic rhetoric of militant Islamists urging global jihad. Which of these contrasting perspectives is superior, analytically and as a basis for counter-terror policy? Are the perpetrators of apparently Islamist terror in Southeast Asia thinking and acting locally? Or globally? Is there a demonstrably Al Qaeda network in the region? If so, what sort of a structure is it? How does it operate? Can a "war" against it succeed? If not, what might be a better approach? Zachary Abuza is an assistant professor of political science and international relations at Simmons College. His most recent book is Renovating Politics in Contemporary Vietnam (2001). Foreign-affairs journals that have published his work include Asian Survey and Contemporary Southeast Asia. He has spoken on Southeast Asian subjects before Congress, at the State Department, on Jim Lehrer's "NewsHour," and in the pages of the Wall Street Journal and Time, among other media. He received his Ph.D. from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy in 1998. In 1995-96 he was a visiting researcher at the Institute of International Relations in Hanoi.

This talk will discuss Wipro's growth to become one of India's top three software service providers and its readiness for the future. To achieve its current position, a key strategy was to develop human capital by providing an entrepreneurial working environment and undertaking a higher level of complexity of work than available with competitors, supplemented by an internal degree program. How will this strategy help the firm in the emerging environment characterized by a slowdown in traditional businesses, strategic shifts towards high-end work and the growth of untraditional, IT-linked businesses (such as business process outsourcing)?

The act of suicide can take many forms and is an old "way out". However, the act always engenders some sort of statement in the community left behind. The recent political and war-like statements of suicide bombers trigger both general concerns and scholarly questions. Suicide is an individual act, but at the same time it can give shape to a movement. How can we understand the current acts of suicide bombing? In what way does it raise new ways of thinking about the underlying assumptions and mechanisms behind social behavior?

Papers Presented:

1. "Inside the Terrorist Mind" by Arie Kruglanski, University of Maryland. Paper presented to the National Academy of Science, April 29, 2002, Washington D.C.

2. "Education, Poverty, Political Violence and Terrorism: Is there a Causal Connection?" by Alan B. Krueger and Jitka Maleckova, Working Paper 9074, National Bureau of Economic Research.

3. "The Interpersonal Influence Systems and Organized Suicides of Death Cults" by Noah E. Friedkin, Department of Sociology, University of California, Santa Barbara.

4. "The Paradox of Suicide in Solidary Groups" by Douglas D. Heckathorn, Cornell University.

5. "Hamas, Taliban and the Jewish Underground: An Economist's View of Radical Religious Militias" by Eli Berman, Rice University, National Bureau of Economic Research.

6. "Suicide Missions: Motivations and Beliefs" by Jon Elster, Columbia University.

7. "Suicide Bombing: What is the Answer?" by Howard Rosenthal, Princeton University and Russell Sage Foundation.

In "Gender Militarized" Frhstck deals with how masculinity is created, constituted, and negotiated in present-day Japan. She describes how Japanese "militarized masculinity" constantly evolves, is culturally specific, contested, debated and resisted. In this talk, she argues that "militarized masculinity" draws from various kinds of manhood, depends on the subordination of alternative modes of manhood, cuts itself off from other modes of gender and is informed by past and present Japanese and non-Japanese militarisms as well as American militarism on its soil. At the core of Frhstck's analysis are the processes of institutional coercion and the expectations and struggles of enlisted personnel and officers in Japan's armed forces to create a "militarized gender" that is distinct from other types of manhood.

About the speaker:

Sabine Frhstck is an associate professor of modern Japanese cultural studies in the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultural Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Her publications include Colonizing Sex: Sexology and Social Control in Modern Japan (University of California Press, 2003); "Managing the Truth of Sex in Imperial Japan" in the Journal of Asian Studies (2000); and (with Eyal Ben-Ari) "Now We Show It All! Normalization and the Management of Violence in Japan's Armed Forces" in the Journal of Japanese Studies (2002), among other articles and book chapters. She is currently working on a book about military-societal relations in modern and contemporary Japan entitled "Avant-garde: The Army of the Future."