Taira, Atsushi

Atsushi Taira is a Professor of Human Geography at Kagawa University, Japan. He obtained his BA from Waseda University, and his MA and PhD from the University of Tsukuba. He also studied at the University of Wisconsin-Madison during his PhD program. His early research interests were in cultural and social geography. His work on the transformation of the urban community in downtown Tokyo was published in the Geographical Review of Japan. He then turned his interest towards economic geography. His main themes are the locational strategies of Japanese-affiliated firms in developed and developing countries, the transformation of local industrial clusters, and glocal strategies of small- and medium-sized firms located outside the major metropolitan areas. His articles have been published in books and in international academic journals such as Geographical Journal, Geographical Review of Japan and Annals of the Japan Association of Economic Geographers. He currently is a steering committee member of the Commission of Local and Regional Development of the International Geographical Union and a co-chair of the Association of Japanese Geographers research group of spaces of international economy and management with Rolf D. Schlunze and other young scholars.

Rolf D. Schlunze holds a professorship for intercultural management at Ritsumeikan University, Japan. To our knowledge, he was the first German geographer to receive his Ph.D. from the University of Tokyo. His doctoral thesis was published in the book series of Wirtschaftsgeographie from LIT Verlag. Honoured with awards by the European Commission, he conducted his post-doctoral research based at universities in the UK and Japan. For almost two decades, his postdoc research focused on the hybridization of managerial systems and subjects sponsored by the Japanese government, and his work regarding the embeddedness of the hybrid factoryand the hybrid manager has been published in peer reviewed journals. He has been promoting the agenda of management geography for more than a decade at academic associations such as the Association of American Geographers (AAG), Association of Japanese Geographers (AJG), Euro-Asia Management Studies Association (EAMSA) and Global Conference of Economic Geographers (GCEG). Via the ManGeo Research Group website, he provides a new platform for further dissemination of the concept of management geography especially aimed at young economic geographers and scholars of international business and adjacent disciplines.