Insightful and trailblazing, this book coedited by Geoffrey Jones and Andrea Lluch provides rich accounts that chronicle the historical path of globalization in two Latin American markets, Argentina and Chile. It is a revised and updated version of a 2008 volume published in Spanish, “extensively rewritten for the English-speaking market” (p. x). This update provides the opportunity to examine a “sample” of the significant contributions that Latin American business history is making to the discipline. It comes at a time when business history is undergoing debate and reflection (e.g., Walter Friedman and Geoffrey Jones, “Business History: Time for Debate,” Business History Review [2011], Abe de Jong, David Michael Higgins, and Hugo van Driel, “Towards a New Business History?” Business History [2015]), not just about its coverage, but also in terms of issues, domains, themes, and approaches. Is North-centric business history equipped to address the globalization of business? How could it relate to the new field of transnational history? Does the burgeoning Latin American business historiography, and that of emerging markets in general, constitute a body of scholarship distinctive from that on North America and Europe? Or, do Latin American contributions simply add new data and geographical settings to the mainstream literature?
This volume compiled by Jones and Lluch sheds light on these questions throughout its nine chapters, written by ten scholars—seven Latin Americans, two Brits, and one Spaniard. They provide fresh evidence and perspectives on the role of family business groups, the impact of multinational enterprises (MNEs), relations between business and the state, the importance of institutional development, and the potential of oral history. The book's historical span is since the mid-nineteenth century to the present.
The Impact of Globalization on Argentina and Chile consists of three parts. The first (chapters 1, 2, and 3) discusses family-owned business groups, which in Chile and Argentina (as in the rest of Latin America) have been the dominant domestic organizational form for the past century and a half. The evolution of business groups (BGs) in a distinctively unstable economic and political context is the subject of chapter 1 on Argentina. In a pioneering research piece, María Inés Barbero examines the reasons for the existence and perdurance of this organizational form. She offers a comprehensive examination of the characteristics and capabilities that allow family-owned BGs to compete satisfactorily in various markets. It is hard to imagine any reader, after reading this chapter, adhering to the ill-informed yet unchallenged idea that business groups are a relic of the past or, worse, an anomaly of capitalist development. Such clarity extends to a reading of chapter 2, about the experience of BGs in Chile (1854–2012), analyzed by Gonzalo Islas from a different perspective: that of corporate governance practices as they relate to levels of investor protection and ownership schemes. The third chapter, by Marcelo Bucheli, also departs from mainstream wisdom, in this case regarding nationalism and MNEs. Bucheli shows that without reference to the action of BGs established between 1930 and 1970 and reproduced within the Chilean elite, the “oil MNE's long-term strategy cannot be understood” (p. 99).
The book's second part consists of three chapters (4, 5, and 6) dealing with the impact of MNEs. In the case of Argentina (chapter 4), Andrés López examines the impact of foreign direct investment (FDI) in the country's economic development over three periods (1880–1930, 1930–70, and 1970–2001). This chapter and Barbero's are complementary. Lopez shows that “it is striking that local companies, primarily organized as business groups, embarked on FDI at every stage in Argentina's economic development” (p. 130). Moreover, in chapter 5, Javier Vidal makes a comparison between Chile and Argentina in light of Spanish FDI since 1880. This was initially linked to very large flow of Spanish immigrants. Vidal highlights “the lack of linearity in the historical business and economic relationship between Spain, Chile and Argentina,” wherein political risk, for example, has in recent years been more severe in Argentina than in Chile (p. 145). In chapter 6, Rory Miller puts a different twist on the impact of MNEs by examining executive recruitment and selection strategies among expatriates in British multinationals in both Argentina and Chile in the period from 1930 to 1970.
Although the theme of state-business relationships runs through most of the chapters, the third part of the book (chapters 7 and 8) addresses this as a central focus. Thus, in chapter 7, Norma Lanciotti studies the relationships between the Argentinean state and foreign-owned urban utility companies from 1880 to 1955, while in chapter 8, Oscar Muñoz studies them in Chile over a very recent (post-1990) period.
In the final chapter, the editors offer their own excellent, pointed comparison of business in both countries during the second global economy running up to the present. They do so in a manner consistent with another guiding thread that distinguishes the book: the response of firms and entrepreneurs to institutional environments (emphasizing their differences) and macroeconomic contexts. As they signal from the introduction, the book raises “fundamental questions about the future trajectory of global capitalism” (p. 4). After more than 250 pages this becomes a compelling, aptly drafted conclusion. Something new in this final chapter is the skillful use of oral history (in-depth interviewing) by one of the editors (Lluch), who interviewed Argentinean and Chilean top business leaders as part of Harvard Business School's project Creating Emerging Markets. In passing, it should be mentioned that William I. Robinson's Latin American and Global Capitalism (2008), a representative piece of “critical globalization studies,” is a missing reference.
A strength of the collection is that it lends itself to selective reading according to the reader's interests. As such, the reader concerned only with Argentina will find a better fit among the chapters on that country than those dealing with Chile.
In closing, it must be said that this original, outstanding collection brings to the attention of the monolingual (English) business history community a corpus of literature largely ignored due to its having been written in Spanish. Undoubtedly, this volume is worth reading not only by business historians and their students but also by the wider, heterogeneous scholarly audience concerned with business groups and corporate governance as well as by historians of varied fields—be they labeled economic, global, and/or transnational historians.
