Revisiting the study of economic groups in the 21st century. Evidence from Argentina

LEANDRO EZEQUIEL NAVARRO ROCHA

Rio de Janeiro

Conferencia; SASE 2023 Socio-Economics in a Transitioning World: Breaking Lines and Alternative Paradigms for a New World Order; 2023

The research on economic groups has had varied contributions, particularly in emerging and late-industrializing countries and developed European nations. The study of these organizations covers debates such as forms of ownership, varieties of capitalism, relations between economics and politics, and their organizational forms vis-à-vis the classical classification elaborated by Chandler (1977, 1990) and Williamson (1975, 1985) for large U.S. firms (Amsden, 1989; Barbero & Puig, 2016; Colpan et al., 2010; Granovetter, 1995; Guillen, 2000; Khanna & Yafeh, 2007; Leff, 1979; Schneider, 2009).This paper analyzes economic groups in Argentina during the 21st century. Before the 1990s, these groups were central to shaping accumulation models. Neoliberalism then led to their decline and foreign ownership of major companies, especially those privatized. However, the 2001 economic crisis and Kirchner governments (2003-2015) favored national capital and challenged foreign ownership, especially in the energy industry, enabling the emergence and establishment of new economic groups.This paper aims to ask what strategies were deployed by the economic groups to achieve this, as well as the reading of the macroeconomic and institutional situation that led to the strategies implemented by their managers.We hypothesize that the expansion of the economic groups did not follow a uniform pattern; instead, they adopted differing control concepts, resulting in diverse business profiles.In order to carry out the objective, we work by combining tools from the qualitative and quantitative paradigms. We primarily use interviews with shareholders, directors, and business managers to understand the decision-making process. Corporate reports and documents will also be analyzed, as well as official documents and resolutions. We work from a theoretical perspective linked to the new economic sociology, pointing out the importance of non-economic motives to explain the existence of economic groups and the embeddedness of the action in a particular social, historical and political context.