Innovación y empresa: estudios históricos de México, España y América Latina (review)

The title of this compelling volume speaks of its contents: a history of technological and managerial innovation and entrepreneurship in Spain and Iberian America, especially Mexico. The volume is the result of a workshop held in 2006 at the Universidad Autónoma de México (UNAM) and funded by Gas Natural, a Spanish corporation that operates in various Latin American countries. According to Guillermo Guajardo Soto, the editor and author of the introduction and one chapter, the fact that most of the biggest Spanish corporations invest and sell in Latin America justifies a volume written in Spanish that compares the history of enterprise and society on the two sides of the Atlantic. Moreover, Guajardo states, studying innovation and its contexts is tantamount to fostering it—which he thinks to be specially urgent in Mexico, in order to counterbalance traditional and Marxist ideologies that, in his view, ignored, or even condemned, innovation and entrepreneurship (p. 18). For the authors of this book, history teaches that fostering innovation requires limiting state ownership to a minimum.

Despite the generality of the title, this book will be mainly of interest to economic historians of twentieth-century Mexico and Spain. Indeed, four of the papers deal with Mexico, four with Spain, two with Argentina, and one with Brazil. The reader might miss the promised comparative perspectives or a more direct approach to the strong presence of Spanish companies in Latin America, for example, which could have analyzed the role played by a common history and language. It is only in the Introduction (written by Guajardo) where we find a brief attempt to compare the different economic strategies of these countries in light of theoretical works on innovation. Guajardo's own chapter deals with the oil and railway industries in Mexico, focusing not on technological innovation but on managerial innovations and analyzing the limitations posed by the Mexican State to the promotion of business in a global economy. Carlos Marichal's contribution is, together with Guajardo's introduction, the most theoretical one, since it discusses some recent literature on Mexican business history. He draws the reader's attention to the need for combining historical approaches with management studies in order to fully understand the role that innovation plays in the economic development of firms and countries. Hernán Salas provides an account of milk production in the northern Mexican region Lagunera, which strongly made its way to international markets. Juan Boggio, highlighting the importance of the entrepreneur's surrounding culture and his or her responses to it, investigates the current business-friendly context of Cancun's tourism-based economy.

The next four chapters deal with Spanish firms. Gabriel Tortella goes back to his well-known analyses of the development of the Spanish oil industry through the twentieth century, pointing at the breakdown in the 1980s of a monopoly—created during the Primo de Rivera dictatorship in the 1920s and maintained through the Second Republic (1931-1936) and the Francisco Franco dictatorship (1939-1975)—as the real engine for the growth of corporations such as Campsa or Repsol. Miguel Muñoz follows the internationalization of Spanish manufacturers of materials for trains and railways from the 1960s up to the end of the millennium. He also points at economic liberalization as the explanation for the success of some of these firms in the global market. Javier Vidal compares the successful internationalization of Sol-Meliá with the less successful case of Iberia. Spanish integration in the European Economic Community plays a major role in his analysis. Luis Alonso Álvarez also studies Inditex-Zara, a corporation born during the Francoist period and which experienced a boom in later years.

Marcelo Rougier explores the relationship between agriculture and industry in the context of Argentina's machinery manufacture (particularly the firm Vassalli S.A.) and Claudio Castro studies the early internationalization of Techint...