Divergent paths, converging ends: a comparative analysis of the crisis and state control of Winco and SIAM

Abstract

This article shows a comparative study between two industrial firms, SIAM Di Tella and Winco SA. We analyze particularly the decisive factors that leaded to a crisis of both firms and to the process by which they became under the control of the state during the sixties and the early years of the seventies. The study remarks the organizational changes and the enterprise managing logic, the productive strategies, financial problems and the links established between the entrepreneurs and the State. We also remark the Argentinean changing macroeconomic conditions as a way of explaining the crisis of both enterprises. The findings of the comparative method allow us to visualize the diver-gent entrepreneurial trajectories but with a same ending: the transfer of both firms to the control of the State. Once they were controlled by the state, both of them were financially sustained during the years with the only purpose of avoiding the bankruptcy and the social conflict as one of its main consequences. The analysis of these factors allow to explore the complex and in occasions traumatic relationship between the entrepreneurial dynamic and the changing institutional economical and political environment on a national level.