Marcelo Bucheli

2022 Mexico City

Abstract: This paper advances the concept of international nonmarket strategy to study actions by multinational corporations (MNCs) to influence the diplomatic and political relations between their home country and the host country. We maintain that the MNC can use its business and political networks at the home country to increase the host government’s bargaining power vis-à-vis the home and obtain business benefits in return. The MNC’s capabilities to have political influence at the home country, however, can also become a source of risk: a host government can have the incentive to use the MNC’s sunk assets in the host country as ‘hostages’ in order to have the MNC use its political capabilities on its behalf at the home country. We illustrate this argument with the historical case of the role played by Standard Oil of New Jersey in the negotiations between Colombia and the United States over the reparations for the loss of Panama in the 1920s. The paper shows the implications to international business theory and the benefits of using historical evidence.

2023 Detroit, MI, United States

Abstract: Drawing on reflections by nonmarket strategy scholars on the state of the art of their field to determine important gaps in that literature, we maintain that they can be addressed with existing contributions of archival-based business historical studies. Those gaps include more nuanced understandings of how MNEs’ subsidiaries nonmarket strategies can differ or be consistent with those of the headquarters, a holistic understanding of the relationship between MNEs and the wider political and economic context, and ways by which MNEs intervene in diplomacy. We show that business historians explore those issues thanks to research methods that include archival-research and how they integrate the political context into the analysis of firms’ decisions. Based on a comprehensive literature review of business history in the light of issues of concern of the nonmarket strategy literature, we identify a range of nonmarket strategies employed by MNEs in volatile and often hostile host country environments.

2023 Detroit, MI, United States

2025 Atlanta, Georgia

Abstract: During the 1960s and 1970s, several democratically elected regimes were overthrown and replaced by dictatorial ones in Latin America. It is well-known that the overthrown regimes had a strong relationship with labor unionism and that this alliance clashed with the interests of multinational corporations and their home countries. This paper considers the element of technological change as one playing a role in increasing the tensions between the democratically elected government, labor unions, and multinational corporations, shifting the focus away from natural resource-oriented multinationals to manufacturing ones. In the process of modernization, manufacturing multinationals required technological changes that meant mass layoffs. A domestic elite eager to modernize their economies through found in labor unionism and democracy an obstacle for their agenda, leading them to promote military coups supported by foreign firms.

2025 Atlanta, Georgia