Influencia de la globalización en la transformación de la estructura corporativa española a través del análisis de consejerías cruzadas

Resumen

In spite of the unifying globalization pressures, different countries continue to exhibit distinctive economic characteristics that become influential in its process of economic development. Among them, under the appellation varieties of capitalism, emerges a classification based in the characteristics that those economies show in different spheres. Starting from social and economical point of view they allow us to build an explanation about diverse national economic patterns. Along the debate that leads to a definition of the varieties it has been stated repeatedly that economies from continental capitalism are moving towards Anglo-Saxon capitalism models. Other research stream shows the relevance and utility of interlocking directorates in the study of the interfirm relations and the corporate structure of the countries. Spain is an ideal laboratory where the changes in corporate structure may be evident. In the Spanish context we can observe if the shift of the corporate structure is towards Anglo-Saxon models as observed in other continental modeled countries. There are some distinguishing traits for this case: the privatization process of large state-owned companies, Spanish savings banks as different entities from ordinary banks, a sustained increase in market capitalization just as alternatively liberal and protectionist policies enacted by successive governments. We aim to see if in this scenario the effects of globalizing pressures are the same that has been observed in other economical environments. First contribution from this thesis consists in enriching the debate about varieties of capitalism, firstly by providing a case study about the spanish corporate network in 2006 with all that aforementioned distinguishing traits that makes it remarkable and secondly by discussing if changes undergone in the last decade are parallel to those suffered by near economies or, otherwise, if the evolution pattern is specific for this case. The spanish interlocking directorates network had been previously studied by Aguilera (1998) aiming to see social and economic changes in the early nineties reflected on it. Following Aguilera's work, the second contribution is stating the relation between socio-economic change and corporate network in the 15 years elapsed between that first study and ours. We show how the corporate network is altered by social and economic evolution of the country. Specifically the influence of the finishing of the privatization process, the progressive incorporation to the European Union and Euro currency, the market changes and other economic phenomena. Finally, from the detailed analysis of interlocking directorates between banks and most relevant industrial sectors we get a deep vision about the motives leading industrial firms to exchange directors among them and with financial institutions. From this analysis a consequence for interlocking directorates theory is derived: the need of considering the context of each interlock to get a full notion of its meaning. Although other scholars weight the relation by its multiplicity or the director role on the board, that is not enough to fully understand the relation. In the Spanish case, the context of the link shows that most interlocks reflect a control/dependence association.