Multilatinas: emerging multinationals from Latin America

Different theories in the field of international business have attempted to explain from various perspectives the evolution of firms from local to global. The stages theory (Johanson and Vahlne 1977) and the entry strategies framework (Root 1987) focus on the first steps of the whole process and explain how a company goes abroad and penetrates foreign markets. The internalization (Buckley and Casson 1976; Rugman 1981) and the eclectic (Dunning 1980) theories take an economist’s perspective, to explain why a company becomes a MNC, internalizing transactions instead of using market mechanisms, but neglect the processes and stages involved in this transformation. The structural theories (Stopford and Wells 1972; Egelhoff 1982) do consider evolution, but their perspective may be too ‘architectural’ (according to Bartlett 1983). Finally, the integration—responsiveness (I—R) framework (Bartlett 1986; Prahalad and Doz 1987) assumes that the company is already a MNC that operates subsidiaries in several countries, so they too tend to ignore the expansion process.