From Local to International and Vice Versa – Comparing Five Case Studies of Privatization in Food and Drink Industry

Abstract

This paper describes and analyses different outcomes of the processes whereby foreign international companies privatize local enterprises. According to preliminary comparisons between the four case studies of brewery privatizations that were conducted within the Dioscuri research agenda, it is argued that the alleged success of the privatizations that has been recorded during the research had to be related to the interrelation of global and local aspects of organizational change. It is shown that the organizational change observed and documented was marked by two interrelated, opposite but complementary processes, internationalization and localization – each of them developing its “embedded” and “disembedded” aspects - which reveal different types of power and knowledge, and tend to produce different discursive practices and representations, related to all phases of economic life of the products: from production, to distribution, marketing and consumption. At the end it is suggested that regional frame of reference, due to the strong regional market policy of the “big” beer producers, would be the most appropriate context for further study of privatized enterprises.