Business Governance in Brazil and South Africa: How Much Convergence to The Anglo-Saxon Model?

ABSTRACT The effect of globalization on national economic and political strategies is a central theme in policy analysis. At the core of this debate is business governance, interpreted in this paper in a wide sense as the laws, rules, and routines that govern large-scale corporations. Conventional wisdom has it that cross-national patterns of business governance are converging on the so-called Anglo-Saxon, capital-market driven model. In this paper I analyze recent changes in Brazil and South Africa, to conclude that models of business governance should be seen jointly with the institutional underpinnings of the economy. These include legal traditions that are unlikely to undergo rapid changes, other institutional features directly related to the ways in which first compete in the global economy, and the mechanisms through which social actors resist changes adverse to their interests.