“Rich beyond the Dreams of Avarice†: The Guggenheims in Chile

This article focuses on the roles of business-government relations, technology, financing, entrepreneurship, and management in the evolution of multinational corporations. It describes the Guggenheims' successive involvements in Mexican silver, Chilean copper, and Chilean nitrates and stresses the brothers' strategic use of technical innovation and relations with host governments to accomplish these major changes in the focus of their business. The essay's findings suggest the need for a more sophisticated treatment of business-government relations and for the incorporation of entrepreneurship and organizational structure as dynamic variables in theories of the MNE. It also points to the importance of historical conjunctures that shape technology in understanding the emergence of the MNE.