Entrepreneurial Behaviour And Institutional Change: The Dynamics Of Building Industry Alliances In Venezuela

Science Technology & Society
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Entrepreneurial Behaviour and Institutional Change: The Dynamics of
Building Industry Alliances in Venezuela
Arnoldo Pirela
Science Technology Society 2007; 12; 113
DOI: 10.1177/097172180601200106

The online version of this article can be found at:
http://sts.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/12/1/113

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ENTREPRENEURIAL BEHAVIOUR AND INSTITUTIONAL CHANGE

113

Entrepreneurial Behaviour and
Institutional Change: The Dynamics of
Building Industry Alliances in Venezuela
ARNOLDO PIRELA
This article presents and analyses the final results of a four-year experience aimed at developing innovative capacities and competitiveness bycreating alliances between the stateowned oil company (PDVSA), and national firms supplying goods and services to the
Venezuelan oil and petrochemical industry. The article proposes a different approach
from the standard analysis on firm behaviour, innovation competitiveness, and cooperative
organisation and alliances that tend to disregard national environment, including national
politicaldevelopments and government ideological orientations. We make a case in favour
of the analysis of the long-term macro-economic and macro-political trends and ideological
orientations of a country, as well as how firms attempt to develop their competitiveness and
the collaboration programmes supposedly taking place. We argue in favour of this approach
in countries with high levels of political andeconomic instability, such as most underdeveloped nations. This is the case of several Latin American countries at present, especially of
the Venezuelan oil-driven economy. A country now in a ‘u-turn’ economy, and maybe the
only one since the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Soviet Union trying to impose
a kind of planned economy and socialism.

Introduction

THIS ARTICLE FOCUSESon the so-called ‘Oil Opening’ in Venezuela. A large
oil production expansion plan, approved by the board of directors of the
Petróleos de Venezuela, Sociedad Anórima (PDVSA) in 1995, and designed to attract foreign investment and foreign technology to the already

Arnolod Pirela is Professor, Universidad Central de Venezuela, Centro de Estudios del
Desarrollo, Caracas, Venezuela. E-mail:pirela@cantv.net.
Science, Technology & Society 12:1 (2007)
SAGE PUBLICATIONS LOS ANGELES/LONDON/NEW DELHI/SINGAPORE
DOI: 10.1177/097172180601200106

Downloaded from http://sts.sagepub.com by Arnoldo Pirela on October 20, 2009

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Arnoldo Pirela

nationalised (in 1976) oil industry. Certainly, this was a period of high
instability, of strong political confrontations, big institutionalchanges
in political and economic structures, in the country and in the state-owned
PDVSA, the Venezuelan politicians’ goose that lays golden eggs.1
Nevertheless, we need to realise that this process was just part of a
larger one. High uncertainty, with all its political, institutional, economic,
organisational, technological and social effects, are one way we can
summarise the atmospherewithin which Venezuela’s industrial structure
has developed in the last three decades. Analysed here are some of the
final results of a four-year research and development, and intervention
experience aimed at developing innovative capacities and competitiveness by creating alliances between the PDVSA, and national private firms
supplying goods and services to the oil and petrochemical...