What Global Capitalism Leaves to the Nation: Coca-Cola, the United States, and Latin America

In this research project, I use the history of Coca-Cola as thread and a unit of analysis to get at pressing issues in the study of American capitalist expansion, globalization, business and cultural history, economic development, U.S. foreign policy, and modern Latin America. To achieve this goal, I focus on how Coca-Cola executives read business conditions and how such reading informed expansion strategies, business norms, and corporate structures. This leads to a careful analysis of how market conditions, governments, institutions, and commercial networks shaped U.S. and Latin American capitalist expansion throughout the 20th century. I show how Coca-Cola’s ability to acclimate to local conditions, its development of a corporate structure that was flexible enough to allow for regional differences, and its willingness to learn from the experience in one country and use that experience to either anticipate or respond to challenges in other parts of the world proved critical to the company’s expansion and successful performance abroad. I show how, in addition to factors already identified by others as critical for American capitalism, Coca-Cola’s expansion and success depended on the company’s ability to use its global presence as a commercial laboratory and its ability to connect local values, beliefs, and practices to its global corporate structures and marketing strategies. Because Coca-Cola’s behavior depended on its ability to read local conditions and to bridge those conditions to a global strategy, I look at how local and global factors impact corporate performance and economic growth. The disentangling of these issues is critical for understanding the nature of corporate America and its relationship to the state and civil society at home and abroad.