Creating Knowledge Networks: Spanish Multinational Publishers in Mexico

Unlike the majority of Spanish multinationals, which have developed only recently, firms in the publishing industry became international in the early twentieth century and have managed to hold on to much of their business, despite the instability of their own institutional systems and those of their principal host economies. Today, the Spanish publishing industry ranks fourth in the world, and its foreign markets continue to grow in North America, Europe, Latin America, and, most critically, in Mexico. The internationalization of Spanish publishing firms was fueled initially by a search for new markets and by linguistic and cultural advantages. With the passage of time, the process came to be built on accumulated knowledge and on the personal and social networks created by Spanish publishers, both inside and outside Spain.