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Sanofi-Aventis and the Complexity of Capitalist Organization

Using case study material on French pharmaceutical firm Sanofi-Aventis, this article aims to elaborate on recent criticisms of the varieties of capitalism (VoC) perspective. The article claims that the VoC approach is not so much ‘wrong’ as limited, both by its narrow focus on the national and its exclusive concern with mapping national institutional organization. The article highlights the important role of sectoral and global institutions, and discusses the difficulty of reading firm strategy directly from national institutional change, when ownership and personnel changes often provide senior management with greater autonomy to pursue divergent strategies which are difficult to generalize from the national level. In the case of Sanofi, the article finds that, whilst domestic institutional shifts explain the timing of the company's strategic change, sectoral and global institutions play a more important role in understanding the form and direction of that change. Meanwhile, Sanofi's PDG, Jean-François DeHecq, drew on non-national institutions — notably US- and UK-based institutional shareholders who bought the new share issues, and foreign investment banks which brokered acquisitions — to operationalize a discretionary strategy of expansion in the US market. The article argues that VoC's emphasis on national institutional configurations fails to adequately engage with these complexities. Further, it presents empirics on Sanofi's geographical accumulation and reinvestment of profit, which highlights how funds generated in the US were recycled in France to support well-paid research and manufacturing jobs. The article concludes that Sanofi is better thought of as part of a disorganized but interconnected economic world, where firms operate as a kind of conduit for cross-subsidy between national social settlements. This requires us to question VoC's emphasis on national complementarities and encourages us to think divergently about the degree of separateness between national capitalisms.