Structures, Managers and Owners: The Case of the Post-War Swedish Paint Industry

Abstract

During the period 1985–90 the leading Swedish paint companies merged their production units into a new combination which now has a dominant position in all important markets for paint, namely manufacturing industry, building industry and home-owners. The aim of the article is to discuss the roles of managers and owners during the concentration process leading up to this merger. Of particular interest is whether one can speak of a development pattern according to the model of Alfred D. Chandler. Owner–management relations, relations to markets and technological change are discussed. The emerging big paint companies can in the late 1980s be seen as a mixture of ‘entrepreneurial’ and ‘family’ enterprises but not as ‘managerial’ in a Chandlerian sense. The paint companies are characterised by strong family ownership, a special relation of the industry to the producers of raw materials and a special character of the market.