The Importance of the Territory for Local and Transboundary Management in the Expansion of Global Production Networks: The Experience in the US-Mexico Border Region.

According to Castells, M. (1996) and Dicken, P. (1989), in the last 30 years, due to the development of  technologies of information and communication, there have been significant changes in the way transnational enterprises operate, which have come to complexity their production networks. In fact, the border between Mexico and the United States has been a privileged space for large corporations that operate under the scheme of global production networks.

While globalization has allowed large corporations to settle into spaces where they obtain greater benefits for their production, the fact is that territories compete to attract productive segments of large global networks. To achieve this, regions have been developing important strategies of attracting foreign capital, such as the improvement of local physical infrastructure to enhance the competitiveness of companies through development of industrial parks and road connectivity, as well as development of technologies of information and communication to facilitate logistics required to transport supplies and products. Some cities at the border region have made efforts to promote productive chains through public policies that seek to encourage local talent to bond with these global networks. Some regions and their public, private and social actors have been able to promote the development of a "management culture", as Boisier, S. (2002) pointed out, to articulate local interests with transnational interests (Barajas, 2013 and 2015).

In 2015 we started to replicate research initially developed in 1999 which has been tracking the evolution of 27 electronics firms located in the Tijuana-San Diego region. 19 of these firms are currently active, which has allowed us to document changes that these companies have experienced. For example with productive branch exchanges (mainly auto parts sector and aero-space) instead of being mono-producers. Also, many companies have become multi-producing companies forming alliances, developing products with higher technological content, and creating greater presence in the local environment.

The aim of this paper is to present an analysis of the logic and sense of the aforementioned changes and try to explain their business development not only in terms of products, markets and supply networks, but to discover to what extent these companies value the regional aspects mentioned before, as explanatory factors for permanence and productive expansion in the border region, particularly in the Tijuana-San Diego border area.

The paper is organized as follows: in the first section is a discussion from a theoretical perspective on the evolution of global production networks and the role of the territories. The second section emphasizes the evolution of the Mexico and the United States and particularly Tijuana-San Diego border area in the last 25 years. In a third section we will present the results of research on the evolution of the 19 companies in the electronics industry that remain in the region as part of the 1999 sample mentioned before. To conclude, we reflect on the progress of the management culture in the region and its role in the reduction or absence of asymmetric power relations around regional actors and actors of global production networks.