Paper short abstract:

When do African business groups respond to a national crisis in ways that are not narrowly directed only to short-term profits, but that assist their society to solve that crisis? The paper introduces the concept of relative business autonomy and explores both how it may emerge and decline.

Paper long abstract:

Forty years ago, Colin Leys asked "how far the class that has the greatest interest in surmounting and resolving the problems confronting capitalist development … [has] identified these problems or shown itself able to tackle them?" An examination of the business response to moments of national crisis in four African cases (Kenya, Uganda, Botswana and South Africa) provides surprising answers: African businesses can be key responders to crisis, on occasion responding well in advance of the state and in welfare-enhancing ways that assist the society more widely to resolve the underlying crisis. Large, home-grown, diversified business groups are prominent in the ranks of the constructive responders to crisis, in surprising and counterintuitive ways.

This paper introduces the idea of relative business autonomy as the capacity, on the part of a key fraction of a business community, to understand and secure the broader system-level needs of capitalism as a whole. The paper makes use of qualitative, country-based fieldwork in East and Southern Africa to explore the conditions under which business autonomy may emerge and develop, as well as when and how it may decline. Relevant explanatory factors include more economistic, firm-level features (including firm size, degree of specialization, ownership model, and the sub-sector of the economy in which the firm operates). Also important however is a second set of more explicitly political factors that may serve to connect the interests of the country's national economic elites to those of the broader society.