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The general question motivating this dissertation is how firms that are lagging technologically in newly liberalized economies can catch up to world standards and develop a capacity for continuous learning. Based on the uneven restructuring of the Chilean and Mendozan (Argentina) wine industries this research challenges the conventional views that market institutions and state tutelage automatically supply the kind of knowledge that firms need in order to achieve technological world standards. It hypothesizes that upgrading requires "learning institutions," where members of a professional community can rework and improve through application, received knowledge embodied in new capital equipment, production techniques and market information. The systematic, wide, unprejudiced discussion of tacit knowledge from production and marketing experience is what helps firms discover what works best for them locally, and allows them to map out a set of incremental standards they can aspire to meet to rebuild their competitiveness. This study suggests how learning institutions that generate such a discussion might b