区域经济网络与跨国零售业外文参考文献及译文 第5页
METHODS
Sample selection
Our population of interest is the world’s forty-nine largest retailers in the world's 500 largest firms. Because our central concern was to pinpoint the existence of different causes of flagship network inception, we selected three of these retailers, embedded in three different competitive contexts to maximize the probability of capturing sufficient variance in the retailers’ network strategies: (i) the retailer's strategic position, (ii) the retailer’s level of internationalisation, i.e. its geographic scope and (iii) the sectoral/environmental drivers of competition.
First, the retailer’s strategy and positioning refers to different generic strategies competitive strategies and therefore to the unique way the firm creates a competitive position in an industry; the way it configures its internal environment (resources) to cope with the influence of its external environment; and the way it defines its internationalisation goals . According to this logic, different interactions of economic and environmental forces should help determine the transaction costs and resource reasons for choice of network partners by retailers while internationalising. We found that while Tesco was competing on a cost-leadership strategy driven by a constant growing market share in the U.K. and several other European countries , LVMH the world’s leading luxury conglomerate was a differentiator and The Body Shop (TBS) a focuser on one limited range of products: medium-range cosmetics. In Calori and colleagues’ international competitive strategy terms adapted by Leknes and Carr for retailing, Tesco was a ‘continental leader’, LVMH a ‘global luxury niche player’ and TBS a ‘world-wide specialist’.
Secondly, the internationalisation scope refers to the MNE’s geographic coverage. The international literature has always highlighted the challenges that geographic diversification imposes on MNEs in terms of resource transfer, regional responsiveness, economic integration, and performance . Recent empirical evidence in international business has shown that most of the world's 500 largest MNEs are not global but home-region based; very few are bi-regional; and only nine out of the 500 are global with significant sales in the three regions of the triad . More specifically, the extent to which a firm crosses the boundaries of its home-region appears to increase the necessity to adapt to different market and institutional conditions, (as so few large MNEs achieve some global activity). Tesco is very home-region oriented (92% of its sales were derived from Europe and 8% from Asia in 2002). TBS is also home-region oriented with 53% of its sales in Europe, but it has significant operations in the two other regions of the triad (22% in Asia Pacific and 25% in the Americas). LVMH is truly global (34% of its sales in Europe, 27% in the United States and 30% in Asia Pacific).
Finally, several sectoral and environmental factors help determine the conditions of cross-border transfer of retail firms’ capabilities. In the grocery retail segment, national taste; cultural, religious and shopping pattern variations; local planning regulations; and the perishability of products impose constraints . These constraints apply to Tesco. In the luxury retail segment, cross-border differences for elitist products and brands are minimal as the same sort of products appeal to the global jet set . This different set of environmental conditions applies to LVMH and affects its internationalisation strategy. In the cosmetic segment there are some consumer taste differences and distributional complexities caused by rising cosmetic market-share of competing General Merchandise Stores (GMS). Such environmental constraints apply to TBS.
The main differences across the three selected firms, susceptible of triggering different causes of flagship network inception, are summarized in Table 2.
TABLE 2 here
Data gathering and analysis
We used a multi-method data-gathering process. First, to assess whether these three retailers have different international networking 原文请找腾讯752018766辣,文-论'文'网
http://www.751com.cn nd to other internal respondents. In total we conducted twenty interviews in 2003 at senior managerial levels within the three retailers and across their network partners: upstream (private labels and general suppliers), downstream (franchisees and concessionaires), selected competitors and non-business institutions such as business schools and trade associations. On average, each interview lasted an hour, was tape-recorded and transcribed. From the interviews, we inferred a hierarchical structure of five nodes and forty seven codes that led to the analysis presented below . To help reduce any retrospective bias and control for the bias present in the interviewer-interviewee relationship we triangulated the different interviews with one another across the network and also with both internal and secondary sources. This method generated a rich multi-faceted view of the phenomenon.
THE THREE CASES
In this section, we explore two research questions. First, we consider evidence for the existence of flagship network strategies and of their correlation with the three retailers’ international success. Second, we examine whether different factors explain their network strategies.
i) Evidence of different levels of flagship-network relations across the three retailers
As summarized in Table 3, the careful selection of cases led to the observation of interesting differences in the degree of flagship network strategies coordinated by the three retailers. But according to the retailers, the flagship strategy significantly contributes to their current international success. 上一页 [1] [2] [3] [4] [5]
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