New digital devices enable consumers to ubiquitously access the Internet and inspire them to switch between online and offline channels when shopping - a phenomenon extant research on consumer behavior terms cross-channel shopping. This considerable change in consumer behavior offers great potential for retailers worldwide to strengthen their competitiveness. Today, retail incumbents aspire to integrate their channels to offer compelling switching opportunities among all online and offline channels - an approach we coin cross-channel management. However, addressing cross-channel shoppers may entail a rise in business model complexity which can only be tackled by installing a firm-wide strategic change process. Set against this transformative background, this book offers insight into how firms can overcome said inertia and successfully transform their current channel specific business model to a much more integrated system of online and offline channels. With the help of 71 interviews with top and middle managers in retailing, this book derives a variety of recommendations in the field of cross-channel management for retailers and manufacturers.

This is the first major biography of Alexander T. Stewart, known during his lifetime as The Merchant Prince for his success in retail, wholesale, and manufacturing in New York City. At the time of his death in 1876, Stewart was one of the three wealthiest men in America, along with William B. Astor and Cornelius Vanderbilt. But, because he died with no surviving children, his name has all but been forgotten. In this work, Stewart is revived, his remarkable success as the father of the department store examined, and his great contributions to retailing acknowledged and recounted. Not only a definitive account, this story of a major figure in America's Gilded Age, as told by Stephen Elias, is also an absorbing tale.

This work fills a gap in the literature on American history and the history of our retail trade. It will be of use to historians, students of merchandising, and those interested in New York's golden age.

With electronic commerce growing exponentially, staying competitive through an effective e-business strategy is a tough challenge. Electronic commerce represents one of the most promising directions for generating competitive advantage at the micro level of the organization and for increasing productivity at the macro level of the economy. This is a study of the critical fundamental elements that could impact a user's perception of business-to-business and business-to-consumer electronic commerce. It examines key components and concepts of e-commerce, evaluating the critical success factors of global e-commerce, the economics of e-commerce, and the practical issues involved with e-commerce in various applications.

Grocery shopping is an often ignored part of the story of how food ultimately gets to our pantry shelves and tables. "A Theory of Grocery Shopping" explores the social organization of grocery shopping by linking the lived experience of grocery shoppers and retail managers in the US with information transmitted by nutritionists, government employees, financial advisors, journalists, health care providers and marketers, who influence the way we think about and perform the work of shopping for a household's food. The author provides insight into the contradictory messages that shape how consumers provision their households, and details how consumers respond to these messages. The book challenges the consumer choice model that places responsibility on the shopper for making the "right" choice at the grocery store, thereby ignoring the larger social forces at work, which determine what products are available and how they get to the shelves.

Exploring the elements that constitute the perceived luxuriousness of a brand, this book addresses the changing definitions of the term 'luxury' in today's world. Taking the approach that the concept of luxury evolves from the consumer, the author introduces a conceptual model which explains how the consumer interprets the luxuriousness of a brand. This innovative study analyses the key elements that influence luxury branding, such as extended product, perceived uniqueness, authenticity and context specificity. By critically reflecting on the existing definitions of luxury and its challenges, this book makes a unique contribution to research and an essential read for marketing students and scholars.

Using various research methodologies, such as reviews, case studies, analytical modeling and empirical studies, this book investigates luxury fashion retail management and provides relevant insights, which are beneficial to both industrialists and academics. Readers gain an understanding of luxury fashion retailing, including proper operations and strategic management, which now are the most crucial items on the luxury fashion industry's senior management agenda.

The continued advancement of globalization, increases in internet connectivity, compatibility of international payment systems, and adaptability of logistics and shipping processes have combined to contribute to the rapid growth of the cross-border e-commerce market. Due to these advancements and the ubiquitous presence of smartphones, consumer use of cross-border e-commerce is increasingly simplified, and thus, sellers are hardly restricted to a specific country in terms of promoting, selling, and shipping goods worldwide. The burgeoning opportunities, habits, and trends of shopping on cross-border e-commerce platforms have expedited the prospect of becoming a presence in the global market. This is true for enterprises of all sizes, especially for small? and medium?sized enterprises (SMEs) that want to add their footprint in the international market for the first time. Like any other industry, cross-border e-commerce has its specific economics and driving forces, but has different scopes, challenges, and trends due to the geographic and cultural expanse of relevant environments. Cross-Border E-Commerce Marketing and Management was conceptualized by identifying the scope of new complementary information with a comprehensive understanding of the issues and potential of cross-border e-commerce businesses. The authors believe that this book will not only fill the void in the current research but will also provide far-sighted vision and strategies, as it covers big data, artificial intelligence, IoT, supply chain management, and more. This book provides the necessary knowledge to managers to compete with the competitive market structure and ultimately contribute to the sustainable economic growth of a country. It works as a guideline for existing cross-border e-commerce managers to formulate individual strategies that combine to optimize the industry while keeping the enterprise competitive. This book is useful in both developed and developing country contexts. This publication is an ideal resource for academicians, policy makers, stakeholders, and cross-border e-commerce managers, especially from SMEs.

This book, the result of a symposium co-sponsored by several academic and professional organizations, provides information and insights useful for anyone aspiring to succeed in marketing to consumers in the 1990s. The book is unique in that it blends thoughtful commentaries of distinguished academics with the reasoned perspectives of executives of such firms as J. C. Penney, Avon, and Mary Kay in arriving at an agenda of critical propositions and issues relating to the nature and structure of retailing by the year 2000. What types of retailers will exist in the next century? How many retailers will there be? What will be the relationship between retailing and society? Questions such as these are asked and answered in the book. By focusing on likely trends in traditional retailing, direct marketing, direct selling, and multi-channel distribution networks, and overlaying these trends with the impact of technology and changing consumption patterns, the book provides a set of guidelines for achieving retailing success.

The book identifies the single-most important key to success in the remainder of this century--relationship management. Only by managing relationships between the firm and its customers, between the firm and its employees, and between employees and customers will a firm be able to survive in the 1990s. As the book notes, retail leaders in the next millennium will have learned to respect the lifetime value of both their customers and employees. The book concludes by identifying 25 conditions that will face retailers in the 1990s. These conditions, which range from hypersaturated markets to demographic trends (income polarization, smaller households, educational decline, more working women, time poverty), database marketing, show biz shopping, and concerned customers, are likely to both inhibit and facilitate retailing in the remainder of the century. Hence, the book should be of interest to business academics, business practitioners engaged in, or wanting to be engaged in, marketing to consumers, and anyone interested in the future of retailing from a societal or public policy perspective.

This book studies the relationship between administrative capacity and a member state's influence in the European Union. More specifically, it studies member states' ability to exert control over the European Commission during trade negotiations. But what determines administrative capacity and how do member states ensure their preferences are defended during trade negotiations? A combination of qualitative fieldwork and survey-analysis provides the answer. Interviews in Belgium, Poland, Estonia and Spain offer a privileged insight into the functioning of national trade administrations and its effects on their behavior in the Council of Ministers. Through survey data, these findings are further corroborated. The book is aimed at a readership interested in EU decision-making, negotiation theory, comparative public administration and the international political economy of trade.

In today's world of galloping change, adjustment and anticipation have become ever more vital for retail operations. Many retailers have successfully anticipated change, while others have simply become relics of retailing history. Facing intense environmental competition, different types of retail institutions, whether a mass merchandiser or a hotel, find themselves confronting different types of challenges. The stories of a spectrum of retailers highlight the variables necessary for duplicating success and avoiding failure. This timely work provides a starting point for understanding the complexities and interrelationships in retail management.

This book tries to integrate the different arrangements devised in the MTS for small and large NMEs into one analytical framework and explores two sets of rules (GATT/WTO-minus and GATT/WTO-plus) along three historical stages (shaping, weakening and strengthening). The focal point of this book is to uncover the composition and structure of the NME treatment in the MTS, its evolving logic and process, and the nature and trend of the political-economic relations between NMEs and the MTS.

This volume discusses continuous improvement strategies of Japanese convenience store operators. The study highlights the efforts of companies operating under lean management systems to identify new, dynamic, firm-specific capabilities in highly competitive markets.

The story of Britain's market halls-built to replace traditional open-air markets throughout England, Wales, and Scotland-is a tale of exuberant architecture, civic pride, and attempts at social engineering. This book is the first history of the market hall, an immensely important building type that revolutionized the way Britons obtained their consumer goods. James Schmiechen and Kenneth Carls investigate the economic, cultural, political, and social forces that led to the construction of several hundred market buildings in the two centuries after 1750. The market hall was frequently vast in scale, revolutionary in plan, and elaborately ornamented-indeed, it was often the most important architectural statement a proud town might make. Drawing on a wide range of contemporary records, the authors show how municipal authorities used market buildings to improve the supply and distribution of food, convey social ideals, control social and economic behavior, and declare a town's virtues. For the Victorians, Schmiechen and Carls argue, the enormous investment of energy, seriousness, and funding in the market hall reflected a belief that architecture was a primary agent of social reform and improvement. Generously illustrated with more than 180 drawings and photographs, this book also includes a Gazetteer with information about some 300 specific market buildings. Published with assistance from the Annie Burr Lewis Fund

Globalization has pushed the use of technology in business with advancing information and communication technology becoming a key factor in the future development of the retailing industry. Technology applications have significantly contributed to the exponential growth and profits of retailing institutions worldwide. ""Information Communication Technologies and Globalization of Retailing Applications"" critically examines the synergy of technology use and conventional wisdom in retailing and explores contemporary changes determining higher customer value. Discussions in this book encompass strategy implications for managers to optimize their advantage in retailing through the application of ICT, bridging the customer-technology gap.

This book is the first to analyze Chile's salmon farming industry in discussing industrial development in terms of the management of public goods. The book highlights important aspects of learning and capacity development, environmental sustainability, institutions, and social welfare or inclusiveness. With aquaculture now providing almost half the global fish harvest, Chile's salmon farming and processing industry stands out as a leader in the new "blue revolution". Taking a holistic, historic approach to understanding the evolutionary development of the industry, the authors employ this strategy in the belief that policy discussions of economic activities have become highly segmented and often provide only a partial picture. Such segmentation is problematic for policy studies based on a complex web of interactions among numerous agents. The present volume untangles this web by considering the development of the Chilean salmon industry not only in holistic and historic terms but also from a socioeconomic point of view. The valuable book offers insightful lessons that can be applied to other natural resource-based sectors facing similar challenges in the course of development. Normal 0 false false false EN-US JA X-NONE /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name: ; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0cm 5.4pt 0cm 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0cm; mso-para-margin-right:0cm; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0cm; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin;}

This book argues that we need to focus attention on the ways that workers themselves have invested subjectively in what it means to be a worker. By doing so, we gain an explanation that moves us beyond the economic decisions made by actors, the institutional constraints faced by trade unions, or the power of the state to interpellate subjects. These more common explanations make workers and their politics visible only as a symptom of external conditions, a response to deregulated markets or a product of state recognition. Instead - through a history of retailing as a site of nation and belonging, changing legal regimes, and articulations of race, class and gender in the constitution of political subjects from the 1930s to present-day Wal-Mart - this book presents the experiences and subjectivities of workers themselves to show that the collective political subject 'workers' (abasebenzi) is both a durable and malleable political category. From white to black women's labour, the forms of precariousness have changed within retailing in South Africa. Workers' struggles in different times have in turn resolved some dilemmas and by other turn generated new categories and conditions of precariousness, all the while explaining enduring attachments to labour politics.

Much scholarship on the British transatlantic slave trade has focused on its peak period in the late eighteenth century and its abolition in the early nineteenth; or on the Royal African Company (RAC), which in 1698 lost the monopoly it had previously enjoyed over the trade. During the early eighteenth-century transition between these two better-studied periods, Humphry Morice was by far the most prolific of the British slave traders. He bears the guilt for trafficking over 25,000 enslaved Africans, and his voluminous surviving papers offer intriguing insights into how he did it. Morice's strategy was well adapted for managing the special risks of the trade, and for duplicating, at lower cost, the RAC's capabilities for gathering information on what African slave-sellers wanted in exchange. Still, Morice's transatlantic operations were expensive enough to drive him to a series of increasingly dubious financial manoeuvres throughout the 1720s, and eventually to large-scale fraud in 1731 from the Bank of England, of which he was a longtime director. He died later that year, probably by suicide, and with his estate hopelessly indebted to the Bank, his family, and his ship captains. Nonetheless, his astonishing rise and fall marked a turning point in the development of the brutal transatlantic trade in enslaved Africans.

Continuous improvements in digitized practices have created opportunities for businesses to develop more streamlined processes. This not only leads to higher success in day-to-day production, but it also increases the overall success of businesses. E-Manufacturing and E-Service Strategies in Contemporary Organizations is a critical scholarly resource that explores the advances in cloud-based solutions in the service and manufacturing realms of corporations and promotes communication between customers and service providers and manufacturers. Featuring coverage on a wide range of topics including smart manufacturing, internet banking, database system adoption, this book is geared towards researchers, professionals, managers, and academicians seeking current and relevant research on the improvement of cloud-based systems for manufacturing and service.

This book addresses concerns with the international trade and investment dispute settlement systems from a statist perspective, at a time when multilateralism is deeply questioned by the forces of mega-regionalism and political and economic contestation. In covering recent case law and theoretical discussions, the book's contributors analyze the particularities of statehood and the limitations of the dispute settlement systems to judge sovereign actors as autonomous regulators. From a democratic deficit coupled with a deficit of legitimacy in relation to the questionable professionalism, independence and impartiality of adjudicators to the lack of consistency of decisions challenging essential public policies, trade and investment disputes have proven controversial. These challenges call for a rethinking of why, how and what for, are States judged. Based on a "sovereignty modern" approach, which takes into account the latest evolutions of a globalized trade and investment law struggling to put people's expectations at its core, the book provides a comprehensive framework and truly original perspective linking the various facets of "judicial activity" to the specific yet encompassing character of international law and the rule of law in international society. In doing so, it covers a large variety of issues such as global judicial capacity building and judicial professionalism from an international and domestic comparative angle, trade liberalisation and States' legitimate rights and expectations to protect societal values, the legal challenges of being a State claimant, the uses and misuses of imported legal concepts and principles in multidisciplinary adjudications and, lastly, the need to reunify international law on a (human) rights based approach.

This book analyzes China's development in the wider context of the global trade, investment, security, knowledge and production regimes established by the United States. It argues that, although China has thus far been able to enjoy rapid growth within this global architecture, it will have to deal with a more challenging external environment as other states react to its rise. More specifically, it is facing growing pressure to realign its currency, a greater number of trade investment and intellectual property disputes, a more hostile security environment, and exclusionary regional trans-Pacific and trans-Atlantic trade agreements. It is also being confronted by an array of internal issues, from an ageing population and weaknesses in the high tech sector, to over-reliance on foreign companies for exports, non-performing loans and a burgeoning state debt. This, in turn, has led an increasing number of firms to relocate to other countries. For the time being, the author concludes, China's global ambitions and challenge to US supremacy will have to be scaled back. This insightful work will appeal to students and scholars of China's politics, economy and development.

This unique edited collection explores the ways in which entrepreneurship acts to shape self-identity for Indian women and validate their identities in a patriarchal society. Differing from existing literature which focuses on the antecedents of entrepreneurship for women and their performing outcomes, Indian Women as Entrepreneurs questions whether entrepreneurship is simply about exploiting a business opportunity for profitability. Asserting that both work and societal environments have an impact on an entrepreneur's self-identity, this book demonstrates ways in which self-concept influences the entrepreneur's relationship with their work in terms of motivation, effort and performance. Building on Unveiling Women's Leadership, this book provides an original and important contribution to the literature on entrepreneurial Indian women.

This book offers a critical analysis of recent developments in the automotive industry of East-Central Europe (ECE). Economists, industry specialists and national governments have considered the rapid development of the automotive industry in ECE in the past twenty years an unqualified success. This rapid growth has been based on large inflows of foreign direct investment (FDI) from Western Europe, North America, Japan and South Korea, and it significantly contributed to GDP growth, created thousands of new jobs, and completely transformed the previously existing automotive industry in the region. This volume offers an analysis that goes beyond uncritical celebratory accounts of this rapid growth. It is based on original, detailed firm-level research conducted by the author in Czechia and Slovakia between 2009 and 2015 that covered assembly firms and the networks of component suppliers. Theoretically and conceptually, the analysis will draw on the global production networks and global value chains perspectives. Drawing on the original empirical data and on additional available information, this volume concentrates on several important questions related to the development of the automotive industry in ECE in the 2000s:* The role of FDI in the rapid development of the automotive industry after 1990 and particularly in the 2000s.* The upgrading of the automotive industry in East-Central Europe through FDI* The position of ECE in the automotive industry research and development (R&D)* The effects of the 2008-2009 economic crisis in the automotive industry of ECE.* The role of state in the rapid development of the automotive industry in ECE in the 1990s and 2000s.* The effects of FDI on domestic firms in the form of linkages between foreign-owned and domestic firms and spillovers from foreign-owned to domestic firms.

This book addresses the lack of binding multi-lateral international agreement on cartels, through analysis of trials and failures. It also suggests strategic approaches to overcome current standstills. In addition, the book contrasts international agreement on cartels with inter-governmental commodity agreement which has been developed separately through international law. Through this project, the author puts forth that successful international law on cartels needs to reflect the interests and arguments of developing countries.