As the largest private employer in the world, Walmart dominates media and academic debate about the global expansion of transnational retail corporations and the working conditions in retail operations and across the supply chain. Yet far from being a monolithic force conquering the world, Walmart must confront and adapt to diverse policies and practices pertaining to regulation, economy, history, union organization, preexisting labor cultures, and civil society in every country into which it enters. This transnational aspect of the Walmart story, including the diversity and flexibility of its strategies and practices outside the United States, is mostly unreported. Walmart in the Global South presents empirical case studies of Walmart's labor practices and supply chain operations in a number of countries, including Chile, Brazil, Argentina, Nicaragua, Mexico, South Africa, and Thailand. It assesses the similarities and differences in Walmart's acceptance into varying national contexts, which reveals when and how state regulation and politics have served to redirect company practice and to what effect. Regulatory context, state politics, trade unions, local cultures, and global labor solidarity emerge as vectors with very different force around the world. The volume's contributors show how and why foreign workers have successfully, though not uniformly, driven changes in Walmart's corporate culture. This makes Walmart in the Global South a practical guide for organizations that promote social justice and engage in worker struggles, including unions, worker centers, and other nonprofit entities.

Omni-channel retailing (OCR) strategies have recently emerged as a powerful engine of growth in the retail industry. The goal is to provide consumers with a seamless and consistent shopping experience across different channels and devices. Success in implementing OCR strategies depends on sophisticated compromises between fulfilment responsiveness and product variety across different product types, consumer segments, and shopping occasions. Failures in OCR strategies to optimize the trade-offs between responsiveness and variety are rooted in a poor understanding of how OCR strategies should build on last-mile supply network (LMSN) distribution configurations. This book addresses this issue by developing a typology of LMSN distribution configurations in OCR. Typologies are useful for four reasons: (1) They provide a mechanism for incorporating holistic principles of inquiry into organizational research. (2) They explicitly define patterns of constructs that determine dependent variables while enabling researchers to move beyond traditional linear theories. (3) They provide a means to incorporate equifinality. (4) They establish connections between the findings of various studies. The existing literature covers a number of last-mile typological systems in the supply chain. However, these typologies do not provide a satisfactory characterization of various forms of LMSN distribution configurations in OCR and their unique structure, product/order and information flow, service architecture, and relational and governance aspects. To address these deficiencies in the literature, this typology updates the linearly "chain-centric" extended supply chain models developed previously and provides a framework that integrates multiple theoretical domains and terminologies that have been used disjointedly to describe the various forms of LMSN distribution configurations in OCR. After an introduction, Section 2 presents a review of the literature. Section 3 describes the methodology used to identify the different configuration dimensions and provides definitions of the terminologies. Section 4 describes the LMSN configuration-based typology while Section 5 presents LMSN evolution patterns through the discussion of example cases. Section 6 highlights key insights derived from the typology, elaborates on academic implications, and suggests some research extensions. Section 7 discusses the managerial implications and concludes.