Globalizing retail: conceptualizing the distribution-based transnational corporation

Abstract: In this article we argue that the retail transnational corporation (TNC) is an entity that merits urgent theoretical and empirical investigation from economic geographers. Using recent theoretical developments that conceptualize TNCs as the complex nexus of intrafirm, interfirm and extrafirm relational networks, we explore the special characteristics of retail TNCs that distinguish them from their manufacturing counterparts, still the predominant focus of interest in the literature on economic globalization. In particular, using Hess % (2004) notion ofthree different kinds of embeddedness (societal, network, territorial), we explain how it is the necessarily high territorial embeddedness in markets and cultures ofconsumption, planning and property systems, and logistical and supply chain operations that defines the distinctive theoretical and organization challenge of the retail TNC. In turn, we argue that this high level of embeddedness frequently implies a very different experience of host-market regulation than is found in other sectors. Additionally, we use Dicken % (2000) distinction between 'placing firms and 'firming places ' to explore how territorial embeddedness ofthe retailTNC is influenced by its societal embeddedness (home country institutional origins), and how network embeddedness is critical to an understanding of how places/host economies are inserted, reciprocally, into the organizationa