Butikens roll för hållbar konsumtion : Ett marknadsorienterat perspektiv på hållbar sortimentsutveckling i dagligvarukedjan

Sustainability is an increasingly important topic across the world, and awareness of it has been growing since the publication of the UN sustainable development goals (SDGs). Seeing an escalating societal interest in sustainability, consumer demand for sustainable products in retailer’s assortments. Making the retail store manager a key player for implementing Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) in retail store assortment. The aim of the study is to use a market-oriented perspective to understand information management between different levels in the grocery retail chain and how the store manager as a key person could affect the growth of CSR products in the store assortment. This study uses a market-orientated information perspective to generate knowledge about the dissemination of information between retail managers at central level and retail store managers. The empirical data is based on interviews with managers in retail buying at central level and at store level in three Swedish food retail chains.Based on the framework by Jaworski and Kohli (1993) five market-oriented factors were identified from which 10 propositions was developed. The propositions contribute to an understanding on how market-oriented factors affect market-oriented activities in retail stores. Weber’s ideal types (Weber, 1983) where the individual is the subject for interpretation of driving forces for CSR in retail store assortment contributes to an understanding of forces, such as authority, power, and rationality from an unspoken and informal point of view. Through the weberian analysis ideal types has been identified among store managers. An analytical reasoning about how social structures operates in organisations, the understanding of substructures and their relationships with each other, became the impetus for the results of this study. Therefore, these ideal types contribute to an understanding for how information management in retail buying could improve the dynamics of internal market orientation that might reduce the gap between consumer demand for CSR and actual sustainable consumption