The globalization of retailing (2 Volumes): N. M. Coe and N. Wrigley (eds)
本书汇集多学科论文，探讨食品和日用品零售商国际化的过程及其对母国和东道国的影响，适合经济地理及其他社会科学研究者阅读。
Scholarly debates on contemporary globalization processes have focused primarily on manufacturing systems and been inattentive to the transformative role of retail distribution. This has happened even though retail industry transnational corporations (TNCs) such as Carrefour and Wal-Mart emerged in the late 1990s as major global firms with market capitalizations that dwarfed their manufacturing TNC rivals (Wrigley; Chapter 8, Volume 1), and TNC retailer activity has been infiltrating swiftly into emerging markets across Latin America, Eastern Europe and South East Asia. The editors of the two-volume collection, The Globalization of Retailing, have put right this disparity by interrogating and bringing to the forefront a new frontier of research in contemporary globalization studies. This book considers seriously the economic geography dimensions of the globalization of retailing. Not only economic geography specialists will find it useful but also scholars from other social science disciplines. The editors, Neil Coe and Neil Wrigley who are leading economic geographers, have assembled a rich and particularly interesting selection of papers—previously available in different journals—which convey the excitement underpinning new empirical research and theoretical creativity in contemporary globalization studies. The papers investigate across diverse disciplines the processes of internationalization of food and general merchandise retailers, and the attendant impacts on both home and host countries. Coe and Wrigley bring two important new elements in this book: first, the editors provide rigorous and conceptually driven accounts of a rapidly developing field, and second, they set out an especially instructive assessment of the evolving research agenda. The papers are organized thematically in seven groups of readings that extend over two volumes. As space limitations preclude a review of all the papers, I summarize here the conceptual themes and empirical contributions.