Ownership structure, organisational flexibility and store performance in retail chains.

Drawing on agency and flexible capability perspectives, the authors develop a theoretical framework explaining the impact of ownership structure on organisational flexibility and store performance in retail chains. The researchers argue that franchised stores attract more entrepreneurial managers with more flexible capabilities and they have a stronger incentive to align their flexible capabilities with the demands of the business environment. A sample of 105 franchised and company-owned stores of an optical retail chain is used to test the hypotheses. Furthermore, the study found strong support for the hypotheses that 'Franchised stores have a higher structural flexibility than company-owned stores', but only weak support for operational and strategic flexible capabilities. Furthermore, in line with the study's theoretical framework, it has been found that in a highly turbulent business environment, franchised stores perform better than company-owned stores. The paper concludes with a discussion of the implications for theory development and management of ownership structures in retail chains.

Institutional maintenance work and power preservation in business exchanges: Insights from industrial supplier workshops

This paper aims to offer new theoretical and empirical insights into power dynamics in an industrial supplier workshop setting. Theoretically, it advances an institutional perspective on supplier workshops as an important venue in managing, preserving and instituting industrial market power. Based on a detailed ethnographic analysis of an industrial workshop setting, this article investigates the institutional maintenance work of Retail Co. in preserving the power dynamics of market dominance in business exchanges and market structures. Our findings revealed three previously unreported insights into the subtle, but nonetheless pervasive power from institutional maintenance work in an industrial workshop setting. First, the institutional workshop work comprised a cultural performance; constituting socialization practice through a performance game, the power of numbers in field comprehension and an award ceremony. Second, the institutional workshop work mobilized projective agency, stipulating, directing and appealing for the instituting of distinct market rules and collective identities. Finally, the institutional workshop work increases supplier docility and utility via the regulative technologies-of-the-self to enhance business planning, operations and market decision-making practice, without necessarily being seen to be disciplinarian.

Waste Not, Want Not: Managing Perishables in Small and Medium Retail Enterprises

Purpose of this paper:
Recent literature indicates that around one third of perishable products finish as waste (Mena et al., 2014): 60% of this waste can be classified as avoidable (EC, 2010) suggesting logistics and operational inefficiencies along the supply chain. In developed countries perishable products are predominantly wasted in wholesale and retail (Gustavsson et al., 2011) due to customer demand uncertainty the errors and delays in the supply chain (Fernie and Sparks, 2014). While research on logistics of large retail supply chains is well documented, research on retail small and medium enterprises’ (SMEs) capabilities to prevent and manage waste of perishable products is in its infancy (c.f. Ellegaard, 2008) and needs further exploration. In our study, we investigate the retail logistics practice of small food retailers, the factors that contribute to perishable products waste and the barriers and opportunities of SMEs in retail logistics to preserve product quality and participate in reverse logistics flows.

Design/methodology/approach:
As research on waste of perishable products for SMEs is scattered, we focus on identifying key variables that contribute to the creation of avoidable waste. Secondly we identify patterns of waste creation at the retail level and its possibilities for value added recovery. We use explorative case studies (Eisenhardt, 1989) and compare four SMEs and one large retailer that operate in a developed market. To get insights into specificities of SMEs that affect retail logistics practice, we select two types of food retailers: specialised (e.g. greengrocers and bakers) and general (e.g. convenience store that sells perishable products as a part of the assortment)

Findings:
Our preliminary findings indicate that there is a difference between large retailers and SME retailers in factors that contribute to the waste creation, as well as opportunities for value added recovery of products. While more factors appear to affect waste creation and management at large retailers, a small number of specific factors appears to affect SMEs. Similarly, large retailers utilise a range of practices to reduce risks of product perishability and short shelf life, manage demand, and manage reverse logistics practices. Retail SMEs on the other hand have limited options to address waste creation and value added recovery. However, our findings show that specialist SMEs could successfully minimize waste and even create possibilities for value added recovery of perishable products. Data indicates that business orientation of the SME, the buyersupplier relationship, and an extent of adoption of lean principles in retail coupled with SME resources, product specific regulations and support from local authorities for waste management or partnerships with other organizations determine extent of successful preservation of a product quality and value added recovery.

Value:
Our contribution to the SCM academic literature is threefold: first, we identify major factors that contribute to the generation waste of perishable products in retail environment; second, we identify possibilities for value added recovery for perishable products and third, we present opportunities and challenges for SME retailers to manage or participate in activities of value added recovery. Our findings contribute to theory by filling a gap in the literature that considers product quality preservation and value added recovery in the context of retail logistics and SMEs.

Research limitations/implications:
Our findings are limited to insights from five case studies of retail companies that operate within a developed market. To improve on generalisability, we intend to increase the number of cases and include data obtained from the suppliers and organizations involved in reverse logistics flows (e.g. local authorities, charities, etc.).

Practical implications:
With this paper, we contribute to the improvement of retail logistics and operations in SMEs which constitute over 99% of business activities in UK (Rhodes, 2015). Our findings will help retail managers and owners to better understand the possibilities for value added recovery, investigate a range of logistics and retail strategies suitable for the specificities of SME environment and, ultimately, improve their profitability and sustainability.

Advanced Business Simulations-Incorporating business and process execution data

Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) and their predictions are widely used by the enterprises for informed decision making. Nevertheless , a very important factor, which is generally overlooked, is that the top level strategic KPIs are actually driven by the operational level business processes. These two domains are, however, mostly segregated and analysed in silos with different Business Intelligence solutions. In this paper, we are proposing an approach for advanced Business Simulations, which converges the two domains by utilising process execution & business data, and concepts from Business Dynamics (BD) and Business Ontologies, to promote better system understanding and detailed KPI predictions. Our approach incorporates the automated creation of Causal Loop Diagrams, thus empowering the analyst to critically examine the complex dependencies hidden in the massive amounts of available enterprise data. We have further evaluated our proposed approach in the context of a retail use-case that involved verification of the automatically generated causal models by a domain expert.