This page contains details of some of the recent journal article publications by members of the Institute for Retail Studies. Pre-print versions of these articles are available online from the University of Stirling’s Depository (STORRE) in most cases, or contact the author or Leigh Sparks directly.
Anne Findlay and Leigh Sparks (2015) Open All Hours, Town and Country Planning, Vol. 84 Iss: 10, pp 424-426
The Summer Budget of 2015 saw the Chancellor announce the devolution of Sunday trading regulations in England and Wales to city mayors and local authorities. In their latest Trading Places column, Anne Findlay and Leigh Sparks discuss the background and implications of the proposals, but setting the debate in the context of a renewed focus on place and localism,. Whilst the debate opens up issues of how places could be conceived and constructed, the power and finance implications tend to be ignored (See Trading Places section of this blog)
Anne Findlay and Leigh Sparks (2015) Kirkcaldy no more, Devizes no more, Bicester no more…, Town and Country Planning, Vol. 84 Iss: 8, pp 312-314
In their latest Trading Places column, Anne Findlay and Leigh Sparks discuss the changing nature of the grocery superstore market, the rise of convenience retailing and the implications of these for planners and place making. They argue that the changes in the superstore market raise new issues for planners and planning, unused to having to deal so directly with contraction and reuse of redundant space (See Trading Places section of this blog)
Mbaye Fall Diallo, Steve Burt and Leigh Sparks (2015) The influence of image and consumer factors on store brand choice in the Brazilian market, European Business Review, Vol. 27 Iss 5 pp. 495 – 512. Permanent link to this document: http://dx.doi.org/10.1108/EBR-03-2013-0048
This paper investigates the role of image and consumer factors in influencing store brand (SB) choice between two retail chains (Carrefour and Extra) in a Latin American market, Brazil. SBs are increasingly offered by retailers in emerging markets. What is less clear,
however, is how emerging market consumers make their choices between the SBs on offer from different retail chains. The results revealed that SB attitude, SB price-image, store image perceptions, SB perceived value and SB purchase intention have significant and positive direct or indirect effects on SB choice overall, and for each retail chain. However, for price-related constructs, the relationships are stronger for the Extra chain compared to the Carrefour chain. Results show that the Brazilian market presents some departures from both developed and other emerging countries. Understanding which factors influence consumer choice of SBs in an emerging market while taking into account the presence of different operators allows retailers to launch new SB programs and implement the appropriate strategies to increase SB sales in this market.
Anne Findlay and Leigh Sparks (2015) Yes, Minister, Town and Country Planning, Vol. 84 Iss: 4, pp 158-160
In their latest Trading Places column, and just ahead of this week’s election, Anne Findlay and Leigh Sparks reflect on the number of high street ministers there have been in England in the last year or so and what they may or may not have achieved, contrasting that with a different approach in Scotland. business rates and local taxation powers should be hot election topics, surely, but apparently not. (See Trading Places section of this blog)
Thomas Boysen Anker, Leigh Sparks, Luiz Moutinho and Christian Gronroos (2015) Consumer dominant value creation, European Journal of Marketing, Vol. 49 Iss 3/4 pp. 532 – 560. http://dx.doi.org/10.1108/EJM-09-2013-0518
This paper provides an analysis of the ontological and semantic foundations of consumer-dominant value creation to clarify the extent to which the call for a distinct consumer-dominant logic (CDL) is justified. This paper discusses consumer-driven value creation
(value-in-use) across three different marketing logics: product-dominant logic (PDL), service-dominant logic (SDL) and CDL. PDL conceptualises value as created by firms and delivered to consumers through products. SDL frames consumer value as a function of direct provider-consumer interaction, or consumer-driven chains of action indirectly facilitated by the provider. Recently, the research focus has been turning to consumer-dominant value creation. While there is agreement on the significance of this
phenomenon, there is disagreement over whether consumer-dominant value creation is an extension of SDL or calls for a distinct CDL. The paper is informed by five cases of consumer dominance. We find that the ontological and semantic analysis demonstrates that PDL and SDL have insufficient explanatory power to accommodate substantial aspects of consumer-dominant value creation. By implication, this supports the call for a distinct CDL.
Leigh Sparks (2015) A Sense of Place, Context: Institute of Historic Building Conservation, 138, p16-17, March
One of series of pieces in this edition of Context, the magazine from the Institute of Historic Building Conservation which look together at the changing face of retailing. This piece considers the future for Scotland’s towns and retail high streets and suggests that they depend on lining culture, heritage band storytelling to present a distinctive sense of themselves to residents and visitors. The article itself is available here, and details of all the pieces can be found here.
George Maglaras, Michael Bourlakis and Christos Fotopoulos (2015) Power-imbalanced relationships in the dyadic food chain: an empirical investigation of retailers’ commercial practices with suppliers, Industrial Marketing Management, Published online April 2, 2105 at http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0019850115000942
Multiple retailers exercise various commercial practices with their suppliers. These practices emanate from a power-imbalanced dyadic relationship largely governed by the heightened retail power. Drawing on the current literature of power-imbalanced relationships in supply chains, we propose and explore a conceptual model illustrating the most significant practices applied in the dyadic, supplier–retailer relationships in the Greek food chain and we evaluate their importance as perceived by suppliers. Insights from qualitative in-depth interviews with various stakeholders and a survey with 398 food suppliers identify dependence, financial goal incompatibility, informational asymmetry and behavioral uncertainty as the most significant determinants of the commercial practices. These practices are grouped into three main categories: upfront payments, unanticipated changes of agreements and negotiation pressures. The importance of these practices for suppliers is highlighted and implications for the supply chain actors beyond the dyad are provided.
Steve Burt, Ulf Johansson and John Dawson (2015) International retailing as embedded business models, Journal of Economic Geography, Published online March 24, 2015 at http://joeg.oxfordjournals.org/content/early/2015/03/23/jeg.lbv008.abstract
As retailers internationalize they interact with diverse socio-political-economic environments and the activities, processes, behaviours and outputs underpinning their business models evolve over time and space. Retailers are not passive, and through managerial agency they interpret the environment to compete and further their own commercial aims. Consequently, mutual interaction with the host environment means that changes may also occur in the established institutional norms in a market. Most existing studies have focused on the implications of territorial embeddedness for internationalizing retailers. In this article we also consider the societal and network forms of embeddedness identified by Hess, and illustrate how retailers transfer, negotiate and adapt their business model as they embed themselves in different institutional environments. A case study of IKEA is used to illustrate the synthesis of these two frameworks.
Alan M Collins, James Martin Cronin, Steve Burt and Richard J George (2015) From store brands to store brandscapes: the emergence of a time and money saving heuristic, European Journal of Marketing, Pre-print available at http://www.emeraldinsight.com/doi/abs/10.1108/EJM-01-2014-0038
This research investigates role of store brands as a time and money saving heuristic in the context of an omnipresent store brand hierarchy. It proposes that the store brand hierarchy is characterised by many of the traits of frequently used heuristics employed by grocery shoppers.The study deductively establishes a model of store brand proneness to reveal the role of store brands as time and money saving heuristic. The findings provide strong support for store brands as a time and money saving heuristic and as a substitute for price search among households experiencing financial and time pressures.Retailers need to be aware that any extension of the store brand portfolio beyond the traditional multi tiered price/quality hierarchy, risks undermining what has emerged to be a valuable heuristic used by certain shoppers.
Dimitrios Kolyperas, Stephen Morrow and Leigh Sparks (2015) Developing CSR in professional football clubs: drivers and phases, Corporate Governance, 15, 2, pp 177-195. (Available at http://www.emeraldinsight.com/doi/abs/10.1108/CG-05-2014-0062)
This paper advances the understanding of how corporate social responsibility (CSR) develops within professional football clubs, along with its organizational implications, phases, drivers and barriers for corporate governance, given that professional football organizations have become particularly strong socio-political business institutions, often home to numerous social and business relationships. Additionally it considera CSR development generally drawing specifically on examples from Scottish professional football while answering two key research questions: what kind of drivers do clubs identify as reasons to develop CSR? and Can developmental phases be identified during this process? The paper draws on primary and secondary data collected across 12 Scottish Premier League (SPL) football clubs. Six phases of CSR development are identified and defined – volunteering, regulation, socialization, corporatization, separation and integration – and implications for football and general corporate governance are presented.
Anne Findlay and Leigh Sparks (2015) The High Street is Dead; Long Live the High Street, Town and Country Planning, Vol. 84 Iss: 1, pp 9-11
In their latest Trading Places column, Anne Findlay and Leigh Sparks reflect on the recent publication edited by Neil Wrigley and Erin Brookes on The Evolving High Street. They provide a review of the contents and an evaluation of some of the main issues that are common to the collection of papers. (See Trading Places section of this blog)
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