Strategy and Opportunism in European Retail Internationalization
| Author | John Dawson |
| Date | 01 December 2001 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/1467-8551.00209 |
| Published date | 01 December 2001 |
Introduction
Retailing across national boundaries is a long-
established activity in Europe. The retailers at the
medieval fairs and markets travelled Europe. The
Italian merchants of the seventeenth century and
the owners of the nineteenth-century department
stores in Paris, London, Berlin, St Petersburg
and other major cities sourced their products by
sending buyers around the world. Retailers also
have a long history of establishing branch outlets
in other countries. Fletcher (1998; Godley and
Fletcher, 2000) identified 23 retail firms from out-
side the UK that opened stores in UK between
1850 and 1900. In some cases they developed sub-
stantial chains; the largest had 400 shops by 1900.
International sourcing and international operations
are not new features of retailing.
Similarly, attempts to control these inter-
national retailers are not new. The decision of the
competition authorities of the European Commis-
sion in 1999 to place conditions on the acquisition
of Meinl in Austria by Rewe of Germany (Euro-
pean Commission, 1999) and policy debates in
Poland through 1999 and 2000 over limiting foreign
direct investment in retailing are modern ex-
amples of a long tradition of attempts to control
the activity of ‘foreign’ retailers within Europe.
On 15 April in the fourth year of the reign of King
James the First of England there was proclaimed,
‘An act against forreyners retayling merchandizes,
keeping shoppes and using handycraft trades with-
in London’. Protecting the home market from
foreign retailers is a long-established government
policy. From the best and worst of intentions
of public-policy agents and governments, inter-
national retailers have always come under very
close scrutiny.
British Journal of Management, Vol. 12, 253–266 (2001)
© 2001 British Academy of Management
Strategy and Opportunism in European
Retail Internationalization1
John Dawson
University of Edinburgh Management School, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh EH8 9JY, UK
email: john.dawson@ed.ac.uk
Europe in recent years has witnessed an increase in the amount of cross-border oper-
ations by retailers. The retail sector has undergone substantial structural change charac-
terized by the emergence of a group of rapidly-growing large retailers, a redefinition
of the balance of internalized and externalized functions and a need to respond to the
cultural variety present in Europe that becomes evident as retailers move out of their
domestic markets. The over-arching requirement for these large retailers is to grow and
gain scale economies. Internationalization of operations has become a requirement for
these large firms. It is argued that the established academic conceptualizations of inter-
nationalization are unsatisfactory in not addressing this overriding requirement for
growth. There is great variety in the international activity in retailing, with the absence
of pattern being one of the few generalities. It is proposed that consideration of oppor-
tunism may be a better way to gain understanding of retailer activity than trying to fit
activity into deterministic strategic models. The experiences of five West European
retailers entering and building retail networks in Poland is provided as evidence for this
view. Suggestions are made for future work exploring this issue of opportunism as a
process in international retailing.
1Substantial work on this paper was undertaken when
the author was Visiting Professor at European Univer-
sity Institute under the EUSSIRF programme and a
Visiting Professor at ESADE Barcelona. Their support
is gratefully acknowledged.
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