The Market Makers How Retailers are Reshaping the Global Economy

The huge expansion of new marketplaces and new retailers over the last fifty years has created a retail revolution.These large and globally sophisticated retailers have harnessed the new technologies in communications and logistics to build consumer markets around the world and to create suppliers, new types of manufacturers, that provide consumers with whatever goods they want to buy. These global retailers are at the hub of the new global economy. They are the new Market Makers, and they have changed the way the global economy works. Despite the fact that this retail revolution unfolded right before our eyes, this book is the first to describe the market-making capabilities of these retailers. In eleven chapters by leading scholars, The Market Makers provides a detailed and highly readable analysis of how retailers have become the leading drivers of the new global economy.

Gary G. Hamilton is a Professor of International Studies and of Sociology at the University of Washington. He specializes in historical/comparative sociology, economic sociology, and organizational sociology. He also specializes in Asian societies, with particular emphasis on Chinese societies. He is an author of numerous articles and books, including most recently Emergent Economies, Divergent Paths, Economic Organization and International Trade in South Korea and Taiwan (with Robert Feenstra) (Cambridge University Press, 2006) and Commerce and Capitalism in Chinese Societies (London: Routledge, 2006).


Misha Petrovic is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology, National University of Singapore. His primary research interests are in economic sociology, social theory, and globalization. He authored and co-authored a number of papers on market-making, consumer goods markets, and the global economy, including recent contributions to the Handbook of Research on Asian Business (Edward Elgar, 2007) and The Oxford Handbook of Sociology and Organization Studies (2009). He is currently leading a comparative research project on the development of marketing capabilities of consumer goods firms in SE Asia and China, and working on a book manuscript tracing the long-term historical development of consumer goods markets.

Benjamin Senauer is a professor of Applied Economics at the University of Minnesota, where he has been on the faculty for over 30 years. His PhD is from Stanford University. He has served as the Director of the Center for International Food and Agricultural Policy at the University and as Co Director of The Food Industry Center, one of over 20 Sloan Foundation Industry Study Centers. His primary areas of interest include trends in the food industry, consumer behavior, and food and nutrition policy. Dr. Senauer has spent sabbaticals and other academic leaves at Cambridge University, the International Food Policy Research Institute, and the World Health Organization and Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. He has published in a wide range of academic journals and is the coauthor of two books, Food Trends and the Changing Consumer and Ending Hunger in Our Lifetime, Food Security and Globalization.

Introduction: The Retail Revolution, Gary G. Hamilton, Benjamin Senauer, and Misha Petrovic
Part I. The Market Makers: A General Perspective
1. Retailers as Market Makers, Misha Petrovic and Gary G. Hamilton
2. Technology and Public Policy: The Preconditions for the Retail Revolution, Frederick H. Abernathy and Anthony P. Volpe
Part II. Making Consumer Markets
3. U.S. Retailing and Its Global Diffusion, Misha Petrovic
4. Globalization of European Retailing, Michael Wortmann
5. Online Retailers as Market Makers, Suresh Kotha and Sandip Basu
Part III. Making Supplier Markets
6. Supplier Markets and the Asian Miracle, Gary G. Hamilton and Cheng-shu Kao
7. Global Logistics, Global Labor, Edna Bonacich and Gary G. Hamilton
8. Making the Global Supply-Base, Timothy Sturgeon, John Humphrey, and Gary Gereffi
9. Transnational Contractors in East Asia, Richard P. Appelbaum
Part IV. Industries and Market Making
10. The Global Spread of Modern Food Retailing, Thomas Reardon and Benjamin Senauer
11. Market Making in the Personal Computer Industry, Kenneth L. Kraemer and Jason Dedrick