Zwischen Basar und Supermarkt: strukturelle Veränderungen im Lebensmitteleinzelhandel in der Türkei unter Berücksichtigung von Globalisierungsprozessen

Since the early 1990s an increase in transnational activities and investments of food retailers from Western Europe and North America in a range of emerging market countries can be identified. This transnational involvement had impacts not only on retail competitiveness and market structure, but also on supply chain dynamics, consumer culture and markets as well as on regulatory frameworks and institutional configurations in the host economies. Whereas in the beginning it was hypothesised that food retailing worldwide will be dominated by a few powerful retail chains that may form oligopolistic market structures on a global scale, today it turned out, that in several emerging market contexts domestic actors perform much more successful than expected and could gain dominant market positions against their transnational competitors. Thereby transformation and modernization-processes in food retail structures are ongoing and pushed forward not only by retail TNCs but also by domestic actors. Until today a large body of scientific work on retail internationalization processes and their impacts in host economies has developed in several disciplines. In economic geography the focus of this work largely lies on the activities and strategies of transnational lead firms during market entry, their success, and their impacts on market structures in the host economies they enter. However underrepresented remain the dynamics and impacts of retail internationalization after the market entry of retail TNCs and the role of domestic actors for the modernization and transformation of existing food retail structures. This work addresses this lacuna by investigating the dynamics of retail market transformations in Turkey since the 1950s, when the first transnational investment in Turkeys food retailing sector took place. Special attention was paid to the path-dependency and context of the developments in the food retailing sector in Turkey, as well as the impact of national, regional or local actors for the resulting dynamics and structures. In this work the retail corporation – regardless of its (trans-)nationality – is seen as complex network configurations of intra-, inter- and extra-firm networks that are embedded in several social, economic and political contexts. For the analysis of these complex structures and dynamics the overarching concept, tasks and schedule of research were designed alongside the Global-Production-Network (GPN) approach. The work consists of four articles, that individually are based on different theoretical approaches to address the specific topics of research they concern. Overall the empirical results affirm that retail TNCs are important mediators for modernization- and transformation-processes within the networks of retailing and its actors. But in the same time domestic actors contribute to the changing structures by reacting or resisting to the transformations that take place. It is shown that the impact of an actor towards the changing dynamics and structures less depends on its (trans-)nationality but on its degree of embeddedness in the relevant socio-economic structures. For this backdrop a consequent contrast between transnational and domestic corporations can not be formulated. Regarding these observations the hypothesis, that retail competition on a global scale will be shaped by oligopolistic structures, can not be verified. Instead the market dynamics in Turkey are characterized by an accelerating amount of domestic actors and high market dynamics, wherein domestic actors compete successfully against their transnational competitors, so that retail TNCs even retrench from the Turkish market. These dynamics were formerly observed for range of other emerging market countries (e.g. in Latin-America). It has to be highlighted that the resulting patterns of retailing are not shaped by one consistent structure. Rather it is parallel structures that occur due to the variety of needs of different societal actors with different capacities. Conceptually it can be shown, that the embeddedness approach also can be applied in the realm of multichannel retailing and e-commerce to make the interconnections of strategies and their outcomes visible. Further embeddedness turns out to be a useful tool in the frame of GPN-analysis not only to investigate the strategies or the conditions for the success of retail TNCs, but to analyse the (power-)positions of (domestic) actors in specific socio-economic structures. The categories resilience, reworking and resistance help to gain a deeper understanding and paint a differentiated picture of the actors capacities and strategies to react to transforming structures they are embedded in, and reciprocally how they can influence the patterns of change in these configurations.