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This chapter is a descriptive and exploratory study of the challenges and opportunities faced by franchisors in adapting their franchise systems to accommodate cultural diversity among franchisees. It uses literature on migrant entrepreneurs and cultural diversity in small business settings in the United Kingdom, Europe, and the Americas as a basis for application to a franchising context. Triggered by events in the Australian franchising sector over the past two years, in which franchise systems have been embroiled in controversial and illegal activities undertaken by franchisees – many of whom were business migrants – the research begins to unravel the complexities of utilizing migrant franchisees as vehicles of system growth. Two sources of data provide indicative evidence about the issues associated with migrant franchisees. Firstly, two surveys of franchisors were conducted in 2014 and 2016 to obtain descriptive data about the incidence of migrants as franchisees. Secondly, a series of focus groups provided insights into the challenges and opportunities faced by franchisors in recruiting and managing migrant franchisees. Tentative findings of best practice in accommodating migrant franchisees are revealed. This research begins to fill an important gap in the literature about cultural diversity in franchising.

An agency relationship exists whenever one party (the principal) delegates authority to another (the agent). Because agents are assumed to be self-interested and to possess goals that diverge from the principal's goals, the principal must expend resources (called agency costs) to insure that agents act in her interest (Jensen & Meckling, 1976). In chains, the firm can choose as outlet managers either employees who are paid a salary (and perhaps a bonus) or franchisees who are granted the right to their outlet's profits after royalties and other expenses. In both cases, an agency problem is created because the firm delegates local decision-making to outlet managers whose interests are not perfectly aligned with that of the franchisor's (Rubin, 1978).

The subject of resale pricing is a hot topic in franchising, due to its links with chain homogeneity and franchisee autonomy. The franchisee is bound by current legislation and regulations, in addition to respecting the franchise contract clauses, to the extent that they are lawful, and potentially opposing contentious professional practices. Focusing on resale prices, we cover these three perspectives, that is, legal, contractual, and professional constraints, using a dual approach based on managerial and legal perspectives and illustrating our arguments using examples from European and French cases.

We illustrate our arguments using examples from European and French cases.

We pointed out that the ban on the practice of imposed resale prices presents several advantages (e.g., integrity of franchise chains, chain’s commercial dynamism).

Our paper contributes to the stream of franchising literature dealing with resale prices.

Our paper can be viewed by franchisors, franchise experts, franchisees, and franchisee candidates as a synthesis of the impact of European and French regulations on resale price-based practices to be adopted in franchise chains. It also highlights practices to be avoided in order to prevent potential conflicts.

We use a dual approach based on managerial and legal perspectives to explore resale prices in the context of franchising.

Franchising manifests a bundle of risks created by the delegation of functions as both franchisor and franchisee exploit their respective comparative advantage. The galvanization of this advantage is governed by the franchise agreement and optimized by the effectiveness of the governance structure. This chapter considers the concept of risk and discusses its implications in valuing franchisee-operated businesses. It examines how risks arise, where they congregate and synthesizes the specific franchising issues relating to risk-adjusted cashflows, risk analysis, risk mitigation, and risk pricing. The authors propose that risks in franchising are multi-layered and hierarchical. Consequently, this relationship is represented in a Franchise Risk Ecology (FRE) comprising risks inherent in the market, the franchisor, the system, the industry, and within the franchisee-operated business.

In this chapter, using a dual approach based on managerial and legal perspectives, we examine franchisee attitudes regarding online sales in franchise networks to better understand their views of the costs and benefits of e-commerce in a franchise network. We thus explore the following research questions from a franchisee perspective: What are franchisees’ attitudes regarding online sales?; Are online sales viewed as complementary or competing sales for physical stores?; What about the opening of a franchisor’s website?; and What about the opening of a franchisee’s website? We also analyze how several different e-commerce options available to franchisors impact franchisee incentives and how they would be treated under European Union competition law.

The empirical research is based on the conduction and analysis of 46 in-depth interviews with franchisees in the retail and service industries in the French market.

We find that online sales in franchise networks raise important questions for the franchisees, and for the franchisors as well. E-commerce has to be integrated into the development strategies of franchise networks. Franchisors should facilitate the online sales practices of their franchisees in order to avoid potential conflicts with them or among the franchisees themselves, thereby maintaining the control necessary to ensure healthy network growth. Moreover, franchisors should pay attention to the sharing of Internet sales with its franchisees.

Our chapter contributes to the stream of franchising literature dealing with the use of Internet in franchise networks. Moreover, it can be viewed by franchisors, franchise experts, franchisees, and franchisee candidates as an overview of issues linked to online sales in franchise networks. It also highlights best practices when having a multichannel strategy.

The purpose of this chapter is to examine how leaders furthered the development of a social enterprise in response to paradoxes. Data on leadership practices were collected through interviews and observations in an Italian Healthcare network over the organization’s first two years. The data indicate that leaders addressed paradoxes in developing several critical resources by using both top-down influence and bottom-up participation. Leaders used top-down practices to further organizational development along a known path when they could leverage technical expertise or a vision to address a source of tension. Bottom-up practices, on the other hand, permitted the discovery of new paths that had not been previously identified. Leaders leveraged such responses where tensions appeared intractable. Implications for managers and organizational development and change practitioners are discussed.

This study considers an under-explored pathway of immigrant business expansion beyond contemporary models of ethnic entrepreneurship.

We push against dominant theories of immigrant adaptation and small business, such as assimilation theory, to explain a rise of franchised small businesses among Indian Americans. We combine two cases on Indian American small business ownership, based on years of qualitative fieldwork each.

Indian Americans have forged a new path of immigrant business growth beyond either enclave or middleman minority businesses. The growth of franchised stores by immigrants remains underexplored in the immigration and work literature. Their growth in the industry signals a type of mobility, by moving more into corporate models of business ownership and performance. Yet, their success has depended on many of the same mechanisms that define lower end, informal ethnic businesses, such as a reliance on ethnic social capital for information and financing, strategies to avoid racism, co-ethnic labor, and the like.

Like any qualitative study, it is limited by its lack of breadth. But, given that it combines two cases, it compensates for this challenge more than otherwise.

This chapter furthers the argument that immigrant mobility does not necessarily mean assimilation and in fact can represent a collective response against assimilationist tendencies. This continued collective strategy to mobility is all the more necessary in the face of neoliberal economic models that place greater burdens on individuals.