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The purpose of the paper is to show that a defining characteristic of the UK retail sector is the high number of women it employs but there remains an enduring under‐representation of women in its management positions. The majority of women in the industry work part‐time and this paper aims to explore the factors that impact upon the career progression.

In the paper, 1,000 questionnaires were completed by store staff in three leading retailers, supported by interviews with store staff and SME retailers in the UK's East Midlands region.

The paper finds continuing barriers to career progression for women working part‐time in retailing. Despite family friendly employment policies becoming an increasingly important feature of modern work organisations, career progression was informed by a traditional concept of a career based on full‐time working.

The paper was limited to one sector. There is a need for further studies into women's career progression in other sectors reliant on female employment.

The findings in the paper have implications for promotion policies, training and development provision and line management practices if retailers are to maximise the potential of the women they employ.

The paper suggests that retailing is an industry where a significant number of women are working below their potential despite organisational policies supportive of diversity and equality of opportunity.

This paper aims to examine a core member-customer threat in co-operatives (co-ops) by drawing from ostracism research, assessing co-op ostracism’s impact on critical membership and relational exchange outcomes and discussing why relationship marketing research needs to pay more attention to the overlooked role of implicit mistreatment forms in customer harm-doing.

Three studies were conducted. In Study 1, ostracism in co-ops was explored, and a measurement scale for co-op ostracism was developed. In Study 2, the core conceptual model was empirically tested with data from members of three different co-ops. In Study 3, a coping strategy was integrated into an extended model and empirically tested with a new sample of co-op members.

Ostracism is present in co-ops and “poisons” crucial relational (and membership) outcomes, despite the presence of other relationship-building or relationship-destroying accounts. Coupling entitativity with cognitive capital attenuates ostracism’s impact.

Inspired by co-ops’ membership model and inherent relational advantage, this research is the first to adopt a co-op member-customer perspective and shed light on an implicit relationship-destroying factor.

Co-op decision makers might use the diagnostic tool developed in the paper to detect ostracism and fight it. Moreover, a novel coping strategy for how co-ops (or other firms) might fend off ostracism threats is offered in the article.

The present study illuminates a dark side of a relationally profuse customer context, painting a more complete picture of relationship marketing determinants. Little attention has been given to ostracism as a distinct and important social behaviour in marketing research and to co-ops as a research context.

This exploratory study examines fashion retailer use of Web sites of retailers operating within the UK. A survey of 990 fashion retailers was undertaken, 780 of which have a registered domain name. A content analysis of their Web sites took place in order to examine: first, retailer characteristics in terms of product focus, marketing positioning, operational structure type and Web site functionality; and second, to establish whether a relationship exists between online levels of involvement and specific fashion retailer characteristics. Results indicate that a high number of those surveyed (78.7 per cent) had registered a domain name and over half of those who had registered, had a Web site that was transactional. Fashion designer retailers predominantly use their Web sites as an informational tool. Whereas transactional retailers were predominantly made up of product specialist retailers who were multiple, independent, mail order or pure play retailers. In conclusion it is product specialists who have greater levels of involvement in e‐commerce.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the effects of international expansion on the sales volumes of large‐scale retailers.

Sales data of 200 largest retailers from around the world reported in the 2004 Deloitte “Global Retail Power” survey were analyzed with regression analyses.

It was found that: even though internationalization makes a positive contribution to retailers' sales volumes its impact is small; this effect is not impacted by the moderating factor of the degree of retailer specialization along product lines; while another moderating factor, namely the identity of the retailer's country of origin, does make a difference.

The research methodology and the nature of the data precluded the use of more “soft” measures such as measures of managerial cognitions, perceptions and attitudes to analyze their impact on the effectiveness of internationalization for retailers. The research used cross‐sectional data and further research should compare results in additional time points to capture the possible dynamic changes in this industry.

Retailers seeking to expand their sales volumes should not rely too much on internationalization but consider also other strategic options. They should therefore analyze carefully whether large investments in overseas operations are justified. This is particularly relevant for US retailers.

This paper focuses on the issue of internationalization as a viable retail strategy to achieve larger sales volumes. The study reaches its conclusions on the basis of an analysis of data from a large population of diverse, domestic‐only and international retailers from around the world from different sectors and countries of origin, who – the international retailers – operate in different countries.

Developing a strong, positive image has become essential to the maintenance of sustained competitive advantage. Research into store image has allowed retailers to create positioning strategies and enabled them to differentiate their stores in terms of the products, prices or services on offer. This paper presents the findings of a survey based on responses from 860 customers of multiple retailers selling womenswear fashion clothing. It examined the principal dimensions involved in store image, utilising a multi‐attribute model, and compares results with qualitative store choice statements. The paper concludes by exploring how retailers could manipulate image variables to maintain or defend their market positioning.

The purpose of this paper is to analyse the marketing strategy in China of the furnishing retailer IKEA in the context of standardisation and adaptation of marketing activities. IKEA's strategy in China is compared to its corporate strategy throughout the rest of the world.

The four P classifications are used as a framework to compare the central marketing strategies of IKEA with marketing strategies used in China. The paper builds on both primary and secondary data. Interviews with senior managers at IKEA are conducted and studies on business and retailing in China are used.

The marketing strategies used by IKEA in China are found to be different from the standardised strategies it uses throughout the rest of the world. Several of the changed strategies are central to the business concept of IKEA.

The present paper shows the challenges for a standardised marketing concept and its implications.

The paper provides, in the context of the standardisation and adaptation of marketing activities, a more nuanced and up‐to‐date picture of the strategies used by IKEA compared to previous studies.

The market for goods and services is a continually changing environment influenced by many internal and external factors. The majority of economies in the World were deeply hit by the coronavirus epidemic (COVID-19) in the first half of 2020. This paper aims to contribute to the understanding of the role of a crisis, COVID-19 in this case, in moderating the market environment and its ability to accelerate or slow down ongoing processes.

A questionnaire survey was used to obtain the opinions of 100 customers and 100 local retailers on the digitisation of the shopping process in a medium-sized Czech town. After the first wave of crisis faded away, the respondents reflected on their opinions before, during and after the crisis. The data were processed using linear mixed models respecting repeated measures.

The crisis seems to have shifted the interest of both groups towards e-commerce but it did not change the disproportion in opinions between them. The interest of customers was significantly higher, even after the crisis.

The credibility of the results is limited mainly by the one-time gathering of the data after the crisis. However, the results indicate a persistent challenge to which small retailers are exposed.

The originality of the results comes from the specific situation brought about by the COVID-19 crisis and the structure of respondents, enabling us to catch an immediate shift of opinions caused by the crisis and to compare the changes in both groups of respondents.

Retailing as a sector employs many women and serves a female‐dominated customer base. It also employs proportionately more women in management positions than in other occupational sectors. However, at senior levels, the proportion of women to men diminishes. This paper aims to examine the perceived facilitators and problems of senior retail managers' career development in order to see if it offers any insights for others to achieve senior managerial positions.

The main research instrument was a quantitative questionnaire with 124 UK senior retail managers.

The findings revealed that apparently more similarities than differences were reported by the men and women senior retail managers. These findings need to be treated with some caution however given that retailing operates in a strong masculine culture. Therefore, to assume that men and women encounter similar facilitators and problems ignores that they are being compared against a norm of male characteristics and values.

The senior women may have achieved their positions by ignoring their feminine characteristics and putting their career before their personal lives; they may have adopted the male cultural norms and developed a style top management are more comfortable with, else they may have more characteristics that are closer to the male norms than the average woman. Men further down the hierarchy may also suffer and may not achieve senior positions because they too are not prepared to conform to idealised and outdated male cultural norms.

The contribution of this paper is its concentration on the views and experiences of retail managers in senior positions, as these are the ones who have seemingly broken through the glass ceiling.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the role of line managers in managing attendance at work in the lean regime of grocery retailing. The increasing competitiveness within the sector, coupled with the sophisticated control systems in place put pressure on managers to keep labour costs low. Attendance, therefore, becomes a critical factor, particularly as staffing levels become leaner. Taking this into account, it is necessary to understand the parameters of the line managers’ role in managing attendance, especially within the lean food retail market and the antagonistic terrain of the supermarket shop floor. The paper discusses the impact of lean retailing on line managers’ authority and provides a fresh sociological analysis regarding their role in managing attendance, offering insights into managerial practices on the UK supermarket shop floor.

The paper draws on qualitative research evidence from two case study grocery retail organizations in the UK. It reports on 44 semi-structured interviews and provides a multi-level analysis aiming to understand the different perspectives on the problem examined.

The paper reveals the existence of a centralized absence management policy and highlights the greater involvement of line managers in this procedure. Line managers though were subjected to forces of bureaucratic control, intensification and degradation of their work. Despite having an active role within the attendance management process and high responsibility for the implementation of rules and procedures handed down by head office, they had limited authority over the process. Line managers perceived the latter as routine and a box-ticking exercise and had developed coping tactics to deal with the control from above.

This paper provides practical and theoretical considerations over the role of line management in the labour process, investigating their role in managing attendance at work within the lean terrain of food retailing. This research contributes to the ongoing academic discussions related to the devolvement of HR responsibilities to the line, highlighting the great involvement of line managers in the absence policy. It also provides a sociological perspective over line managers’ authority and discretion in managing attendance, revealing that they were subjected to direct and bureaucratic control within their role in attendance management. However, the research reveals that line managers were not passive in the face of direct control from above and had developed tactics to cope with the monotony and the repetition of this process, attempting to somehow escape the top-down control they were subjected to.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate market‐facing fashion industry strategic alliances in the fashion industry by studying a specific case in context of the existing literature. It has three key objectives: to explore the motives causing strategic alliance formation in the fashion industry; to understand the processes involved in the creation and management of such an alliance, and to identify factors defining the success of the alliance.

Case study methodology was employed studying an instance of market‐facing strategic alliance in the fashion sector.

It was found that while issues generic within the literature may be discerned in instances of strategic alliance in the fashion industry, industry‐specific factors, especially competence in marketing, branding and retailing, impact on the motives for alliance, partner selection and alliance implementation and alliance.

The usual limitations of any case study apply.

The paper provides an account of the motives for processes affecting and outcomes of strategic alliance in the fashion industry and promoting student, academic and practitioner understanding of the topic. The paper also provides a model for the management of such an alliance.

The paper offers insights into a contemporary phenomenon of interest to both practitioners and academics and provides detail on the motives and processes contingent to the successful management of strategic alliances within the fashion sector.