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We distinguish between two forms of local banks that build and maintain legitimacy in different ways: branches and unit banks. Branches gain legitimacy through the parent organization. Unit banks gain legitimacy through the personal reputation and social connections of the founders. Given the different ways in which legitimacy is built by these organizational forms, we think that the rural or urban nature of the community is likely to affect the founding rates of these two forms differently. Rural communities, in which personal and family relationships play an important role in both social and economic life, provide advantages to well-connected founders of unit banks. In these communities social networks serve as a demand buffer for unit banks, making the founding rate of this organizational form less sensitive to fluctuations in the demand for banking services in rural versus urban communities. In contrast, the founding rate of branches may not be greatly affected by the community context because branches gain legitimacy through a sponsoring organization whose legitimating characteristics are not local. Empirical analyses of foundings of local banks between 1976 and 1988 support these predictions. Supplemental empirical analyses also show no evidence of such buffering effect for unit retail establishments, which are expected to be less central in the social networks of rural communities than unit banks. Our results suggest that community organization channels resources to some kinds of organizations at the expense of others and that organizational research in general and organizational ecology in particular will benefit by paying more attention to community context.

The purpose of this paper is to offer theoretical and methodological guidance for ethnographers of finance and financialization. It critiques the notion of financialization as a macro process and argues for more in-depth ethnographic studies of professional financial actors.

The author analyzes existing ethnographies of financial “elites” and “non-elites” and draws on his years of employment at two contrasting British retail stockbroking firms. The concepts of “identity” and “self” are used to analyze the ways in which professional financial actors are shaped by their activities and working cultures.

The processes through which financial actors are constructed and the consequent ways in which they come to understand their professional selves are influenced by a variety of dynamics: occupational and organizational cultures and practices, the nature of the work itself, technological development, and social interactions with colleagues.

The paper demonstrates the situated nature of financial action and suggests that future research grapples with these dimensions.

The application of an ethnographic perspective to British retail stockbroking and the method of “ethnographic reflection” evoked to achieve this are new contributions. The broad analysis of ethnographies of finance through the lens of identity offers a fresh view of the literature. The paper may be of interest to those wishing to study stockbrokers, financial actors, and financial organizations, as well as those in the social sciences, more generally, who are interested in the micro-dynamics of organizations, financialization, and capital circulation.

The literature on organizational change has long acknowledged the need to balance stability and economic efficiency with the need to be flexible and to change. Authors, certainly in the dynamic capabilities tradition but also in other perspectives, have stressed the importance of more open and loosely coupled systems to promote adaption. However, many organizations do not operate on such premises but rather rely on creating efficient business units through tight coupling, building strict social and administrative control, and jointly relying on common systems. In this study, we conduct 46 interviews with employees from three different retail organizations to investigate how units in such tightly coupled systems change within the framework of the set standards. Through contrasting the characteristics of high and low functioning units, we identify three mechanisms that seem to enable the units to successfully and repeatedly realign and establish new configurations. We conclude that the orchestrator of all three realignment mechanisms is the middle manager, and we discuss the middle manager's role and the different activities that enable a successful realignment.

Retailing has developed from independent merchants to multinational giants operating through global value chains, which has profoundly shaped consumption patterns in Western economies. This constant development currently consists of three global-scale change trajectories – climate change, online consumption, and technological development – that affect the retail industry. Based on this, this chapter concentrates on connecting the development paths of consumption and retailing and identifies various factors that affect the future of international retailing. The authors analyze the changes in institutional logics of international retailing by mapping the past, present, and future of the retail industry and consumption using content analysis of secondary data. The authors pay special attention to the effect of the current Covid-19 crisis on the future development of the retail industry. In the findings of this chapter, the authors recognize institutional logics changes in organizing the position of retailing as a connector of customers and producers, and the authors suggest blockchain to be an emerging new institutional order.

This chapter highlights factors, such as stakeholder engagement and changes in operating processes, which can enable retailers to implement an alternative approach to recovering and redistributing fresh surplus food.

A successful fresh surplus food redistribution program was identified as part of a larger research project on food waste and redistribution. The “Buon Fine” program of a large Italian retailer (Coop Lombardia) was described by two senior executives who were interviewed for four hours using a semi-structured questionnaire. Collected information was triangulated with corporate reports and other publications.

Coop Lombardia implemented an expanded supply chain by cooperating with municipalities and food aid organizations. Such a process differed in important ways from the traditional “food bank” model. The latter organizations collected and distributed surplus food to disfavored populations.

The findings of this chapter will help senior executives of retail trade companies to improve the sustainability of their supply chain and help policymakers address food poverty to improve food security in their territory.

This chapter addresses the issue of value creation in the retail banking sector, focusing on France. The author shows that since the 2007 financial crisis, banking organizations have used a disruptive innovative approach to regain the trust of retail banking customers. This innovative hybrid design is not only driven by efficiency and fully dematerialized solutions, but also considers human, social, and territorial development aspects.

This chapter is based on an EU statistical analysis (2009–2013) of two strategies used by French, Italian, and German national banks to manage the 2007 financial crisis: closing retail bank branches and lay-offs. Interestingly, in France, bank units and employee numbers fell the least. A complementary qualitative analysis of the principal banking innovations promoted by R&D directors helps to explain the main features of the French strategy to cope with the mistrust of clients and employees.

Though low-cost models are promoted as major innovations today (“banking is necessary, bankers are not”), and result in massive offshoring and restructuring levels to face new global competitors such as Google, Amazon, and PCCW-HKT, the French retail banking sector, previously state regulated but progressively deregulated, has adopted an original strategy to regain trust and loyalty. Rather than adopting these low-cost models strictly, with full dematerialization, it focuses on balanced innovation – such as the “neighbourhood bank format,” which improves knowledge of the expectations and needs of local clients and environments. These solutions are not only global or local, but a mix of both dimensions.

Global industries like finance are embedded in both territorial and historical relationships and governance. This means that they can only be observed from this dual perspective, which is a dilemma that characterizes today’s economy. Innovation decisions and design particularly illustrate the banking sector’s embeddedness, with the dichotomy between fully digitalized options and fully territorialized services. Therefore, innovation is neither a “Champion” or leadership question, nor a mere ICT option. It is a hybrid combination to restore trust and relations.

The implications of such a balanced approach to innovation are highly important in terms of offshoring, lay-offs, and outsourcing practices, which are adopted as essential, and taken for granted by owners and CEOs in global value chains such as finance.The given data and analysis give concrete means to integrate local cultural and institutional habits, so that innovation make sense to stakeholders.

This chapter suggests a critical approach to innovation strategies and trends in the finance sector.

Purpose – The aim of this study is to determine the impact of feeling bored on managers' decision-making in the digital age under conditions of increased uncertainty by examining the role of personality trait openness and empirically testing such relationships within the context of retail middle managers.

Design/methodology/approach – Feeling bored was defined within a broader Decision-Making Process Model, which included the personality trait openness. An empirical study with retail middle managers was conducted to examine the relationships between feeling bored and decision-making competence (DMC). Regression models were fit to test whether feeling bored affects DMC and whether the associations were moderated by personality trait openness.

Findings – In the relationship between feeling bored and DMC, the moderating role of the personality trait openness was established. Results showed that feeling bored has a significant negative association with middle managers' confidence levels and risk perceptions when making decisions. Results also provided evidence that the learning component of personality trait openness plays a moderating role in the relationship between feeling bored and DMC. Most notably, the learning component of personality trait openness neutralizes the negative effects of feeling bored on managers' ability to remain appropriately confident when making decisions. In addition, the learning and inquisitive components temper the positive association between mood excited and risk perceptions. Limitations to the study are outlined.

Practical implications – Since trait openness (specifically its learning component) benefits decision-making contexts, it makes trait openness a worthy criterion to include when screening aspirant retail middle managers. The benefits of trait openness (specifically its learning component) for middle managers and their teams (especially when they are feeling bored) are indicated, since learning neutralizes the negative effect feeling bored has on appropriate confidence levels in retail management decision-making contexts.

Competence-Based Management (CBM) theory and research suggest that a firm’s competence building and leveraging processes are key factors influencing its competitive success. To achieve sustained competitive success, a firm’s competence building processes must continuously renew and extend the competences a firm has and can leverage. However, the ability of a firm to sustain strategically adequate levels of competence building – while also maintaining strategically successful competence leveraging – may be limited by various self-reinforcing managerial and organizational mechanisms that can arise from competence leveraging processes. In this paper we focus on certain managerial behaviors that may create path dependencies that lead an organization to become “locked-in” to its current competence leveraging processes and to neglect essential competence building, resulting in an inability to renew competences at a strategically adequate level and eventually in competitive failure.

In order to avoid such consequences, the management literature suggests that organizations must cultivate dynamic capabilities to overcome tendencies toward lock-in and to sustain ongoing competence building. This study investigates ways in which firms can maintain healthy competence building processes by avoiding lock-ins, especially those resulting from self-reinforcing managerial behaviors. A case study of successful competence-renewing processes in a home improvement retailing company helps to amplify the components of dynamic capabilities and to illustrate the insights that emerge from our study.