The Market Makers

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.Introduction: The Retail Revolution; PART I. THE MARKET MAKERS: A GENERAL PERSPECTIVE; 1. Retailers as Market Makers; 2. Technology and Public Policy: The Preconditions for the Retail Revolution; PART II. MAKING CONSUMER MARKETS; 3. U.S. Retailing and Its Global Diffusion; 4. Globalization of European Retailing; 5. Online Retailers as Market Makers; PART III. MAKING SUPPLIER MARKETS; 6. Supplier Markets and the Asian Miracle; 7. Global Logistics, Global Labor; 8. Making the Global Supply-Base; 9. Transnational Contractors in East Asia; PART IV. INDUSTRIES AND MARKET MAKING; 10. The Global Spread of Modern Food Retailing; 11. Market Making in the Personal Computer Industry