Business as usual? A response to Palmer, Owens, and Sparks

摘要

Over the past six years we have published a series of papers—individually, together, and with collaborators—seeking to develop an economic geography perspective on the globalisation of retailing (for example, Coe, 2004; Coe and Hess, 2005; Coe and Lee, 2006; Currah and Wrigley, 2004; Wrigley, 2000; Wrigley and Currah, 2006; Wrigley et al, 2005). In so doing, we have had three audiences in mind. Firstly, we have been addressing the economic geography research community in an effort to stimulate interest in a drastically underresearched aspect of economic globalisation. While globalisation has been all the rage in economic geography for a decade now, the literature still remains somewhat productionist in nature, with the distribution industries in particular continuing to suffer a neglect that is clearly at odds with their scale and contemporary importance (Wrigley, 2000). Secondly, we have been attempting (Coe and Hess, 2005; Wrigley, 2005) to open a dialogue with scholars in development studies and agricultural economists who have been at the forefront of attempts to understand the profound developmental implications of the deluge of retail foreign direct investment (FDI) and retailer-driven local, regional, and global supply network transformation in developing countries (see, for example, Dolan and Humphrey, 2004; Reardon et al, 2003).