ABSTRACT

By the end of the first decade of the 21st century − more than fifteen years after Gereffi’s (1994) identification of retailer buyer-driven global supply chains, and the subsequent engagement of economic geographers with the transformational impacts of multinational retailers within emerging economies (Coe & Wrigley, 2007), Hamilton, Senauer and Petrovic (2011, p. 3) summarized the increasing consensus that large retailers had become ‘the key organizers of the global economy’. But what have been the contributions of International Business studies (IB) and Economic Geography to this consensus? In this chapter, we provide an assessment of these contributions in order to understand how Economic Geography has been able to make a distinct and strategically important impact despite its modest scale compared to the critical mass of IB studies.