International value chain processes by retailers and wholesalers — A general approach

Many traditional behaviorist or marketing approaches and descriptive models have been developed in the past to explain internationalization of retail firms. Only a few of these have a wider scope comparable to theories used today in international management research. The international retailing research so far has barely touched upon the international management of value-added activities and processes. This paper proposes and discusses a general value chain approach which opens up a promising perspective to provide a new direction for research and a better understanding of management options for increasingly internationalized retail firms. This appears to be all the more important because, in practice, more and more highly internationalized firms are structuring their value-added activities and processes on an increasingly international basis in order to gain competitive advantages or to increase their profits.