earticle

영어

Retailing is one the most dynamic and challenging areas of the economy. Today`s retailer, looking ahead to tomorrow, has to take into account the following major trends: the slowdown in population and economic growth; the increasing cost of capital, labor, and energy; the changing consumer lifestyles, shopping patterns, and attitudes toward shopping; the emergence of new technologies such as computerized checkout, electronic shopping, and more advanced automatic vending; the growing strength of major retailers; and rise of consumerism and environmentalism and the increase in government regulations affecting retailing. Clearly thes trends call for more professional management in retailing that goes beyond good merchandising skills. Top management will have to be skilled in designing and implementings profit performance systems. The key need will be find ways to increase retail productivity. The search for more productivity in the 1980s will favor the development of retailing forms that keep costs down. Many retailing innovations have come about as solutions to high-cost, high-price retailing, They are partially explained by the wheel of retailing hypothesis. According to this hypothesis, many new types of retailing institutions begin as low-margin, low-price, low-status operations. they become effective competitors of more conventional outlet, which have grown "fat" over the years. Retail life cycle, the wheel of retailing, the retail accordian and dialectic theory has considerable utility for explaning the process of retail revolution, though it still needs to expand the concept fundermentally and comprehensively. This study attempts to apply organization theory to retail organization and to gauge the applicability by the review of organization life cycle concept and the relationships between organization size, structure and effectiveness. It also investigates some problems associated with the application of the theory to retail organization. It suggestes that the organization theory offers theoretical foundation to explain the retail evolutionary process.