تصمیمات قیمت گذاری و انتخاب استراتژی های تولید کننده غالب در زنجیره تامین دو کاناله

This paper investigates the dominance strategies exerted by the dominant manufacturer for maintaining its dominant position in the channel system which is operating substitutable products and what influences they have on members of the whole channel system and the consumers. As to the channel system with two manufacturers and one retailer, the pricing decisions are depicted to compare the optimal choices made by the system members under the dominant manufacturer's wholesale price dominance strategy and channel dominance strategy, respectively. It shows that only the dominant manufacturer can necessarily benefit from the wholesale price dominance strategy. Furthermore, both dominant manufacturer and retailer can benefit from the channel dominance strategy, and consumers can also benefit from it. The channel dominance strategy, however, is not always the optimal choice for the dominant manufacturer. Whatever dominance strategy is it, the weak manufacturer will suffer loss, but in the channel dominance strategy, the market share proportion of the weak manufacturer will increase under certain circumstances.

This paper sets out to explore what happens when knowledgeable corporations engage explicitly in practices of organisational learning not only to become better capitalists by generating ever more innovative ways of maintaining profitability, improving competitiveness and maximising shareholder value, but also to become more responsible ‘corporate citizens’ in their business practices. As the multi-stranded and inter-related discourses of corporate citizenship, corporate social responsibility and stakeholder accountability increasingly infiltrate and re-work capitalist practice (Bhattacharya et al., 2004, Grit, 2004, Joyner and Payne, 2002, McIntosh et al., 1998 and Sadler, 2004), the tools and techniques of the knowledge-based economy are being progressively adapted for and applied to the world of business ethics. The numerous business schools, management consultancies and management gurus that have come to dominate the world of business since the 1960s (Bryson, 2000, Thrift, 1997a, Thrift, 1997b and Thrift, 2005), along with their training courses, best-selling books and influential models of corporate strategy, have more recently been joined by a growing network of corporate responsibility research centres, ethical business texts and ethical consultancies. The empirical focus of this paper is upon the ways in which UK food and clothing retailers are learning to develop their ethical trading programmes, as a particular part of the broader field of corporate responsibility. Retailers’ supply chains have been contested since the 1990s through NGO campaigns and critical media interest, which have drawn public attention to worker welfare issues associated with the use of low wage labour at sites of production (Crewe, 2004 and Freidberg, 2004). Resulting ethical trading initiatives, involving corporate codes of conduct, have gathered pace as a ‘third way’ solution to some of the problems of such exploitative systems of provision, particularly those involving low-wage producers in economically less developed countries (Barrientos, 2000, Blowfield, 1999, Freidberg, 2003 and Jenkins, 2002). Despite a growing literature on ethical trade and an increasing public awareness of the politics of global supply chains, surprisingly little attention has been paid to how retailers actually learn to trade ethically. As a relatively new and fast-moving area of corporate responsibility, which groups and individuals are influencing the retailers’ learning in this area? And how are retailers learning to incorporate ethical trading codes and standards into mainstream supply chain management? This paper attempts to address these questions in the context of the learning spaces experienced by UK food and clothing retailers, in order to advance understanding of how the learning economy is being played out in the specific field of corporate responsibility concerned with ethical trade. Through my analysis of corporate ethical learning, I bring together research and debate in three broad areas of human geography and the wider social sciences – the changing nature of knowledge-based economies, the growing significance of alternative economic spaces, and the intertwined discussions on emotional and ethical geographies. In particular, I adopt Thrift, 1997a, Thrift, 1997b and Thrift, 2005 notion of ‘knowledgeable (or soft) capitalism’ in order to capture the experimental and creative ways in which UK retail companies and their mentors (ethical consultancies, social auditors and multi-stakeholder organisations) are responding to the particular uncertainties of the current global trading environment and to the political and economic challenges these present to the corporate world. Before exploring the ethical learning spaces experienced by UK retailers and their management teams, I first review the main features of what has come to be known as the knowledge-based economy and introduce the notion of soft capitalism. A largely parallel literature on alternative economic spaces and the proliferative economy (Gibson-Graham, 1996 and Leyshon et al., 2003) is then discussed, as it demonstrates the challenges to capitalist hegemony. In framing these two areas of literature – around the knowledge-based economy on the one hand and the proliferative economy on the other – I then bring them into conversation by suggesting that the recent trends in fostering more responsible forms of capitalism have relied upon the kinds of learning practices which have long been part of the knowledge-based economy, though of course they are being applied with a crucial set of ethical twists. I suggest that some of the recent work on both emotional and ethical geographies can help to illuminate the ways in which corporate responsibility is actually being learned by business managers in practice. In the following section of the paper, I focus on the UK retailers’ global supply chains and the emergence of ethical trade. I outline the hybrid networks of economic and political alliance that make up ethical trading initiatives and the continually evolving ways in which corporate attempts to account for labour standards in supply chains are being steered. The emergence of a set of new ethical consultancies and social auditing trainers is then discussed as part of a broader suite of learning spaces that have very recently arisen to help retailers navigate their way through the particular challenges of ethical trade. I then move on to evaluate two examples of formal learning spaces experienced by the UK food and clothing retailers. The first concerns training courses on social auditing, designed and delivered by the educational arms of large auditing corporations for specialist auditors and retailers’ technical managers in order to equip them with the skills required to conduct full-scale social audits of production sites. The second example concerns corporate awareness-raising courses on ethical trade, which increasingly are being developed by ethical consultancies for a wide range of management teams working for retail firms. The commodification of ethical knowledge by auditing and consultancy firms, and the emphasis placed by awareness-raising courses on individual managerial discretion when it comes to making ethical trading decisions, are illustrative of some of the limits to capitalism’s ‘moral turn’ in this case. However, it is argued that these ethical training courses, which encompass participative and affective practices of learning, are nonetheless bound up in new forms of responsible capitalism that make up a set of much broader diverse economies. The empirical material concerning the corporate training courses on ethical trade is taken from the author’s own research, funded by The British Academy. This involved 27 corporate interviews with: (1) ethical trading managers (and some technical managers) at most of the leading food and clothing retail corporations operating in the UK (covering 14 firms in total); (2) managers of the five most influential international audit houses, the clients of which include the UK retailers; and (3) four key ethical consultants involved in advising and training retailers in matters of ethical trade. I also observed and participated in a corporate awareness-raising course on ethical trade, along with workshop sessions held as part of the Ethical Trading Initiative Biennial Conferences in 2003 and 2005. In line with the requests of the majority of my interviewees and the Chatham House Rules instituted on courses and at conferences, individuals and companies must remain anonymous throughout the paper.

In this paper, I have examined selected ethical learning spaces experienced by UK food and clothing retailers as they attempt to develop strategic responses to recent political calls for more responsible trading. Auditing experts and ethical consultancies represent new ethical additions to the cultural circuit of capital discussed by Thrift (2005). Furthermore, the associated concept of knowledgeable, or soft, capitalism appears to capture the creative ways in which retailers, with the help of these agents, are learning to trade ethically. Role play exercises and ethical problem-solving were discussed as particular participative and affective practices of learning used on both social auditing and corporate awareness-raising courses that form an important part of this learning. Just as Barnett et al. (2005) argue that, “… ethical consumption does not simply bring to light already existing dispositions, but it might well invent new ones” (p. 32), I suggest that new managerial dispositions and sensibilities are being articulated through the particular ethical connections made on the training courses. Following Grit (2004), it is further suggested that these courses play a modest role in re-working the boundaries between market, state and civil society. At first glance, the ethical learning practices discussed signal a ‘moral turn’ for capitalism. However, a critical review of them reveals some significant limitations to such a turn. The first limitation concerns the commodification of ethical knowledge itself, as auditing corporations and ethical consultancies sell their courses to retail clients. In so doing, it could be argued that consultancies are to some extent capitalising on the dilemmas of ethical trade, with the result that the processes of re-regulating global labour standards themselves become bound up in profit-maximising circuits of capital. However, it is very difficult to imagine how ethical trade might develop without any kind of commodification process at all.8 Second is the problem of just how much difference these courses make to improvements in labour conditions at sites of production, and here more research is needed. In her discussions with the psychologist, Edgar Schein, Coutu (2002) concludes that despite the time and money ploughed into corporate learning programmes, “… most people just end up doing the same old things in superficially tweaked ways” (p. 2). This concurs with Thrift’s (2005) cautionary note about managerial disillusionment with aspects of soft capitalism. However, while Thrift still has concerns about the production of certain ‘hard edges’ associated with the more profit-motivated forms of soft capitalism, such as resulting downsizing and redundancies, in my study of explicitly ethical forms of soft capitalism I worry about precisely the opposite scenario – that the desired material consequences of ethical learning in the form of improved labour conditions might be insufficient. In other words, while there is no doubting the emergence of these ethical learning spaces, there still remain large numbers of production sites around the world at which basic ILO conventions are regularly being violated; a point unsurprisingly made by one influential trade union representative at the ETI Biennial Conference in 2005. This problem is exacerbated by the individual managerial discretion shown to be encouraged by ethical awareness-raising courses, shaped by both a broader discourse of entrepreneurial management and an already voluntaristic framework for the governance of labour standards at the institutional level of the firm (Hughes, 2005). Indeed, with reference to corporate voluntarism, the ethical training courses encouraging individual discretion could be viewed as a strategic option for firms to manage away the challenges of ethical trade. In highlighting these particular limitations to capitalism’s moral turn in this context, though, I do not want to argue that ethical trade and its associated learning spaces should be seen as some kind of peripheral and insignificant movement that is largely powerless in the face of a more potent and dominant capitalist logic. Rather, I suggest that the ethical learning practices discussed in this paper highlight the making of new, albeit moderate, forms of responsible capitalism that are part of a much broader diverse economy comprised of multiple capitalist and non-capitalist forms; a diverse economy that is never quite predictable in its development and in which these ethical learning practices represent just a small ‘island of epistemic stability’ (Thrift, 2005, p. 25).