A transactional approach to global sourcing: application to French food retailers

Global sourcing is undoubtedly one of the major symbols of current worldwide strategies. Although much has been written on manufacturers’ ploys in searching for more competitive and/or reactive foreign suppliers, this is not the case for retailers, surely because retail buyers do not wish to speak about an issue deemed politically sensitive. The objective of this paper is to try and partially remedy this lack of information from field studies conducted on French food retailers. Based on Williamson’s (1975, 1985) “transactional paradigm”, the paper analyses how the retailers have known ‐ or not ‐ how to implement structures and to develop strategic behaviours to reduce the risk linked to global sourcing, from experience acquired in distribution channel management on the domestic market.