Antecedents to Catching Up in Low-Tech Industries : Group-level dynamics in the Chinese Hypermarket Industry 1992-2011
Résumé
Building on archives and 49 interviews, we provide a historical account of the emergence of the hypermarket industry in China from 1992 to 2011. We identify four major factors that explain catching up processes: learning, managerial mobility, government intervention and local advantages. Unlike existing research, we find that technologyrelated factors did not play a role in the catching up processes, yet supply-chain management did. Consistent with the existing literature, we find that policy-related factors (government intervention) and market- knowledge related factors (learning) but also hardly mentioned additional market- knowledge related factors such as managerial mobility and local advantages played a major role.