How Do Turkish Grocers Respond to Changes in the German Retail Market?

Abstract

Although widely employed, mixed embeddedness analysis in ethnic entrepreneurship has some limitations in its political, dual and spatial understanding and assessment of opportunity structures. To address this, we propose an alternative framework that combines Hess' categorisation of embeddedness with Katz's resilience framework. Using this combination, this study examines the responses of Turkish grocery retailers to structural changes in the German retail market. Despite extensive research on these changes, the responses of ethnic retailers have been neglected in the general literature on structural change in the retail sector. Drawing on data from 23 interviews with retailers, experts, intermediaries and producers, this study aims to fill this gap. The findings underline the impact of embeddedness on Turkish retailers' responses to market changes. The proposed analytical framework provides a comprehensive analysis of the competitive strategies of ethnic businesses and overcomes the limitations of the mixed embeddedness concept.