Les relations interorganisationnelles dans la grande distribution : vers des relations claniques modernisées

Until the 90's, the interorganisational relationships between companies within the marketing channels of the mass-market retailing have leaned on traditional models and historical commercial practices. The two main goals of those models were to create a well-balanced sharing of the added-value between the actors (Aoki, 1991; Ribault, 2000) and to allow long-term stability for the supply chains. W.G. Ouchi (1979) theorized that interorganizational relationships are governed as a clan and controlled by rituals. Since the 90's, the crisis and the entrance of big foreign producers and retailers in the Japanese market has been upsetting this logic by introducing a double necessity of reducing sale prices for consumers, whom purchasing capacity decreased, and of rationalizing the transactions within the marketing channel in order to increase its economic and financial performance. The evolution of the skills and competences of the main actors - the producers, the wholesalers and the distributors- shows that roles and positions were redefined at the dawn of the XXIth century. A new retailing business is forming mixing traditional commercial practices and new practices linked to the supply chain's performance.