Colas, burgers, shakes, and shirkers: Towards a sociological model of franchising in the market economy

A growing volume of literature continues to inform debates on franchising as a business form. However a great deal of the theorizing and research continues to focus on narrowly defined issues such as franchising as a distribution channel. The dominant reason for this restricted focus is perhaps that franchising does not fit comfortably within the limits of any single academic discipline or area of management practice. Rather it extends into a multiplicity of fields such as law, marketing, economics, entrepreneurship, human resource management, psychology, sociology, and organizational theory. It is the authors' contention in this paper, that a more encompassing theoretical model is now needed and that a mainly sociological approach has much to offer. This discipline arguably has the conceptual suppleness and ability to link the strategies and behavioral patterns of individual actors to organizational structures and characteristics, and to set these in the context of the wider economy and society. Overall, the model offered here takes the form of 15 general propositions spanning three levels: the macro, touching on cultural societal, and economic attributes, the organizational, and, finally, the individual level. It builds on the substantial existing literature, seeking to integrate this in order to form a general model equally suited to quantitative or qualitative research approaches. (C) 1999 Elsevier Science Inc.