Resisting collaborative practice: an analysis of supply chain partnerships for building urban online grocery provision

This chapter investigates the resistance by online retailers, logistic firms and urban planners in the development of supply chain infrastructures for online grocery provision. Recent studies have shown that significant shifts in urban geographies are increasing consumers’ expectations of online retail provision. However, there is growing evidence that collaborative practices within the supply chain are shown to be resisted. That these trends are found despite growing demand of online provision highlights both the difficulty of bringing geographically dispersed online trading partners together and the problems associated with improving organizational collaborative practice. Drawing upon twenty nine in-depth interviews with experts in online retail, logistics and urban planning within an urban metropolis in an emerging market, we detail the different ways that collaboration is resisted in online retail provision. Several different patterns of resistance were identified in (non-) collaboration notably, ideological, functional, regulatory and spatial.