Departamento de Sociología

Since the 1960s, new business models are becoming more important in European retailing; their lower prices are putting pressure on traditional retailers. These are, on the one hand, hypermarkets (in Germany also called SB-Warenhäuser, i.e. self service department stores) which, on a large sales-area (5.000 to 20.000 square meters), are not only selling groceries but also a broad assortment of non-food items and, on the other hand, hard discounters (called discounters from here on) which are, on a relatively small sales-area (less than 1000 square meters), selling a flat assortment of groceries and a small supplementary variety of one-off non-food offers. Both formats have become spread throughout Europe by multinational companies, especially Tesco, Carrefour, Auchan, Casino, Metro, Aldi, and Schwarz. The project aims for a comparative analysis of parent and subsidiary companies of selected multinational hypermarket and discounter chains in six European countries. The main focus of the comparison is on industrial relations and the work organisation – in the following subsumised under the term employment relationships – of these companies.