[ARTICOLO] Herbert, M., Robert, I. and Saucède, F. (2018), “Going liquid: French food retail industry experiencing an interregnum”, Consumption Markets & Culture, pp. 1-30

Retail industry has changed a lot in the last decade, capturing more and more scholars’ attention.
By analysing the French food retail industry, the present research focuses on the impact of liquid modernity on food sector, trying to understand the existence of a new order at a designing stage. Starting from the comprehension that older ways of retailing are no more adoptable, nine experts, id est CEOs and top managers of large retailers and entrepreneurs using alternative modes of food retailing, have interviewed. An interpretive analysis reveals a wide diversity of changes. Following Bauman’s liquid metaphor about society (2012), Authors identify shock, transformations, and crisis in food retailing, which they describe as phases that mark the dynamics in the shift from solid to liquid retailing. Thus, discussion on how retailers are adapting has done, deploying tactics both to respond and belong to these liquid times, corroborating the idea that food retailers are dropping the old battle of favouring the channel with the highest profitability and instead are embracing the idea of an omnichannel retailing services ecosystem.
Then Authors discuss how retailers can regain some legitimacy by claiming a role in territorial sovereignty, underlying Bauman and Bordoni’s study (2014). Here it has been stated that our current crisis is ultimately a meta-crisis that Authors label as a “crisis of agency”, but which is definitively a crisis of territorial sovereignty. As a matter of fact, State agencies can no longer rule and offer solutions for all other types of crisis. Moreover, ideologies that were more or less wrapped around the ideals of the State are now built around the “absence of state as an effective instrument of action and change”.