Essay About Wal-Mart And Cultural Norms

Cultural Norms For Wal-Mart
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Wal-Mart emphasizes low prices, not sales and unlike competitive flyers, they use
professional models. Wal-Mart focuses on ordinary people including their associates.
The flyers also devote an inordinate amount of space to community oriented and patriotic
topics. Unraveling the symbolic puzzle presented by the distinctive elements of Wal-
Mart flyers draw our attention to the importance of retail and retail symbolism.
Published research offers many reasons for Wal-Marts success in the US market. Its
exemplary growth has been attributed to the large size of the US market. Sam Walton,
Wal-Marts founder recently pasted away flyer an airplane, was the reason why Wal-
Mart does so well. The theoretical framework driving the semiotic analysis is institutional
theory (Meyer & Rowan, 1977. This theory suggests that because consumers respond
positively to family, community and national institutions, retailers can reflect the
corresponding norms in functional and symbolic acts. A retail firm and its environment
are seen interpenetrate each other to extent that a retailers actions reflect the economic
and cultural moral norms of the environment. These norms are cognitive guidance
systems, rules of procedures that actors employ flexibility to assure themselves and those
around them and those around them that their behavior is reasonable.
These environmental norms are of two forms, and they are called: task and
institutional. These task norms reflect the organizations economic environment to which
it responds with functionally related per formative action. Retailers are not only
integrated