Gary G. Hamilton is a Professor of International Studies and of Sociology at the University of Washington. He specializes in historical/comparative sociology, economic sociology, and organizational sociology. He also specializes in Asian societies, with particular emphasis on Chinese societies. He is an author of numerous articles and books, including most recently Emergent Economies, Divergent Paths, Economic Organization and International Trade in South Korea and Taiwan (with Robert Feenstra) (Cambridge University Press, 2006) and Commerce and Capitalism in Chinese Societies (London: Routledge, 2006).
Misha Petrovic is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology, National University of Singapore. His primary research interests are in economic sociology, social theory, and globalization. He authored and co-authored a number of papers on market-making, consumer goods markets, and the global economy, including recent contributions to the Handbook of Research on Asian Business (Edward Elgar, 2007) and The Oxford Handbook of Sociology and Organization Studies (2009). He is currently leading a comparative research project on the development of marketing capabilities of consumer goods firms in SE Asia and China, and working on a book manuscript tracing the long-term historical development of consumer goods markets.
Benjamin Senauer is a professor of Applied Economics at the University of Minnesota, where he has been on the faculty for over 30 years. His PhD is from Stanford University. He has served as the Director of the Center for International Food and Agricultural Policy at the University and as Co Director of The Food Industry Center, one of over 20 Sloan Foundation Industry Study Centers. His primary areas of interest include trends in the food industry, consumer behavior, and food and nutrition policy. Dr. Senauer has spent sabbaticals and other academic leaves at Cambridge University, the International Food Policy Research Institute, and the World Health Organization and Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. He has published in a wide range of academic journals and is the coauthor of two books, Food Trends and the Changing Consumer and Ending Hunger in Our Lifetime, Food Security and Globalization.

• Introduction: The Retail Revolution


• Part I. The Market Makers: A General Perspective


• 1: Misha Petrovic and Gary G. Hamilton: Retailers as Market Makers


• 2: Frederick H. Abernathy and Anthony P. Volpe: Technology and Public Policy: The Preconditions for the Retail Revolution


• Part II. Making Consumer Markets


• 3: Misha Petrovic: U.S. Retailing and Its Global Diffusion


• 4: Michael Wortmann: Globalization of European Retailing


• 5: Suresh Kotha and Sandip Basu: Online Retailers as Market Makers


• Part III. Making Supplier Markets


• 6: Gary G. Hamilton and Cheng-shu Kao: Supplier Markets and the Asian Miracle


• 7: Edna Bonacich and Gary G. Hamilton: Global Logistics, Global Labor


• 8: Timothy Sturgeon, John Humphrey, and Gary Gereffi: Making the Global Supply-Base


• 9: Richard P. Appelbaum: Transnational Contractors in East Asia


• Part IV. Industries and Market Making


• 10: Thomas Reardon and Benjamin Senauer: The Global Spread of Modern Food Retailing


• 11: Kenneth L. Kraemer and Jason Dedrick: Market Making in the Personal Computer Industry

In eleven chapters by leading scholars, The Market Makers provides a detailed but highly readable analysis of how retailers have become the leading drivers of the new global economy. The analytic core is the "market-making perspective," which refocuses economic analysis away from factories and production to markets and market-making.