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Fashion companies consistently prove to be the most prolific and successful of the international retailers. Success is attributed to small format size, single brand emphasis and economies of format replication. These factors contain the costs, and risks, of foreign market expansion. Evidence from the British fashion market attests to the aggressive expansion policies of foreign fashion retailers who, in the past decade, have disrupted the competitive equilibrium of the UK market. This study examines the motives, methods and management challenges that foreign fashion retailers face, and adopt, as they establish operations within the UK. Drawing from the wider international business and international retailing literature, seven research propositions direct the first, positivist research stage. Via a mail survey, sent to all foreign fashion retailers with stores in the UK, the study identifies that these are proactive internationalists, drawn to the UK to exploit the opportunities afforded from niche markets and brands with significant consumer appeal. The research also notes specific differences between designer, specialist and general fashion retailers in terms of motivations, entry methods, operating strategies, critical success factors and the problems they encounter. The second phase of the research is interpretivist in nature and examines the actual process of internationalising fashion retail operations within the UK from the perspective of seven case companies. The study concludes that the foreign entrants remain within the British market for reasons of exceptional profitability, reputation and consumer and competitor intelligence. The central contribution of the study resides in the identification and analysis of the facets integral to the actual process of successfully internationalising fashion retail operations; notably the incremental development of effective central and local management structures, the clear demarcation of management decision-making responsibility, and the staged development of product ranging and development, brand positioning and distribution planning policies.

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The rise of a mass investment culture has been recognised by academics and contemporaries alike. Generally understood in the British context as ‘popular capitalism’, the growing numbers of individuals with a stake in stock markets on both sides of the Atlantic has been an integral part of the advent of what is loosely termed neoliberalism in contemporary societies. However, we know very little about how this mass investment culture developed and evolved in the late-twentieth century, and the relationship it fostered between the individual and the financial services industry. This thesis seeks to explore this phenomenon as it emerged in Britain, in order to highlight the limitations of popular capitalism, both as a political project and as a framework of analysis for understanding the 1980s. Instead a concept of financial consumerism is offered as a more useful lens through which to understand the changes associated with Thatcherism and neoliberal reform in Britain. In doing so, this research moves our site of analysis away from the national and Thatcher-centred bounds of the Conservative Party’s political project, and the economic ideologies of New Right think tanks and economists in Chicago, Germany and Austria. Instead, analysis centres on the actions of agents external to the Conservative Party. They transformed an ideological project designed to create self-governing citizens into a form of consumption which favoured large financial institutions at the expense of the individual consumer.

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