Mark And Spencer Business Case

Marks & Spencer Marks & Spencer was founded on 1884 as a market stall by Marks. It became Marks & Spencer in 1894 as a partnership with Spencer. From that humble beginning Marks & Spencer became leader in the industry. And for more than half a century M & Spencer was the epitome of enlightened capitalism. It dominated the British high streets and provided shoppers with quality and value clothingunrivalled by competitors. It was one of Britain’s largest high profile retailers selling variety of goods and services such as clothes, food, furniture and loan services. But its glory has started to crumble when it profits began to fall since 1998. M & S has been facing their worst times ever. Their problems began at the start of financial year April 1999. They suffered almost from financialruins. Since the event of its failure, M & S has been taking more than several attempts to recover their losses. Extensive studies and researches have been conducted to find out the root causes so as to come up with appropriate strategies for development. Most of the studies started with the company’s profile. Below is an analysis of the company’s profile and the validity of one strategic managementmodels to Marks & Spencer’ experiences.

Marks & Spencer’s organization culture is characterized as a reflection of “taken for granted fashion” that is an attitude shared by members of the organization. The beliefs and basic assumptions operate unconsciously among the members and also exist at the organizational level. The assumptions and taken for granted fashion have taken its roots from thebasis of the organization’s success.

During the 80's Marks & Spencer experienced a massive growth of interest in culture and symbolism in organizations. The culture and symbolism that pertain to meaning and imagery are

used to emphasize the ‘softer’ character of the organization. M & S pattern of action within the organization is treated in view of meanings and symbol rather than as a ‘hard’structure of the business system. They depended too much in the image of M & S that they have overlooked the other side of the coin.

`The explanation of why people act as they do may lie not in a combination of "objective" and "subjective" factors, but in a network of meanings which constitute a "world taken for granted" (Schutz, (1964)1. the participants. Indeed, "objective" factors, such astechnology and market structure, are literally meaningful only in terms of the sense that is attached to them by those who are concerned and the end to which they are related... Organisations do not react to their environment, their members do. People act in

terms of their own and not the observer's definition of the situation' (Silverman's, 1970)2
A key for sustainability of all organizationis to change and evolve continuously to match with its environment out side its window in which it operates. Until the late 1990s M&S have been very successful. It worked to achieve this esteem by applying a structured formula to all its operations and maintained it by establishing a set of fundamental principles, which were held as core to the organization and used in all of its businessactivities since its birth. Their paradigm help them in the past but the same paradigm didn’t worked in the present and they went through a strategic drift. Mark & Spencer’s corporate culture from its foundation to its fall in the late 1990s is described as follows:

M&S always depended on the British suppliers overlooking the impact of this system to its financial costs. They had a traditional way ofhaving specialist buyers through an operation being performed from the central buying office from where it was distributed to stores overlooking its effect on time factor.

M & S stores used to have identical layout, design, and training among others. Store managers are not in the liberty to deviate from the specifications. Moreover, there existed severe restrictions on the ways by which store...