Distribution channel sustainability: Self-organization model and empirical study

Abstract

Distribution channel plays a key role for the success of an enterprise in gaining competitive edge, markets demanding agility and quick market responsiveness which represent complex phenomena in global competition. To discover the behavior and mechanism of organization, nowadays, more and more people have paid attention to the complexity theory such as self-organization, dissipative structure theory, synergetic theory, etc. The paper introduces the concept of self-organization theories and distribution channel firstly. Then enlightened by the systematical methodology, the paper puts forward the concept of sustainability of organization on the basis of analyzing the characteristics of self-organization distribution channel. A thorough analysis of the mechanism of distribution channel sustainability has been made accordingly. Finally, the paper adopts the distribution channel of TCL Group as an example, indicating that the success of TCL Group is mostly due to its effective and efficient self-organized distribution channel.