Doctoral Student at Faculdade de Economia, Universidade do Porto (original) (raw)

Franchising, especially business format franchising also known as the McDonalds approach has been seen by practitioners and also by some academics simply as a straightforward approach for the creation (and replication) of one’s own business – i.e. as one of the ways for entrepreneurship (and growth). Several trade associations were created for the promotion of this kind of business using a combination of “recipes for success ” and entrepreneurial “bias for action”. The prevailing explanations for the franchising phenomena, especially the initiative of franchising, the propensity to franchise, and franchise performance, are mostly based on two orders of reasons or a combination of them: franchising as a means to deal with resource scarcity and / or mechanism for franchisor and franchisee to align incentives between both. However, empirical studies have shown limited support for such claims, especially in face of the so called plural form. The mixed nature of the plural form, where pr...