Cultural Norms for Wal-Mart

Wal-Mart emphasizes low prices, not sales and unlike competitive flyers, they use

professional models. Wal-Mart focuses on ordinary people including their associates.

The flyers also devote an inordinate amount of space to community oriented and patriotic

topics. Unraveling the symbolic puzzle presented by the distinctive elements of Wal-

Mart flyers draw our attention to the importance of retail and retail symbolism.

Published research offers many reasons for Wal-Mart’s success in the US market. Its

exemplary growth has been attributed to the large size of the US market. Sam Walton,

Wal-Mart’s founder recently pasted away flyer an airplane, was the reason why Wal-

Mart does so well. The theoretical framework driving the semiotic analysis is institutional

theory (Meyer & Rowan, 1977. This theory suggests that because consumers respond

positively to family, community and national institutions, retailers can reflect the

corresponding norms in functional and symbolic acts. A retail firm and its environment

are seen interpenetrate each other to extent that a retailer’s actions reflect the economic

and cultural moral norms of the environment. These norms are cognitive guidance

systems, rules of procedures that actors employ flexibility to assure themselves and those

around them and those around them that their behavior is reasonable.

These environmental norms are of two forms, and they are called: task and

institutional. These task norms reflect the organization’s economic environment to which

it responds with functionally related per formative action. Retailers are not only

integrated