Backlash against the "Big Box": Local Small Business and Public Opinion toward Business Corporations

Abstract

Political discourse often distinguishes “big” from “small” business, with the former cast as the insidious monolith of the present era and the latter as the virtuous incarnation of the average citizen’s participation in the American dream. Throughout the nation, this abstract juxtaposition of big and small business takes concrete form in the emerging dominance of large-scale corporate retail chain stores over locally owned small retail businesses. While studies have analyzed the economic and civic impact of corporate “big-box” store development, social scientists have yet to address the basic public opinion question of whether residing in local areas where retail commerce is dominated by big-box corporations activates hostility among citizens toward business corporations. Drawing upon two national surveys combined with Census data, this article demonstrates that citizens’ attitudes toward large corporate retailers, and business corporations more generally, are strongly linked to the vitality of small local retail business.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 7 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.