In the light of the most recent work in social sciences, the understanding of globalization as a force of uniformization seems to be less and less acurate. The goal of this PhD dissertation is, therefore, to use the example of retail store industry, as a media of this globalization process, to verify, through the particular case of food practices and representations, if it is still possible to describe globalization as a destructive phenomenon in terms of cultural differences. Following an inductivist methodology, we studied this industry, its development modalities and their consequences within the various environment which have seen its appearance, its growth and spread to new cultural spaces in order to developp a more general theory of globalization. Adopting the principles of socio-anthropological research and the « case studies mosaic » strategy, and as it is encouraged by the iterative model of the grounded theory, we have constantly sought to submit our theoretical analysis at the test of our empirical field through a continious extension of cases and variation of objects. Thus, gaining in generalization, we have argued for a less simplist understanding of the globalization process, therefore founding our plead for a complex perspective of social and cultural phenomena.
