Bodies and Structures

The Global Space of a Drugstore

The drugstore served an interface for the circulation of people, goods, and ideas.  Company executives often traveled abroad to learn about, borrow, and translate so-called best practices that would improve the company's bottom-line.  The sources for this module demonstrate how Hoshi Pharmaceuticals modeled the spatial layout of an ideal drugstore on successful drugstores in the Midwestern United States.  Here, we see the process of translation, of how Hoshi's blueprint of an ideal drugstore developed as an abstraction from ideas forged from traveler's itineraries.  The creation of an abstract space -- developed in order to control particular places (the local, franchise drugstores) -- involved the circulation of different ideas.  The two pages that follow describe two of the most important ideas: scientific management and franchising.

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