Strategy-Structure-Performance Paradigm in Franchise-Intensive Organizations Within the Cultural Industry: The Case of Mixue Ice Cream & Tea

초록

This paper examines how franchise-intensive organizations within the cultural industry navigate structural realignment during major strategic transitions. Conceptualizing the focal firm not merely as a retail chain but as a prominent cultural consumption platform characterized by digital engagement and youth consumer culture, we drawon Chandler’s (1962) strategy-structure-performance (SSP) paradigmand Strategic Tension Theory to conduct a longitudinal analysis of Mixue Group. Using process tracing with triangulated data, we investigate structural adjustments as the firm pivots from aggressive scale expansion to a quality-first strategy in 2026. Our analysis reveals a complex landscape of structural matches and tensions. While the new top management team and AI-enabled monitoring reinforce standardization, they simultaneously trigger a "Scale-Quality-Unit Economics Trilemma," exacerbating cost pressures on franchisees whose micro-economics are further eroded by exogenous food delivery platform wars. Furthermore, we identify a latent cultural friction between the new leadership's financial-exit logic and the network's grassroots operational ethos. We propose an extended SSP-F (Franchise Governance) framework that reconceptualizes "structure" across TMT composition, franchisee empowerment, and digital embeddedness, thereby enriching the SSP paradigm for cultural platforms where performance is co-producedwith independent operators navigating digital and cultural complexities.

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