COMPETITIVE ADVANTAGE introduces a whole new way of understanding what a firm does. Porter's groundbreaking concept of the value chain disaggregates a company into 'activities', or the discrete functions or processes that represent the elemental building blocks of competitive advantage. Now an essential part of international business thinking, COMPETITIVE ADVANTAGE takes strategy from broad vision to an internally consistent configuration of activities. Its powerful framework provides the tools to understand the drivers of cost and a company's relative cost position. Porter's value chain enables managers to isolate the underlying sources of buyer value that will command a premium price, and the reasons why one product or service substitutes for another. He shows how competitive advantage lies not only in activities themselves but in the way activities relate to each other, to supplier activities, and to customer activities. That the phrases 'competitive advantage' and 'sustainable competitive advantage' have become commonplace is testimony to the power of Porter's ideas. COMPETITIVE ADVANTAGE has guided countless companies, business school students, and scholars in understanding the roots of competition. Porter's work captures the extraordinary complexity of competition in a way that makes strategy both concrete and actionable.

Competitive advantage: creating and sustaining superior performance

Theorists in various fields have discussed characteristics of top managers. This paper attempts to synthesize these previously fragmented literatures around a more general “upper echelons perspective.” The theory states that organizational outcomes—strategic choices and performance levels—are partially predicted by managerial background characteristics. Propositions and methodological suggestions are included.

Upper Echelons: The Organization as a Reflection of Its Top Managers

The primary purpose of this article is to clarify the nature of the entrepreneurial orientation (EO) construct and to propose a contingency framework for investigating the relationship between EO and firm performance. We first explore and refine the dimensions of EO and discuss the usefulness of viewing a firm's EO as a multidimensional construct. Then, drawing on examples from the EO-related contingencies literature, we suggest alternative models (moderating effects, mediating effects, independent effects, interaction effects) for testing the EO-performance relationship.

Clarifying the Entrepreneurial Orientation Construct and Linking It To Performance

It is argued that (a) social identification is a perception of oneness with a group of persons; (b) social identification stems from the categorization of individuals, the distinctiveness and prestige of the group, the salience of outgroups, and the factors that traditionally are associated with group formation; and (c) social identification leads to activities that are congruent with the identity, support for institutions that embody the identity, stereotypical perceptions of self and others, and outcomes that traditionally are associated with group formation, and it reinforces the antecedents of identification. This perspective is applied to organizational socialization, role conflict, and intergroup relations.

Social Identity Theory and the Organization

计量经济分析 = Econometric analysis

Prior research has analyzed R&D spending in family and founder firms. Yet little is known about the economic and technological importance of innovations in these types of firms. Using patent citation data, we show that founder-managed firms, which we argue favor an entrepreneurial orientation, receive more patent citations when compared with other firms, even controlling for R&D spending. By contrast, family-managed firms, many of which, we argue, pursue socioemotional wealth for the family, receive fewer patent citations compared with other firms, again, controlling for R&D spending. Patent citations have been shown in the literature to reflect the economic and technological importance of innovations.

https://mediatum.ub.tum.de/doc/1308017/file.pdf

Economic and Technological Importance of Innovations in Large Family and Founder Firms An Analysis of Patent Data

This article contends that the study of consumption is often subsumed within an ideological concern to castigate society for its materialism at the expense of an alternative morality that emerges from an empathetic concern with poverty and the desire for greater access to material resources. Examples are given of the benefits that accrue to populations from an increased quantity of goods in certain circumstances. An anti-materialist ideology is favoured by associating consumption with production rather than studying consumers themselves and their struggles to discriminate between the positive and negative consequences of commodities. The form of morality attacked here is also associated with a generalized critique of Americanization that tends to appropriate on behalf of the United States all blame and thereby agency for regressive global and local developments. The Americanization thesis also tends to ignore the contribution of much of the rest of the world to the production of consumer culture and conte...

The Poverty of Morality

Part 1 Objectification: Hegel and objectification Marx - objectification as rupture Munn - objectification as culture Simmel - objectification as modernity. Part 2 Material culture: material culture artefacts in their contexts. Part 3 Mass consumption: the study of consumption object domains, ideology and interests towards a theory of consumption.

Material Culture and Mass Consumption.

Ideology, Power and Prehistory.

The Description for this book, Narrative and Its Discontents: Problems of Closure in the Traditional Novel, will be forthcoming.

Danny Miller

Papers

Economic and Technological Importance of Innovations in Large Family and Founder Firms An Analysis of Patent Data

The Poverty of Morality

Material Culture and Mass Consumption.

Ideology, Power and Prehistory.

Narrative and Its Discontents: Problems of Closure in the Traditional Novel