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

This article describes the ways in which people, mainly selected from a single street in South London, utilize material culture in dealing with various experiences of separation and loss, such as death or the ending of a relationship. It starts from a dialectical approach to all relationships as consisting of a tension between idealized and actual categories. It then considers how objects are used to resolve this tension. Two aspects of this process are examined in more detail. The first shows how divestment from objects is used to control and extend the process of separation from persons. The second looks at how objects are used to create an economy of memory and relationships. The article thereby brings older anthropological insights on death and social rupture to bear on individuals within a contemporary metropolitan context.

Loss and material culture in South London

Scholars of entrepreneurship have focused mostly on founder entrepreneurs, new ventures, venture capital, and entrepreneurial initiatives in larger firms. However, family firms, which account for a majority of new ventures, have received far less prominent attention from the field. Although family businesses, often rightly, have been portrayed as being conservative and even stodgy, many of them are successful and enduring, and enjoy advantages in the business founding, growth, and maturity phases of the life cycle. We discuss the resources that may be responsible for these advantages in successful family firms, and the lessons that may be drawn from such firms for quintessential topics in entrepreneurship such as effectuation, new ventures, venture capital, opportunity platforms, and entrepreneurial orientation.

What Can Scholars of Entrepreneurship Learn from Sound Family Businesses

The relationships between Porter's (1980) business strategies and the process of strategy making are investigated. The complexity of a strategy is shown to be associated with the intensity of information processing and managerial interaction used in its development and implementation. Porter's strategy of innovative differentiation related significantly to information processing, interaction, and assertiveness in strategy making, especially among the most profitable firms, cost leadership had very few notable associations with decision making, and focus strategies related inversely to information processing.

Matching Strategies and Strategy Making: Process, Content, and Performance

The Pride Shale is a 60-m-thick succession of thinly interlaminated dark shales, siltstones, and fine-grained sandstones within the Bluestone Formation (Upper Mississippian) of southern West Virginia. A hierarchy of submillimeter- to meter-scale cycles in this succession preserves a spectrum of tidal and climatic periodicities. Submillimeter-thick, fine-grained sandstone/shale or siltstone/shale couplets are interpreted as the product of suspension settling associated with individual ebb-tidal flows. Up to 17 couplets systematically thicken and thin within millimeter- to centimeter-scale bundles interpreted as neap-spring tidal cycles. Successive neap-spring cycles display a thick-thin relationship interpreted to reflect unequal perigean and apogean tides. The fine scale and abbreviat d character of these microlaminated rhythmites is suggestive of a distal, subtidal setting wherein subordinate daily and neap and apogean ebb flows were generally of insufficient strength to transport sand and silt. Decimeter-scale cycles in the Pride Shale are manifested by the progressive upward thickening and thinning of up to 18 millimeter- to centimeter-thick (neap-spring) cycles. This bundling is interpreted to reflect a climatic (monsoonal) signal which defines that part of the year when adequate fluvial-tidal discharge forced suspended sediment into the basin. Lastly, a multi-year cyclicity is recognized in thick exposures where 17-22 annual beds display a crude upward thickening and thinning within meter-scale bundles. This bundling is interpreted to reflect the 18.6-year lunar odal cycle, with the thick annual beds representing years during which the inclination of the lunar orbital plane favored increased tidal amplitudes. Decompacted thicknesses of cycles indicate that accumulation rates for the Pride Shale typically ranged between 3 and 20 cm per year, but reached over 60 cm per year where sandy rhythmites developed as the marginal infill of large slump scars. The stratigraphic relationships and sedimentation rates for the Pride Shale are consistent with paleontological evidence of rapid sedimentation in turbid waters seaward of multiple points of fluvial discharge. The Pride Shale is interpreted as an extensive prodeltaic deposit which, in places, records hundreds of years of nearly continuous tidal sedimentation along the eastern margin of the Appalachian Basin.

Late Mississippian Prodeltaic Rhythmites in the Appalachian Basin: A Hierarchical Record of Tidal and Climatic Periodicities

Normally, academics simply review books and comment on their merits as the books are published But taking books in retrospect gives one the opportunity to do something perhaps rather more signific

https://people.stfx.ca/svincent/anth326/anthwmgst326fall2012/millerwhatisrelationship.pdf

Danny Miller

Papers

Loss and material culture in South London

What Can Scholars of Entrepreneurship Learn from Sound Family Businesses

Matching Strategies and Strategy Making: Process, Content, and Performance

Late Mississippian Prodeltaic Rhythmites in the Appalachian Basin: A Hierarchical Record of Tidal and Climatic Periodicities

What is a Relationship? Is Kinship Negotiated Experience?