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

En suivant la tradition de l'analyse ethnographique, l'A. propose un compte-rendu du Best Value, soit l'inspection faite par le gouvernement du Royaume-Uni des services fournis par les municipalites et autres unites d'organisation locale. Son analyse repose, en grande partie, sur les categories et les termes employes par l'inspectorat lui-meme. Dans chaque domaine d'inspection, il apparait que les resultats contredisent les intentions initiales des enquetes menees. Cela semble etre le resultat des processus d'abstraction qui surgissent pendant l'inspection. Une telle abstraction a ete decelee dans l'apparition d'un jargon et d'une bureaucratie issus de l'echelle meme de l'audit, dans l'exteriorisation de facteurs critiques lors de l'etude de marche, ainsi que dans l'accent mis sur la representation de la consultation, au dela des resultats de la consultation elle-meme, et par le fait que l'on ait privilegie l'information quantitative plutot que l'information qualitative. Enfin, l'expression appropriation du processus est analysee afin de demontrer comment l'ethos central du service public est nie par ces memes forces. Toutes ces formes d'abstraction se manifestent plutot en depit qu'a cause des intentions de l'inspectorat. Dans la conclusion ces formes sont analysees comme des contradictions qui sont le produit de forces decrites par le biais d'une theorie du Virtualisme.

The Virtual Moment

The configuration approach to the study of organizations is enjoying increasing popularity, in part, due to the methodological advances of qualitative comparative analysis. I argue that there are significant contrasts between earlier taxonomic clustering and typology approaches to configuration and the newer ones being pursued with the qualitative comparative analysis methodology. I compare the two approaches and their application, arguing that what is missing in many studies, old and new, often due to the lack of qualitative evidence, is “configuration itself”—that is, contrasting common, thematic, and rich characterizations that provide insight into how organizations function.

Challenging trends in configuration research: Where are the configurations?:

Recent face recognition experiments on the LFW benchmark show that face recognition is performing stunningly well, surpassing human recognition rates. In this paper, we study face recognition at scale. Specifically, we have collected from Flickr a \textbf{Million} faces and evaluated state of the art face recognition algorithms on this dataset. We found that the performance of algorithms varies--while all perform great on LFW, once evaluated at scale recognition rates drop drastically for most algorithms. Interestingly, deep learning based approach by \cite{schroff2015facenet} performs much better, but still gets less robust at scale. We consider both verification and identification problems, and evaluate how pose affects recognition at scale. Moreover, we ran an extensive human study on Mechanical Turk to evaluate human recognition at scale, and report results. All the photos are creative commons photos and is released at \small{\url{this http URL}} for research and further experiments.

MegaFace: A Million Faces for Recognition at Scale.

Acknowledgments Introduction 1. Life 2. Relationships 3. Fashion 4. Comfortable 5. Ordinary 6. The Struggle for Ordinary 7. Anthropology: From Normative to Ordinary 8. Sociology: The Ordinary and the Routine Bibliography Index

Blue Jeans: The Art of the Ordinary

The Upper Mississippian Hinton, Princeton, and Bluestone formations of southern West Virginia constitute a westward-thinning wedge of strata that filled the central Appalachian basin over approximately 7 m.y. Up to 17 transgressive-regressive sequences comprise the study interval in the basin depocenter. High-frequency, fourth-order (~400 k.y.) sequences vary with regard to the degree of basal incision, the overall thickness, and the character of the dominant facies. Five sequence types are recognized in the outcrop belt: (1) major incised valley fill to coastal plain, (2) major incised valley fill to deltaic, (3) minor incised valley fill, (4) coastal plain, and (5) marine-dominated sequences. Sequence development is ascribed to glacioeustasy during the early stages of the Permian-Carboniferous Gondwanan glaciation.

Sequence Stratigraphy of Upper Mississippian Strata in the Central Appalachians: A Record of Glacioeustasy and Tectonoeustasy in a Foreland Basin Setting

Danny Miller

Papers

The Virtual Moment

Challenging trends in configuration research: Where are the configurations?:

MegaFace: A Million Faces for Recognition at Scale.

Blue Jeans: The Art of the Ordinary

Sequence Stratigraphy of Upper Mississippian Strata in the Central Appalachians: A Record of Glacioeustasy and Tectonoeustasy in a Foreland Basin Setting