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

In the promotion of AIDS and its Metaphors, Susan Sontag has expressed irritation, disappointment, and even hurt that her book has been reviewed by experts on science and AIDS rather than as "writing." This is "a literary performance," she insists in one interview, that "has more to do with Emerson than Randy Shilts."' "Imagine," she invites us in another, "M. F. K. Fisher just reviewed for her recipes. First of all M. F. K. Fisher is a writer. Her subject just happens to be food."2 The plausibility of such statements depends on assuming a difference, sharp enough to amount to an opposition, between one entity called writing and another called AIDS. It is not the derisory oyster that secretes the pearl of M. F. K. Fisher's prose, or that can help us estimate its luster. Likewise, the comparison implies, AIDS "just happens to be" the most recent incitement to what should more properly, or "first of all," engage our attention: Susan Sontag's ongoing writing project. The claim for the precession and superiority of form over a content whose main function is to justify the elaboration of artistic or literary devices is of course a familiar one, from Wilde, the Russian formalists, even Sontag's own early manifesto "Against Interpretation." As the case of Wilde best illustrates, however, the argument for the secondariness of content typically surfaces in contexts where the content in question, far from being trivial, enjoys a particular volatility whose ignition would catastrophically overwhelm both personal and public spheres together, obliterating whatever barriers had allowed, or required, them to be kept separate. The intellectually

https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/778735.pdf

Sontag's Urbanity

A Theory of Shopping

Using data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID) we specify, estimate and simulate a dynamic structural model of housing demand. Our model generalizes previous applied econometric work by incorporating realistic features of the housing market including non-convex adjustment costs from buying and selling a home, credit constraints from minimum downpayment requirements and uncertainty about the evolution of incomes and home prices. We argue that these features are critical for capturing salient features of housing demand observed in the PSID. After estimating the model we use it to simulate how consumer behavior responds to house price and income declines as well as tightening credit. These experiments are motivated by the U.S. recession starting in December of 2007 that saw large falls in home prices, large negative income shocks for many households and tightening credit standards. In the short run, relatively few households adjust their housing stock. Households respond instead by reducing non-housing consumption and reducing wealth because they wish to avoid losing their home and the associated adjustment costs. Households that adjust in the short run are those hit with a series of bad shocks, such as a negative income shock and a home price decline. A larger proportion of households do adjust their consumption in the long run, increasing their housing stock since housing is less expensive. However, such changes may occur several years after the shocks listed above.

A Dynamic Model of Housing Demand: Estimation and Policy Implications

In this debate piece, I argue that there is something more important than the discipline of anthropology, and that is the ability of anthropologists to study the world through ethnography and transmit that understanding back to global populations as education. An inwardly directed concern only with our discipline can sometimes constrain both of these tasks.

/pdf/anthropology-is-the-discipline-but-the-goal-is-ethnography-8i8vrtvn52.pdf

Anthropology is the discipline but the goal is ethnography

This article is intended as a critique of recent theorizations of sexuality and desire, which have led performative theorists to contend that gender is an effect of discourse, and sex an effect of gender. It results from informal discussions between the three authors on the mechanisms through which sexuality gets objectified in modernity. The ideas of influential Western thinkers (in particular Georges Bataille) are confronted with field data on sexuality - as lived and imagined - that the authors have been gathering in Amazonian societies, Trinidad, and on the Internet. Ethnographic data and Western theories about the nature of eroticism are used to argue that the utopian definition of sexuality as sexual desire and will to identity is too divorced from the mundane - love: domesticity and reproduction in a broad sense - and based on a too limited sphere of social experience. Consequently, to apply this definition to how and why humans engage in sexual activity leads to erroneous generalizations. For when encountered ethnographically, sexuality consists of practices deeply embedded in relational contexts. The article concludes with the proposition that debates about the possibilities of human sexuality and of its political intervention will make no significant progress unless we stop repeating that 'sexuality is socially constructed', and start looking at the ways in which it is lived as part of everyday social life.

Danny Miller

Papers

Sontag's Urbanity

A Theory of Shopping

A Dynamic Model of Housing Demand: Estimation and Policy Implications

Anthropology is the discipline but the goal is ethnography

Sex and Sociality Comparative Ethnographies of Sexual Objectification