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

. One of the major challenges in river restoration is to identify the natural fluvial landscape in catchments with a long history of river control. Intensive land use on valley floors often predates the earliest remote sensing: levees, dikes, dams, and other structures alter valley-floor morphology, river channels and flow regimes. Consequently, morphological patterns indicative of the fluvial landscape including multiple channels, extensive floodplains, wetlands, and fluvial-riparian and tributary-confluence dynamics can be obscured, and information to develop appropriate and cost effective river restoration strategies can be unavailable. This is the case in the Pas River catchment in northern Spain (650 km2), in which land use and development have obscured the natural fluvial landscape in many parts of the basin. To address this issue we used computer tools to examine the spatial patterns of fluvial landscapes that are associated with five domains of hydro-geomorphic processes and landforms. Using a 5-m digital elevation model, valley-floor surfaces were mapped according to elevation above the channel and proximity to key geomorphic processes. The predicted fluvial landscape is patchily distributed according to hillslope and valley topography, river network structure, and channel elevation profiles. The vast majority of the fluvial landscape in the main segments of the Pas River catchment is presently masked by human infrastructure, with only 15% not impacted by river control structures and development. The reconstructed fluvial landscape provides a catchment scale context to support restoration planning, in which areas of potential ecological productivity and diversity could be targeted for in-channel, floodplain and riparian restoration projects.

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Creating a catchment scale perspective for river restoration

This paper provides a historical perspective on communication among Filipino transnational families. Before the explosion of communication channels and opportunities accompanying the arrival of mob...

Crafting love: Letters and cassette tapes in transnational Filipino family communication

The establisment of a national site survey in the Solomon Islands provides a case study of the way in which the discipline of archaeology, developed in highly industrialised, wealthy countries, must be adapted if it is to prove meaningful in other parts of the world. Such changes are not only organisational and logistical; they extend to the conceptual basis of archaeology and to the relationship of the discipline to society. Specifically discussed are the problems of interpreting archaeological discoveries in terms of traditional perspectives of the past, the establishment of an archaeological unit and fieldwork programme, the question of decentralisation, rescue archaeology, protective legislation, the use of archaeology within the educational system, and the role of the external researcher.

Archaeology and Development [and Comments and Reply]

I begin this article with a brief history of the use of “the normative” in anthropology, starting with Kant and concluding with discussion of the concept within theories of practice. This is followed by an account of an ethnographic study of blue-jeans wearing in North London. The importance of becoming ordinary is exemplified in that study by migrants’ experience of being comfortable in blue jeans. I argue that jeans are the first postsemiotic garment, an antithesis to identity. I end by considering the challenge represented by the concept of “the ordinary” for anthropology's foundational presumption of the normative.

Anthropology in blue jeans

We characterize organizational research as a process driven by researcher’s adaptations to institutional pressures and resource constraints. Drawing on observations on the evolution of several rese...

Danny Miller

Papers

Creating a catchment scale perspective for river restoration

Crafting love: Letters and cassette tapes in transnational Filipino family communication

Archaeology and Development [and Comments and Reply]

Anthropology in blue jeans

Methods, Theories, Data, and the Social Dynamics of Organizational Research