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

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/0149206320977901

Paradoxical Resource Trajectories: When Strength Leads to Weakness and Weakness Leads to Strength.

Why does the festival of Christmas appear to be expanding worldwide while other festivals decline? Why do people emphasize their local rituals, given this is a global festival? Is this a religious festival whose values have been destroyed by materialism? What is the relationship between this family celebratory meal and the divine family to which it pays obeisance? These seemed to be questions that lent themselves to an anthropological perspective. For this reason in 1993 I brought together an edited volume Unwrapping Christmas, which was published by Oxford University Press. For that collection I also obtained permission from Claude Levi-Strauss to include the first translation of his paper “Le Pere Noel supplicie.” Subsequently, on request from Suhrkamp Verlag, who had published several of my books in German, I submitted the following manuscript as part of their launch of a series of more popular academic works in a digital edition. This is the first publication of the manuscript in English.

/pdf/christmas-an-anthropological-lens-1mlumn4g96.pdf

Christmas: An anthropological lens

Strategy formulation is defined as the process employed by executives to adjust the organization and its activities to the environment. Strategies are said to be goal oriented streams of decisions....

Towards a contingency theory of strategy formulation.

Social science contains a grand narrative about our fall from intense sociality to fragmented individualism. The present essay contests this narrative with respect to the sociality of the English. It starts with a study of hospice patients with terminal cancer who live in villages and yet become isolated and lonely. To explain this phenomenon, it uses a larger ethnography of village life, finding that villagers are highly sociable and philanthropic in the public domain, but circumspect and reticent with regard to the private domain. So once patients are restricted to their homes, isolation follows. The article further examines the comparative anthropology of Britain and historical studies of neighbors and family relations to suggest that this pattern of sociality has held true for centuries and represents nothing new. Finally, I consider these insights in the context of a wider study of social media, and its consequences for the work of the hospice.

/pdf/the-tragic-denouement-of-english-sociality-15ypeazo8k.pdf

Danny Miller

Papers

Paradoxical Resource Trajectories: When Strength Leads to Weakness and Weakness Leads to Strength.

Christmas: An anthropological lens

Towards a contingency theory of strategy formulation.

The tragic denouement of english sociality

The Political Economy of the Internet