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

Shelf life: Supermarkets and the changing cultures of consumption

Advantage by design: Competing with opportunity-based organizations

1. Hidden Pictures First, from Strangers on a Train, something obvious, literally obstructing the way. The eponymous train is coming into Metcalf; Guy Haines is about to get off, and, though it’s early in the film, he’s bearing considerable narrative momentum withhisvaliseandtennisrackets.AtMetcalf,he’ssupposedtomeethishatefulwife Miriam about a divorce that would allow him to marry the more personable Ann Morton, but he has also just met Bruno Antony, a stranger on the train, who has broached a less civilized plan; Bruno will murder Miriam if, in an undetectable

https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/656470

Hitchcock's Hidden Pictures

This concluding chapter analyses the importance of the various discussions in the preceeding papers for the study of long-term change, material culture patterning and the best manner in which the past can be understood.-from Authors

Ideology, Power and Prehistory: Ideology, power and long-term social change

This article explores emerging themes from the first stage of
ethnographic research investigating pregnancy and loss in Qatar. Issues around
the development of foetal personhood, the medical management of the pregnant
body and the social role of the pregnant woman are explored. Findings suggest that
Qatari women are expected to be calm vessels for their growing baby and should
avoid certain foods and behaviours. These ideas of risk avoidance are linked to
indigenous knowledge around a mother’s influence on a child’s health and traits.
Motherhood holds a particularly important place in Qatari culture and in Islam,
and women are ultimately responsible for protecting and promoting fertility and
for producing healthy children.

/pdf/calm-vessels-cultural-expectations-of-pregnant-women-in-3vb6k6yzhj.pdf

Danny Miller

Papers

Shelf life: Supermarkets and the changing cultures of consumption

Advantage by design: Competing with opportunity-based organizations

Hitchcock's Hidden Pictures

Ideology, Power and Prehistory: Ideology, power and long-term social change

Calm Vessels: Cultural Expectations of Pregnant Women in Qatar