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

What is the relationship between identities that people construct, express and consume online and those offline?

For years now our profession has selected its members, at least in part, on the basis of standardized tests, such as GMAT or GRE, thereby discriminating against dyslexics and others with disadvanta...

The Dyslexic Researcher: A Call to Broaden Our Portals

By adopting an epidemiological approach to the study of ADHD and entrepreneurship, we bridge the gap between mainstream ADHD research and entrepreneurship research on ADHD. Based on a longitudinal ...

When ADHD Helps and Harms in Entrepreneurship: An Epidemiological Approach

This article starts with a consideration of the different reasons academics might be interested in the detailed analysis of who interacts with whom on a social media platform such as Facebook. We t...

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/2056305118784776

Facebook Interactions: An Ethnographic Perspective:

Disorganizing the narrative economy of Hitchcockian suspense and at odds with the formal perfection of the director’s acclaimed style, Rope ’s secret understyle traffics in faults, oversights, and inelegancies of various kinds, all strangely accepted and even flaunted, rather than hidden, by the film. Though visible only to those who view Rope too closely, these errors touch on a central aspect of Hitchcock’s perfectionist art, disclosing an essentially imperfect Hitchcock, one who is endlessly and deliberately making and cleaning up messes, and whose very corrections cause further mistakes to proliferate.

Danny Miller

Papers

What is the relationship between identities that people construct, express and consume online and those offline?

The Dyslexic Researcher: A Call to Broaden Our Portals

When ADHD Helps and Harms in Entrepreneurship: An Epidemiological Approach

Facebook Interactions: An Ethnographic Perspective:

Hitchcock’s Understyle: A Too-Close View of Rope