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

Conditioning competitive risk: Competitors’ rank proximity and relative ability

My co-authors and I came away from a recent experience publishing in a finance journal (Miller et al., 2007). It was a first for most of us, and an edifying, if at times trying experience. More importantly, it provided us with a perspective into a distinct field, with different modes of argument, methods and appraisals. Our essential takeaway: because of differences in theoretical orientations and research approaches, we can learn from them, and perhaps they can learn from us. The insights in what follows come from the details, not the broad brush differences between our fields already so familiar to anyone with a cursory exposure to finance. Therefore, I use specific examples from our own publishing interactions to highlight some important contrasts. Our work in finance examined the performance of family vs other types of businesses on the Fortune 1000. So the situation I describe pertains to the area of corporate finance, especially as relating to corporate governance and ownership structure, which have been topics in journals such as Journal of Finance, Journal of Financial Economics, Journal of Corporate Finance and Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis. I should also say that our lessons come from empirical, not theoretical, work. The research orientations I describe reflect significant variations from those within our own discipline (see Table 1). The subtext of what follows is that since we embrace different assumptions and theories, and enjoy different degrees of paradigm consensus, our methods also differ. For example, because there is more paradigm consensus in finance, there is less emphasis on literature reviews, elaborate hypothesis development and the search for explanation. There is also a more developed set of methodological requirements to ensure rigour – methodologies with enough credibility that disconfirming results are easier to publish than in our own discipline. In fact, our finance article showed, contrary STRATEGIC ORGANIZATION Vol 6(3): 329–339 DOI: 10.1177/1476127008093523 Copyright ©2008 Sage Publications (Los Angeles, London, New Delhi and Singapore) http://so.sagepub.com

Stranger in a strange land: a brief journey into the realm of empirical corporate finance:

Les entreprises familiales (EF) sont reputees prendre un soin particulier de leurs employes, avec l’objectif de creer une « communaute » interne tres soudee. Leurs relations et contacts avec leurs partenaires exterieurs seraient aussi plus approfondis et personnels. Ces deux attitudes favoriseraient la viabilite d’une entreprise qui doit faire vivre la famille proprietaire, ainsi que les generations suivantes. Ces liens sociaux nous paraissent pouvoir compenser le manque de capital, de produits et d’infrastructure propre aux economies emergentes dynamiques. Cette etude, menee dans un secteur tres competitif de marche emergent, les entreprises de haute technologie en Coree, examine trois points majeurs : (1) Les relations internes et les liens avec l’exterieur sont plus developpes dans les EF que dans les autres. (2) Ces relations ameliorent la performance des secteurs de haute technologie dans les marches emergents, pour lesquels il est indispensable, du fait de leur nature competitive complexe et evolutive, de disposer d’une expertise pointue et d’un capital social a l’interieur comme a l’exterieur de l’entreprise. (3) Les performances des EF sont plus dependantes de ces relations communautaires et de ces liens avec l’exterieur que celles des autres entreprises, parce que dans ce cadre personnel et intime, les employes et les partenaires exterieurs ont generalement tendance a recompenser la generosite, ou au contraire a punir l’egoisme, d’une famille proprietaire qu’ils voient a l’oeuvre de leurs propres yeux. Nos observations empiriques confirment la plupart de ces hypotheses de facon significative.

/pdf/combler-le-vide-institutionnel-le-comportement-social-et-les-37wedx08b0.pdf

Combler le « vide institutionnel » : Le comportement social et les performances des entreprises familiales comparés à ceux des autres entreprises des marchés émergents dans le secteur des hautes technologies.

Mobiles and impoverished households in Jamaica.

This talk reports on research by nine anthropologists who each simultaneously carried out a 15 month ethnography on the use and consequences of social media in field sites ranging from the Syria-Turkey border, an IT complex in south India to both a factory and a rural town in China, a squatters settlement in Brazil, a mining town in Chile, an English village and small towns in south Italy and Trinidad. The focus will be on two issues: our definition of social media as 'scalable sociality', in contrast to prior media with its duality of the private and the public, and secondly the impact of a shift to visual communication. These have consequences for a broad range of issues such as enhanced conservatism, and both enhanced and reduced individualism, inequality and privacy. The paper will briefly discuss our theoretical structures that underlie this project such as the 'theory of attainment', and 'polymedia'. The research directly challenges most universal claims that either the internet or social media has a specific effect on human populations based on the extrapolation of evidence from any one case. By contrast this project reveals a high degree of social and cultural specificity. We also show how genres of content migrate easily between different platforms which leads us to question the arguments about social media that assume causation either on the basis of the nature of the platform or upon what have been called its 'affordances'. Finally, a mention will be made of the plans for the dissemination of the research results through eleven Open Access volumes and multilingual popular media such as YouTube, a MOOC, and a website, and the potential this represents for the use of new digital capabilities for the future of research dissemination.

Danny Miller

Papers

Conditioning competitive risk: Competitors’ rank proximity and relative ability

Stranger in a strange land: a brief journey into the realm of empirical corporate finance:

Combler le « vide institutionnel » : Le comportement social et les performances des entreprises familiales comparés à ceux des autres entreprises des marchés émergents dans le secteur des hautes technologies.

Mobiles and impoverished households in Jamaica.

Why we post: the comparative anthropology of social media