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

Our growing indifference to Roland Barthes’s thought suggests that the reactionaries were right after all.What had seemed a stupid complaint during his heyday now, twenty years after his death, proves prophetic: Roland Barthes has nothing to say. Yet it is precisely at a moment when few read Barthes for his ideas, that the complaint seems most foolish, in having imagined that anyone ever read Barthes, ever could read him, just for these. Hadn’t Barthes’s writing performance, unabashedly flighty, survived several of its intellectual moments during his own lifetime? To state the obvious: Barthes’s achievement has always lain in something else, something that, having now outlived the vitality of virtually everything he “had to say,” still seduces, fascinates, inspires; and still exasperates, disgusts, enrages.To continue stating the obvious: that something else is the overriding insistence, the inescapable obviousness, of style in his work. When it first intoxicated us, happy drunks hailed it as an audacity, and mean ones censured it as an embarrassment. But what continues to make both responses possible is that his style is never very well covered by the theories that provide the occasion for its display. The comparably outlandish writing performance of Lacan or Derrida has given intellectuals less trouble; in these writers, style may be readily understood to be part of the argument, from the formidable authority of which it derives a serious, a substantial, an inevitable character. (The not so perversely traditional opening of the Ecrits:“le style est l’homme même.”) But Barthesian style consistently manages to seem overperformed in relation to its ideas, or what comes to the same thing, undertheorized. At times, particularly in his early work, Barthes goes out of his way to insist that style may never attain to socio-intellectual meaningfulness; this is the case with the bravura pages on style in Writing Degree Zero, pages whose own epigrammatic éclat obviously performs the distinctive “brilliance” of style, even as they make the argument that none of it matters, that style, allied to the body, to the personal mythology of the author, to the “secret” of both, is intrinsically closed to social signification, and as such irrelevant to the assigned intellectual themes of the day—and of the rest of Barthes’s text—which are Freedom, Commitment, and Writing. At other times, of course, mainly in late works, Barthes does advance an implicit justification for his style, but one that

Foutre! Bougre! Ecriture!

The limits of jeans in Kannur, Kerala

Cette observation ethnographique, realisee dans les quartiers nord de Londres, sur la maniere dont on choisit les objets de la vie quotidienne vient completer l’etude de Bourdieu sur le contexte social du jugement esthetique. Ces donnees suggerent que de tels jugements esthetiques sont rarement une simple rencontre « kantienne » entre des personnes et des objets isoles. Les individus s’appuient plutot sur des processus sociaux pour decouvrir ce qu’ils aiment. Les exemples presentes concernent l’ajout de nouveaux elements decoratifs dans la maison, les problemes lies au choix et a l’achat d’une robe a fleurs et de sous-vetements, le recours aux services de la societe Colour me Beautiful pour choisir ses habits. Ces etudes de cas illustrent la signification des relations sociales et celle des rapports entre les objets dans la definition du gout.

« Je m’y connais peut-être en art mais je ne sais pas ce que j’aime »

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Commentary: opportunism, perspective and insight

Como o Mundo as Midias Sociais e o primeiro livro da Why We Post, uma serie de livros que investiga as descobertas de nove antropologos, que passaram 15 meses vivendo em comunidades em diferentes partes do mundo, incluindo Brasil, Chile, China, Inglaterra, India, Italia, Trinidad e Turquia. Este livro oferece uma analise comparativa que resume os resultados da pesquisa e a analise do impacto das midias sociais sobre politica e genero, educacao e comercio. Qual e o resultado do aumento da enfase na comunicacao visual? Estamos nos tornando mais individualistas ou mais sociais? Por que as midias sociais publicas sao tao conservadoras? Por que a igualdade na internet nao consegue anular a desigualdade? Como os memes se tornaram a policia moral da internet?

Apoiado por uma introducao a estrutura academica do projeto e aos termos teoricos que ajudam a analisar as descobertas, o livro argumenta que a unica maneira de se apreciar e entender algo tao privado e ubiquo como as midias sociais deve se dar a partir da imersao nas vidas das pessoas que ali postam. So entao podemos descobrir como diferentes individuos em todo o mundo ja transformaram as midias sociais de maneiras tao inesperadas e avaliar suas consequencias.

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Danny Miller

Papers

Foutre! Bougre! Ecriture!

The limits of jeans in Kannur, Kerala

« Je m’y connais peut-être en art mais je ne sais pas ce que j’aime »

Commentary: opportunism, perspective and insight

Como o Mundo Mudou as Mídias Sociais