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

Disciplinary approaches to consumption

The smartphone is often literally right in front of our nose, so you would think we would know what it is. But do we? To find out, 11 anthropologists each spent 16 months living in communities in Africa, Asia, Europe and South America, focusing on the take up of smartphones by older people. Their research reveals that smartphones are technology for everyone, not just for the young. The Global Smartphone presents a series of original perspectives deriving from this global and comparative research project. Smartphones have become as much a place within which we live as a device we use to provide ‘perpetual opportunism’, as they are always with us. The authors show how the smartphone is more than an ‘app device’ and explore differences between what people say about smartphones and how they use them. The smartphone is unprecedented in the degree to which we can transform it. As a result, it quickly assimilates personal values. In order to comprehend it, we must take into consideration a range of national and cultural nuances, such as visual communication in China and Japan, mobile money in Cameroon and Uganda, and access to health information in Chile and Ireland – all alongside diverse trajectories of ageing in Al Quds, Brazil and Italy. Only then can we know what a smartphone is and understand its consequences for people’s lives around the world.

The Global Smartphone: Beyond a Youth Technology

II est generalement admis que Noel etait une fete autrefois purement religieuse qui a ete sacrifiee au profit du commerce et du materialisme — c'est une opinion qui trouve un large echo a Trinidad. L'objet de cet article est de decrire en detail ce que font la plupart des Trinidadiens a ce moment de l'annee : ils consacrent des mois entiers au nettoyage et a l'embellissement de leur demeure ainsi qu'aux preparations culinaires specifiques au repas de Noel et effectuent apres d'innombrables visites entre voisins et amis. On constate que le Noel trinidadien possede sa propre dimension ethnique, qui s'appuie sur la conception de ce qui est vecu comme « espagnol », laquelle renvoie a la population amerindienne originelle. A l'evidence, cela permet de montrer que cette fete est devenue une strategie populaire pour contrer les effets potentiellement anti-sociaux et percus comme tels du materialisme.

Noël à Trinidad ou l'« alter-matérialisme »

Tide-dominated or tide-influenced coastal marine deposits form some of the most complicated and largest hydrocarbon fields in the world (Wood, 2004 and references cited therein). Good outcrop analogs can provide significant insight to geologists for recognizing tidal influence in core and interpreting petrophysical log data, thus reducing uncertainty and risk when developing depositional models and planning for field development. Despite the observation that 8 of the 12 largest deltas in the modern world are either tide dominated or strongly tidally influenced (Middleton, 1991), many geologists fail to recognize tidal influence in the rock record, perhaps, in part, because of the influence of preexisting paradigms. This seems to be particularly so for many geologists prospecting for hydrocarbons within Pennsylvanian sediments in the Arkoma and Anadarko Basin of the southcentral United States.

Although good ancient analogs of tide-dominated deltas exist (see summary table in Feldman et al., 2014), many of these studies inferred tidal influence from the intercalation of sandstone and mudstone, an abundance of fluidized mud deposits, a dominance of structures formed from currents, and the shoreline-perpendicular orientation of elongate sandstone bodies. Few studies have identified sedimentary structures in delta-front and prodelta settings that can be directly related to semidiurnal, semimonthly, and longer-term tidal deposition. This may reflect background interference from storms or variable fluvial discharge that disrupted tidal deposition and thus obscures evidence of fortnightly or longer tidal signals, or it may reflect …

Stratigraphy, sedimentology, and geochemistry of the Upper Mississippian Pride Shale in the Appalachian Basin

Many start-ups chose to compete with incumbent firms using one of two generic strategies: cost leadership or differentiation. Our note demonstrates how this choice depends on whether the start-up was founded out of necessity. Our results, based on a representative dataset of 4,568 German start-ups, show that the start-ups of necessity entrepreneurs are more likely than others to pursue a cost leadership strategy, and less likely to pursue a differentiation strategy.

Danny Miller

Papers

Disciplinary approaches to consumption

The Global Smartphone: Beyond a Youth Technology

Noël à Trinidad ou l'« alter-matérialisme »

Stratigraphy, sedimentology, and geochemistry of the Upper Mississippian Pride Shale in the Appalachian Basin

A Note on Necessity Entrepreneurship and Competitive Strategy