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

Cet article examine la nature de la consommation dans une societe industrielle. Plus precisement il etudie la facon dont les residents d'un habitat a loyer modere de Londres ont decore et transforme leurs cuisines. Des differences marquantes sont observees dans la facon dont ces locataires s'efforcent ou non de s'approprier les lieux qu'ils occupent et ces differences sont mises en relation avec les categories sexuelles, l'appartenance a un groupe ethnique ou d'autres facteurs. Une telle perspective eclaire notamment la nature dialectique de la categorie de genre examinee dans des conditions specifiques. Les pratiques de consommation, sur une longue periode, detiennent un potentiel dynamique et offrent un champ qui permet a certains groupes sociaux de construire une culture specifique a partir de biens alienables

Aliénation et appropriation : le cas de la cuisine dans une cité anglaise de H.L.M.

Capis An Edaphic Approadi. DANIEL MILLER New York: Be% 1997; x + 357 pp. On a first reading Capitalism appears scattered and confusing; on a second reading it is significant and provocative. The first reading stems from Capitalism's seemingly erratic jumps from one social context to another and from one agent's perspective to another's in its descriptions of commodity production in Trinidad, Capitalism's ethnographic site. A second reading clarifies Miller's major proposition: commodities are produced not only as objects with market value by manufacturers, but also as "projects of value," Miller's key concept, by brand owners, advertising executives (Capitalism's research foci, heretofore neglected by anthropologists), and even consumers. That reading also reveals how those projects generate social and cultural contradictions among and between such producers. For example, Trinidadian sweet drink manufacturers seek market share and profit through creating local and transnational brand name reputations, as well as through advertising agents' ads and promotions. Yet, brand names and products are also projects of value. Solo company's sweet drinks wear the oldest, indigenous brand name. Its brand, therefore, represents authentic Trinidadian nationalism; loyalty to the brand is loyalty to Trinidadian identity. But in other contexts Trinidadians identify as global consumers of higher quality foreign drinks. Coke, therefore, lends its reputation for quality to its local franchiser, Cannings. Local company executives face the problems of positioning the company in the market and of positioning themselves within larger global conglomerates. They represent themselves to conglomerates as having local expertise necessary to reinterpret or replace homogenized, global marketing campaigns by locally relevant, but for conglomerates more expensive, ones despite suspected lesser effectiveness. Conglomerates often accede so as to increase the local office's importance and because consumer reaction is unpredictable. "Profitability" of a local branch's "nationalism," therefore, structurally contradicts that of its conglomerate's "globalism." Profitability is not the only "value" at issue; material culture's logic cannot be reduced to market culture's commodities. Rather, commodities are complex symbolic formations (p. 4) produced and reproduced by multiple agents in a dynamic history of production, distribution, and consumption. Advertising agents create ads using their own models of consumer preferences as well as current aesthetic and professional models. The result is a genre of "capitalist realism . . . a kind of hyperreal idealized world of consumption" (p. 191). It has its own self-referential standards and expectations about which Trinidadians are highly sophisticated, because for them the world of ads is similar to the world of cinema elsewhere. Consumers also have their own categories and discourses: red drinks stand for East Indians and black drinks for Africans. Yet, consumers in each ethnic group tend to drink and identify with a drink's other qualities in the opposed category, for example, Indians consume Coke, a black drink, because of its modernity. Commodities such as drinks become, therefore, objectifications, out of commerce's control, for projects of value whereby each group appropriates imaginary aspects of the other's identity. Surprisingly, advertising executives tend to ignore consumers' categories for their own. Reactive fear of competitors, networks of social peers, and unpredictability of consumer reaction, more than profitability, motivate them. Miller concludes that "cultures" of consumption and production can operate separately, because assigning blame for advertising campaign failures is difficult. …

Capitalism: An Ethnographic Approach

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Anthropological studies of mobile phones

Ideology and Power in Prehistory

Amongst the original sins that anthropology students are warned against from the start of their education are those of functionalism and technological determinism. Things never to be espoused accept under pain of extreme denigration. The implication being that these were primitive forms of anthropological explanation now superseded by more advanced positions. In historical context these prohibitions may have seemed reasonable enough. Perhaps there once was a threat of a full fledged ideological commitment to modelling the world as an organic or systemic functional model, which we needed to eschew. But, at least outside the study of ecology, those days are long gone, leaving these prohibitions as generic, rather undefined and possibly by now somewhat debilitating to any anthropology that seeks to provide plausible accounts and explanations for social change. The three books under review here are concerned with transformations in the digital world, and it is clear that at some level this new digital world has dramatically transformed all our lives because of advances in technology that function rather well. The reason for picking these three books, in particular, is that they highlight an ambiguity at the heart of explanations that implicate technology and function. Because it is always people who create the machines that, as these books clearly reveal, have the ability to script people. We will examine them in a sequence that reflects another variable factor in such equations. In this first case it is the creation of a machine, in the second it is the development of software, that is a game. While in the third case it is the creation of narratives. Furthermore the three vary with respect to whether the intention is to control or to facilitate the people at the user end of the spectrum.

Danny Miller

Papers

Aliénation et appropriation : le cas de la cuisine dans une cité anglaise de H.L.M.

Capitalism: An Ethnographic Approach

Anthropological studies of mobile phones

Ideology and Power in Prehistory

People that make machines that script people