Researchers have used the absorptive capacity construct to explain various organizational phenomena. In this article we review the literature to identify key dimensions of absorptive capacity and offer a reconceptualization of this construct. Building upon the dynamic capabilities view of the firm, we distinguish between a firm's potential and realized capacity. We then advance a model outlining the conditions when the firm's potential and realized capacities can differentially influence the creation and sustenance of its competitive advantage.

https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=5629&context=lkcsb_research

Absorptive Capacity: A Review, Reconceptualization, and Extension

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

Organizational learning has many virtues, virtues which recent writings in strategic management have highlighted. Learning processes, however, are subject to some important limitations. As is well-known, learning has to cope with confusing experience and the complicated problem of balancing the competing goals of developing new knowledge (i.e., exploring) and exploiting current competencies in the face of dynamic tendencies to emphasize one or the other. We examine the ways organizations approach these problems through simplification and specialization and how those approaches contribute to three forms of learning myopia, the tendency to overlook distant times, distant places, and failures, and we identify some ways in which organizations sustain exploration in the face of a tendency to overinvest in exploitation. We conclude that the imperfections of learning are not so great as to require abandoning attempts to improve the learning capabilities of organizations, but that those imperfections suggest a certain conservatism in expectations.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/2486499.pdf

The myopia of learning

Myopia of learning

Effective organizations are configurations of management practices that facilitate the development of the knowledge that becomes the basis for competitive advantage. A market orientation, complemen...

Market Orientation and the Learning Organization

Global Capitalism at Risk: What Are You Doing About It?

When markets quake: The management challenge of restructuring industry

"Statecraft"—the use of persuasion and informal authority to mobilize coalitions to accomplish goals—is a little-recognized but critical element of strategic leadership. In exercising statecraft, top managers continually move back and forth across the "boundary" between the firm and a wide variety of constituencies, paying close attention to the political as well as the economic consequences of their decisions. The two central jobs of the corporate statesman are managing the core coalition assembled to achieve corporate purpose and maintaining the balance between the technocratic and political systems of the firm.

Statecraft, Strategy, and Corporate Leadership:

Surveys methods of technocratic and political management and using case studies, shows how business and government can work together.

Joseph L. Bower

Papers

Global Capitalism at Risk: What Are You Doing About It?

When markets quake: The management challenge of restructuring industry

Statecraft, Strategy, and Corporate Leadership:

The two faces of management : an American approach to leadership in business and politics

Business Policy: Managing Strategic Processes