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Journal ArticleDOI

Towards an attention-based view of the firm

William Ocasio
- 01 Jul 1997 - 
- Vol. 18, Iss: 6, pp 187-206
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TLDR
The central argument of as discussed by the authors is that firm behavior is the result of how firms channel and distribute the attention of their decision-makers, and that decision makers do what they focus their attention on depending on what issues and answers they focus on and how the firm's rules, resources, and relationships distribute various issues, answers, and decision makers into specific communications and procedures.
Abstract
The central argument is that firm behavior is the result of how firms channel and distribute the attention of their decision-makers. What decision-makers do depends on what issues and answers they focus their attention on. What issues and answers they focus on depends on the specific situation and on how the firm's rules, resources, and relationships distribute various issues, answers, and decision-makers into specific communications and procedures. The paper develops these theoretical principles into a model of firm behavior and presents its implications for explaining firm behavior and adaptation. ? 1997 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

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Citations
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Institutional logics and the historical contingency of power in organizations: Executive succession in the higher education publishing industry, 1958-1990

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References
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Book ChapterDOI

Firm Resources and Sustained Competitive Advantage

TL;DR: In this article, the authors examined the link between firm resources and sustained competitive advantage and analyzed the potential of several firm resources for generating sustained competitive advantages, including value, rareness, imitability, and substitutability.
Book

Judgment Under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases

TL;DR: The authors described three heuristics that are employed in making judgements under uncertainty: representativeness, availability of instances or scenarios, and adjustment from an anchor, which is usually employed in numerical prediction when a relevant value is available.
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A Resource-Based View of the Firm

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Exploration and Exploitation in Organizational Learning

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors consider the relation between the exploration of new possibilities and the exploitation of old certainties in organizational learning and examine some complications in allocating resources between the two, particularly those introduced by the distribution of costs and benefits across time and space.
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