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The fundamental problem of the resource‐based view (RBV) of the firm is its lack of predictive ability and its inability to identify, ex ante, those resources and capabilities leading to competitive advantage and superior profitability. This paper aims to propose an extension of the RBV model that incorporates the demand‐based variables of customer needs and size of addressable market segment in the definition of the resources and capabilities that enable competitive advantage and superior profitability.

The paper's approach is to use a literature review and two case studies.

In this model a company has a competitive advantage if its resources and capabilities are valuable, rare, non‐imitable, organized, and if these resources and capabilities address unmet customer needs in market segments large enough to cover organizational fixed costs.

The proposed extension of the RBV is based on current literature and two qualitative case studies. Future longitudinal studies should establish causal links between current resources and capabilities meeting the proposed criteria and future performance.

The model appears to be able to guide decisions about investment in resources and capabilities to further develop existing competitive advantages and to build new ones. The benefit of this model lies in its ability to identify, ex ante, those resources and capabilities leading to competitive advantage and superior firm profitability.

An improved ability to predict future firm performance based on more rigorous tests of current resources and capabilities improves the resource allocation process in firms and thus benefits society.

The benefit of this model lies in its ability to identify, ex ante, those resources and capabilities leading to competitive advantage and superior firm profitability.

Can (and should) strategy scholarship attempt to find general prescriptions for business strategy that are applicable to all firms across all business conditions? We suggest that a universal theory of business strategy is a chimera: attractive but completely illusory. Our argument is based on two fundamental insights namely, organizations do not automatically adopt all practices and activities that could benefit them (even if knowledge about those activities is in the public domain), and theories and empirical work can address portions of the strategy problem usefully without attempting or achieving a general theory of strategy. Based on this, we believe strategy scholarship can fruitfully build on a variety of mid-range theories to offer three things from a prescriptive standpoint: (1) understanding the structure and processes inherent in organizations and markets; (2) offering productive ways to frame and analyze problems; and (3) offering recommendations for stratagems that appear successful. More generally, organizations might find immense value in strategy scholarship that offers specific tools, prescriptions, and alternative ways of looking at a problem, and that raise performance, on average.

Research in strategic human resource management (SHRM) has evolved over the past 30 years to become more theory based and to exhibit greater empirical rigor. However, much has changed in the external environment that makes the existing theories, approaches, and methodologies inappropriate for addressing the questions that organizations face in managing their human resources today. In this chapter we discuss a number of environmental changes impacting organizations and identify tensions that researchers have faced in exploring how firms seek to manage their people as a source of competitive advantage. We argue that past research has focused on only one side of the tension at a time, thus limiting the usefulness of the answers that research provides. We advocate for research that simultaneously addresses both sides of the tensions in a way that can revolutionize research in SHRM.

Almost since the inception of the resource‐based view (RBV), critics have complained that the view is weak in the prescriptive dimension. A recent statement of this critique is by Priem and Butler, who argue that the RBV does not address value creation. One aspect of this is that the link between resources and value creation is black‐boxed. The paper aims to argue that a Porterian activity analysis with a focus on activity drivers can remedy this weakness, and how it brings into focus important implementation issues that are neglected in the RBV.

The study extends Priem and Butler's critique of the RBV by examining the RBV literature in light of Porter's activity‐based framework.

The resource‐based logic has been gainfully applied in many fields other than strategy. However, because it lacks the concept of activities, the paper argues that it has not reached its full potential in the field of strategy. Formally including the concept of activities and activity drivers addresses the prescriptive shortcomings of the RBV.

Porter's activity drivers are “levers” that managers can manipulate to improve firm value creation in two ways: The first method involves using activity drivers to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of individual activities. The second method involves improving the fit at the level of the firm's activity set. Managers may identify potentially rewarding competitive positions and then use competitive data regarding rivals' activities and drivers to gauge how successful their firm may be in capturing these positions.

This is one of the first attempts to address the prescriptive shortcomings of the RBV using a Porterian activity lens.

Man has been seeking an ideal existence for a very long time. In this existence, justice, love, and peace are no longer words, but actual experiences. How ever, with the American preemptive invasion and occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq and the subsequent prisoner abuse, such an existence seems to be farther and farther away from reality. The purpose of this work is to stop this dangerous trend by promoting justice, love, and peace through a change of the paradigm that is inconsistent with justice, love, and peace. The strong paradigm that created the strong nation like the U.S. and the strong man like George W. Bush have been the culprit, rather than the contributor, of the above three universal ideals. Thus, rather than justice, love, and peace, the strong paradigm resulted in in justice, hatred, and violence. In order to remove these three and related evils, what the world needs in the beginning of the third millenium is the weak paradigm. Through the acceptance of the latter paradigm, the golden mean or middle paradigm can be formulated, which is a synergy of the weak and the strong paradigm. In order to understand properly the meaning of these paradigms, however, some digression appears necessary.

The globalisation of the world economy has left governments less powerful and threatened cultures with homogenisation. The Huntington thesis – that the world is now divided into rival civilisations and that they are likely to be the source of the next round of world conflicts – may seem weak in the light of this. In fact many people fear that economic efficiency will produce a single culture and, because it will be dominated by hotly competing corporations with little restraint, will threaten civility itself. R.G. Collingwood even argued that economics as a practical science threatens civilisation by its very existence. This paper argues that, if one takes seriously Collingwood’s own distinction between wealth and riches, and if a co‐operative economy can be made to flourish, civilisation can readily survive. Wealth in these terms is a community resource which frees up human possibilities, riches are personal barricades and a source of power, and we can understand how to maximise wealth without creating unnecessary riches. In these terms the three main competing civilisations – that of the West, that of Islam, and the Chinese civilisation which is exemplified, for instance in Taiwan, may well survive and remain distinct. They represent basic human choices. For one can have societies in which the major focus is on individuals, societies in which it is on the community as a whole, and societies in which it is on families, social groups, churches and other institutions which comprise civil society.

A collection of essays by a social economist seeking to balance economics as a science of means with the values deemed necessary to man′s finding the good life and society enduring as a civilized instrumentality. Looks for authority to great men of the past and to today′s moral philosopher: man is an ethical animal. The 13 essays are: 1. Evolutionary Economics: The End of It All? which challenges the view that Darwinism destroyed belief in a universe of purpose and design; 2. Schmoller′s Political Economy: Its Psychic, Moral and Legal Foundations, which centres on the belief that time‐honoured ethical values prevail in an economy formed by ties of common sentiment, ideas, customs and laws; 3. Adam Smith by Gustav von Schmoller – Schmoller rejects Smith′s natural law and sees him as simply spreading the message of Calvinism; 4. Pierre‐Joseph Proudhon, Socialist – Karl Marx, Communist: A Comparison; 5. Marxism and the Instauration of Man, which raises the question for Marx: is the flowering of the new man in Communist society the ultimate end to the dialectical movement of history?; 6. Ethical Progress and Economic Growth in Western Civilization; 7. Ethical Principles in American Society: An Appraisal; 8. The Ugent Need for a Consensus on Moral Values, which focuses on the real dangers inherent in there being no consensus on moral values; 9. Human Resources and the Good Society – man is not to be treated as an economic resource; man′s moral and material wellbeing is the goal; 10. The Social Economist on the Modern Dilemma: Ethical Dwarfs and Nuclear Giants, which argues that it is imperative to distinguish good from evil and to act accordingly: existentialism, situation ethics and evolutionary ethics savour of nihilism; 11. Ethical Principles: The Economist′s Quandary, which is the difficulty of balancing the claims of disinterested science and of the urge to better the human condition; 12. The Role of Government in the Advancement of Cultural Values, which discusses censorship and the funding of art against the background of the US Helms Amendment; 13. Man at the Crossroads draws earlier themes together; the author makes the case for rejecting determinism and the “operant conditioning” of the Skinner school in favour of the moral progress of autonomous man through adherence to traditional ethical values.

Nobody concerned with political economy can neglect the history of economic doctrines. Structural changes in the economy and society influence economic thinking and, conversely, innovative thought structures and attitudes have almost always forced economic institutions and modes of behaviour to adjust. We learn from the history of economic doctrines how a particular theory emerged and whether, and in which environment, it could take root. We can see how a school evolves out of a common methodological perception and similar techniques of analysis, and how it has to establish itself. The interaction between unresolved problems on the one hand, and the search for better solutions or explanations on the other, leads to a change in paradigma and to the formation of new lines of reasoning. As long as the real world is subject to progress and change scientific search for explanation must out of necessity continue.

“Communism has never concealed the fact that it rejects all absolute concepts of morality. It scoffs at any consideration of “good” and “evil” as indisputable categories. Communism considers morality to be relative, to be a class matter… It has infected the whole world with the belief in the relativity of good and evil.” Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn, Warning to the West, 1975.