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Part I of this chapter applies the principles of the philosophy of science and the derived scientific method to analyze the foundational concepts and core proposition of the Resource-Base View (RBV) as popularized by Barney (1986, 1991, 1997). This analysis identifies seven fundamental conceptual deficiencies and logic problems in Barney's conceptualization of “strategically valuable resources” and in Barney's VRIO framework for identifying strategically valuable resources that can be sources of sustained competitive advantage. Three problems – the Value Conundrum, the Tautology Problem in the Identification of Resources, and the Absence of a Chain of Causality – relate to the RBV's and VRIO's failure to provide an adequate conceptual basis for identifying strategically valuable resources. The Uniqueness Dilemma, the Cognitive Impossibility Dilemma, and an Asymmetry in Assumptions about Resource Factor Markets result in an inability of the VRIO framework to support identification of resources that can be sources of sustained competitive advantage. More fundamentally, the core proposition of the RBV – that resources that are strategically valuable, rare, inimitable, and organizationally embedded are sources of sustainable competitive advantage – is argued to result directly in the Epistemological Impossibility Problem that precludes use of the scientific method in RBV research. This chapter argues that until these conceptual deficiencies and logic problems are recognized and remedied, the RBV – in spite of its current popularity – is and will remain theoretically sterile and incapable of contributing in any systematic way to the development of strategy theory.

Part II of this chapter then suggests how foundational concepts developed within the competence perspective on strategy provide essential remedies for the identified deficiencies and problems in the RBV – and thereby provide a more conceptually adequate basis for representing the nature of firms in the scientific study of their interactions and competitive outcomes.

This chapter focuses on the empirical research on the resource-based view of the firm (RBV), and its main purpose is to analyse the use of mixed methods in this perspective. The recent advance of the RBV has posed new challenges, and the issue need not be quantitative versus qualitative methods, but rather how to combine the strengths of each in a mixed methods approach. This study carries out a literature review about the use of mixed methods in the RBV and provides an examination of opportunities and challenges associated with the application of mixed methods in order to improve RBV research. Moreover, the chapter seeks to introduce mixed methods research in order to familiarize to strategic management and the RBV scholars about this type of research and its terminology, procedures, designs and purposes.

The paper tries to investigate the impact of applications of the resource-based view (RBV) theory in the management field to improve the firm’s profitability. Global firms are innovating and adopting new technology, paving the way to improve their performance.

We have adopted RBV in management practices such as marketing, strategy, finance, and human resources.

RBV has gained researchers' attention with the growing competitive world and new challenges to retaining customers and achieving their pre-defined targets. We attempt to identify the issues related to the usage of RBV in management.

Using RBV in management may help researchers create a competitive mindset and be prepared for uncertain challenges in the business world.

It has been a tremendous challenge for organisations to navigate and survive the COVID-19 pandemic. This paper proposes a novel multi-level conceptual model, based on the resource-based view (RBV), to address the pandemic crisis and highlight the importance of strategic human resource management (SHRM) in promoting employee motivation and organisational resilience. The paper aims to provide insights and practical guidance for organisations to leverage their internal resources and capabilities to thrive in the post-pandemic landscape.

This paper conducted a comprehensive literature review of the existing research on the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, SHRM, RBV, job satisfaction, turnover intentions and organisational resilience, covering the main contributors to this research stream and their findings.

The conceptual model presented in this paper offers five testable propositions to examine the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on employee motivation and organisational resilience and how organisations can navigate challenging times through SHRM, which enables RBV. It highlights the foundational role of RBV and identifies the resources employed by SHRM as intervening constructs that significantly enhance employee outcomes, including motivation, job satisfaction, turnover intention and organisational resilience.

The proposed model counsels that organisations need to look beyond the straightforward application of SHRM and should enable the RBV climate to protect and uphold employee motivation and organisational resilience. Finally, measurement and analysis implications are presented for future research opportunities and managerial interventions to mitigate the impact of difficult times such as the COVID-19 pandemic.

Currently, there is a lack of research regarding the conceptualisation of the COVID-19 pandemic and its impact on employee and organisational resilience. Therefore, the proposed model discusses the significance of the alignment of SHRM and RBV as a moderator of the relationships between the impact of COVID-19 pandemic, employee motivation and organisational resilience.

This paper reviews the past 20 years of empirical research, based on the resource-based view (RBV) of the firm, in hospitality and tourism literature. There has been a significant increase in empirical RBV-grounded management research throughout the 2000s. However, to date, there has been no systematic assessment of the RBV in both qualitative and quantitative empirical hospitality and tourism literature. The purpose of the present paper, therefore, is to review and analyse the approaches employed in empirical hospitality and tourism research founded on the RBV, provide an overview and suggest how to further advance the RBV as a framework for future research.

The present study systematically reviews empirical RBV-based hospitality and tourism studies, published between 2000 and 2019. Through a well-defined and replicable inclusion/exclusion criterion, a sample of 122 studies was identified and reviewed.

It was found that while the RBV has received support in both quantitative and qualitative studies, the way in which researchers have utilised it in quantitative and qualitative research varies considerably in terms of the types of resource examined, the measurement variables used and the terminology/theoretical sub-stream employed. To increase the effectiveness of the RBV as a theoretical foundation in future research, its application needs to become more consistent across different studies, allowing for the development of a unified theory. Several shortcomings of the extant literature are identified, including the practical utility of the RBV; the tautology inherent in RBV-based research; the limited amount of qualitative research and the limited focus on industry contexts other than hotels, not to mention the current abundance of research with a Western perspective. These shortcomings lead to the suggestions for future research.

The implications raised in the present study are, firstly, the current body of hospitality and tourism literature founded on the RBV is lacking in certain areas, which highlights the need for further research. Secondly, the confusion arising from its tautologies have negatively impacted the usefulness of the RBV for researchers and practitioners alike. Finally, focusing on lower than firm-level competitive advantage will allow researchers to provide more meaningful recommendation to practitioners.

This is the first systematic review of both qualitative and quantitative hospitality and tourism research founded on the RBV. It provides an overview of this theory, with the aim of highlighting what has already been explored while aiding the further development of the theory in hospitality and tourism research.

The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate why greater attention to performance measurement is so essential to assessing the meaningfulness and usefulness of the knowledge gained from empirical tests of the resource-based view (RBV).

This paper reviews the RBV empirical literature and relies on illustrative examples from various industries in order to assess the degree to which the empirical operationalization of the dependent variable in RBV research adheres to its theoretical specification.

This analysis shows that although RBV theorists routinely conceptualize the dependent variable in terms of a firm's performance in direct comparison to the performance of its competitors, or relative performance, the overwhelming majority of empirical studies conducted in the field operationalize the dependent variable in terms of a firm's performance in isolation, or absolute performance.

Because significant findings are only meaningful if they are grounded in valid data, the findings suggest that support for the RBV and subsequent practical advice about resource-based strategy appears tenuous. Therefore, this paper highlights several possible reasons for the tendency to equate absolute and relative performance, discusses the implications of this disconnect on the RBV's usefulness and scientific rigor, and suggests how both theorists and empiricists might advance theory and method to produce more meaningful knowledge about the RBV.

By providing a critical view of the RBV, this paper offers new insights into what the authors know, what the authors do not know, and how the authors can improve what is known about this important and well-accepted theory.

The purpose of this paper is to discuss the process of entrepreneurial growth from the perspective of the resource-based view (RBV) of the firm and transaction cost theory (TCT) and to formulate propositions regarding the entrepreneurs’ decisional rules and structural elements in this process.

The argumentation draws upon three fields of academic research, namely, entrepreneurship studies on firm growth as well as strategic management and organization science studies on company scope and size (boundary). A systematic review of the literature was performed that combines the RBV and TCT to explain a firm’s boundary.

Three levels of entrepreneurial decisional rules in the process of growth were identified. The first level includes main decisional criteria. The second level approaches the structural elements of growth process, namely, its motives, rationale, mechanism and modes. The third level assumes evolutionary approach to decision making, namely, feedback relationships among transaction costs, governance and capabilities to create value from growth.

The paper broadens the early stream of research in the process of entrepreneurial growth. It contributes to explaining the way growth is realized, instead of identifying its predictors, which has dominated in to-date studies. The entrepreneurs’ decisional rules and choices in the process of expansion were suggested. Moreover, the integrated RBV-TCT approach was proposed as a theoretical background for studying this phenomenon.

The purpose of this paper is to integrate the resource-based view (RBV) with organisational learning theory by investigating the role of the RBV mechanism in the preceding performance-current performance linkage. The authors further examine the role of the decision-making approach on the RBV-prior-current performance paradigm. Using China as the research setting, they empirically test the theoretical model based on 229 firms selected from a nation-wide survey.

This study has used China as the research setting. The authors empirically test the theoretical model based on 229 firms selected from a nation-wide survey.

This study reveals that prior export performance is a key determinant of current export performance, and this effect is enhanced by product certification (an internal RBV mechanism) and the intention to make an initial public offering (and external RBV mechanism). Moreover, the internal RBV-prior-current performance paradigm is positively moderated by the delegated decision-making approach, while the external RBV-prior-current performance paradigm is negatively moderated by this decision-making approach.

The results related to RBV and prior organisational learning also extends the extant literature and offer implications in two important ways. One, this research advances existing research that has only considered the direct effect of organisational learning on current performance (Lages et al., 2008). In addition to its direct effect, this study suggests that the interplay of organisational learning and resource commitment also provides important determinants of export performance. These new results imply that future research should not only explore the effect of organisational learning theory but also that of firm resource in the research on the prior-current performance dyad (Lages et al., 2008). Two, this study also advances the theoretical development of the export venture resource and management commitment research by revealing two new factors (Cavusgil and Zou, 1994). As a result, when conducting exporting activity from an emerging economy, exporting firms should consider committing their resources on acquiring international certification and seeking external funding. These new findings provide new guidance on the choice of the type of resource commitments and their roles in the prior-current performance conceptualisation when operating in the emerging markets.

The results also contribute to the conceptualisation of the decision-making literature in the context of emerging economies (Garnier, 1982; Kao, 1993; Redding, 1993; Solberg, 2000), where an owner decision-making approach is associated with a number of negative effects (Kao, 1993; Redding, 1993). This study suggests that an owner decision-making approach can actually help firms to implement the effect of external RBV’s influence in the prior-current performance framework. As a result, the findings imply that researchers and managers of EMEFs should now consider including the effect of decision-making governance when exploring the interactive effect of RBV and organisational learning in export performance research (Lages et al., 2008).

This three-way interaction results have implications for the development of organisational learning theory, the RBV, decision-making, export performance and emerging market literature.

Academic dialogue related to ‘organizational performance’ in strategic management has primarily centred around the industrial organization theory (IO) and resource-based view (RBV). Both perspectives, though conceptually dialectic, have served as primary competing theories governing research studies in the domain of strategic management. However, the confluence of these theoretical perspectives has not been adequately explored to advance a shared view of competitive advantage. This study aims to explore the likelihood of embedded commonalities between RBV and IO.

A bibliometric analysis was conducted to visualize the intellectual map of studies and knowledge development encompassing these theories. This was followed by a comprehensive literature review to understand how the business environment (BE) and organizational capabilities have contributed towards attaining competitive advantage.

This study established that connecting the intellectual boundaries of these theoretical perspectives would facilitate better comprehension of the processes and outcomes in organizations. Integrating the knowledge emerging out of this methodological blend, a convergence framework connecting the intellectual boundaries of both theories was presented.

The framework that emerged from this study would help in better understanding of organizational behaviour from a dual theoretical lens. It would also motivate future studies to consider RBV and IO as complementary theories rather than the current narrative of competing theories.

This study added to the efforts to achieve equilibrium between the BE and internal capabilities of organizations so as to maximize positive social externalities.

This study contributed to the limited attempts to leverage shared knowledge from a dual perspective using a comprehensive literature review in sequential combination with bibliometric analysis.

The resource-based view (RBV) has not previously been conceptualized as a theoretical framework encompassing metaphysical and empirical perspectives. The purpose of this paper is to logically analyze the evolutionary process of the RBV, triggered by “rigidity.” It attempts to clarify the significance and limitations of the RBV.

Based on Popper’s methodological model of the growth of knowledge, the study analyzed and evaluated the evolution of the RBV.

The RBV has evolved in three phases. The sub-problems have changed through empirical testing on the basis of one metaphysical problem and one metaphysical theory. Thus, the evolution may indicate progress within one framework. However, during phase 3, the ambiguity of concept may inhibit the growth of knowledge. For further progress, it is necessary to overcome the vulnerability of the RBV’s metaphysical statements.

This paper shows the possibility of the growth of knowledge within the RBV framework and for a new framework to emerge due to its limitations. It should contribute both theoretically and practically to the field of strategic management.

Popper’s model was used to examine a previously neglected topic, namely, the growth of knowledge in the evolution of the RBV. Moreover, considering “rigidity” as corresponding to a process of error elimination is a novel approach, clearly revealing the dynamism of the RBV’s evolution.