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Wonders whether companies actually have employees best interests at heart across physical, mental and spiritual spheres. Posits that most organizations ignore their workforce – not even, in many cases, describing workers as assets! Describes many studies to back up this claim in theis work based on the 2002 Employment Research Unit Annual Conference, in Cardiff, Wales.

The purpose of this study is to critically evaluate the canonical contribution of the classical theories of multinational enterprises (MNE) and complement them with congruous multi-theoretical lenses to a propose a meta-theoretical view for competitive advantage. The proposed framework is applied to fundamental questions of MNE, and exploratory insights are revealed.

This study sought to review the literature on various paradigms such as resource-based view, knowledge-based view, attention-based view, relational view, dynamic capability view and institution-based view to propose a meta-theoretical approach explicating the phenomenon of competitiveness.

This study proffers that the key to global competitiveness lies in building micro-foundational, multidimensional and multilevel multinational orchestration capabilities. The requisite orchestration capabilities are capabilities par excellence that explain: how organizational capabilities originate through the cognition of individual employees at the micro level; how individual-level abilities are amplified when they are harnessed through relational capabilities to form knowledge capabilities at the meso-level; and how the confluence of knowledge capabilities and higher order dynamic capabilities gives rise to heterogeneous firm-level knowledge-based dynamic capabilities that can be combined with institution capabilities to aggrandize the prediction of competitive advantage for MNEs.

The successful development of MNE competitiveness as a field of academic inquiry, brought about by an increasing amount of theoretical specialization, has come at the price of significant fragmentation of the overall scientific quest. The abovementioned paradigms and their underlying constructs have primarily been conceptualized in silos. The classical theories of MNE have been used a starting point to which complementary multidisciplinary views have been scaffolded to gain a more nuanced understanding of global competitiveness.

Aim of the present monograph is the economic analysis of the role of MNEs regarding globalisation and digital economy and in parallel there is a reference and examination of some legal aspects concerning MNEs, cyberspace and e‐commerce as the means of expression of the digital economy. The whole effort of the author is focused on the examination of various aspects of MNEs and their impact upon globalisation and vice versa and how and if we are moving towards a global digital economy.

The resource‐based view of the firm (RBV) is an important, emerging theory of firm heterogeneity. It is well grounded in industrial economics and has benefited in its development from a multiplicity of contributions by management writers. But like any developing body of knowledge, it is not short of confusion, ambiguity and conceptual and empirical difficulties. This paper provides an integrated review of the resource‐based view of the firm in an effort to eliminate much of the ambiguity caused by weak taxonomies and the inconsistent and conflicting use of terminology. It provides a detailed insight into the logic of the RBV and illuminates its contributions to the debate on the nature of competitive advantage. The paper then evaluates the status of some ongoing debates that are germane to our understanding of competitive advantage and outlines prospective directions for the development of the resource‐based view.

The aim of the paper is to demonstrate how business process‐based approach (PROPHESY) facilitates integration of resource‐based and market‐based approaches to strategy management. The paper begins by presenting resource‐based and market‐based strategy management approaches generally. It extends earlier research by examining the linkages between markets and resources as practised by three case study companies representing a cross‐section of the manufacturing industry. It continues with a discussion on the reasons behind the choice of the criteria used for cross case analysis. Although the results are exploratory, they provide a comparative analysis of how market‐based strategies could relate and integrate with resource‐based strategies through business processes.

Porter's activity‐based view of the firm is a comprehensive strategic framework which analyzes firm‐level competitive advantage. Although Porter's activity‐based view is widely cited by academics, taught to students, and applied by practitioners, little is known about its intellectual roots. Given that a framework's intellectual antecedents not only determine its current content, but also its future development, this paper aims to examine the intellectual roots of Porter's activity‐based view and the value chain.

The paper examines Porter's writings in an effort to document his influences while developing the activity‐based view and value chain. Porter's and other scholars' explanations are found to be lacking, so the paper ventures further down paths first suggested by Porter and others.

Whereas Porter's five forces framework built on the existing industrial organization paradigm, the activity‐based view is not derived from any existing paradigms. While consultants of the 1970s impacted Porter's development of the value chain and the activity‐based view, its deeper roots lay in operations research, particularly activity analysis; and the work of Arch Shaw, who was the first to teach a business policy course at Harvard Business School. Porter's contribution is to bring the diverse threads together into a coherent whole which managers can apply to analyze and improve their competitive positions.

Following Porter, the authors argue that activities are a key link between resource holdings and strategic positions. Therefore, it is only when the activity‐based and resource‐based views are integrated that they provide a comprehensive explanation of firm value creation.

The paper is the first to critically examine the intellectual antecedents of the activity‐based view.

The purpose of this article is to identify and discuss the practical implications of the resource based view of the firm.

Review of relevant literature.

A number of recommendations are put forward and the practical implications constitute the main findings of this study.

The implications can be summarized by these recommendations: diversify based on capabilities and not on the markets you are currently serving, focus on creating value together with your customers based on your resources instead of offering a set of products, integrate HRM practices with strategic management processes. The complexity of imitating resources is also discussed.

Few publications have set out to develop implications of the resource‐based view from a CEO's point of view. This paper provides an easy‐to‐access review and summary of some of the main implications of the resource‐based view.

Argues that operations strategy research should integrate recent theories from the resource‐based view of strategic management. Going beyond the model of Hayes and Wheelwright, this would call for the end of the market‐based view, where operations strategy merely follows the directions set by the marketing function. It would emphasize the dynamic development and leveraging of competencies and capabilities in order to set new business diversification strategies. A new paradigm of operations strategy could emerge, where “management fundamentals” such as learning and culture would be actively integrated within operations, in order to become key sources of competitive advantage. Accordingly, the operations function could progressively: take the leadership of strategy formulation; create “portfolios” of optional capabilities for strategies of organizational agility; and implement world‐class practices more effectively through evolutionary strategic frameworks.

The purpose of this study is to explore growth models based on “industry-based capabilities”, “resources-based capabilities” and “institution-based capabilities” in the context of the determinants of micro, small and medium enterprises’ (MSMEs) actors’ intention to grow.

This study involved 188 owners/managers of MSMEs. The analysis was conducted using partial least squares structural equation modelling. Moreover, the importance-performance map analysis package is used to complement the study findings.

This study uses the framework of the resource-based view (entrepreneurial knowledge), industrial-based view (industrial linkage) and institutional-based view (government support and access to finance) as proxies of the tripod-based view framework. The findings show that entrepreneurial knowledge (skills, competencies and functional), government support, access to finance and industrial linkage (vertical and horizontal) significantly encourage MSMEs’ owner/manager growth intention.

Firstly, this study suggests that MSMEs actors focus on developing entrepreneurial knowledge to boost the skills, competencies and functionalities needed to improve their business capabilities, directly affecting their growth intention. Secondly, this study indicates that the growth intention of MSME players, besides increasing internal capacity, must also be supported by the external environment, such as financial institutions, government and industrial linkage.

This study offers a tripod-based view as a framework for MSMEs’ actors’ intention to grow, where the constructs in the model used so far have not been explored comprehensively in the context of MSMEs. So, the built model brings more relevant factors to explain this topic from various perspectives.

Based on the strategy tripod perspective, this study aims to address how emerging economy multinational enterprises (EMNEs) make a strategic decision of choosing a foreign location for their strategic asset seeking and under what mechanism EMNEs make foreign direct investment (FDI) location choice.

This paper first reviews the literature on strategy tripod and strategic asset seeking strategy of EMNEs. Then, six cases of Chinese multinational enterprises operating in manufacturing industry have been introduced, emphasizing on interactions within three dimensions of strategy tripod framework, namely, resource-based dimension, industry-based dimension and institution-based dimension. By triangulating with multiple sources of archival and interview data, this paper identified a conceptual model presenting location choice mechanisms.

Based on a comparative multi-case study, four mechanisms of EMNEs’ location choice when seek strategic asset by FDI within a strategy tripod framework have been revealed. Specifically, EMNEs make their strategic decision of choosing a foreign location for their strategic asset seeking under mechanisms of seeking complementary resources based on industry characteristics; echoing with institutional dimension of home country when exploitation of resource; matching institutional dimension of host country when consider industry fitness; and institutional leveraging combined with understanding of resource and industry dimensions inside strategy tripod.

The findings shed novel insights into the mechanisms under which EMNEs choose their location for strategic asset-seeking FDI. It also broadens the strategy tripod framework by looking deeper into the characteristics of each dimension within a new research context of EMNEs’ FDI location choice.