Resources, Firms, and Strategies A Reader in the Resource-Based Perspective

Strategic management has been increasingly characterized by an emphasis on core competences. Firms are advised to divest unrelated businesses and return to core business. Moreover, competitive advantage is now increasingly seen as a matter of efficiently deploying scarce knowledge resources to product markets. Much of this change in emphasis has occurred because of the emergence of a unified and rigorous approach to strategy, often called the resource-based approach. This Reader brings together extracts from the seminal articles that created this dominant perspective in strategic management. It includes the pioneering work of Selznick, Penrose, and Chandler and more recent writing by Wernerfelt, Barney, Teece, and Prahalad and Hamel.

Edith Penrose: Foreword; Nicolai J. Foss: Resources and Strategy: A Brief Overview of Themes and Contributions; Philip Selznick: Leadership in Administration; Edith T. Penrose: The Theory of the Growth of the Firm; Alfred D. Chandler: Strategy and Structure; Kenneth Andrews: The Concept of Corporate Strategy; George B. Richardson: The Organisation of Industry; Harold Demsetz: Industry Structure, Market Rivalry, and Public Policy; Richard R. Nelson and Sidney G. Winter: An Evolutionary Theory of Economic Change; David J. Teece: Economies of Scope and the Scope of the Enterprise; Birger Wernerfelt: A Resource-based View of the Firm; Richard P. Rumelt: Towards a Strategic Theory of the Firm; Jay B. Barney: Strategic Factor Markets; Ingemar Dierickx and Karel Cool: Asset Stock Accumulation and the Sustainability of Competitive Advantage; Cynthia A. Montgomery and Birger Wernerfelt: Diversification, Ricardian Rents, and Tobins q; Margaret A. Peteraf: The Cornerstones of Competitive Advantage; Joseph T. Mahoney and J. Rajendran Pandian: The Resource-based View Within the Conversation of Strategic Management; C. K. Prahalad and Gary Hamel: The Core Competence of the Corporation; Richard R. Nelson: Why do Firms Differ; and How does it Matter?; David J. Teece, Gary Pisano, Amy Shuen: Dynamic Capabilities and Strategic Management; Richard N. Langlois: Transaction-cost Economics in Real Time; Bruce Kogut and Udo Zander: Knowledge of the Firm; Constantinos C. Markides and Peter J. Williamson: Related Diversification, Core Competences and Corporate Performance; Nicolai J. Foss: Resources and Strategy: Problems, Open Issues, and Ways Ahead