Christine Oliver

SUSTAINABLE COMPETITIVE ADVANTAGE: COMBINING INSTITUTIONAL AND RESOURCE- BASED VIEWS

This article suggests that the context and process of resource selection have an important influence on firm heterogeneity and sustainable competitive advantage. It is argued that a firm’s sustainable advantage depends on its ability to manage the institutional context of its resource decisions. A firm’s institutional context includes its internal culture as well as broader influences from the state, society, and interfirm relations that define socially acceptable economic behavior. A process model of firm heterogeneity is proposed that combines the insights of a resource-based view with the institutional perspective from organization theory. Normative rationality, institutional isolating mechanisms, and institutional sources of firm homogeneity are proposed as determinants of rent potential that complement and extend resource-based explanations of firm variation and sustainable competitive advantage. The article suggests that both resource capital and institutional capital are indispensable to sustainable competitive advantage.

The Antecedents of Deinstitutionalization

Deinstitutionalization refers here to the erosion or discontinuity of an institution alized organizational activity or practice. This paper identifies a set of organiza tional and environmental factors that are hypothesized to determine the likelihood that institutionalized organizational behaviours will be vulnerable to erosion or rejection over time. Contrary to the emphasis in institutional theory on the cultural persistence and endurance of institutionalized organizational behaviours, it is suggested that, under a variety of conditions, these behaviours will be highly susceptible to dissipation, rejection or replacement.

Organizations working together

Interorganizational Networks A New Institution A Typology of Cooperative Interorganizational Relationships and Networks What is Coordination? Environmental Determinants of Network Systems External Control and Technology Structural Properties Centrality, Size, Complexity, Differentiation, and Connectedness Conflict and Interorganizational Effectiveness The Failure of Evolution Theoretical Implications, Practical Recommendations, and Global Applications

The Dynamics of Strategic Change

The article reviews the book “The Dynamics of Strategic Change,” by C.R. Hinings and Royston Greenwood.

Toward An Institutional Ecology of Organizational Founding

In this study, we demonstrate how the ecological and institutional characteristics of organizational niches affect the likelihood of organizational foundings. We describe and measure key ecological...

Network Relations and Loss of Organizational Autonomy

A fundamental premise of resource dependence theory is that organizations tend to avoid interorganizational relations which com- promise their autonomy. This study examined the frequency with which organizations in a population established interorganizational relationships as a function of five different types of network relations that varied in the degree to which they required organizations to relinquish autonomy. The findings failed to support the assumption that organizational independence is a primary consideration in the decision to establish or forego interorganizational relations.

Building the Social Structure of a Market

Motivated by the question of how to develop viable new markets and value chains in the resource-constrained settings of least developed countries, we adopted multi-year qualitative methods to examine the intervention of a nongovernmental organization (NGO) in developing the dairy value chain in Bangladesh. Consistent with the theoretical premise that markets and value chains are social orders, we found that the NGO’s success relied on building the social structure of a market wherein market participants could negotiate relationships and norms of production and exchange and embed them in practices and technologies. To establish social structure among participants as a means of market building, the NGO acquired relevant knowledge, then used contextual bridging (transferring new meanings, practices and structures into a given context in a way that is sensitive to the norms, practices, knowledge and relationships that exist in that context), brokering relationships along the value chain (facilitating introductions and exchanges between value chain members) and funding experimentation (providing resources to test ideas and assumptions about new market practices). Market participants themselves also contributed to the development of the market’s social structure by means of social embedding (building relationships and negotiating norms of exchange and coordination), and material embedding (implementing technologies and practices and integrating market norms into technology). Increased productivity and equity and reduced costs of transactions resulted from the creation of a social structure that, in this case, preceded and enabled the economic structuring of a market rather than the other way around.

Enhanced Market Practices

Interest in market-based solutions to reduce poverty has grown substantially in the last decade. However, missing from the core of the management conversation has been an adequate understanding of the poor as producers. Drawing on an in-depth study of market-based poverty alleviation initiatives for smallholder farmers by a nongovernmental organization in a least developed economy, this article explains how a non-state organization can reduce poverty for poor producers and improve overall market functioning. It suggests that meaningful improvements in income can be explained by the enhancement of market practices that redistribute social control toward poor producers and reduce the constraining effects of market and governance failures.

Industry Identity in an Oligopolistic Market and Firms’ Responses to Institutional Pressures

This study sought to explain the puzzle of firm noncompliance under conditions of highly salient and coercive institutional pressures from stakeholders. Based on a qualitative study of the Canadian banking industry’s responses to institutional pressures from government, clients, and the media for higher-quality banking service to small and medium-size enterprises (SMEs), results revealed that oligopoly power could not account exclusively for firms’ dismissiveness of salient stakeholder expectations. We introduce the concept of industry identity to explain how market power interacted with industry identity to predict firms’ nonconformity to institutional pressures and their willingness to maintain identity–image misalignment. Our study contributes new insights into theories of institutional conformity, identity, and oligopoly behavior.

The Goals of Scholarship

This paper argues for the importance of discussion among management scholars about the goals of our scholarship and how it should be valued. Within the context of several identifiable pressures facing today’s management scholars, I recommend more overt debate about how we value our work and more ontological empathy towardd each other’s scholarship.