Peter H. Friesen

Momentum and Revolution in Organizational Adaptation

The change in 24 structural and strategy making variables over time is analyzed by a study of 26 companies. Organizations were found to resist reversals in the direction of change in strategy and s...

Porter's (1980) Generic Strategies and Performance: An Empirical Examination with American Data Part I: Testing Porter

Porters (1980) three generic strategies have received a great deal of attention recently in the literature on strategic management. In this, the first of two papers, we employ methods of taxonomy on the PIMS data base of consumer durable business units to determine whether Porters differentiation, cost leadership and focus types occur with any degree of regularity. Then, in a sequel paper to appear in O.S. we examine whether the types differ among each other and between types not displaying differentiation or cost leadership in their growth and ROI performance.

Structural Change and Performance: Quantum Versus Piecemeal-Incremental Approaches

The effectiveness of different approaches to changing organization structure is examined. Two dimensions of structural change are explored. The findings show a tendency for quantum change, that is,...

Successful and Unsuccessful Phases of the Corporate Life Cycle

An empirical study of successful and unsuccessful phases of the life cycle revealed two very significant differences. First, successive successful phases showed gradual and continual increases in the sophistication of their information processing and decision making methods. Unsuccessful phases showed no such continuous development. Second, successful phases revealed few differences in innovation-related variables, while unsuccessful phases demonstrated more significant differences, alternating between greater extremes of innovation and stagnation.

Porter's (1980) Generic Strategies and Performance: An Empirical Examination with American Data Part II: Performance Implications

In Part I of this paper, published in O.S. 7/1, we compared the strategic clusters that emerged from a taxonomy of consumer durable businesses to three strategies suggested by Porter (1980). We discovered clusters that pursued combinations of Porters differentiation and cost leadership strategies, and also those that did not. The purpose of this paper is to compare the performance of these groups of clusters, discuss the differences in strategic behaviour among them that may explain performance, and elicit some normative implications.

Annual Inequality and Lifetime Inequality

An estimator of inequality in lifetime incomes is derived. It can be computed for a population from the distribution of incomes in one year. As a result, the estimates are as easily calculated as measurements of annual inequality, but can be used as measurements of lifetime inequality. Estimates from this measure and two others have been computed for selected years since 1947. The results are compared by their implications for the level and trend of inequality in the United States.