The following essay has three parts. The first is a story about fluctuations in the balance of the relationship between impersonal and personal principles of social organization. This draws heavily on Max Weber’s interpretation of western history. The second part reviews the concept of an...

Managers would like to understand which strategies generate value in e-commerce environments, and researchers are just beginning to explore this issue. Which strategies are useful and which are not? In a step towards answering this question, we estimate the impacts of several competitive...

This research builds on the complementary corporate social responsibility (CSR) literatures in strategy and marketing to provide insight into the efficacy of CSR as a challenger's competitive weapon against a market leader. Through an investigation of a real world CSR initiative, we show that...

The case describes the dramatic journey of a movie theater "Konark Cinema" from an oligopolistic to monopolistic competition, with an enormous opportunity to skim the market today. The primary concern for the owner and management is to revive the business in order to recover the huge losses, and...

This investigation into small-to-medium sized wine businesses empirically tests linkages among differentiation strategies and financial performance over time. Using a two-by-two model, we examine the impact of differentiation strategies on profitability and growth. Financial and operational data...

Hidden Champions (HCs) are firms unknown to the wider public, but global leaders in the niche markets they serve. This paper looks at distinctive features of these firms, focusing on their dynamic capabilities. Employing a unique data base on German firms, we identify a representative sample of...

The study is aimed at investigating how entrepreneurial managers in Nigeria can better identify and distinguish the cause-and-effect relationship amongst the components of competitive strategies. The components of competitive strategies among entrepreneurial ventures were classified into three...

Competitive advantage is a relative feature, evaluated in respect of other competing enterprises. The gaining of sustainable competitive advantage is conditioned by knowledge of own performance and the results of the competitive environment. SMEs have limited opportunities to obtain such...

Purpose: To ascertain the relationship between the operation system function goal decision making and customer demand and competition strategy, can better discover and integrate all available resources (including important capital resources) to achieve business opportunities, the establishment...

Which strategies generate value in e-commerce environments? In a step towards answering this question, this paper estimates the impacts of several competitive strategies on the values of the well-known Internet retailer Amazon.com and three of its early competitors, BarnesandNoble.com, CDNOW,...