• Examining Firms’ Strategies for Competitive Advantages through Resource-based View and Dynamic Capability View under Different Environments

Abstract

The fundamental question in the field of strategic management is how firms achieve and sustain competitive advantage. Rooted on Ricardian perspective, resource-based view advocates firms to accumulate heterogeneous resources for competitive advantages. Rooted on Schumpeterian perspective, dynamic-capability view suggests firms to redeploy unique resources and competences to quickly respond to environmental change for competitive advantages. While the resource based view and the dynamic capability approach are often portrayed as sister theories, they sometimes cited as a competing theory or as complementary theory with respect to the others. For application of strategic management, the important issues are to clarify the applied environment and the interaction of each other. Therefore, this article divides environment into technological innovation (competence-enhanced vs. competence-destroyed) and market changes (static market vs. dynamic market). Through conducting multiple case-studies, this article analyzes firms’ strategic behavior to obtain competitive advantage in different environmental contexts. This research finds that when entering the context of competence-enhancing innovation and static market, firm prefers to resource-based view for developing competitive advantages; when entering the context of changed technology or market, firm prefers to dynamic-capability view for developing competitive advantages. This research further induces two different types of dynamic-capability strategy and concludes that two strategic views complement each other.

Keywords: Corporate Social Responsibility, Operating Performance, Stakeholders