ORGANIZATIONAL CAPABILITY AND COMPETITIVE ADVANTAGE

by William Lazonick (Editor)

In an age of intense international competition, enterprises, regions and nations depend on their organizational capabilities to gain competitive advantage in global markets. This volume brings together critical scholarly contributions to historical and contemporary debates over the origins and characteristics of organizational capabilities that result in competitive advantage. Included are case studies drawn from textiles, chemicals, automobiles, computers and agriculture that illustrate how organizational capabilities generate sustained competitive success. In a new introduction, the editors, who have themselves been in the forefront of analysing the dynamics of innovation and industrial development, provide a state-of-the-art survey of the subject.

672 pages, Hardcover

First published May 1, 1995

About the author

William Lazonick is a Canadian economist who studies innovation and competition in the global economy. His research seeks to understand how, on the basis of innovative enterprise, a national economy can achieve stable and equitable economic growth. Lazonick is the originator of "the theory of innovative enterprise", which, he argues, provides both an essential intellectual foundation for understanding economic performance and a fundamental critique of the neoclassical theory of the market economy. Much of his current work focuses on how the financialization of the U.S. industrial corporation, manifested in massive distributions of corporate cash to shareholders and the explosion of stock-based executive pay, results in employment instability and income inequity, while undermining the innovative capability of the U.S. economy. He also conducts cross-national comparative research on the social conditions that enable or proscribe innovative enterprise, focusing in particular on the economies of Britain, Japan, and China as well as the United States.