Resource Based View

Seite 1

2.1. The RBV: conceptualization of e-business capabilities

The RBV has been used to answer one of the most

extensively researched questions in the management

strategy field, related to understanding the sources of

sustained competitive advantages (Porter & Millar, 1985;

Rumelt, Schendel, & Teece, 1991). At the same time, the

RBV has become one of the standard theories to explain

why firms in the same industry vary in performance over

time (Hoopes, Madsen, & Walker, 2003). This suggests

that the effects of individual, firm-specific resources on

performance can be significant (Mahoney & Pandian,

1992). In this regard, the RBV is based on two underlying

assertions: resource heterogeneity and resource immobility.

Resources and capabilities possessed by competing firms

are heterogeneously distributed and may be a source of

competitive advantage when they are valuable, rare,

difficult to imitate, and not substitutable by other resources

(Barney, 1991; Schulze, 1992; Wernerfelt, 1984). At the

same time, resources and capabilities are a source of

sustained competitive advantage, that is, differences may

be long lasting (resource immobility) when protected by

barriers to imitation (Mahoney & Pandian, 1992) or

isolating mechanisms (Rumelt, 1984) such as time-compression diseconomies, historical uniqueness, embeddedness, and causal ambiguity (Barney, 1991; Dierickx &

Cool, 1989; Peteraf, 1993).

The RBV generally tends to define resources broadly and

include assets, infrastructure, skills, and so on. While

resources serve as the basic units of analysis, firms

create competitive advantage by assembling resources

that work together to create organizational capabilities.

Grant (1991) suggests that the capabilities of a firm

are what it can do as a result of teams of resources

working together. Teece, Pisano, and Shuen (1997)

argued that capabilities cannot easily be bought; they

must be built. Thus, building capabilities is not only

a matter of combining resources; capabilities are rooted

in processes and business routines. Also, capabilities

involve complex patterns of coordination between

people and between people and other resources

(Grant, 1991), and between an organization and other

organizations. In this respect, Day (1994) describes

capabilities as complex bundles of skills and accumulated

knowledge, exercised through organizational processes,

which enable firms to coordinate activities and make use of

their assets. Day argues that capabilities and organizational processes are closely entwined, because capabilities

enable the activities in a business process to be carried

out. More recently, Makadok (2001) considers capability

as a special type of resource. More specifically, he defines

capability as an organizationally embedded non-transferable firm-specific resource whose purpose is to improve

the productivity of the other resources possessed by the

firm.

For the purposes of the present study, the above

definitions of capability permit the identification of three

important characteristics:

(a) Capabilities are rooted in processes and business

routines, because it is capability that enables the

activities in a business process to be carried out.

(b) Capabilities are firm-specific, while an ordinary resource is not. Because of this embeddedness, ownership

of a capability cannot easily be transferred from one

organization to another.

ARTICLE IN PRESS

50 P. Soto-Acosta, A.L. Meron ˜o-Cerdan / International Journal of Information Management 28 (2008) 49–60

(c) The primary purpose of a capability is to enhance the

productivity of the other resources that the firm

possesses.

Extending the traditional notion of organizational

capabilities to e-business, a firm’s e-business capability is

defined here as its ability to mobilize and deploy Internetbased resources, in combination with or in the presence of

other valued resources. e-Business capabilities are firmspecific (or interfirm-specific) and rooted in processes and

business routines. In the present study, a distinction will be

drawn between external and internal e-business capabilities. The former refers to the ability to mobilize Internetbased resources and other corporate resources with

external business agents (e.g. supplier and customers),

while the latter represents the ability to mobilize Internetbased resources and other corporate resources within a

firm’s boundaries.

esto lo saque de P. Soto-Acosta, A.L. Meron

Analyzing e-business value creation

Seite 2

A rich theory that

elaborates on antecedents, consequences and various facets of

business model innovation needs to be developed and linked to

extant theoretical frameworks such as value chain (Porter 1998),

configurational theories (e.g. Meyer et al. 1993), or the resource

based view (Barney 2001). In particular, more theoretical work

is needed to specify different modalities of interdependencies

among the elements of retail format, activities, and governance,

as well as develop empirical models for measuring such interdependencies and their effects on customer experience and retail

performance.

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