ABSTRACT
This chapter returns to the purposive, rational model of corporate strategy and the firm introduced in Chapters 3 and 5. The purposive view of firms possesses an image of the strategy analyst as the architect of the firm (e.g. Kay 1993). The contemporary approach in strategy is based on the analytic revolution which focuses heavily inside the firm because the external context is presented as hyper-competition (D'Aveni 1994). This is the Resource Based Strategic Analysis (RBSA) approach, which is associated with three broad strands of theorising the firm from an organisational economics perspective:
resources-into-capabilities;
Penrosian learning;
organisational knowledge.
