ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the critiques of Michael E. Porter's Competitive Strategy: Techniques for Analyzing Industries and Competitors. The first criticism is that Porter's model is static and a poor fit for describing a modern, rapidly changing industry. The next criticism is that the intellectual beliefs underlying five forces might be incorrect. One of these assumptions is that buyers, competitors, and suppliers are unrelated, and do not coordinate their approaches, or interact. The next criticism is that Porter is selective either with his examples or with his use of academic literature. Scholars have generally agreed that Porter's text is a masterful synthesis of practical lessons from research in industrial companies over the preceding 20 years. Economists have mostly treated Competitive Strategy as a useful source of theories and hypotheses that later, more academic, projects could test. Business and management scholars have taken it as a starting point, with other authors suggesting ways to extend it or make changes to it.
