ABSTRACT
To understand competitive forces, Michael E. Porter's Competitive Strategy: Techniques for Analyzing Industries and Competitors offers a "middle-ground framework"—a model more generalized than a case study of one company or industry, yet more detailed than an economic model. Competitive Strategy stresses the idea of the strategic choice by a company. A company achieves this through positioning and through the profitability. The success of Porter's framework is limited by four factors. The first is that his analysis is focused on what might be called a "meso" level, but does not take account of either. A second limitation is that he does not inquire much into the nature of a company. A third limitation is that by seeking a middle ground between academic economics and business, Porter loses a certain precision in his concepts. Finally, Porter's models lend a scientific justification to situations of monopoly or oligopoly.
