PurposeThe paper aims to explain why the customer value construct is important to resource‐based view (RBV) scholars and how one might define it to study it.Design/methodology/approachBy a summary of the ideas behind the RBV and previously applied definitions of customer value, the paper explains why Woodruff's multidimensional definition of customer value is suited to studying customer value from a managerial perspective. To this end, it develops a framework and derives three research questions for studying how managers use the firm's resources to create customer value.FindingsIt was found that to understand how managers invest in dynamic capabilities to create customer value one must identify how a firm's managers develop a shared understanding of their customers' values and the firm's capacity to deliver on them. This shared understanding will need to reflect customers' multidimensional values and what is most important to the firm.Practical implicationsThese phenomena are best studied qualitatively because the focus is on understanding how managers work together and use the resources at their disposal to create customer value. The performance effects of different resource investment decisions can be examined by including high and low performing firms in the study dataset.Originality/valueThe paper describes a framework that can explain how managers map customer value and its different dimensions against the resources at the firm which they believe can deliver an optimal product and service mix to the firm's customers.

The aim of this special issue is to better understand the strategy and change interface, in particular, the (sub)processes and cognitions that enable strategies to be successfully implemented and organizations effectively changed. The ten papers selected for this special issue reflect a range of scholarly traditions and, thus, as our review and integration of the relevant literatures, and our introductions to the ten papers demonstrate, they shed light on the strategy and change interface in starkly different ways. Collectively, the papers give us more insight into the recursive activities, and structural, organizational learning and cognitive mechanisms that are encouraged or deliberately established at organizations to allow their people to successfully implement a strategy and effect change, including achieve greater levels of horizontal alignment. Moreover, they demonstrate the benefits associated with establishing platforms and/or routines designed to overcome decision-makers’ cognitive shortcomings while implementing a strategy or making timely adjustments to it. We conclude our editorial by identifying some yet unanswered questions.

Surprisingly, the strategic management literature has had little to say of an explicit nature on the topic of capitalism. However, the discourse on capitalism is vast in economics and many would say the writings of some economists on the topic of capitalism have been inordinately influential. Bearing this in mind, the differences between three world renowned economists on the topic of capitalism are examined with the intention of identifying where scope exists for strategic management to contribute to the discourse on capitalism. The paper concludes that strategic management is well placed to develop its own organization-centric discourse on the subject.

This article argues that resource-based logic can be extended by conceptualizing the firm in resource-investment terms. It establishes that investing in resources is essentially a bilateral process involving managers and the owners of capital and that all resource-investments are necessarily made within an institutional superstructure. As a result, the capital invested into the firm is necessarily highly structured. These ideas are developed in this article from a payments perspective because this perspective allows scholars to explore the ex ante investment decisions that allow firms to grow, and to focus on firms' resource payments, which can be considered a proxy for firms' ex post resource-investments. The article concludes with a discussion of the implications of these ideas, including the implications for performance, theory of the firm, and endogenous growth research.

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