This article continues to operationally define and test the resourcebased view of the firm in a study of the major U.S. film studios from 1936 to 1965. We found that property-based resources in the form of exclusive long-term contracts with stars and theaters helped financial performance in the stable, predictable environment of 1936-50. In contrast, knowledge-based resources in the form of production and coordinative talent and budgets boosted financial performance in the more uncertain (changing and unpredictable) post-television environment of 1951-65. The resource-based view of the firm provides a useful complement to Porter's (1980) well-known structural perspective of strategy. This view shifts the emphasis from the competitive environment of firms to the resources that firms have developed to compete in that environment. Unfortunately, although it has generated a great deal of conceptualizing (see reviews by Black and Boal [1994] and Peteraf [1993]), the resource-based view is just beginning to occasion systematic empirical study (Collis,

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The dilemmas experienced by managers in cultural industries are also to be found in a growing number of other industries where knowledge and creativity are key to sustaining competitive advantage. Firms that compete in cultural industries must deal with a combination of ambiguity and dynamism, both of which are intrinsic to goods that serve an aesthetic or expressive rather than a utilitarian purpose. Managers involved with the creation, production, marketing, and distribution of cultural goods must navigate tensions that arise from opposing imperatives that result from these industry characteristics. In this paper we outline five polarities that are shaping organizational practices in cultural industries. First, managers must reconcile expression of artistic values with the economics of mass entertainment. Second, they must seek novelty that differentiates their products without making them fundamentally different in nature from others in the same category. Third, they must analyse and address existing demand while at the same time using their imagination to extend and transform the market. Fourth, they must balance the advantages of vertically integrating diverse activities under one roof against the need to maintain creative vitality through flexible specialization. And finally, they must build creative systems to support and market cultural products but not allow the system to suppress individual inspiration, which is ultimately at the root of creating value in cultural industries.

Organizations that go through rare and unusual events, whether they are costly or beneficial, face the challenge of interpreting and learning from these experiences. Although research suggests that organizations respond to this challenge in a variety of ways, we lack a framework for comparing and analyzing how organizational learning is affected by rare events. This paper develops such a framework. We begin by first outlining two views of rare events. The first view defines rare events as probability estimates, usually calculated from the frequency of the event. The second view defines rare events as opportunities for unique sensemaking based on the enacted salience of specific features of the rare events. We next use these definitions to explore how rare events trigger learning, and then examine the kind of learning processes that are triggered by rare events. We conclude with a discussion of promising areas of research on learning from rare events.

Guided by notions from the literature on organizational learning, this paper investigates how product line experimentation and organizational performance change across the careers of top managers. Its subjects are the studio heads who ran all the major Hollywood film studios from 1936 to 1965. The study found first, that product line experimentation declines over the course of executive tenures; second, that there is an inverse U-shaped relationship between top executive tenure and an organization's financial performance; and third, that product line experimentation is more likely to benefit financial performance late in top executives' tenures. These findings are consistent with a three-stage 'executive life cycle'. During the early years of their tenures, top managers experiment intensively with their product lines to learn about their business; later on their accumulated knowledge allows them to reduce experimentation and increase performance; finally, in their last years, executives reduce experimentation still further, and performance declines.