The purpose of this research is to establish a conceptual framework that contributes to explaining sustained competitive advantage, forming an analytical framework that brings the resource-based view and organizational analysis' neoinstitutional approaches closer together. A detailed epistemological articulation has been undertaken to advance the understanding of strategy and competitive advantage in organizations, aggregating contribution to the literature with the proposal of a theoretical model that steadily articulates elements from organizational institutionalism and the resource-based view. Hence, the major contribution is to associate the resource-based view and organizational analysis' neoinstitutional theory as a means to reformulate the notion of institutional isomorphism, and have a potential new explanation for organizational diversity and the existence of organizations that are more capable of generating (or maximize) value than others. In its formulation, the similarity among organizations in their fields provides the baseline for organizational performance. Thus, it is from this baseline level that organizations would then be able to differentiate themselves and generate sustainable competitive advantage through active and selective response to different institutional pressures.

The purpose of this paper is to identify complementarities between the approaches of population ecology and evolutionary economics in order to contribute to a synthesis of organizational evolutionary dynamics and its implications for a strategic management research model. Using the metatriangulation technique to construct theories, we attempt to entwine these two perspectives. The proposed model is structured in two dimensions: the environmental selective system and the corporate adaptation process. The environmental selective system gathers together the complementary factors presented by evolutionary economics and ecology: technological innovation, demographic processes, environmental dynamism, population density and other institutional processes, and interpopulation dynamics. As ecology does not encompass the corporate adaptation process (generation, selection, and propagation of variations), the proposed model adopts the theoretical grounds underpinning evolutionary economics. The model offers three main contributions for future research into strategic management. First, it allows the development of descriptive and normative studies of the relationship among the environmental selection factors and the different types of enterprise strategies. Second, the proposed conceptual framework may be very beneficial for studies of interorganizational learning. Third, the model has the advantage of responding to the criticism of strategy theories in terms of their inability to generalize.

No abstract

This article deals with the influence of transaction costs and organizational competences on the choice of governance structure for manufacturing stage in a productive system. The objective is to develop a conceptual model that explains the choice of supplier for manufacturing through transaction costs and organizational competences. Following earlier studies, the model proposes competences of the product´s owner influence the vertical scope in a relation moderated by transaction costs. The constructs in the model are: "governance structure", the dependent variable categorized as internal or external supplier, "transaction costs", measured by asset specificity of the product and bargain power of the firm in the manufacturing stage, and "competences on operations", measured by experience and diversification of the firm. The study presents some methodological implications for applying the model in Brazilian pharmaceutical industry, through searching for secondary data on drugs and firms in a public database of the federal regulatory agency.

A moderna biotecnologia caracteriza-se pela elevada dependência da pesquisa em ciências básicas, pela multidisciplinaridade e complexidade de sua base de conhecimento e pela elevada incerteza associada às suas descobertas. Como consequência, essa indústria fomentou uma rede de alianças reunindo organizações distintas, tais como universidades, institutos de pesquisa, fundos de investimento, agências governamentais e laboratórios farmacêuticos. Este trabalho analisou a influência da estrutura social formada por essa rede de alianças no crescimento econômico das empresas brasileiras da moderna biotecnologia, segmento de saúde humana, no período de 2004 a 2008. Os resultados sugerem que à medida que a empresa de biotecnologia acumula experiência em fazer e gerir alianças, ganhando capacidade relacional, desenvolve competências que influenciam positivamente o depósito de novas patentes e o seu crescimento em termos do número de funcionários.