The world's most valuable public companies today are built on digital platforms. While American digital platforms (ADPs) have successfully dominated many international markets, some Chinese digital ...platforms (CDPs) have managed to survive and thrive in China, with European digital platforms (EDPs) largely absent both at home and abroad. Using comprehensive longitudinal data over 6 years, this study examines the platform competition between ADPs and CDPs in China, and explores how digital platforms challenge traditional ways of thinking about strategy and international competition. Some ADPs initially dominated the Chinese market, but some CDPs used their institutional advantages in China to offset the competitive advantages of ADPs based on superior resources and capabilities and strong market positions. Their competition evolved over three distinctive episodes so far, and CDPs used successive temporary advantages to achieve sustainable competitive advantages dynamically and accomplished radical changes cumulatively through incremental changes. A new dynamic equilibrium model of platform competition – ‘the spiral model’ – between global and native digital platforms is developed, which highlights a trajectory that is different from the dominant models of change in the literature. Limitations of the study and new areas for future research are highlighted.
There is considerable debate about whether bilingual children have an advantage in executive functioning relative to monolingual children. In the current meta-analysis, we addressed this debate by ...comprehensively reviewing the available evidence. We synthesized data from published studies and unpublished data sets, which equated to 1,194 effect sizes from 10,937 bilingual and 12,477 monolingual participants between the ages of 3 and 17 years. Bilingual language status had a small overall effect on children’s executive functioning (g = .08, 95% confidence interval = .01, .14). However, the effect of language status on children’s executive functioning was indistinguishable from zero (g = −.04) after we adjusted for publication bias. Further, no significant effects were apparent within the executive-attention domain, in which the effects of language status have been hypothesized to be most pronounced (g = .06, 95% confidence interval = −.02, .14). Taken together, available evidence suggests that the bilingual advantage in children’s executive functioning is small, variable, and potentially not attributable to the effect of language status.
Cultural capital has been increasingly understood as acquirable cultural resources that concern a plural class structure and localized relational symbolic struggles. Against this background, the ...advantages of cultural capital can be conceptualized not only as the gap between the upper and the lower classes (the absolute advantage), but also as the status relative to the peers of a substantively meaningful group (the relative advantage). The current study makes the distinction between the absolute and relative advantages of cultural capital, and illustrates it using the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) 2000. Both types of advantages are significantly stratified by family origin, but the absolute advantage has a significantly stronger positive correlation with test performances than the relative advantage while only the relative advantage reveals a significantly negative correlation with school misbehaviour.
History is increasingly recognized as a distinctive source of competitive advantage for family businesses. Taking a rhetorical history perspective, we study how a family business leveraged the ...family’s three generations long history of entrepreneurship to sustain profitable growth over 16 years. Through our analysis, we identify three history scripting strategies—embedding, elaborating, and building family history—that created important sources of competitive advantage for the family business, facilitating acceptance by broader communities, building a reputation of continuity, and inspiring innovation through tradition. These findings advance the history-informed understanding of family firms’ idiosyncratic sources of superior performance.
•Many developing countries seek to diversify and sophisticate their exports.•Defying comparative advantage helps sophisticating export for all income levels.•The impact on export diversification is ...heterogeneous across development levels.•Attracting FDI is a powerful but risky approach to export structure transformation.•Defying comparative advantage through FDI brings unsustainable industrialization.
Since the 1990’s, developing countries have tried to promote export diversification and sophistication, notably by attracting vertical FDI and by supporting the emergence of new industries whose factor content is distant from the country’s endowment. We investigate whether defying comparative advantage has prompted a more sophisticated and diversified export basket in a large panel of countries over the period 1992–2012. We find that developing countries that defy their comparative advantage tend to export more manufactured items and manufacturing goods that are more sophisticated. As for export diversification, the impact is heterogeneous across development levels: although defying comparative advantage seems to help diversify the export baskets of middle-income and resource-rich countries, it tends to concentrate those of lower-income economies. Moreover, we find that the impact of the distance to comparative advantage on productive transformation is strongly conditioned by the size of FDI stocks and by the country’s specialization in the lower added-value productive tasks of global value chains (GVCs). More specifically, our results suggest that defying comparative advantage by attracting FDI may be a dangerous strategy in the long-term since it tends to bring only partial and artefact industrialization, with manufacturing exports increasing while the manufacturing value-added actually decreases.
Research Summary: Strategic openness—firms voluntary forfeiting of control over resources—seemingly challenges the premise of the resource-based view (RBV), which posits that firms should control ...valuable, rare, and inimitable (VRI) resources. We reconcile this apparent paradox by formalizing whether and when firms—consisting of resource bundles and deriving competitive advantage from exploiting selected VRI resources—may maximize profitability by opening parts of their resource base. As such, our article refines RBV-related thinking while supporting the theory's core tenets. Notably, we illustrate how a common-pool resource can become a source of competitive advantage and how firms may use openness to shape inter-firm competition. Managerial Summary: Conventional wisdom holds that firms must control scarce and valuable resources to obtain competitive advantage. That being said, over the past decade, many firms—among them Computer Associates, IBM, and Nokia—embarked on open strategies and made parts of their valuable resources available for free. These decisions pose an obvious conundrum, which we solve in our article. We use a mathematical model, grounded in principles of the resource-based view, to show why and under what conditions open strategies will succeed. Firms significantly improve their performance when (a) opening resources reduces their cost base while (b) strongly increasing demand for their still-proprietary resource(s). We also explain how openness can reshape markets by weakening competitors, particularly in highly rivalrous environments.
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to examine how innovation-related firm-specific ownership advantage (FSA) plays a role in developing the competitive advantage of Chinese multinationals when they ...internationalize.
Design/methodology/approach
Based on a review of the existing literature concerning foreign direct investment by emerging economy multinational enterprises (EMNEs), the authors identify that numerous studies explain this phenomenon on the basis of their location-bound country-specific advantages. However, such views do not fully explain the key underlying factors behind the rapid rise and success of many EMNEs as these firms rapidly internationalize and develop global competitiveness in developed markets. The current research explores three leading innovative Chinese EMNEs from the engineering sector: BYD, Sany Heavy Industry and CSR China.
Findings
The authors find that EMNEs’ knowledge, and particularly their innovation-creating technological knowledge, has contributed greatly to their successful internationalization. The illustrative cases show that the three firms have now moved beyond the infant to the mature stage of EMNE development through developing their technological knowledge in order to realize FSA through internationalization. This study helps in contributing fresh reflections to the continuing debate concerning the causes of internationalization and global competitive development by EMNEs and the role of their FSAs in these processes.
Originality/value
This is one of the few studies which have demonstrated that some of the EMNEs do possess firms’ specific advantage which helps explain their innovative capabilities, competitive advantages and subsequent internationalization patterns.
This study aims to find out how the development of research related to sustainability competitive advantage that has been carried out so far and to find research gaps that can be used in the future ...related to the field of sustainability competitive advantage. This research was conducted using the systematic literature review method with the help of VOSviewer and Bibliometrics software. From the quantitative data obtained, research with the theme of Sustainability Competitive Advantage tends to experience significant growth in its publications. The keyword “sustainability” is the most relevant keyword with the most occurrences.
Water pollution caused by organic wastewater has become a serious concern worldwide. Fenton oxidation process is one of the most effective and suitable methods for the abatement of organic ...pollutants. However, the process has three obvious shortcomings: the narrow working pH range, the high costs and risks associated with handling, transportation and storage of reagents (H2O2 and catalyst), the significant iron sludge related second pollution. In order to overcome these shortcomings, various optimized Fenton processes have been widely studied. Therefore, a summary of the study status of Fenton optimization processes is necessary to develop a novel and high efficiency organic wastewater treatment method. Based on the optimization perspective, taking shortcomings of Fenton process as a breakthrough, the fundamentals, advantages and disadvantages of single Fenton optimization processes (heterogeneous Fenton, photo-Fenton and electro-Fenton) for organic wastewater treatment were reviewed and the corresponding reaction mechanism diagrams were drawn in this paper. Then, the feasibility and application of the coupled Fenton optimization processes (photoelectro-Fenton, heterogeneous electro-Fenton, heterogeneous photoelectro-Fenton, three-dimensional electro-Fenton) for organic wastewater treatment were discussed in depth. Additionally, the effect of some important operation parameters (pH and catalyst, H2O2, organic pollutants concentration) on the degradation efficiency of organic pollutants was studied to provide guidance for the optimization of operation parameters. Finally, the possible future research directions for optimized Fenton processes were given. The review aims to assist researchers and engineers to gain fundamental understandings and critical view of Fenton process and its optimization processes, and hopefully with the knowledge it could bring new opportunities for the optimization and future development of Fenton process.
Display omitted
•Review of single Fenton optimization processes for organic wastewater treatment.•Review of coupled Fenton optimization processes for organic wastewater treatment.•Key operational parameters are discussed.•Insights into future research directions for optimized Fenton processes.
Purpose
The growth of global e-commerce presents significant opportunities for global expansion. Yet it has not leveled the playing field between emerging markets e-commerce corporations (EM-ECCs) ...and advanced markets ECCs (AM-ECCs). While AM-ECCs have been expanding overseas with considerable success, EM-ECCs have been less disposed to internationalize and have been content to serve and defend their home turfs against foreign rivals who wield monopolistic advantages. Leveraging the network, ownership, location and internalization (N-OLI) theoretical framework, this paper aims to examine the variables affecting the internationalization of AM-ECCs and EM-ECCs.
Design/methodology/approach
This paper adopted an exploratory research method using multiple corporate cases to focus on understanding the dynamics present within single settings, capture corporate context and allow comparison between cases.
Findings
The findings suggest that AM-ECCs, in comparison to EM-ECCs, are endowed with favorable and strong network-based advantages, ownership-based advantages, location-based and internalization-based advantages that make them more capable of pursuing internationalization aggressively. However, EM-ECCs are induced to pursue regionally-focused internationalization due, on the one hand, to capital scarcity, weaknesses on network-based and internalization-based advantages and, on the other hand, to geographical strength and strong location-based advantages emanating from knowledge of the home region.
Originality/value
This paper identifies the internationalization challenges that EM-ECCs face with respect to AM-ECCs. While extending the theoretical discussion of the N-OLI framework in light of EM-ECCs, this paper also extends the EM-ECC strategies within local and regional markets, including emerging markets such as India and the Middle East. This extension supports the assertion that regional focused strategies are not immune to technological advantages which support the notion of a regional strategic growth strategy because of localization advantages and capital leverage limitations. Finally, the paper expands the analysis to some emerging markets that have attracted less attention in the literature, namely, India and the Middle East.
PDF
