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A Structurationist View on Knowledge and Strategic Management

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A Structurationist View on Knowledge and Strategic Management Going Beyond the Resources Given: A Structurationist View on Knowledge and Strategic Management ALBRECHT BECKER STEPHAN DUSCHEK Department of Business Administration Free University, Berlin Garystr. 21 D- 14195 Berlin, Germany Tel.: +49 30 838 54069 Fax: +49 30 838 53307 [email protected] ELISABETH BRAUNER Institute for Psychology Humboldt-University in Berlin Oranienburger Str. 18 D-10178 Berlin, Germany Tel.: +49 30 285 165 349 Fax: +49 30 285 165-329 [email protected] Paper prepared for The Third European Conference on Organizational Knowledge, Learning, and Capabilities - OKLC - Athens, Greece April 5-6, 2002 Please do not cite without permission 2 Abstract Current knowledge-based theories explain firms' competitive advantages through the use of dynamic resources. They cannot, however, explicate how knowledge-based resources are created and why they are reproducible and inimitable at the same time. We present a model of resource usage and creation, which is based on structuration theory, phenomenology and the concept of transactive knowledge systems. The recursive process of the simultaneous creation and use of knowledge-based resources is conceptualized as a process of structuration. We argue that the concept of transactive knowledge systems may account for firm-specific usages of unshared expertise as the basis for competitive advantages as well as for the inimitability of resources. 3 1 Introduction Within the resource-based view of the firm it is widely acknowledged that knowledge is the main source of competitive advantages (Conner & Prahalad, 1996; Krogh & Roos, 1996). Correspondingly, the so-called knowledge-based view of the firm is gaining more and more acceptance within the overall framework of resource-based theorizing (cf. Kogut & Zander, 1992; Spender & Grant, 1996). Spender (1994, 1996a) argues from a knowledge-based perspective that organizational knowledge, understood as shared, or collective, tacit knowledge, is crucial for the generation of competitive advantages. The tacitness of knowledge brings about nonmarketability, nonsubstitutability, and inimitability, which are necessary qualities of resources that can provide sustained competitive advantages (Hoops & Postrel, 1999). Collective and tacit organizational knowledge, thus, is seen as the main source of economic rents in knowledge-based theories (Spender, 1994, 1996a; Collis, 1996). But the knowledge-based view of competitive advantages, first, fails to conceptualize the generation of knowledge (Gulati, Nohira, & Zaheer, 2000). Second, it cannot cope with the resources' paradoxical character as, on the one hand, tacit and unique and, on the other hand, reproducible at the same time. Our paper focuses on a re-conceptualization of the knowledge-based perspective on the sources of competitive advantages. We start from Penrose's (1995) proposition that not resources per se but the services generated by the use of these resources account for competitive advantages. Our line of reasoning is based on the structurationist theory of organizations (Giddens, 1984), a phenomenological conceptualization of the emergence and reproduction of knowledge (Schütz, 1982; cf. Duschek, 2001), and the concept of transactive knowledge systems (Brauner, in prep.; Brauner & Becker, 2001, under review). We argue that the generation of knowledge as resource may be seen, first, as part of the process of using 4 context-free resources in a unique and context-bound way as modalities of structuration. Second, the differentiation between object-level knowledge and metaknowledge, that is knowledge about knowledge, in the concept of transactive knowledge systems provides a more in-depth understanding of the use and generation of knowledge. It is the interplay of unshared expertise and partly shared, or mutual, metaknowledge which can account for the inimitability of knowledge-based resources of competitive advantages. In the following section of the paper we will, first, demonstrate the knowledge-based view's problems in explaining the origin of knowledge and, thus, of competitive advantages. Then, we will show the paradoxical character of resources. In the last two parts of section 2 we develop a concept of knowledge-based resources and their use based on structuration theory and phenomenology. Section 3 presents our application of the concept of transactive knowledge systems to the use and generation of knowledge-based resources. 2 Knowledge and Sustained Competitive Advantages 2.1 The Unclear Origin of Knowledge Knowledge-based competitive advantages has initially been analyzed within the framework of Ricardian rents (Peteraf, 1993; Schulze, 1994). The focus of resource-based approaches is on valuable knowledge that is rare, immobile, and nonsubstitutable. Beyond this, Ricardian knowledge-based resources have to be in fixed or inelastic supply in the long run (cf. Varian, 1999) As a result, the sources of Ricardian rents are conceptualized as exogenous to the firm (Spender, 1996b), the origins of competitive advantages cannot be explained within the boundaries of this approach. Resources may only be treated as given; they are “intrinsically heterogeneous factors” (Collis, 1996: 140). The task of strategic management, then, is limited to the discovery of nonmarketable, nonsubstitutable, and inimitable knowledge among the 5 firm's entire stocks of knowledge (Barney, 1986, 1991). The generation of (new) knowledge as a source of competitive advantages is beyond its scope. The concept of Penrose rents, which is favored by the knowledge-based approaches of strategic management, explains competitive advantages with dynamic factors endogenous to the firm. Already in 1959, Penrose (1995, first published 1959) argued that competitive advantages are generated not by resources per se but by services, that is by firm-specific uses of resources (Dierickx & Cool, 1989; Mahoney & Pandian, 1992; Teece, Pisano, & Shuen, 1997; Kor & Mahoney, 2000). These unique services are termed, for instance „core competencies“ (Prahalad & Hamel, 1990), „core capabilities“ (Leonard-Barton, 1992, 1995), „combinatorial capacities“ (Kogut & Zander, 1992), „strategic assets“ (cf. Amit & Schoemaker, 1993), or „dynamic capabilities“ (Teece et al., 1997) within the (modern) resource-based and knowledge-based literatures. Achieving competitive advantages, in this view, is an evolutionary process of cumulative growth of knowledge in the specific context of a firm (Penrose, 1995). Hence, this dynamic knowledge-based view is going undoubtedly beyond „resources given“. Quite explicitly, it claims to analyze the generation of resources, namely collective knowledge. But taking a closer look at the literature reveals that the knowledge-based view either is basically taxonomic in character (Spender, 1996a, b; Nonaka & Takeuchi, 1995; see for a critical illustration Tsoukas, 1996) or deals with the process of resource generation rather sketchily (Moran & Goshal, 1999; Tsoukas & Valdimirou, 2001). Thus, Gulati, Nohira, and Zaheer (2000: 207) conclude that even the dynamic knowledge-based view of the firm either takes the resources as given or assumes "that firms 'somehow' develop such resources". The origin of knowledge, that is the value generating process of building knowledge-based competitive advantages, remains unclear as we will explain in more detail in the following section. 6 2.2 The Paradoxical Character of Resources The knowledge-based view's difficulties to explain the origin of knowledge as a resource stems from two closely related sources: First, proponents of this view conceptualize the notion of knowledge in a somewhat unclear way (Grant, 1996; Tsoukas & Vladimirou, 2001) and, second, they cannot deal with the resources' paradoxical character (Duschek, 2001; Ortmann & Sydow, 2001). Organizational knowledge and specifically knowledge that may form the basis for competitive advantages is seen as shared, or collective, and tacit knowledge (Penrose, 1959; Spender, 1996a, b; Hoops & Postrel, 1999). The shared and tacit character of knowledge shall account for the causal ambiguity of knowledge as resource (Collis, 1996), that is the unclear causal link between knowledge and competitive advantages (Reed & DeFillippi, 1990). Causal ambiguity is seen as a main barrier to imitation of resources. This argument raises a main issue about sustained competitive advantages as the tacitness and causal ambiguity of resources contain the seed of the self-destruction of competitive advantages (Collis, 1996). On the one hand, the continuance of the existing dynamic patterns of productive activities must be a repeated process (Amit & Shoemaker, 1993). To produce competitive advantages of the firm it has to stretch beyond the boundaries of single strategic business units (Prahald & Hamel, 1990). Furthermore, the unique way of resource usage must be systematically monitored, that is the firm must know that the services can provide a "template for the creation of new patterns or routines" (Krogh & Roos, 1996: 35). The tacitness and causal ambiguity, on the other hand, obstructs the possibility of systematic observation, intended reproduction, and management of resource usage and knowledge because tacitness implies the inability to explicitly reflect on knowledge (Reber, 1993; Polanyi, 1966). Thus, there is a paradox in the knowledge-based view's conceptualization of unique resources as basis for sustained competitive advantages: The uniqueness implies opacity and tacitness of knowledge, the sustained character requires
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