Abstract: For years, scholars have searched for the answer to how competitive advantage can be achieved and maintained. This quest becomes even more difficult in environments that are highly dynamic. Hospitals face this dilemma. What is even more interesting, or troubling, is that these organizations are seemingly highly rigid and restricted through being monitored by institutions, having to obey to many laws and regulations with respect to operating and quality standards, and have to operate in line with restrictive protocols. Still, some hospitals manage to achieve adequate perforamances, whereas indeed other go bankrupt. In particular protocols, as restrictions endogenous to the hospital, are factors that a manager is able to control through continuous adaptation and aligning interests of many hospital stakeholders. This article provides a qualitative inquiry into how dynamic managerial capabilities help hospitals overcome the described dilemma, through a case study in 3 hospitals.

Abstract: The possibility that everyday micro-organizational practices can give rise to dynamic capabilities that then provides a firm with competitive advantage over its rivals, remains an intriguing but unexamined question. We argue here that a firm’s dynamic capabilities are better understood in practice-terms as its cultivated ‘habitus’. From this practice-based perspective a ‘firm’ is nothing more than the gradual ‘firming up’ of a collection of productive social practices. What accounts for a firm’s competitive advantage therefore is an amalgam of historically-shaped social practices held together by an underlying ‘habitus’ which predisposes the firm to respond to external challenges in a unique and idiosyncratic manner that sets it apart from its competitors. This helps explain why an organizations’ success is often deemed to be inimitable and non-substitutable.

Abstract: Whereas strategy research has begun to clarify how practices as well as capabilities affect routines, much less is known about the capability-practice relationship, in particular the activities that shapes the environment. How do practice influence the shaping-effect of capabilities while breaking with the past? To examine this question, I pursue theory development and draw on empirical data from Ericsson and ABB. Based on a polar cross-case comparison with strong replication of evidence, two key categories emerged from a data-set of 5.000 documents including 625 verbatim transcripts from 29 interviews. The study shows that managers’ use symbolic capital in strategizing that changes a capability rather than a routine-component. To theorize this finding, the Bourdieusian perspective provided useful frame of reference to develop compelling theory.

Abstract: The ontological turn in organisational capabilities theorising has pitched methodological individualism against methodological collectivism. Although illuminating in their own rights, it has been acknowledged that reconciling this dichotomy holds the key to unlocking the capabilities paradox. In this work we attempt to provide a solution to this micro-macro divide. Drawing on Archer’s morphogenesis approach we examine capabilities in terms of emergent social structures. We argue for the pre-existence of an objective capability and analyse its reproduction or transformation in terms of a reciprocal interplay between the emergent powers of structure, culture and agency. We thus maintain that by preserving the ontic differentiation between structure, culture and agency the conditions propitious for continuity or change are illuminated.