Inter-Firm Resources and Sustained Competitive Advantage

Resource-oriented perspectives of strategic management are on the way to discovering a topic to which little attention has been paid so far within their own ranks: inter-firm networks. In this article, it is argued that the resource- and competence-based view ? despite its new facet of analysis ? falls back on a traditional firm-focused explanation. Conversely, the relational view, the youngest branch of strategic management, follows completely new explanatory paths. Here, an inter-firm focus is established. Overall, there are two related, but diametrically opposed strategic management approaches, each assigning a different kind of importance to the meaning of competition in the context of analysing cooperative inter-firm relations.