The purpose of this paper is to identify the sources of variation in firm performance. This is one of the cornerstones of strategy research, i.e. the relative importance of industry and firm-level effects on firm performance. Multilevel analysis is well suited to analyze variance in performance...

The paper describes six major approaches within strategic groups research: the industrial organization perspective (the IO-view), the strategic choice perspective, the strategy types perspective, the cognitive perspective, the customer perspective, and the business definition perspective. The...