Sustained Competitive Advantage

Universidade Católica Portuguesa

Faculdade de Economia e Gestão

Name: António Patrão Areal de Rothes, 351312049

Class: Research Seminars (English - diurnal)

Homework number: 2

Research Question Essay

After an in depth read of Firm Resources and Sustained Competitive Advantage, an article written by Jay Barney, it came to my conclusion that the main question that the author is trying to answer is, whether or not particular firm resources can be sources of sustained competitive advantage.

This particular conclusion was easy to establish almost since the beginning because, after a brief introduction and the contextualization, the author defines the structure of the article. In this structure Barney sub-divides the article into three main parts: an initial definition of some key terms, to a better understanding of the article, followed by a framework for evaluating whether or not particular firm resources can be sources of competitive advantage, and in the end the conclusion. This led me to easily comprehend what was the main objective of the article.

The question the author is trying to answer is, in my opinion, really relevant in the managerial world. Sustained competitive advantage is a key aspect to any company to thrive. In order to be ahead of their competitors, and to establish themselves as the leader brand in the market, companies will need to have competitive advantage. So, it is easily perceptible that not only knowing how to obtain this competitive advantage but also, from what sources it could be obtained is not just relevant, but utter important.

It might seem hard at first to understand how the question does might be related with the literature review but, if we analyze each topic one by one, and then reassemble all the conclusions will have a better insight on this. Let’s begin with the literature review. Imagine that we’re working on an article in which the theme is the origin of the crisis, the literature review is all the theories and research that have been done so far around this topic. The research question is what we propose as what might be the reason of the origin of the crisis; it is a new approach to a topic that was already analyzed. Both of this concepts are deeply related to each other, it is important to analyze and understand other points of views, before introducing our owns.