Competitive Advantage and the Complexity Perspective

This paper is interested in exploring the competitive advantage of businesses. Current understanding of competitive advantage arises from the strategic management paradigm, but with the recognition that business environments are quite complex, this theory is not proving itself to be adequate. The early theory that underpins this comes from optimising economic theory, the inadequacy of which led to the resource-based view. The next development came from knowledge management which better embraces complexity, and which sees knowledge as a valuable strategic resource recognising the need to look more inside the organisation qualitatively. However, a new paradigm has arisen that couples knowledge processes with cybernetics. This recognises that achieving competitive advantage requires that an organisation’s pathologies must be recognised and addressed.