A Review of Approaches to Empirical Research on the Resource-Based View of the Firm

This study reviews empirical studies of the resource-based view (RBV) and examines methodological issues and new directions that will help to clarify the value and boundaries of the RBV. Through our comprehensive review of the research design and operationalization of resource-based constructs used in 125 empirical studies, we (1) discuss key empirical issues particularly important to RBV research, (2) illustrate how researchers have or have not overcome some of these challenges, and (3) highlight two important approaches that offer promise for sharpening the boundary conditions of the RBV: an integrative framework for RBV research and utilization of nonsignificant results. Since its introduction into the strategic management literature, the resource-based view 1984) has earned great attention among scholars as a framework for explaining the conditions under which a firm may gain a sustained competitive advantage. Following Penrose (1959), Wernerfelt (1984) introduced the notion that firms should be analyzed from the resource side at the level of the firm, not just from the product side at the level of the industry. Barney (1986, 1991) argues that a firm has the potential to generate sustained competitive advantage 959 †The authors would like to thank Keith Brouthers, Michael Hitt, Ed Levitas, and Richard Priem for constructive comments on an early version of this manuscript. from firm resources that are valuable, rare, inimitable, and nonsubstitutable. These resources can be viewed as bundles of tangible and intangible assets, such as a firm's management skills, its organizational processes and routines, and the information and knowledge under growing number of empirical articles relating to the RBV are appearing in the literature. Researchers have performed empirical tests in which they have directly or indirectly invoked the RBV as a key theoretical anchor and accumulated important empirical contributions (Barney et al., 2001; Wernerfelt, 1995). However, serious empirical challenges inherent in the RBV remain that must be confronted to contribute to further theoretical and empirical advance-for example, observe that " researchers sometimes take a frequently researched strategy subject area, relabel the independent variable as 'resources' and the dependent variable as 'competitive advantage,' and use measures common to much cross sectional strategy research as operationalizations. " Our intention is not so much to add another theoretical argument to the RBV debates or provide meta-analytic review of empirical results (e.g., Barney & Arikan, 2001; Newbert, 2007) as to shed new light on the RBV by providing a comprehensive examination of the empirical issues …