The Dialectics of Competency Acquisition: Pollution Prevention in Electric Generation

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. Strategy researchers now recognize that distinctive competencies are critically important fo sustained competitive advantage. The processes by which such competencies are acquired, however, has only started to be examined. Connections between macro-industrial system leve properties and micro-developments in proprietary technology at the firm level need to be mad This paper argues that system-wide properties, such as long-standing elementary and opposing logics in societal forces like governments and markets, and micro-developments, such as the firm's capacity to search for talent, technology, and ideas and to harmonize what it learn internally, can contribute in significant ways to the creation and acquisition of new competencies Based on the case of pollution prevention in electric generation, it shows how the system-wid properties channel and direct the paths that the acquisition of new competencies take and ho they interact with micro-developments at the firm level. ? 1998 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.