Knowledgeable Practice: Capturing the Contextual Use of Knowledge as a Strategic Resource

A series of recent academic as well as practitioner oriented ideas and movements have sought to view knowledge as the key strategic resource that leads to sustained competitive advantage. All these movements, however, implicitly assume that firms differ in the ways they understand, create, access, and use knowledge as a resource. In this paper, I present a two stage mixed-methods study explore the roots of these elemental differences in the socio-cognitive schemas, “executive knowledge schemes”, of top managers of firms competing in a single mature industrythe U.S. Metalcasting Industry. I find that senior executives of incumbent firms, show remarkable variation in their interpretations of knowledge, especially in its strategic context and these differences not only influence their scanning behaviors, but also how their firm’s adapt and regenerate knowledge. My research serves to expand the current theoretical frameworks of the resource based and knowledge based views of competitive advantage by clarifying the role of executive leadership in the definition, interpretation, and firm level application of knowledge as a strategic resource.