Restricted accessResearch articleFirst published online 2014-4
Resource Longevity and the ‘Pull’ of Existing Organizational Paths: Strategic Adjustment and Response by UK Producers to a New International Division of Labour in the Ceramic Tableware Sector
This article presents the findings from a study that explores the implications of a new international division of labour in the ceramic tableware sector for UK producers. Many UK producers have struggled over recent years to adapt to changing competitive and market conditions in the sector. The findings suggest that strategy choice and success for UK producers during the period of interest (1996–2008) has not been exorable and homogenous. Instead, past actions, events and outcomes, as well as the ‘pull’ of existing organizational paths, appear to have influenced past capability selection and accumulation decisions, shaping the historically conditioned, rent-generating competencies upon which case study firms had based their respective responses to changes in competitive and market conditions. This has increasingly conditioned two distinctive focal action patterns within the sample, each, seemingly, presenting its own respective ‘lock in’ effects.
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