Abstract
The resource-based view and learning theory have developed independently but still have important areas of theoretical overlap, especially in central assumptions, such as how organizational differences, path dependence, and complex social technologies shape strategy. In addition, they have divergent and complementary theory, with major differences stemming from organizational learning focusing on behaviors rather than resources and organizing its research based on the sources of learning and the triggers of learning. Two research streams in organizational learning with particular implications for the resource-based view are the work on problemistic search and the work on interorganizational imitation. Both are expected to develop quickly as a result of the necessary interaction between research based on organizational theory and strategic management. They are promising areas of investigation for the resource-based view of the firm that can help distinguish the sources of sustainable competitive advantage and the importance of enduring competitive advantage.
Keywords
The resource-based view has reached a very prominent position in strategic management and is now one of the pillars of the strategy field. It applies economic theory to explain the consequences of strategic actions, and it applies organizational theory to explain the causes of strategic actions. This creates a natural point of comparison with learning theory, which is an organizational theory with strategic implications and that has reached a level of prominence that makes it one of the pillars of the organizational theory field. A comparison of the two theories not only helps assess the progress of each one so far; it can also yield insights that inform future research.
There are different ways of comparing theories. The less meaningful comparison is to examine differences in the explanandum—what they seek to explain. Such a comparison would produce a list of obvious conclusions because a strategy theory with organizational content and an organizational theory with strategic implications are oriented toward different phenomena. The more meaningful comparison is to examine differences in the explanans—how they seek to explain. This leads to an examination of the mechanisms in each theory, which is an essential discussion because the difference between prediction and theory is that prediction concerns what happens while theory is why it happens. Here one finds differences between the theories, but one also finds interesting overlaps. Overall, the overlaps are so great, and the differences so important, that the interface between the resource-based view and learning theory is a promising area of research. This has been my view since I was a doctoral student, and indeed one of my first papers integrated elements of the resource-based view and learning theory (Barnett, Greve, & Park, 1994).
In the following, the two theories are analyzed first by noting the main areas of overlapping theory, then by examining key differences in the theory. The treatment is selective because it is most economical to focus on the mainstream of each theory rather than variations and to emphasize the most central points of overlap and differences. A full discussion covering variation in statements among followers of each theory and the full range of theoretical mechanisms that each theory covers would be much longer than this article and would not serve well as an introduction to the two, though it would be helpful as a reference work. This article is an introduction.
The most central overlapping theory of the resource-based view and learning theory is the assumption of organizational differences, path dependence, and complex social mechanisms. Key areas of difference in the theories are the differences in focus on either resources or behaviors, in the detailed learning-theory treatment of own and others’ experience as sources of learning, and in the greater interest in environmental change in learning theory. These differences reflect the goals of an early treatment of learning theory that has shaped its evolution until now (Levitt & March, 1988). Because of the differences in theory, there are also minor differences in the methodology used when testing these theories, and examples of these will also be shown. Table 1 outlines the comparison of theories, and details are given in the following review before some suggestions on methodology and future research are made.
Comparison of the Resource-Based View and Learning Theory
Key Overlaps Between the Theories
Organizational Differences
Organizational differences were central to the original statements of the resource-based view because the theory was constructed as a contrast with economic views of strategy assuming similar firms that could draw only temporary advantages from strategic positioning. Contrary to this view, the theory posits that organizational differences can give rise to sustainable competitive advantage (Barney, 1986, 1991). This is not meant to say that any part of a firm would remain unique over time, especially not if it were strategically advantageous. Rather, a fundamental part of the theory is that organizational differences exist and may have strategic consequences, and some strategically important differences are difficult to transfer across organizations. This theoretical statement has been supported by research examining involuntary (imitation by competitor) and voluntary (intrafirm) transfer of knowledge (e.g., Zander & Kogut, 1995) and by studies that have found multiple sources of imitation barriers (Jonsson, 2009; Polidoro & Toh, 2011).
Learning theory rarely makes explicit statements of organizational differences because it was founded before economics took an interest in organizations or strategy, and hence its goal from the start was to examine the features of organizational behavior neglected by economic theory (Cyert & March, 1963). Its focus on organizational differences is clear from the commonly accepted definition of learning as being “routine-based, history-dependent, and target-oriented” (Levitt & March, 1988: 319). Organizations do not share history and do not fully share routines or targets, either, so organizational differences are central to learning theory. Like the resource-based view, organizational learning does not assume that a strategically beneficial behavior will remain unique to one organization, and indeed it has a significant empirical interest in how organizations learn from each other (Kraatz, 1998; Lavie, Kang, & Rosenkopf, 2011). Heterogeneity in learning is a central part of this research and includes learning that leads to competitive advantage (Greve, 1998a).
Path Dependence
Path dependence as a source of organizational differences is important in the resource-based view. This is because a path-dependent organizational resource has a high likelihood of being unique, and hence difficult to replicate at least in the short term, because different firms rarely have similar or even comparable paths of resource development (Barney, 1991). The claim that path dependence shapes organizations is in turn based on observation of technological evolution incrementally building on prior knowledge and being directed by performance at each step (Arthur, 1989). The resource-based view expanded this reasoning to a great variety of decisions, including choice of firm location (Alcácer & Chung, 2014; Shaver & Flyer, 2000), and hence interaction with other firms, and direction of research and development efforts (Daneels, 2002; Eggers, 2016).
Path dependence is also important in learning theory. Indeed, the theoretical mechanism is so similar to that of the resource-based view that some work has noted that learning theory and the resource-based view blend well (Daneels, 2002). A central mechanism in learning theory is problemistic search, which is path dependent because it occurs only when low performance needs to be addressed and it favors search near current activities of the organization (Ahuja & Lampert, 2001; Cyert & March, 1963; Gaba & Greve, 2019; Posen, Keil, Kim, & Meissner, 2018). Path dependence is also seen in the theory of exploration and exploitation (March, 1991), which argues that organizations are liable to emphasize incremental changes from the current set of activities rather than radical experiments. This theory has led to a significant body of research showing that such path dependence is indeed strong and consequential for organizational strategies (Lavie, Stettner, & Tushman, 2010).
Complex Social Technologies
Complex social technologies are a central reason that some firm resources can remain unique. The uniqueness comes from the inability of competitors to understand the resource itself or its contribution to the strategic advantage and is especially likely to occur if it is poorly understood even inside the firm that holds it (Barney, 1991). This mechanism is easy to understand theoretically but harder to document empirically, although there is research showing indicators, such as inability to reproduce manufacturing efficiency across plants that make the same product (Thornton & Thompson, 2001).
Learning theory has no explicit assumption of complex social technologies, but its central assumption of bounded rationality is meaningful exactly because the tasks organizations are conducting are not seen as fully solvable problems. If organizations and their environments were not complex social technologies, even a boundedly rational individual (such as an executive) would be able to find the optimal set of actions without learning. Learning theory is constructed to explain how organizations act when they are complex social technologies that respond to environments that are also complex social technologies.
Indeed, bounded rationality is an essential mechanism in learning theory. Although elements of the resource-based view such as path dependence and organizational differences do not require bounded rationality, other elements of the theory do. Complex social technologies as sources of persistent uniqueness require bounded rationality because without it, there would certainly be firm employees who could transfer knowledge of key resources to competitors, and it is difficult to prevent such transfer (see Marx, Singh, & Fleming, 2015; Samila & Sorenson, 2011). Persistent uniqueness requires that competitors are unable to identify the key sources that need to be transferred, which is much easier if employees of the focal firm are also unable to do so.
Key Differences Between the Theories
Resource or Behavior
In the resource-based view, the central construct is the organizational resource. Resources are defined broadly, and they are definitely broader than the physical assets that the term “resource” most readily brings to mind, but the resource terminology is still important because a firm draws from resources in order to accomplish goals. Among the resources available to the firm, the resource-based view is interested in resources that are strategic because they give rise to sustainable competitive advantage, which means that they produce rents and cannot easily be acquired or reproduced by other firms (Chi, 1994). By contrast, the central construct in learning theory is organizational behaviors. This is an important difference because a firm enacts behaviors in order to accomplish goals. It is fair to say that the link from behavior to goals is a closer one, because enacting behaviors is how organizations draw from resources to accomplish goals.
The focus on behaviors can be seen very clearly in the branch of learning theory that examines routines, which are multiperson interlocked behaviors to complete specific tasks (Becker, 2008). The research has shown significant learning of routines, as well as flexibility in adapting routines to task variations, and it has built a promising foundation for examining how routines and resources interact to form organizational strategy and operations (Feldman, 2004; Feldman & Pentland, 2003). The emphasis on path dependence in the creation and exploitation of routines means that there is a potentially strong connection between routine research and the resource-based view of the firm.
Another branch of organizational learning theory is less explicit in its focus on behaviors because it examines the consequences of behavioral change through the evolution of costs over time (Argote, 1999). Although this research usually looks at experience curves, so it does not directly examine behaviors, the best papers typically illustrate the findings with examples of behaviors that are learned and transferred in order to improve the organization (Baum & Ingram, 1998; Darr, Argote, & Epple, 1995; Jain, 2013). A paper showing learning within establishments and transfer within multiestablishment firms is memorable because it studied pizza franchises and contained an example of change in work procedures that reduced the number of pizzas dropped on the floor (Darr et al., 1995).
Most organizational learning theory has an intermediate form that looks at larger bundles of behavior than routines, but it examines specific behaviors rather than their consequences. This theory examines how organizations adopt innovations, change form, or change strategies through learning from their own experience and vicarious learning from peer organizations (Levitt & March, 1988). Some research compares these sources of learning and looks at their interactions (Chuang & Baum, 2003; Kraatz, 1998; Wezel & Saka-Helmhout, 2006), but it is more common to analyze them separately. Interestingly, research on these two sources of learning has very different implications for the resource-based view of the firm.
Learning From Own Experience
Research on learning from own experience has shown how the history of each organization significantly influences its behavioral changes, thus contributing to organizational differences. A large research stream is centered on the path-dependent formation of aspiration levels for each organizational goal (Cyert & March, 1963; Lant, 1992). These aspiration levels are compared with realized performance, a process that triggers problemistic search whenever the performance is below the aspiration level. The result is that organizational change occurs in spurts depending on the performance level, and because each organization has different aspiration levels, the performance level that initiates search and change differs across organizations (Greve, 2003). This process has been documented for a wide range of organizational changes with strategic consequences, including research and development expenses (Lucas, Knoben, & Meeus, 2018; Vissa, Greve, & Chen, 2010), innovations (Gaba & Joseph, 2013; Maslach, 2016), asset investment (Arrfelt, Wiseman, & Hult, 2013; Audia & Greve, 2006), and product-market position changes (Greve, 1998b; Joseph, Klingebiel, & Wilson, 2016).
Learning research is focused on how this process helps each firm adapt (or hinders adaptation) to the environment through the signals given through its performance measurement and goals. For the resource-based view, an important additional insight is that even competitive advantages that should not be fully sustainable may in fact be unique to one firm through long periods because its competitors are not engaged in problemistic search. This was seen in the slow diffusion of the innovation of post-Panamax container ships, which were more cost-efficient but also too large to pass through the Panama Canal (Greve, 2009). The first adopters of post-Panamax ships chose designs that were too small to yield the sizable cost advantages that would later be realized, so their competitors did not immediately experience large enough reduction of performance levels to initiate problemistic search. Unsustainable competitive advantage can become enduring competitive advantage if competitors do not search.
There is also significant research on how the direction of change is path dependent. Much of this research has focused on the innovation process, so it is convenient to draw examples from this line of research. There is evidence of that firms specialize research and development efforts over time, which is an important source of path dependence because it means that the initial choice of research and development efforts places an upward bound on what will be found (Benner & Tushman, 2002). This specialization over time is partly a result of adjusting efforts through learning from failures, as firms continue to pursue efforts that have not failed yet but are likely to (possibly prematurely) halt efforts that show failure (Khanna, Guler, & Nerkar, 2016). The main check on this specialization tendency is performance feedback and specifically that longer duration of low performance directs and strengthens the period of learning (Yu, Minniti, & Nason, 2019).
Vicarious Learning
Research on vicarious learning has generated significant evidence of interorganizational imitation, thus showing a range of behaviors that spread easily enough that they cannot maintain organizational differences. Early work on the diffusion of market positions showed that firms can learn from others how to make market entries that require new resources (mostly knowledge) and provide rewards in the form of first-mover advantages (Greve, 1996, 1998a). This work also showed that such diffusion is faster among subunits of the same firm, as one might expect, but interfirm diffusion also occurs. This finding has been reproduced for a wide range of strategic behaviors, with barriers in the form of uncertain benefits or investment in resources. For example, technological innovations are easier when firms are able to learn from each other (Cohen & Levinthal, 1990; Powell, Koput, & Smith-Doerr, 1996). Target selection for firm acquisitions improves through learning from other firms (Beckman & Haunschild, 2002), though for many other decisions, the learning may not be in the form of improvements (Greve, 2011; Haunschild, 1994). In many of these studies, an important driver of diffusion is social ties to organizations with the ability to absorb the knowledge needed for the new behaviors (Giuliani & Bell, 2005).
The interest that learning theory has in interorganizational diffusion is valuable for the resource-based view. Given that the key component of its view on competitive advantage is whether it is sustainable or not, it is vital to examine the conditions under which sustainability fails. This is where diffusion research comes in, because it clarifies what kinds of practices, what kinds of firms, and what kinds of interfirm relations lead to leaks of competitive advantage through imitation. Because these issues are less central for most diffusion research than for the resource-based view, even the most thorough reviews of the diffusion literature have not given sufficient treatment of these questions (e.g., Rogers, 1995; Strang & Soule, 1998). Drawing such implications through reviewing diffusion research could advance the resource-based view further.
Environmental Change
Environmental change is much more prominent in learning theory than in the resource-based view. To some extent, this seems like a difference in emphasis rather than in content of the theory. It is fundamental to the resource-based view that competitive advantage is sustained if it cannot be eliminated through competitive action, but this does not mean that it is permanent—environmental change can originate from other sources than competitors and can eliminate sustained competitive advantage (Barney, 1991). Still, the difference is too large to just set aside as one of emphasis. In learning theory, two fundamental ideas are that (a) the current organizational environment may not be fully understood and hence can be discovered through learning processes and (b) the environment is likely to change, triggering additional learning processes. The first of these is the more fundamental difference between the theories. If no organization has fully understood the environment, what appears to be a sustained competitive advantage is contingent on other organizations not gaining knowledge and associated resources that nullify or reverse the competitive advantage. Such discoveries of environmental preferences are frequent and well documented. For example, the mobile-phone market was upended after the discovery that consumers were willing to input text through tapping a screen rather than a physical keyboard.
How is it possible that no organization has fully understood the environment yet? Here it is important to keep in mind that learning theorists understand organizational learning well enough to be clear-eyed about its limitations. Recall that a main driver of learning is problemistic search, which is initiated when organizational performance is below aspiration levels, and hence occurs irregularly (Cyert & March, 1963; Greve, 1998b; Posen et al., 2018). Moreover, it follows that success is negatively related to problemistic search, which means that the organizations that search the most are relatively resource poor and hence less likely to find anything. 1 This means that the search for improvements by each organization and the industry as a whole moves at an uneven pace and is much slower than a search for opportunities would be. No wonder the dominant makers of mobile phones, which all had physical keyboards, did not test whether consumers would accept touchscreens. Developing reliable touchscreen technology was expensive, moreover, and almost required a firm with an interest in mobile phones and a profitable business that could subsidize this development. That pioneering firm was IBM, but Apple later launched a more successful touchscreen phone series.
The limitations of the learning process are not just about the timing of search, however, but also about its direction. Learning theory contributes to research on the development and diffusion of innovations, both of which have shown that organizational learning is localized through geographical proximity and interpersonal or interorganizational network ties (Greve, 2009). Although such localized learning can lead to broad diffusion of innovations that give competitive advantage, it is significantly slower than global learning processes, and evidence on the development of innovations suggests that this learning is even more localized (Funk, 2014; Hansen & Løvås, 2004; Powell et al., 1996). Put together, the evidence on the timing and direction of organizational learning strongly suggests that industries may encounter surprising shifts in knowledge that gives competitive advantage. It is unclear how the theory can be modified to take such shifts in competitive advantage into consideration, but the emphasis on environmental change in learning theory seems well justified.
Different Methodology
The theoretical differences of the resource-based view and learning theory also have implications for the commonly used methodology. The differences are clearest in the selection of outcomes to study but are also seen in other parts of the studies. Learning theory forces the analyst to be very concrete when specifying the strategic behavior that is being examined. One example is from work on the slow diffusion of innovative production assets in the form of ship designs that were superior to the current industry standard (Greve, 2009). This research is aligned with the resource-based view because it shows that the adoption of the innovative ships was so slow that the early adopters would be ready to retire their first acquisitions soon after designs had become common. Ships last 20 to 30 years, and the adoption curve climaxed 15 years after their introduction. It diverges from the resource-based view because the designs that were the focus of the study did become common and hence were not a source of sustainable competitive advantage. It is a typical learning theory paper, because learning research rarely looks for or finds truly sustainable competitive advantage but often encounters close approximations, such as production assets that remain a source of advantage throughout much of their lifetime. For learning theorists, a decade-long competitive advantage is already good. Similar research methodology can also be seen in the resource-based view, though sometimes with learning theory inputs, and has led to interesting conclusions about the sustainability of competitive advantage (Knott, 2003).
Another difference is that learning theory quantifies some firm differences that may be important for the resource-based view. Work on organizational responses to performance below aspiration levels estimates the updating rules that firms use to form aspiration levels and has developed a string of different rules with various levels of complexity (Bromiley & Harris, 2014; Greve, 1998b; Moliterno, Beck, Beckman, & Meyer, 2014). These rules can be shown to differ across industries and may even change over time within each firm (Blettner, He, Hu, & Bettis, 2015), and analyzing such comparisons further can show how competition levels in industries affect the path-dependent formation of goals.
These examinations have two levels of implications for the resource-based view of the firm. The most obvious one is that comparison of aspiration levels and performance triggers change, so knowing more about the formation of aspiration levels helps predict events such as firms’ attempts to gain their own sustainable advantage or obtain resources that currently favor their competitors. A more subtle one is that the formation of aspiration levels is an indicator of managerial attention patterns, which in turn help predict how firms compete. A heavy focus on own past performance indicates a firm with self-centered management. A heavy focus on competitors’ performance indicates the opposite, and investigation of which competitors matter most can tell who are seen as the main peer group. Typically, product development, technological races, and contestation over resources are most intense within peer groups (Kacperczyk, Beckman, & Moliterno, 2015; Sharkey & Bromley, 2015).
Future Research
A comparison of learning theory and the resource-based view is most useful for future research if it produces ideas for how theory and evidence can be developed further by borrowing insights from each other. Here a review of differences, such as the one above, is necessarily incomplete, because finding the insights from one research stream that best informs another is complex and requires creativity. To simplify the task, this section will only look for learning theory insights that could be fruitful for research on the resource-based view.
A good start would be to examine more closely the distinction between sustainable competitive advantages and enduring competitive advantages. As defined in the resource-based view, sustainable competitive advantages would be difficult to transfer even if members of the potential recipient firm were aware of the advantage and bent on obtaining it. Learning theorists would argue that many competitive advantages are enduring even if they do not have that nature. It is entirely possible for an industry to be populated by firms whose executives are either too complacent to search for improvements or too committed to specific search directions, and as a result, they overlook competitive advantages of a focal firm that would be there for the taking if they sought them out. Indeed, the focus on path dependence in learning theory and the resource-based view of the firm suggests that this is a likely outcome. It follows that sustainability of competitive advantage is determined by its resource base and the firm that holds it, but the duration that a resource that provides unsustainable competitive advantage stays unique to the firm that holds it depends on other firms.
Studies on the diffusion of innovation bear out this point whenever the innovation spreads overly slowly (e.g., Klepper & Graddy, 1990), but an even more important case would be innovations that do not spread for a long time, for no apparent reason. One famous example is the Xerox PARC center and the development of technologies such as the graphical user interface and object-oriented programming, which came to fruition much later than their development and to the benefit of other companies than Xerox. This raises two questions: (a) How do we know which competitive advantages are truly sustainable, and which ones endure just because of failures to transfer? (b) Strategically, what is the practical difference between the two? The rich literature on vicarious learning, especially in the form of diffusion of innovations, is a good start in answering these questions, though it is important to maintain a focus on strategically important innovations (Greve, 2009; Greve & Seidel, 2014).
Pursuing this idea one step further, learning theory may provide ideas for new research on the kinds of competitive advantage that are sustainable. Although learning theorists emphasize how and when organizations learn (e.g., Argote & Greve, 2007; Gavetti, Greve, Levinthal, & Ocasio, 2012; Posen et al., 2018), the converse insight of how and when they do not learn follows readily from a close reading of the findings so far and could provide insights into types of competitive advantage that would be particularly difficult to transfer. The work on learning from the organization’s own experience is central to this effort because the common finding that organizations specialize their search direction has two interlinked implications: (a) A firm is more likely to make discoveries that fit its specific needs, and (b) its competitors are more likely to overlook exactly those discoveries. Both implications suggest that sustainable—or at least enduring—competitive advantages are likely to be found, and these implications may help generate predictions on when this is more likely. The progress of such research would depend on the ability to distinguish sustainable competitive advantage from enduring competitive advantage, but this seems like a solvable problem.
The future research outlined here is best done by scholars sensitive to the concerns of both the resource-based view and organizational learning theory. The resource-based view helps identify resources that appear to provide sustainable competitive advantage but may in fact provide only enduring advantages. Learning theory provides theory on when and why vicarious learning is likely to fail. Together the two theories can examine the diffusion of resources and behaviors that lead to competitive advantage, both when this diffusion actually occurs and when firms fail to learn vicariously from each other (Denrell & Kovacs, 2008).
Conclusion
The resource-based view and organizational learning theory have mostly lived separate lives in the scholarly journals. The paper databases show that Strategic Management Journal is the best-known journal that often publishes the resource-based view, while Organization Science has the same role for learning theory. Neither journal publishes many papers using the other of the two theories. Both theories are found side by side in other journals, however, such as Journal of Business Research and International Business Review. It is likely that the separation of the two theories into different leading journals has caused researchers to overlook their similarities and pay insufficient attention to their differences. This is an error. Theories with partial overlap but significant differences are especially interesting areas of comparison, as they are exactly the places in which some import of insights from the other theory could advance research significantly.
I am writing this fully knowing that I have had an interest in drawing such insights across theories for long but have done less than would have been possible. It is easier to work within a single theory than to engage in comparison, integration, or contestation. Even working within multiple separate theories is easier than working with two related theories, and modifying a new theory is easier than combining two familiar theories. These considerations should be ignored whenever possible because, ultimately, dialogues between related theories is a very fruitful endeavor. The resource-based view and learning theory have much to learn from each other, as this comparison has illustrated. Importantly, both have an interest in firm strategies that suggest they have a significant shared future. The choice of what insights to bring and what research directions to initiate is an important one, and I expect many scholars to bring their ideas to the journals soon. Given the importance of these two theories to management research and practice, such papers should get a welcoming reception.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
I am grateful to Jay Barney and Dave Ketchen for the inspiration for this article and all the helpful comments along the way. I would also like to thank all the colleagues and collaborators who have helped pose questions and provide answers that advance research on learning theory.
