
doi: 10.2139/ssrn.1673322
Competitive advantage has always been an issue of discussion ever since the advent of strategic management as a field of study and practice. Michael Porter was the first to make the term popular in the early 80s and he was so successful in attracting the scholars’ attention to the idea of competitive advantage that it became the keyword of strategic management and the heart of running a business. Several researches and studies have been conducted to understand the definition of competitive advantage and sustainability of competitive advantage. However, in all the efforts, one major item seems to have been lack of and that is an aggregating approach in conceptualizing competitive advantage to test what level of diversity may seem to exist in defining competitive advantage and sustainable competitive advantage.This study intends to conceptualize competitive advantage in order to understand how various the opinions are and also to survey the literature of strategic management as to find the concentrations on the subject of sustainable competitive advantage.The studies revealed that there is a considerable diversity among the views of scholars with respect to competitive advantage and also sustainability of competitive advantage. It is implied that the different conceptualizations of competitive advantage may lead to different mental models and as a result to different practical implications. Therefore, the existing diversity must be taken seriously since there are always prescriptive suggestions in the achievements of strategic management and specifically its central topic, namely competitive advantage.
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