Towards a Stakeholder Perspective on Competitive Advantage

Competitive advantage and stakeholder management are two important research streams that have attracted much attention during the past few decades. Distinctive approaches to studies on competitive advantage exhibit differences in their assumptions, units of analysis, and strategic implications; however, none of them can individually explain the whole concept of competitive advantage. Although competitive advantage is the core issue of strategic management in which stakeholder management is rooted, the two topics have developed seemingly independently in the literature. By focusing on value creation, value protection, and value capture, this paper suggests a theoretical framework that employs a stakeholder perspective, linking three approaches on competitive advantage—the resource-based view, the relational view, and the activity-position view. This framework provides insight to an incomplete picture of competitive advantage in the extant literature.