INTEGRATING THE RESOURCE-BASED AND STRATEGIC GROUPS’ INFLUENCES ON FIRM PERFORMANCE: EXTENDING A MESO PERSPECTIVE

Integration of the Resource-Based View of firm performance and the findings from Strategic Groups Research must allow for the separation of firm level effects from those of membership in a particular strategic group. These perspectives have focused on differing levels of analysis. Further integration requires combining variables from these different levels of analysis, recognizing the MESO nature of both the relationships among these variables as well as the fundamentally inter-level character of these variables themselves. It is shown that the meaning and measurement of these terms, as well as the statistical procedures used to test relationships among them, must be better understood in order to extend an initial integration of the RBV and SGR provided by Short, Palmer and Ketchen (2003). A framework for such an extension is discussed.