Is Competitive Advantage Intellectually Sustainable?

One can never be sure what a finding about “competitive advantage” means unless one reads the “fine print” of a particular work’s definition. ... [W]hen people use the same term to mean many different things and/or call the same thing by many different terms, it is hard either to have a conversation or to efficiently present one’s findings. As Oxley, Rivkin, and Ryall (2010, p. 379) have suggested, one criterion for a piece of theory in strategy to be high quality should be that “The theoretical claims [of the work] are unambiguous: interpretation of its terms, premises and conclusions does not vary from scholar to scholar.” The strategy field is clearly failing to meet that test with respect to “competitive advantage.” At least one scholar (Lieberman, 2010) has called for abandonment of the term in research settings for precisely this reason.