Vegetable market: competitive advantages of Georgian product and competition challenges

The increasing turmoil in the external organizational setting or business environment has focused attention on capabilities and resources as the primary source of competitive advantage. Obviously, this statement points to the application of the resource-based view (RBV) of organizational management. Nevertheless, what constitutes RBV remains an illusion in many quarters of organizational management, as scholars have managed to put up their personal ideas, and managed to converge on phenomenon-driven theories, in addition to RBV. This paper reviews the concepts of RBV in light of knowledge management to highlight some critical pitfalls that might have eluded the research community on the subject matter of RBV. To this end, this paper’s educational value lies in the fact that it simplifies the concept of RBV to the new researcher in a fashion that is capable of appealing to his or her level. A cross-sectional qualitative research approach was employed in an effort aimed at understanding the role of RBV in creating a sustainable competitive advantage and key competencies. A total of 20 relevant articles were searched from different databases and search engines, including Scopus, EBSCO, ABI Inform, IEEE, PubMed, Science Direct, SABINET, IEEE, Bing, Science Direct, and Google Scholar. The findings indicate that RBV plays an important role and assists organizations not only create, nurture, and maintain competitive advantage, but also understand the collective resources needed to compete favorably in a globalized and highly competitive market. With expert knowledge workers at its core to provide support for knowledge creation, sharing, and utilization, the RBV principles discussed in this paper promise to guarantee a methodological step geared towards the achievement of competitive advantage. It, therefore, makes an incremental contribution to the RBV to attain modest improvement in organizational settings.

This article provides a new perspective on sustainable marketing strategies in the context of a globalized clothing and textile (C&T) sector in Zimbabwe by linking two diverse streams of literature, namely, globalization and marketing strategy. A quantitative approach was adopted to obtain data from 127 respondents using a two-stage cluster sample. Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) confirmed three of four hypothesized relationships, namely that integrated co-alliances, modern technology and national policy impact the sustainability of clothing and textile sector in Zimbabwe. The adoption of a standardized marketing strategy characterized by uniform application of the marketing mix elements with minor modifications will have a significant impact on the capacity of the C&T sector to withstand the adverse effects of globalization. The research extends the body of existing knowledge on marketing strategy in the context of globalization of Zimbabwe’s C&T sector, and argues empirically for a new approach to developing and implementing competitive marketing strategies. The research findings will enable companies in the C&T sector of a developing economy to craft competitive marketing strategies, which incorporate internal company capabilities and technology, and also recognize the role of national policy in the globalization discourse.

There is no consensus in theoretical and empirical studies about the relationship between bank competition and stability. This research aims to investigate the relationship between bank competition and stability in the UK. The analysis has been done on a large sample of UK banks for the period 2004–2014. There is quite contrasting evidence on the bank competition and bank soundness relationship. A unified framework has been developed to assess how different factors may make it more likely that the data favor one theory over another. The results suggest that in some cases a U-shaped relationship exists between bank competition and stability. Therefore the conclusion is that in order to protect the bank from different risk exposures a moderate level of bank competition is needed.