Rethinking Skinner’s model: strategic trade-offs in products and services

Roberto Sarmiento, Matthias Thurer and Garvan Whelan

Management Research Review, 2016, vol. 39, issue 10, 1199-1213

Abstract: Purpose - The purpose of this paper is to further clarify the link between the theoretical and practical/real-life implications of a seminal topic in the strategic operations management field: Wickham Skinner’s strategic trade-offs model. This will help researchers, practitioners and students to realize the “everyday life” consequences of this highly influential model. Design/methodology/approach - A theoretical analysis is made of previous research dealing with the strategic trade-offs model. Building on these investigations, a Popperian approach is used to logically develop the model, and the authors demonstrate how it can be empirically tested. Findings - Previous investigations on Skinner’s model mainly focus on trade-offs between competitive capabilities (e.g. cost, quality, delivery) at the firm level. This paper demonstrates that the implications of this model necessarily should include consideration of the strategic trade-offs between the competitive characteristics of products/services that practitioners, students and the general public can observe. Originality/value - While previous investigations have provided necessary clarifications, no paper has addressed the issue of the existence of strategic trade-offs between the competitive characteristics of products/services. This paper offers guidelines for researchers and practitioners on the way that the strategic trade-offs model can be conceptualized, understood and tested.

Keywords: Competitive capabilities; Karl Popper; Competitive characteristics of products and services; Falsification theory; Strategic trade-offs; L2; L6; M1 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2016
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.emerald.com/insight/content/doi/10.110 ... d&utm_campaign=repec (text/html)
https://www.emerald.com/insight/content/doi/10.110 ... d&utm_campaign=repec (application/pdf)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eme:mrrpps:v:39:y:2016:i:10:p:1199-1213

DOI: 10.1108/MRR-02-2015-0042

Access Statistics for this article

Management Research Review is currently edited by Dr Jay Janney and Prof Lerong He

More articles in Management Research Review from Emerald Group Publishing Limited
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Emerald Support ().