Manufacturing strategies in different environments: does equifinality or a dominant strategy exist?

Shaohan Cai

International Journal of Management and Enterprise Development, 2017, vol. 16, issue 3, 243-273

Abstract: This study addresses two essential issues related to equifinality: (1) whether firms can choose different but equally effective manufacturing strategies for different environments (equifinality) and (2) whether there is one strategy adopted by more firms than others (dominant strategy) in each individual environment. With data collected from 434 Chinese manufacturing companies, this study identifies a four-cluster taxonomy of business environments (harsh, labour munificent, stable and low-cost) and a four-cluster taxonomy of manufacturing strategies (mass servers, marketeers, manufacturing emphasisers and low emphasisers). The analyses show that dynamism and munificence exert joint effects on equifinality and the existence of a dominant strategy.

Keywords: China; equifinality; manufacturing strategy; taxonomy. (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.inderscience.com/link.php?id=85068 (text/html)
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:ids:ijmede:v:16:y:2017:i:3:p:243-273

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in International Journal of Management and Enterprise Development from Inderscience Enterprises Ltd
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sarah Parker ().