The Red Queen among Organizations: How Competitiveness Evolves

Description

There's a scene in Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking Glass in which the Red Queen, having just led a chase with Alice in which neither seems to have moved from the spot where they began, explains to the perplexed girl: "It takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place." Evolutionary biologists have used this scene to illustrate the

William P. Barnett is the Thomas M. Siebel Professor of Business Leadership, Strategy, and Organizations at Stanford University's Graduate School of Business.

The Red Queen Among Organizations represents outstanding scholarship in the organisational theory field but is sufficiently rooted in the "real world" to be of benefit to business strategists and particularly to MBA and doctoral students in the field of corporate strategy. [I]t is a serious attempt to understand organisational behaviour, and it does it exceptionally well."--Cary L. Cooper, Times Higher Education "The main strength of the book is in highlighting the importance of competition in market-based economies for building viable, adaptive organizations."--Jason Potts, Kate Morrison, The Business Economist "Barnett presents an excellent theoretical account of the evolution of competitiveness, supported by empirical evidence... This ecological theory provides an excellent complement and contrast to many existing theoretical frameworks in strategic management."--J.J. Bailey, Choice "The most ambitious and important new book is The Red Queen among Organizations, by William P. Barnett... [I]t is the best strategy book of the year because of its main insights: Competition concerns relative performance, not absolute performance; a company's competitiveness is context specific, and contexts can change, giving rise to the competency trap; learning comes from competing, not isolation from competition; and differentiation is desirable as a way to secure rents, but must be pursued in the context of competition, not in the vain hopes of avoiding it."--Phil Rosenzweig, Stratgey & Business "Barnett's presentation of the Red Queen theory is a well-crafted, nuanced, and thoughtful contribution to the voluminous literature on organizational population change."--David Knoke, American Journal of Sociology