Whereas pedagogy and its peripheral disciplines are solely based on the individual, business administration considers education based on the role of organizations and individuals. In the pedagogical world, education is a whole range of individual-targeted activities that work with intentions from the outside, and the goal is to expand individual knowledge and skills and shape attitudes, whether it is called cooperative learning or not. On the other hand, the view of education in management studies can be positioned as a tool or process for changing the nature of the organization by expanding individual knowledge and skills and forming new attitudes. However, as the word management is defined as "doing things through others", education is one of the important themes in business administration as well.
In this session, we will consider how education, learning and knowledge have been positioned in business strategy, which is the most senior concept in business administration. Business strategy can be divided into two types: business strategy, which aims to generate profits in each of the company's business fields (industries), and corporate strategy, which refers to how to unite multiple businesses as a company. It is important both in terms of ensuring growth potential in Among the strategic views, strategic theories and approaches related to education here, the Resource-Based View, a strategic view that proactively positions human and organizational capabilities as resources that should be utilized by the company; the Learning Approach, which focuses on the importance of the process by which organizations learn knowledge, skills and attitudes; the We then discuss "value differentiation" with a focus on organizational structures and activity processes that produce innovation.
（1）Resource-Based View
The basic method of acquiring the people, goods, money, information, and knowledge necessary for a company's business (management of management resources) is to either bring them in from outside or manage them internally. While recruiting from outside is advantageous for rapid resource acquisition, J. B. Baney of Ohio State University proposed the importance of developing the core human resources that are essential for achieving the organization's goals. The positioning view, which seeks to position the company in a favorable market position, and the resource-based view, which focuses on management resources, are two typical streams of management strategy theory. Equivalent to the latter, we aim to establish superiority through the use of management resources and lateral deployment of resources.
In addition to corporate resources, which are the financial, physical, human and organizational attributes of a company, the organizational attributes that combine and utilize those resources are specifically called "capabilities" and the framework called VRIO as a criterion to determine how effective they are in establishing competitive advantage VRIO questions a company's resources from the four perspectives of economic value, rarity, inimitability, and organization to identify long-term competitive advantages that are difficult for competitors to imitate. The idea is to analyze whether or not it can be produced.
- economic value
Can management resources and capabilities neutralize threats or seize opportunities in the external environment?
- rarity
Do only a small number of competitors control the same type of management resources?
- difficulty in imitating
Are firms that do not have similar resources at a cost disadvantage in acquiring or developing those resources?
- organization
Do you have organizational policies and procedures in place to utilize valuable, rare and costly management resources that have high imitation costs?
From this perspective, it is the organization's vision and structure for human resource development that gives it a strong competitive edge, rather than the human resources themselves, which can be transferred from the outside, but are also at risk of being lost.
（2）Learning approach
While the resource-based view focuses on management resources, a factor within the organization, and especially emphasizes the importance of human resources, the strategic view called the "learning approach" believes that the process of learning by the organization itself is what creates an advantage. The learning approach, on the other hand, is not unidirectional and is based on the premise that management strategy theory up to that point was based on the implementation of plans made in advance to achieve specific organizational goals, but the learning approach is not unidirectional. The Therefore, whereas many other business strategy theories, such as the resource-based view, attempt to present specific strategic options, the learning approach does not present strategic options directly. The emphasis is on the process of strategy formation and the process by which the organization accumulates the capabilities required to execute the strategy.
In the learning approach, the strategy formation process does not assume that only the "intended" strategy will be implemented. Based on the idea that predicting the future is not as easy as pre-planned strategies can be, "emergent" strategies are created in the field, or strategies themselves are modified by learning from "unrealized" strategies. From this process, the organization also learns business procedures, standard patterns, how to deal with the external environment, how to solve problems, etc., and builds and forms rules and organizational culture. This is called organizational learning.
In other words, the point of the learning approach is not to formulate and implement the most effective strategy at the moment, but to learn from the environment of the moment in order to gain competitive advantage in the future.
（3）Value Differentiation
In today's world of globalized competition, it is quite difficult to maintain a long-term advantage based on current resources alone. By changing the structure of competition itself through innovation, it is possible to gain a more powerful advantage. For example, if we can bring an electric car to market that outperforms Toyota's Prius, and if we can turn the battery manufacturing and management technology and charging infrastructure into a business resource, we could fundamentally change the competitive structure of the industry. Organizations that can continuously generate such innovations are an important topic of recent research in management science. Ken Kusunoki argues that innovation at the conceptual level is the source of stronger competitive advantage, and he analyzes organizational structures and processes of organizational activities in a model of "value differentiation" (value difference) and "bounded co-habitation" (bounded co-habitation).
According to Kusunoki, the knowledge that drives innovation is shifting from traditional knowledge of "know-why" and "know-how" to "know-what," which is the learned knowledge of "research" that has led the U.S. to become the world's number one manufacturer of computers, rockets, and automobiles. The know-how is the knowledge learned by doing, and can be thought of as the knowledge that led to the innovations of Japanese companies that created sophisticated products based on American technology and were largely responsible for the collapse of General Motors and Chrysler. The The competitive advantage of Japanese companies in the 1980s and early 1990s is analyzed using the resource-based view and the learning approach, and the source of their superiority was the process of accumulating and acquiring knowledge. On the other hand, KNOW-WHOW is considered to be learned knowledge by use, which generates concept-level innovation, such as "how and in what context users will use the product" or "what value they will seek". As the way of organization to create this concept-level innovation, it is effective to create an organizational structure of "value differentiation" and an environment of "constrained coexistence" in the value-differentiated organization.
The counterpart to value differentiation is functional differentiation, which works best in cases where the concept is already established. Products and services are developed through business processes that involve a pre-designed system of division of labor and cross-functional integration, which results in a deepening of the organization's expertise. However, what is (or could be) a pre-determined concept is now the exception rather than the rule. Some people see the car as a mere transportation tool, while others think of it as a space to enjoy communicating with their families. Or perhaps some people use their cars to express themselves. When the concept is as multifaceted as this, it is more likely that the concept will evolve in an emergent way if we adopt a value-differentiated organizational form, in other words, work in units based on the values of each.
Constrained coexistence means that in order for a value-differentiated organization to facilitate the emergent evolution of a concept, multiple different differentiated activities (sub-organizations/teams) must be positioned for close interaction, and activities must coexist under various constraints, such as cost, resources, time and space, while sharing the final overarching concept. It is defined as letting Because of the constraints, each value-based activity creates tensions within the organization that compete for conceptual superiority and generate constructive interactions. As a result, concepts are relativized and better concepts are created.
The concept of value differentiation and coexistence of constraints can be positioned as a learning environment for organizations to innovate.
Education in the field of business administration is often discussed at the functional strategy level, which is a subordinate level of management strategy, such as organization theory and human resource management, and at the more practical level of planning and practice, such as employee training. It is also possible to position it as.
Required reading
- 青島矢一・加藤俊彦（2012）「戦略競争論の4つのアプローチ」『競争戦略論（第2版）』東洋経済新報社(in Japanese)
＊It includes more than just the resource-based view (the resource approach) and the learning approach, but we recommend reading the positioning approach and the game approach sections as well for an overview of management strategy theory.
- 楠木建（2001）「価値分化：製品コンセプトのイノベーションを組織化する」『組織科学』 Vol. 35, No. 2, pp. 16-37. (in Japanese)
It's easy to get it from Content Works' online bookstore, booknest（http://www.booknest.jp/）
References
- Jay B. Barney (2002) Gaining And Sustaining Competitive Advantage, Second Edition. Pearson Education .
- Mintzberg, H., B. Ahlstrand and J. Lampel (2008) Strategy Safari: The complete guide through the wilds of strategic management (2nd Edition). Pearson Education Canada