Knowledge and sustainable competitive advantage of the Eyre Peninsula's fishing industry in Australia

• Author: Samuel Howard Quartey
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1002/kpm.1592
• Date: 01 April 2019
• Published date: 01 April 2019

RESEARCH ARTICLE

Knowledge and sustainable competitive advantage of the Eyre

Peninsula's fishing industry in Australia

Samuel Howard Quartey

1,2

1

Marketing and Management, Adelaide

Business School, University of Adelaide,

Adelaide, South Australia, Australia

2

Department of Human Resource

Management, Central University, Accra,

Ghana

Correspondence

Samuel Howard Quartey, Marketing and

Management, Adelaide Business School,

University of Adelaide, Adelaide, SA, Australia;

Department of Human Resource

Management, Central Business School, P. O.

Box 2305 Miotso‐Tema Accra‐Ghana, West

Africa.

Email: samuel.quartey@adelaide.edu.au;

showard.quartey@central.edu.gh

Funding information

Adelaide Scholarship International (ASI)

Researchers have largely emphasised the strategic importance of knowledge as a

source of competitive advantage from a firm‐level perspective. Instead, this study

looks at knowledge and sustainable competitive advantage from an industry‐level

perspective. The knowledge‐based view of the firm continues to provide a nuanced

understanding of firms' competitiveness but less on industry competitiveness. This

study specifically addresses knowledge‐based view of sustainable competitive

advantage from a fishing industry perspective by using an exploratory qualitative

design and thematic analysis of 54 interviews. The findings demonstrate a strategic,

organisational, and commercial influence of knowledge on establishing a sustainable

competitive advantage. This study contradicts the universal theoretical assumption

that a firm is an effective knowledge creating and distributing entity by arguing that

an industry can also create deep knowledge for competition through collaboration

than most firms. It argues that knowledge can be the most important source of

sustainable competitive advantage for the industry. This paper advances scholarly

works that seek to deepen and understand the intersection between knowledge

management and strategic management.

1|INTRODUCTION

How organisations build sustained competitive advantage has been an

important focus of scholarly interests in the fields of strategic manage-

ment and organisation science (Chuang, 2004). Organisational

theorists have long been preoccupied with the question of human

knowledge in organisations, and how knowledge emerges and is

created has become a central concern in organisations, and research

interests in the role of knowledge in firm competiveness continue to

accelerate. Researchers exploring this area of research are increasingly

investigating the processes leading to the creation, distribution, and

integration of knowledge as features of firm superior performance

and competitiveness (e.g., R. M. Grant, 1996; Spender & Grant,

1996). These researchers have been more concerned with social and

economic processes and outcomes of knowledge combination

and integration. They further opine that knowledge is a means to an

end and not the end in itself, arguing that knowledge as a resource

can be a catalyst for pursuing competitive advantage.

The present study defines sustainable competitive advantage as

the ability of an industry to survive and succeed in a dynamic

competitive environment. However, in the past, most firms desired

competiveness where they appealed to the majority of their current

and emergent customers in their targeted markets. Hall (1992)

maintains that firms seek to sustain competitive advantage by

possessing relevant capability differentials. Capability differentials

help firms to leverage their assets, resources, and capabilities that

are difficult to duplicate or exceed and provide a superior long‐term

position and existence than competitors (Coyne, 1986). Teece (2007)

further argues that the microfoundation of firms' sustainable perfor-

mance is knowledge that is capable of developing dynamic capabilities.

This view suggests that knowledge as a source of firms' capability

differentials and superior performance can play a significant role in

sustaining industry competiveness.

Knowledge as a powerful competitive weapon has been strongly

emphasised in the strategic management literature, yet the sustain-

ability of the competitive advantage provided by knowledge is not

well explained (Chuang, 2004). Knowledge could mean anything from

justifiable truth (Nonaka, 1994), art of knowing and doing (Argyris &

Schon, 1996), and practice‐driven (Nag, Corley, & Gioia, 2007) to

organisational capabilities (Gold, Malhotra, & Segars, 2001). Despite

Received: 27 November 2018 Accepted: 3 December 2018

DOI: 10.1002/kpm.1592

86 © 2019 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Knowl Process Manag. 2019;26:86–97.wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/kpm