National Business Systems and Industry-Specific Competitiveness

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Abstract
Countries have been shown to be competitive in specific industries. This paper contends that this industrial specialization can be understood in terms of an affinity between national `models of capitalism' and the characteristics of industrial task environments. Put differently, industry-specific competitiveness is conceived to arise out of a fit between patterns of national business systems and patterns of industrial task environments. Specifically, the paper will propose a relationship between the communitarian or individualistic nature of national business systems and the organization-specificity of knowledge in an industry. More communitarian business systems are thought to enjoy a competitive advantage in industries with a high organization-specificity of knowledge, i.e. in industries that rely more on the long-term accumulation of organization-specific knowledge within tightly-knit corporate communities. More individualistic business systems, on the other hand, are thought to enjoy a competitive advantage in industries with a low organization-specificity of knowledge, i.e. in industries that thrive more on the speedy dissemination or reallocation of company-unspecific knowledge through a constant reconfiguration of social relationships. The paper will offer some illustrations of these proposed relationships in terms of the competitive profiles of the United States, Japan, Germany and Britain.

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