The dialectics of competency acquisition: pollution prevention in electric generation
研究宏观系统特性（如政府与市场的对立逻辑）与微观企业行为（如搜索人才、技术并整合内部学习）如何共同影响新能力的获取，以发电行业污染预防为例。
Strategy researchers now recognize that distinctive competencies are critically important for sustained competitive advantage. The processes by which such competencies are acquired, however, has only started to be examined. Connections between macro-industrial system level properties and micro-developments in proprietary technology at the firm level need to be made. This paper argues that system-wide properties, such as long-standing elementary and opposing logics in societal forces like governments and markets, and micro-developments, such as the firm's capacity to search for talent, technology, and ideas and to harmonize what it learns internally, can contribute in significant ways to the creation and acquisition of new competencies. Based on the case of pollution prevention in electric generation, it shows how the system-wide properties channel and direct the paths that the acquisition of new competencies take and how they interact with micro-developments at the firm level. © 1998 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.