Why a management concept fails to support managers’ work: The case of the ‘core competence of a corporation’
区分了经验抽象与理论抽象，指出管理概念从理论抽象转为经验抽象后，会引发管理者对现有能力的无效分类而非创造新能力，以“企业核心竞争力”概念为例说明。
Management concepts are both products and instruments of abstractive thinking. This conceptual article discusses the relationship between different forms of abstraction and the practical relevance of management concepts. It focuses on the difference between empirical and theoretical abstraction. The former serves to categorize while the latter serves to explain and construct. We argue that this distinction can partly explain the difficulties managers face when using the management concepts that researchers have introduced. To substantiate our claim, we analyse the creation and use of the concept of a corporation’s core competence. The analysis shows how, in this case, a theoretical abstraction of a novel strategic principle turned into an empirical abstraction, which in practice has triggered unproductive attempts to categorize existing competencies rather than create new ones.