Gaining Competitive Advantage through Strategically Use of Government within Mainland China

摘要

In strategic management field,Porter (1980) proposed his famous "five forces" model and argued that a given firm can gain a competitive advantage when it achieves higher bargaining power than each of the five forces. However,the 5F model is criticized by some scholars since it doesn't consider the impact of government. This paper takes the view that "government" is the sixth force within an industry. Through building a good guanxi with government,business can not only insure its access to scare resources controlled by government,but also effectively beat the five forces through strategically using the sixth force "government" or/and her public policies,and thus gain competitive advantage. In this paper,the importance of government in China is firstly discussed within the industrial organization structure. How business strategically use the "government" is then analyzed,and the approaches to build guanxi with government are further discussed. Recognizing the importance of government is meaningful to any business.