Philosophical Notions and Framework

This chapter presents the philosophical notions, theoretical perspectives, models, and empirical findings in the literature that are highly related. The objective of this chapter is to provide a brief definition of philosophical notions and present framework of the book, identify the need for us to focus on customer-focus performance rather than traditional financial performance, define the notion of customer-focused performance, discuss its role in the overall firm performance, and to see which and how different factors influence firm performance. Furthermore, the possible determinants are discussed by examining different perspectives of what factors can exert significant influences on firm performance. To this end, this chapter is divided into four parts. In the first part, definitions of constructs and constituents of core competences in this book are discussed and the framework of this book is given. In the second part, customer-focused performance is discussed in detail based on extant literature and the limitations of traditional financial performance are reviewed. In the third part, determinants of firm performance are analysed, in which several key research streams are reviewed, for example, the environmental determinism such as industrial organizational economics perspective, institutionalism perspective, etc. the strategic adaptation stream, and the resource-based view. Finally, a chapter summary is provided.