The New Industrial State Revisited

How firms and nations handle the antinomy of chauvinist versus comprehensive rationality varies with the spirits of capitalist evolution. These spirits vary with structures of ownership and control, that is, with what controlling interests perceive as critical resource dependences. Critical or vital are those dependences that are seen as directly related to the core competences of organizations, which are defined by the dominant coalitions of interests that decide the course of an organization. An organization’s sense of direction, derived from its self-defined core competence, leads to a selection of core competitors, that is, a selection of rivals that serve as a benchmark for comparing and assessing the organization’s performance and the sustainability of its ambitions. The selection of core competitors, in turn, leads to the identification of core complementors, that is, the dominant alliances of a private, public or semi-public signature with whom organizations think they can preserve or strengthen their identity and ambitions or, more fundamentally, to alter their course and competence and to recast the rules of rivalry and cooperation.