The Emergence of Resource-Based Theory: A Personal Journey

I have recently been encouraged to share my personal reflections on the emergence of resource-based theory. In many ways, I have been reluctant to do so, at least in print, since any such effort would necessarily reflect my idiosyncratic view of this history. A complete discussion of both the people involved in the development of resource-based theory and the context within which this theory developed in the field of management would, I suspect, require the objective eye of a third party. In this way, I certainly do not qualify to write such a history. However, when the 30th anniversary of the publication of the Special Theory Forum on Resource-Based Theory in the Journal of Management came around, I thought it might be time to put down on paper—a quaintly old-fashioned phrase—my own recollections of this history. In doing so, I decided to make no pretense that this is an objective or rigorous historical effort. Rather, these are the reflections of a strategic management scholar, coming toward the end of his career, about a time, now over 30 years ago, when resource-based theory did not yet exist. I have not tried to verify my reflections by appeal to historical documents, except for any papers I and others have published. I did pass this essay by many of the people mentioned in it—to see if my memories were consistent with their memories—but that is as far as I have gone in verifying the “facts” I share in this essay.