Content area
Full Text
ABSTRACT
As business becomes more fast-paced in the 21st century, organizational success relies ever increasingly on knowledge resources. Therefore, firms constantly engage in activities to search and integrate external knowledge resources with their internal ones for upgrading their existing knowledge bases. These activities and processes that relate to the search, assimilation, integration and transformation of external and internal knowledge resources are labeled as 'absorptive capacity' (AC) of a firm. The aim of this study is to review the AC literature in order to enhance understanding about the nature of this important organizational construct as well as to appraise possible avenues for AC and institutional theory (IT) literature to connect with each other. To achieve this objective, the study examines the origin, major contribution, and antecedents and outcomes of AC. The review reveals AC as a multidimensional construct, which has been repeatedly re-evaluated, modified, and reconceptualized by several authors since its inception. Until recently, the construct has been studied at different analytical levels across different research settings. We pinpoint prior related knowledge as the most prominent antecedent of AC alongside a wide variety of other factors and argue that different antecedents may have varying effects on different dimensions of the AC. In addition to this, AC influences various organizational outcomes such as innovation, performance, and learning. Surprisingly, there is a very limited research that connects the institutional perspective with the AC, which holds immense potential for future research efforts.
JEL Classification: M10; M19.
Keywords: Absorptive Capacity; Institutional Theory; Review; Antecedents; Outcomes.
1.INTRODUCTION
Since the 1990s, the topics of absorptive capacity (AC) and institutional theory (IT) have become among the most fertile research areas in the field of management and organization studies. Though the two come from completely different research traditions and have evolved independently from one another, they share a common understanding of the adoption and diffusion of new knowledge (resources) with a different focus. AC, on the one hand, enables a firm to acquire and assimilate knowledge, on the other hand, IT talks about obstacles and knowledge embeddedness in a particular institutional context (Martin, Massy, and Clarke, 2003).
Though the concept of AC has until now been evaluated by many other scholars (e.g., Zahra and George, 2002; Lane and Lubatkin, 1998), the work of...