Intra-industry structure and performance: strategic groups and strategic blocks in the worldwide airline industry

Strategic groups and strategic blocks offer alternative ways to study intra-industry structure and to predict systematic performance differences across firms. Yet, this paper argues that more accurate predictions of competitive performance can be derived from an integrated use of these concepts. Integrating the concepts of strategic groups and blocks calls for a more nuanced definition of intra-industry structure than is customary in strategic management today. Such a reconceptualization has consequences not just for research, it would also require changes in the tools that practitioners use to analyze intra-industry structure. The validity of a joint model of intra-industry structure is established empirically in the worldwide airline industry using inside-out and outside-in analysis concurrently. European Management Review (2004) 1,132-1 44, advance online publication, 26 November 2004 doi: 10.1057/palgrave.emr.1500018