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California Management Review
California Management Review is a premier academic management journal published at UC Berkeley
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Article Information
Commitment versus Flexibility?
Ghemawat, Pankaj , and Patricio del Sol
40
/
4
(
Summer
1998
):
26
-
42
This article unbundles the relation between commitment and flexibility by distinguishing between firm-specific and usage-specific resources. This distinction turns out to be valuable because firm-specificity does not always imply (nor is it always implied by) usage-specificity. Firm-specific resources are more strategic than usage-specific resources. More broadly, the distinction between these two kinds of specificity helps explain why the tension between commitment and flexibility can easily be overdone: the two aren't always negative measures of each other.