Self-Regulation as a Nonmarket Strategy. An Exploratory Study on Mechanisms Transforming Firm’s Nonmarket Environment

For a long time, largely inspired by Porter (1980, 1985), researchers in business strategy have focused on how companies seek a sustainable competitive advantage through several manners directly related to the firm’s positioning in a marketplace. Most strategic management theories focus on how firms achieve and sustain competitive advantage over their rivals when the landscape is given. It means that pre-existing institutions, independent from an organization, constrain and determine actors and their behaviour. Moreover, any change to the business conditions presumably occurs for exogenous reasons (external environment) and thus shall be passively accepted or addressed with resources and competencies that the firm detains.