Jay B. Barney (born October 8, 1954) is an American professor in strategic management at the

University of Utah The University of Utah (U of U, UofU, or simply The U) is a public research university in Salt Lake City, Utah. It is the flagship institution of the Utah System of Higher Education. The university was established in 1850 as the University of De ...

Early life and education

Jay Barney was born in

Walnut Creek, California Walnut Creek is a city in Contra Costa County, California, United States, located in the East Bay region of the San Francisco Bay Area, about east of the city of Oakland. With a total population of 70,127 per the 2020 census, Walnut Creek s ...

on October 8, 1954. He spent his formative years in

San Bruno San Bruno (Spanish for " St. Bruno") is a city in San Mateo County, California, United States, incorporated in 1914. The population was 43,908 at the 2020 United States Census. The city is between South San Francisco and Millbrae, adjacent to ...

, California and graduated from

San Carlos High School San Carlos High School was a high school operated by the Sequoia Union High School District in San Carlos, California, United States, from 1960 until 1982. Originally founded due to increasing enrollment across Belmont, San Carlos, and Redwood C ...

in San Carlos, California in 1972. He attended

Brigham Young University Brigham Young University (BYU, sometimes referred to colloquially as The Y) is a private research university in Provo, Utah. It was founded in 1875 by religious leader Brigham Young and is sponsored by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-d ...

in Provo, Utah where he majored in

sociology Sociology is a social science that focuses on society, human social behavior, patterns of social relationships, social interaction, and aspects of culture associated with everyday life. It uses various methods of empirical investigation an ...

. He graduated from BYU, summa cum laude, in December 1974 and began the

Doctor of Philosophy A Doctor of Philosophy (PhD, Ph.D., or DPhil; Latin: or ') is the most common degree at the highest academic level awarded following a course of study. PhDs are awarded for programs across the whole breadth of academic fields. Because it is ...

program in sociology at

Yale University Yale University is a Private university, private research university in New Haven, Connecticut. Established in 1701 as the Collegiate School, it is the List of Colonial Colleges, third-oldest institution of higher education in the United Sta ...

New Haven New Haven is a city in the U.S. state of Connecticut. It is located on New Haven Harbor on the northern shore of Long Island Sound in New Haven County, Connecticut and is part of the New York City metropolitan area. With a population of 134,023 ...

, Connecticut in 1976.

Career

Barney joined the faculty at the Anderson Graduate School of Management at

UCLA The University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) is a public land-grant research university in Los Angeles, California. UCLA's academic roots were established in 1881 as a teachers college then known as the southern branch of the California ...

in 1980. He moved to the Mays Business School at

Texas A&M University Texas A&M University (Texas A&M, A&M, or TAMU) is a public, land-grant, research university in College Station, Texas. It was founded in 1876 and became the flagship institution of the Texas A&M University System in 1948. As of late 2021, T ...

in 1986, then to the Fisher College of Business at the

Ohio State University The Ohio State University, commonly called Ohio State or OSU, is a public land-grant research university in Columbus, Ohio. A member of the University System of Ohio, it has been ranked by major institutional rankings among the best publ ...

in 1994, where he held the Chase Chair for Excellence in Corporate Strategy, and then to the Eccles School of Business at the University of Utah in 2012, where he held the rank of Presidential Professor and the Lassonde Chair in Social Entrepreneurship. Professor Barney's 1991 paper has developed a framework for distinguishing among several different types of firm performance—i.e., competitive disadvantage, competitive parity, temporary competitive advantage, and sustained competitive advantage

competitive advantage In business, a competitive advantage is an attribute that allows an organization to outperform its competitors. A competitive advantage may include access to natural resources, such as high-grade ores or a low-cost power source, highly skilled ...

—and identified the attributes of resources and capabilities that would make them costly to imitate. This framework is known as the VRIO (Valuable, Rare, Costly to Imitate, and exploited by Organization). In the mid-2000s, Professor Barney worked with Dr. Sharon Alvarez to develop a new theoretical approach to the study of entrepreneurship. Research topics that build directly on resource-based theory include The Knowledge based Theory of the Firm,

Relational View In management, the relational view by Jeffrey H. Dyer and Harbir Singh is a theory for considering networks and dyads of firms as the unit of analysis to explain relational rents, i.e., superior individual firm performance generated within that ne ...

Dynamic Capabilities In organizational theory, dynamic capability is the capability of an organization to purposefully adapt an organization's resource base. The concept was defined by David Teece, Gary Pisano and Amy Shuen, in their 1997 paper ''Dynamic Capabilities ...

, theories of

core competence A core competency is a concept in management theory introduced by C. K. Prahalad and Gary Hamel.Prahalad, C.K. and Hamel, G. (1990)The core competence of the corporation", Harvard Business Review (v. 68, no. 3) pp. 79–91. It can be define ...

, and competitive heterogeneity. Barney currently serves as the editor of the ''Academy of Management Review''.

Awards and honors

* Academy of Management Scholarly Contributions Award (2010) * Irwin Outstanding Educator Award, Business Policy and Strategy Division of the Academy of Management (2005) * Fellow, Academy of Management (2001) * Fellow, Strategic Management Society (2007) * Ph.D. (Honorary) Universidad Pontificia Comillas, Madrid, Spain (2011) * Ph.D. (Honorary) Copenhagen Business School, Copenhagen, Denmark (2008) * Ph.D. (Honorary) Lund University, Lund, Sweden (1997)

Selected works

Journal articles

* Jay B. Barney (1986) "Organizational Culture: Can It Be a Source of Sustained Competitive Advantage?" Academy of Management Review. 11: 656-665. * Jay B. Barney (1986) "Strategic Factor Markets: Expectations, Luck, and Business Strategy," Management Science, 32(10): 1231-1241. * Jay B. Barney (1988) "Returns to Bidding Firms in Mergers and Acquisitions: Reconsidering the Relatedness Hypothesis," Strategic Management Journal, 9, Special Issue: 71-78. * Jay B. Barney (1990) The debate between Traditional Management Theory and Organizational Economics: Substantive Differences and Intergroup Conflict?, Vol. 15, No.3: 382-393 * Jay B. Barney (1991) "Firm Resources and Sustained Competitive Advantage," Journal of Management, 17(1): 99-120. * Jay B. Barney and Mark Hansen (1994) "Trustworthiness as a Source of Competitive Advantage," Strategic Management Journal, Vol. 15: 175-190. * Jay B. Barney (1995) "Looking Inside for Competitive Advantage," Academy of Management Executive, 9(4): 49-61. * Bill Fuerst, Jay B. Barney, and F. Mata (1996) "Information Technology and Sustained Competitive Advantage: A Resource-Based Analysis," MIS Quarterly, 19: 487-505. * Jay B. Barney and Patrick Wright (1998) “On Becoming a Strategic Partner: The Role of Human Resources in Gaining Competitive Advantage,” Human Resource Management, 37: 31-46. * Sharon A. Alvarez and Jay B. Barney (2007) "Discovery and creation: alternative theories of entrepreneurial action." Strategic Entrepreneurship Journal 1(1–2): 11–26. * Sharon A. Alvarez, Jay B. Barney, and Phillip Anderson (2012) “Forming and Exploiting Opportunities: The Implications of Discovery and Creation Processes for Entrepreneurial and Organizational Research,” Organization Science, 24(1): 301 -317.

Books

* Jay B. Barney and William G. Ouchi. (1986) Organizational Economics: Toward a New Paradigm for Studying and Understanding Organizations. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. * Jay B. Barney and Ricky Griffin (1992) Managing Organizations: Strategy, Structure, and Behavior. Boston: Houghton-Mifflin. * Jay B. Barney (2010) Gaining and Sustaining Competitive Advantage, currently in 4th edition, Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson/Prentice Hall. (Translated into Japanese, Chinese, Italian) * Jay B. Barney and William Hesterly. (2014) Strategic Management and Competitive Advantage. Currently in 5th edition. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall. (Translated into Chinese, Korean) * Jay B. Barney and Delwyn Clark (2007) Resource-based Theory: Creating and Sustaining Competitive Advantage. London: Oxford University Press, 2007. (Translated into Chinese) * Jay B. Barney and Trish Clifford (2010) What I Didn’t Learn in Business School: Making Strategy Work in the Real World. Cambridge: Harvard Business Review Press. (Translated into Korean, Hungarian, Chinese, Polish)

Personal life

Barney resides in Park City, Utah. He is married with three children.

References

* Michael Porter (1979) “How competitive forces shape strategy,” Harvard Business Review, March/April: 137 – 156; Michael Porter (1980) Competitive Strategy. NY: Free Press. * Joe Bain (1956) Barriers to New Competition. Cambridge, MA: Harvard. * Richard Rumelt (1984) “Toward a strategic theory of the firm,” in R. Lamb (ed.), Competitive Strategic Management. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, pp. 556 – 570. * Birger Wernerfelt (1984) “A resource-based view of the firm,” Strategic Management Journal, 5: 171 – 180. * Jay B. Barney (1986a) “Strategic factor markets: Expectations, luck, and the theory of business strategy,” Management Science, 32(10): 1231 – 1241; Jay B. Barney (1986b) “Organizational culture: Can it be a source of sustained competitive advantage?” Academy of Management Review, 11: 656 – 665; Jay B. Barney (1988) “Returns to bidding firms in mergers and acquisitions: Reconsidering the relatedness hypothesis,” Strategic Management Journal, 9: 71 – 78. * Margie Peteraf (1993) “The cornerstones of competitive advantage: A resource-based view,” Strategic Management Journal, 14: 179 – 191. * Jay B. Barney (1991) “Firm resources and sustained competitive advantage,” Journal of Management, 17: 99 – 120. * W. B. Arthur (1989) “Competing technologies, increasing returns, and lock-in by historical events,” Economic Journal, 99: 116 – 131. * Steve Lippman and Richard Rumelt (1982) “Uncertain imitability: An analysis of inter-firm differences in efficiency under competition,” Bell Journal of Economics, 13: 418 – 438. * 0Jay B. Barney (1986b) “Organizational culture: Can it be a source of sustained competitive advantage?” Academy of Management Review, 11: 656 – 665. * 1I. Dierickx and K. Cool (1989) “Asset stock accumulation and sustainability of competitive advantage,” Management Science, 35: 1504 – 1511. * 2Jay B. Barney (1996) Gaining and Sustaining Competitive Advantage. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley. * 3Jay B. Barney and Patrick Wright (1998) “On Becoming a Strategic Partner: The Role of Human Resources in Gaining Competitive Advantage,” Human Resource Management, 37: 31-46. * 4Gautum Ray, Jay Barney, and W. Muhanna (2005) “Information Technology and the Performance of the Customer Service Process in North American Insurance Companies: A Resource-based Analysis,” Management Information Systems Quarterly, 29: 625-652. * 5S. D. Hunt and D.F. Davis (2008) “Grounding supply chain management in resource-advantage theory,” Journal of Supply Chain Management, 44(1): 10 – 21. * 6Sharon Alvarez and Jay B. Barney (2007) “Discovery and Creation: Alternative Theories of Entrepreneurial Action,” Strategic Entrepreneurship Journal 1(1): pp. 11 – 26; Sharon Alvarez, Jay B. Barney, and Phil Anderson (2013) “Forming and Exploiting Opportunities: The Implications of Discovery and Creation Processes for Entrepreneurial and Organizational Research,” Organization Science, 24(1): 301 -317.