Editorial: Competitive productivity (CP): advancing the competitiveness paradigm

Abstract

[...]CP is centred around (1) relativity (performance measurement and management in relation to markets' and competitors' performance and each entity's past performance);(2) benchmarking as in “Einstein Marketing proposes Service Philosophy as the driver of a service provider's market offering (i.e. product features and quality, services mix and quality, price), but importantly, our model includes a contextual moderator in that relationship: the market situation” (Baumann et al., 2016a, b, p. 60);(3) “trilogy architecture” (Baumann et al., 2019, p. 120) integrating macro, meso and micro levels as the newly developed M-M-M CP architecture (national competitive productivity (NCP), firm competitive productivity (FCP), individual competitive productivity (ICP) and (4) pragmatism (move away from long, slow and bureaucratic processes towards a pragmatic approach). Despite the rise in fierce competition over the years, official global competitiveness rankings do not always reflect this changed performance, likely because they were designed in a Western context, and do not capture the nuances attributed to cultural differences – amongst other factors – that shape their competitiveness. Though it is crucial to explore contributing factors such as education and role of institutions, culture, operating practices and policies as some determinants, our interest in furthering the CP narrative is to push the boundaries and entertain novel theories that are interdisciplinary, or not usually found in the literature, especially in the domain of cross-cultural and strategic management. Competitiveness and productivity research in business and management, and related disciplines, is not new, yet warrants ongoing investigation because the tides of global activity are constantly changing, and the newly introduced CP paradigm combining competitiveness and productivity warrants empirical verification and theoretical probing.