Comprehending how private and public sector firms achieve competitiveness and unfold is a major problem that safety, health and environmental students should expect to encounter in their initial job. An incomplete understanding of this fundamental organizational requirement will inevitably hold back student career aspirations. Students should be aware of that working in today's firms requires a crystal clear understanding of the way senior-level executives desire to have their organizations compete and unfold. Previously, students who wanted to better understand this requirement have had to satisfy themselves with fragmented and piecemeal models. As a result, newly placed students may find it extremely difficult to integrate their strategic and technical ideas with other organizational specialists (e.g., finance, managerial specialists, design and process engineers) who will require students to make an organizational logic to their practice.
One-way for students to overcome this difficulty is to be aware of the newly developed organizational models. Over the past three decades, three models on how a firm can unfold have been advanced: industrial organization (IO), the resource-based view of the firm, and Schumpeterian economics. The (IO) position is that the environment determines how the organization will unfold and compete. The resource-based view, an internal perspective, is that competitiveness is achieved through protecting and productively using organizational resources. The Schumpeterian perspective, which has both internal and external elements, is that competitiveness is a function of firm innovation of internal resources and external reaction. This paper will review only the resource-bases view; chiefly because research on the other views are based on decades of theoretical and empirical research; whereas the resource-based view is new, less developed and fits best with the strategies of the modern environment, safety and health movement. The resource-based view of the firm contends that the firm's resources are the foundation for achieving competitive advantage (Hart 1995). Resources of the firm can be classified as the firm's reputation (history & vision), personnel (competencies & capabilities), physical (property, structures, equipment & materials), efficacy (technical efficiency and effectiveness of processes, services, technologies, information systems), and financial types controlled by the firm that have value, are rare, are difficult to imitate, and have few substitutes (Barney 1991). For students, the ability to analyze a firm's failures to use resources productively and protect a firm's resources can itself be a source of competitive advantage. The case for resource protection is grounded upon two business contentions: first, resources provide the guidance for exploiting internal strengths, resolving internal problems and neutralizing external threats. Therefore, for competitiveness to be gained from resources RISKS (i.e., potential harm), DANGERS (vulnerability to sources of harm), and LOSSES (i.e., actual harm sustained) to which a firm's resources might be subjected must be effectively counteracted. The effective characterization of existing and potential risk, danger and loss problems affecting a firm's resources is becoming an increasingly important capability for students to possess.
