This is a conceptual paper. In her doctoral thesis, “Capital functions and the position of the workers” (in Swedish), published in 1980, Philpson, explored a Marxian theory of Business administration, based on a little known work by Marx, “Resultate des unmittelbares produktionsprozesses”. She explored the three concepts “levels of functions of capital”, after Bettelheim, the “generalisation of capital functions” and hence globalisation and the possibility to use the concept of “hegemony” in business administration, after Gramsci.

Two of the principle concepts were Marx’ “inner” and “outer” conditions of production. These pre-empted the Resource-Based View (RBV) and the School of Industrial Organization (IO) with hundred years. In Philipson, she proposed 72 phenotypes for the principle strategic situations for companies, based on their inner and outer conditions of production. The resource based view and the Industrial Organization School have long been two antagonistic explanations of the strategic possibilities of firms.

This study is a synthesis of these two schools based on the framework developed in Philipson. It suggests a phenomenology for studying firm strategy that might possibly give precedence for a different mix of the two schools in the phenomenological cases.

In spite of the development of the RBV and the IO over the last 30 years, the most interesting questions to pursue for strategy research are how companies transcends their resources to reinvent themselves and how they transcend their resources to face new environmental conditions of which they do not have enough experience and resources; hence the trans- cendence of their limitations.