Campbell-Hunt, C. (2000). What have we learned about generic competitive strategy? A metaanalysis. Strategic Management Journal, 21(2), 127-154.

Porters competitive strategy as a dominant paradigm is two decades old now but it often fails to
describe the performance results of various strategic designs. The author did a meta-analysis to
collect empirical data about the potency of generic competitive strategy to explain performance.
He divided the meta-analysis into three studies- one was a meta-analysis of the principal
elements of competitive strategies that described them, two was a meta-analysis of clustered
categories of competitive strategy design which were compared to the alternative interpretations
of classification of competitive strategies and three was the use of these descriptions to assess
whether the paradigms theoretical proposition that performance depends upon competitive
strategies hold true.
The author used four approaches to understand how the generic competitive strategies are
described the taxonomic, empiricist, nominalist and dimensional interpretation. He made 4
propositions about their description. Then he made two propositions about the theory of
performance as explained by competitive strategies.
He used meta-analysis for the first study. He made a distinction between two kinds of metaanalysis descriptive and inferential. He used a descriptive and made the case why inferential
will not hold true. The analysis identified meta-dimensions of the competitive strategies votevectors are used to establish relationships between meta-dimensions, and these were not
dependent on the sample size. The study applied both hierarchical agglomeration and the density
analysis algorithm for cluster analysis. Seventeen studies were analyzed.