COMMITMENT VERSUS FLEXIBILITY

This article unbundles the relation between commitment and flexibility by distinguishing between firm-specific and usage-specific resources. This distinction turns out to be valuable because firm-specificity do es not always imply (nor is it always implied by) usage-specificity. F irm-specific resources are more strategic than usage-specific resource s, More broadly, the distinction between these two kinds of specificit y helps explain why the tension between commitment and flexibility can easily be overdone: the two aren't always negative measures of each o ther.