This dissertation serves three major functions in strategic management literature.First, Michael Polanyi s philosophy of knowledge is reexamined and applied to organizational assets and their use under strategy s knowledge-based and resource-based views.Second,theory- building takes place using exploratory and explanatory qualitative analysis to inform management theory.Third,a quantitative content analysis is performed to compare low-and high-performing organizations sustained competitive advantage evaluated through Barney s (1986;1991)indicators of sustained competitive advantage value,rareness,inimitability,and nonsubstitutability.Specifically,six hypotheses are tested using the Wilcoxon-Mann-Whitney non-parametric statistical test for paired rankings.Strong support for the notion of sustained competitive advantage and difference between strategic language content between low-and high-performing organizations is found.This study provides one of the first tests of some basic assumptions of knowledge-and resource-based views as well as on of the first tests of sustained competitive advantage.