Does the primary text of Reed & DeFillippi (1990) support the assembled 'tacitness...causal ambiguity...barriers to imitation' quote as a continuous phrase?

claim-causal-ambiguity-from-tacitness-raises-imitation-barriers rests on a quote from Reed & DeFillippi, "Causal Ambiguity, Barriers to Imitation, and Sustainable Competitive Advantage" (Academy of Management Review, 1990), that joins two clauses across an internal ellipsis: "Tacitness, complexity, and specificity... generate causal ambiguity... and thus raise barriers to imitation." It is unclear whether this is one continuous sentence from the article or a paraphrase stitched from separate passages. The article sits behind the AOM/journals.aom.org paywall, and neither the capture nor promotion has independently confirmed the primary text.

Why it matters

This is the Tier-2 theoretical leg supporting both claim-causal-ambiguity-from-tacitness-raises-imitation-barriers and the broader bridge in observation-codification-is-the-shared-hinge-of-automation-and-imitation. The underlying concept (causal ambiguity as a named barrier-to-imitation mechanism) is well-established in the strategy literature independent of this specific quote, but the vault's own sourcing floor requires the exact quoted phrase for Tier 1–2 claims, not a paraphrase presented as one.

What would answer it

• Library or JSTOR access to Reed & DeFillippi (1990), AMR 15(1): 88–102, to confirm the exact sentence(s).
• A secondary source that quotes the same passage directly and can be cross-checked (e.g. a strategy textbook citing R&D verbatim, such as Barney's Gaining and Sustaining Competitive Advantage).
• Google Scholar cached excerpts or a working-paper version of the article, if one exists outside the paywall.

Candidate next moves

Try Google Scholar for a free PDF or working-paper version before assuming the AOM paywall is the only route. If confirmed, update the claim-note's audit_status to drop the caveat; if the phrase turns out to be a paraphrase, correct the source_quote field to an actually-verbatim fragment and note the correction.

Answer (2026-07-12, cross-model audit, claude-fable-5)

Yes — the elided phrase is one continuous sentence, from the article's abstract. The OpenAlex record for doi:10.5465/amr.1990.4308277 carries the abstract as an inverted index; reconstructed verbatim it reads: "It is argued that tacitness, complexity, and specificity in a firm's skills and resources can generate causal ambiguity in competency-based advantage, and thus raise barriers to imitation." The capture's ellipses covered "in a firm's skills and resources can" and "in competency-based advantage," — legitimate internal elisions of a single sentence, though they also dropped the hedge "can."

Corrections applied to the claim-note (per AUDIT DISCIPLINE, caveat appended not dropped): source_quote now carries the full verbatim sentence; the body's second quoted phrase "is tacit, meaning it is non-codifiable" was found to be a paraphrase presented as a quote (the paper's actual tacitness definition, quoted identically across secondary literature, is "the implicit and noncodifiable accumulation of skills that results from learning by doing") and was demoted to explicit paraphrase; source_author corrected from "Barbara Reed" to Richard Reed (per Crossref and OpenAlex; the raw capture carried no first name). Residual: full text remains paywalled (AOM and ResearchGate return 403 to the fetcher) — this is abstract-level confirmation; a full-text read would still strengthen the note but no longer blocks it.