---
title: "Does the primary text of Reed & DeFillippi (1990) support the assembled 'tacitness...causal ambiguity...barriers to imitation' quote as a continuous phrase?"
type: "question"
status: "answered"
date_answered: "2026-07-12T00:00:00.000Z"
date_raised: "2026-07-12T00:00:00.000Z"
writer_model: "claude-sonnet-5"
tags: ["causal-ambiguity","tacit-knowledge","strategy-literature","verification","sourcing-discipline"]
---


[[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.