Jay Bryan Barney

Jay Barney was born in Walnut Creek, California on October 8, 1954. He spent his formative years in San Bruno, California and graduated from San Carlos High School in 1972. Majoring in sociology at Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah, he graduated summa cum laude in December 1974. In 1976 he began a PhD in sociology at Yale University. Barney joined the faculty at the Anderson Graduate School of Management at UCLA in 1980. He moved to the Mays Business School at Texas A&M University in 1986, then to the Fisher College of Business at the Ohio State University in 1994, where he held the Chase Chair for Excellence in Corporate Strategy, and then to the Eccles School of Business at the University of Utah in 2012, where he held the rank of Presidential Professor and the Lassonde Chair in Social Entrepreneurship. Professor Barney's 1991 paper has developed a framework for distinguishing among several different types of firm performance—i.e., competitive disadvantage, competitive parity, temporary competitive advantage, and sustained competitive advantage—and identified the attributes of resources and capabilities that would make them costly to imitate. This framework is known as the VRIO (Valuable, Rare, Costly to Imitate, and exploited by Organization).